Kindle Edition, 2013 © The New Yorker

COMMENT
Conflicting Interests

by George Packer

American foreign aid has always been an awkward exercise in high-minded self-interest—humanitarian goals balanced uneasily with strategic calculations. Whenever these two come into conflict, Presidents inevitably find a way out of their loftier commitments. In 1947, when Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed a huge reconstruction package for postwar Europe, initiating the modern era of foreign assistance, he told his audience at Harvard’s commencement, “Our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” But, when the Marshall Plan was enacted, the Times headline was forthright about its anti-Soviet purpose: “AID BILL IS SIGNED BY TRUMAN AS REPLY TO FOES OF LIBERTY.” The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which President Kennedy signed at the height of the Cold War, created the Agency for International Development and placed restrictions on foreign military funding. In 1974, Congress amended the act, and required the United States to reduce or end military aid to regimes with poor human-rights records, “except in extraordinary circumstances.”

In the interests of national security, such provisions have been flouted by Presidents ever since their enactment. After a military coup overthrew an elected government in Chile in 1973, with the connivance of the C.I.A., President Nixon continued assistance to the Pinochet regime. Even Jimmy Carter, who tried to put human rights at the heart of his foreign policy, granted himself “extraordinary circumstances” waivers so that aid could continue flowing to sordid but strategically important regimes in Iran, Zaire, and other countries. In 1986, Congress imposed a painful contortion on future Presidents with an appropriations bill that stated unequivocally that “none of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available pursuant to this Act shall be obligated or expended to finance directly any assistance to any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree.” But after 9/11 President Bush found a way to resume assistance to Pakistan, even though its President, Pervez Musharraf, had taken power by overthrowing an elected government. And, when Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak cracked down on pro-democracy activists in 2006, the Bush “freedom agenda” was quietly revised to keep the pipeline of aid open to a key Middle Eastern ally.

This history of double standards shadows the recent events in Egypt and Washington. When a country’s military sends tanks into the streets, deposes an elected President, suspends the constitution, shuts down television stations, and arrests the leadership of the ruling party, the usual word for it is “coup.” But, in the days since all this came to pass in Egypt, the Obama Administration has gone to great lengths to avoid calling it by its rightful name—Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said that the events of July 3rd and afterward were under “review”—for the obvious reason that, under the law, it would mean the end of $1.5 billion in U.S. military and economic aid.

Hypocrisy can be an essential tool of foreign policy, but it works best when there is a policy to justify it—otherwise, it can seem randomly cynical. At the moment, the U.S. has no policy toward Egypt. In the two and a half years since the popular protests that overthrew the Mubarak regime, the Administration has followed a pattern: express concern about tumultuous events, then accept their outcome as a fait accompli and make the best of the new status quo, without a perceptible effort to use whatever influence the U.S. still has over the main actors in Egypt’s political drama.

The President’s critics wildly overstate that influence. Qatar underwrote the Islamist government of Mohamed Morsi with eight billion dollars, and Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait immediately promised twelve billion dollars to the interim regime. Even American money no longer buys what it used to. As for American prestige in Egypt, it has declined under Obama from the dismal level of the Bush years, with the anti-Morsi crowds convinced that the U.S. and its Ambassador, Anne Patterson, were conspiring to keep the Muslim Brotherhood in power, and the Islamists equally convinced that the Americans had conspired to throw Morsi out. The advent of political freedoms has not helped America’s cause in the country where, four years ago, President Obama promised a new era of understanding.

It’s easy to fault the White House for passivity and confusion, but no one has come up with a plausible policy in the face of the Middle East’s day-to-day upheavals, its shifting alliances and growing fissures. Some American neo-conservatives and congressional Democrats and Republicans have called on the President to denounce the coup, eliminate aid, and demand the restoration of elected government. This position has the advantage of being consistent with America’s stated principles, as well as with its laws. (It also joins together two of the Middle East’s strangest bedfellows: pro-Israel hawks and the Muslim Brotherhood.) But the loss of American hardware might reduce the Egyptian military’s ability to control jihadis in the ungoverned Sinai desert, while the diplomatic rebuke could profoundly alienate secular-minded Egyptians. The U.S. would appear less hypocritical, and also less relevant than ever.

But the “realist” position—the view that Washington should use whatever tools available to pursue its vital interests—is hardly more helpful. If those interests include the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the fight against jihadism, and that old chestnut “stability,” it isn’t at all clear how the coup advances any of these. Morsi basically kept Egypt’s foreign policy in place; the Muslim Brotherhood had its eyes on the prize of domestic transformation. The violent elimination of the Brotherhood from Egyptian politics could easily spawn a new generation of extremists who regard democracy as a Western trap, and un-Islamic. (Some analysts see the Salafist al-Nour Party as the real winner in the events of the past two weeks.) In 1992, the Algerian Army cancelled elections that would have put Islamists in power, and the country was engulfed in a decade-long civil war. Egypt isn’t likely to descend to that level of violence, but the coup will surely be a boon to Al Qaeda’s sympathizers, and create new ones.

The core political problem in Egypt is one that almost always arises from years of dictatorship: a culture of suspicion and confrontation, a mentality of winner-take-all. Islamists and secular-minded Egyptians regard one another as obstacles to power, not as legitimate players in a complex game that requires inclusion and consensus. Versions of this mutual negation can be seen across the region, from the liberal mini-uprising in Istanbul’s Taksim Square to the brutality of Syria’s sectarian civil war. The fractures are deepened by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which are competing for checkbook influence. In Syria, both are strengthening the ultraconservative Sunni rebels; in Egypt, Qatar backed the Brotherhood, while Saudi Arabia is supporting the secular forces (another perverse alliance). But neither country has any interest in an inclusive outcome. They both see a zero-sum game: Sunni vs. Shiite, Arab vs. Persian. Ultimately, they want to preserve and advance their own profoundly undemocratic regimes. America has no stake in these fights.

The street protests that began the Arab Spring have become destructive means for each side to assert its own primacy on the national stage. Nothing good will come of the overthrow of Morsi’s bad government if Egypt’s next transition doesn’t find a place for all of the country’s legitimate factions. America may no longer have the leverage to insure an outcome favorable to its interests or its values, but it should use its remaining influence to help Egypt’s factions move past their own zero-sum game. ♦

ENCORE
Songs of Commerce

by Dana Goodyear

In 2009, Andrew Mason, the founder and, until recently, the C.E.O. of the Chicago-based daily-deals site Groupon, was chosen as one of Crain’s “40 Under Forty.” He sat for a video interview wearing an oversized dinner jacket and a gray waistcoat—head shaved, complexion splotchy, grin goofy—and used the time to talk about how his recent weight gain relieved him of the need to be self-conscious about further weight gain. At that point, Groupon, a collective-buying platform that hires comedy writers to pitch discounted local services to subscribers, had a hundred employees and was operating in thirty-five cities in the United States. Mason was twenty-nine.

The following year, Groupon had twenty-two hundred employees in twenty-nine countries, commanded an audience of twenty million subscribers, and was being hailed as the fastest-growing company in history. Mason appeared at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference with slicked-back hair and an unnatural orange-gold glow. He prowled the stage in an oxford shirt unbuttoned to his sternum, announcing his newest initiative: Grouspawn, a college-education fund for babies whose parents used a Groupon for their first date. Groupon, he said, had incentivized procreation, an otherwise inexplicable act.

A few weeks ago, Mason, who was fired in February, when Groupon’s stock was down eighty-three per cent from its I.P.O. price, presented yet another take on the contemporary executive, in “Hardly Workin’,” an album that he described on his blog as “motivational business music targeted at people newly entering the workforce.” The album cover shows him wearing a brown parka and a three-day beard—the anti-executive. Even his eyebrows look rumpled.

“Hardly Workin’, ” a collage of eighties and nineties pop-music styles, name-checks successful leaders such as Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, and Charlie Munger (“You got to stay focused and retain that hunger / Or you’ll never ever ever be the next Charlie Munger”); delivers truisms (“The best things in life are clear without instructions / If you gotta explain it, your plan needs reduction”); nasally keens (“La la la la / In a culture of trans-paren-seeee / It’s not just a right, it’s a respon-si-bili-tee”); and is as indeterminate as a centaur at a rodeo. The seven-track album is available on iTunes for nine-ninety-nine; bought individually, each track costs ninety-nine cents.

At Northwestern, Mason was a music major and played in a band called Planet of the Planets; his bandmate Aaron With coined the name Groupon and became the company’s editor-in-chief. In the early days of Groupon, With said, the site featured a deal from a personal trainer, who then started a boot camp at the Groupon offices. “Andrew wrote a song for the instructor to play during the workout, and it was all about exercising to be a more fit and successful employee,” With said. “It was called ‘Exercise.’ It had a catchy beat. It was very repetitive.” Steve Albini, an indie-rock producer for whom Mason interned, recently compared Mason’s embodiment of a fully enlightened, spiritually balanced tech C.E.O. to the persona crafted by Liberace or Fred Armisen. Albini wrote in an e-mail, “Once a guy like Andrew gets familiar with the business culture (out of necessity), his taste for the absurd allows him to expose it in a way that is both funny and uncomfortable to confront.”

“I had the idea probably a year and a half ago,” Mason said about the album, by phone. (He now lives in San Francisco, where he is launching a new company; at Groupon’s current share price, which has rebounded, his stake is worth almost half a billion dollars.) In spite of the album’s conventional wisdom (look to nature for inspiration, set hard-to-reach goals), Mason argues for its originality. “No one else has created a body of work to create a step-function improvement in an employee,” he said. “Step function? That’s just a bullshit business term for when there is some discontinuity in progression up a y-axis and it goes straight vertical. One day you’re at work and you go home and listen to my album, and you come in the next day and you’ve made not gradual but sudden meaningful improvement.”

The mark of a great business idea may be the sense that it’s been there all along. In “My Door Is Always Open”—a song that With describes as “a painful and ultimately redemptive duet between upper-level management and an employee that climaxes in a glorious harmony”—Mason laments a hierarchical culture that lets “problems fester.” He mentioned that he and a friend who still works at Groupon had recently met for dinner. “He was talking about a situation he had at work and said how he was frustrated that people just let ‘problems fester,’ ” Mason said. “I said, ‘You’re welcome.’ ” ♦

ON THE COUCH
Comeback

by Lizzie Widdicombe

With their personal lives in order (more or less), now comes the awkward part, where our wayward former leaders Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer seek to repair their relationship with the voting public, post sex scandals. You might think that this is where the marriage counsellors exit and the spin doctors step in. But what if the marriage counsellors stuck around? When a husband betrays his wife, experts recommend various therapeutic techniques to help him regain her trust. Perhaps Weiner, who is running for mayor, and Spitzer, who is running for Comptroller, could use some of the same tactics to rebuild their relationship with us.

Christina Curtis, a psychotherapist with fifteen years of experience in couples reconciliation, got together with a few colleagues last week for an impromptu counselling session devoted to the damaged voter-politician relationship. Infidelity causes trauma, she said, which is easily reactivated by “visual and auditory cues.” She explained, “For a betrayed spouse, there’s just the reminders all the time.” Ditto the Weiner and Spitzer campaigns: “With these people in our face all the time in the media, we, too, are getting the cues, and we’re remembering, ‘Oh, yeah, they did that.’ ” For a voter, even seeing Weiner’s face on TV triggers flashbacks to June, 2011, when he announced that he couldn’t “say with certitude” whether the crotch in a photo that he tweeted was his.

“And you remember the look of that woman,” another therapist, Dr. Jim Walkup, added, referring to Spitzer’s escort, Ashley Alexandra Dupré.

Curtis said, “And his wife”—Silda Wall Spitzer—“having to go up to the podium, and the humiliation.”

The therapists had gathered, along with Dr. JoAnn Magdoff, in Dr. Walkup’s midtown office. There was a maroon analyst’s couch and framed medical degrees; outside, in a waiting area, speakers emitted soothing ocean sounds. Dr. Magdoff discussed the sense of betrayal that voters might have. She pointed out that victims typically feel more than rage: “It really evokes their old attachment injuries as well.”

Dr. Walkup said, “What we’re getting right now is apologies. And most spouses will say, ‘Gosh, I feel like I’ve heard this before. I’m not sure I can trust this.’ ” Along with the painful flashbacks, he said, we may be experiencing “a very powerful need to interrogate, a constant ‘Let’s go back over those details.’ ” It’s the same impulse, he said, that makes reporters “keep digging up whatever they can.” (Last month, for instance, the Times ran a story following up on the women involved in Weiner’s sexting scandal.)

For some hurt spouses, the therapists said, it helps to know every detail of the infidelity. “The detail puts a kind of container around it,” Dr. Magdoff said. “They know just how far it went.” But Curtis cautioned that information can be “a double-edged sword.”

Dr. Magdoff said, “I had a patient who had been having an affair. She and her husband were doing very well in couples therapy. And she called me and said, ‘The hard part is I can’t tell him that the other guy’s a much better lover.’ ”

“Unless he’s willing to get some sex therapy and become a great lover,” Dr. Walkup suggested.

Besides submitting to interrogation, what else can the candidates do to regain our trust? Time is the best remedy, the therapists said, but they have also known betrayed spouses who “insist on keeping very open access to e-mail,” Dr. Magdoff added. That’s one thing people can do to build trust, they suggested. Perhaps Spitzer and Weiner could start by giving us their e-mail and Twitter passwords? Spitzer doesn’t seem so keen on this; he has opposed a request to have his e-mails searched as part of a civil fraud case against A.I.G. that began when he was attorney general.

And then there’s demeanor. Curtis said that the candidates, like straying spouses, should make an effort to have “patience, to not be defensive—really being able to stay with the need that people have to ask the questions.” Spitzer did not quite demonstrate this, last week, in his response to criticism from a women’s group. (“Oh, no, I’ve apologized often,” he told a reporter. “I have with regularity. Next.”) Impatience could give the voters a feeling of “not being seen,” which, Dr. Magdoff pointed out, “is one of the most awful feelings in the world.” Curtis suggested that this dynamic might have been at work when Spitzer encountered a heckler at an appearance in Union Square. (“Why were you late? Were you with a hooker?” a man yelled, according to the Daily Beast.) “There’s something with voters right now where they want to say, ‘But this really happened!’ ”

The therapists were reluctant to make predictions about the success of the Weiner and Spitzer campaigns. But Dr. Walkup said, “It’s the same with marriage. You can’t tell when the couple walks in.” ♦

THE PICTURES
Surface, Not Depth

by Tad Friend

The whole idea of B movies is to strip out the boring stuff—plot, character development, etc.—so they’re all pinwheeling stuntmen, morphing mutants, exploding big rigs, and heaving bosoms. For sixty years, the producer Roger Corman set the rules in this twitchy domain. He shot fast: when he directed “The Little Shop of Horrors,” in 1960, it wrapped in two days and a night. He shot cheap. And he recycled: he allowed Universal to reuse his title “The Fast and the Furious” in exchange for the studio’s footage of ancient Rome in “Spartacus,” which he then used as sourdough starter for any number of films. Artistic vision, Corman cheerfully acknowledged while taking a taxi downtown the other day, was a luxury. “Whenever we had a dull trailer, Joe Dante”—his trailer editor during the seventies—“would say, ‘Cut to the exploding helicopter.’ Who says trailers must only contain shots from the film?”

Yet Corman’s four hundred films also helped launch Jack Nicholson, William Shatner, and Tommy Lee Jones, as well as the directors Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme, and Martin Scorsese. Julie Corman, the producer’s wife and a producer in her own right, suggested in the taxi that “Boxcar Bertha”—Scorsese’s second feature—could be interpreted on many levels: “Martin thought it was about his relationship with his brother. I thought it was a great statement about women’s lib. And Roger thought it was a gangster movie.”

Corman has now invited broader reappraisal by rolling out a catalogue raisonné of his work, a subscription YouTube channel called “Corman’s Drive-In.” Even the sublimely meaningless moment in “Sharktopus” when the leaping sea monster swallows the dangling bungee jumper will be subject to exegesis. (What does it say that Corman had his daughter Mary play the bungee jumper? Discuss, with reference to the patriarchal gaze.)

The Cormans were in Manhattan to see “Ellsworth Kelly at Ninety,” a show of Kelly’s paintings, at three locations in Chelsea. Julie said that Kelly was Roger’s favorite contemporary painter, so “I gave him one for his fiftieth birthday, when I was pregnant. And because Roger bought into this German theory that the most well-adjusted children were brought up in blue-and-yellow environments, it had to be a blue-and-yellow Kelly.” Corman remarked, “I loved the boldness of his colors and the flatness—that he was interested in surface, not depth.”

At eighty-seven, the producer has a genial, emeritus-professor air that surprises those who know him only from “Attack of the 50ft Cheerleader.” He wore a gingham shirt, a blue blazer, and droopy tan pants, and, having recently had back surgery, he carried a slim black cane with an amber handle. Corman was Ingmar Bergman’s American distributor for a time, and in 1974 you could see a drive-in double feature of Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” and Corman’s “Caged Heat” (directed by Demme), which was similar to Bergman’s film in having been shot abroad (the Philippines) and in being about women in prison (only literally).

Lately, the Cormans have been producing films for the Syfy channel. The titles are fairly self-explanatory: “Dinocroc,” “Supergator,” “Piranhaconda.” “I balked at ‘Sharktopus,’ ” Corman said. “I told the network, ‘You should go right up to the acceptable level of insanity in a title, but if you go over it, the audience turns against you’—and then ‘Sharktopus’ was one of their biggest hits.” Coming soon, therefore, is “Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda”—not to be confused with last week’s succès d’estime “Sharknado,” produced by one of Corman’s many imitators. The artistic principle that underpins his late period, he explained, is “to build the head and jaws of the creature so that it squirts blood when it clamps on the pretty girl in the bikini.”

At the first gallery, he inspected Kelly’s “Gray Curved Relief”: two joined panels, with the jutting top panel casting a shadow on the one below. “Just when I’ve been talking about his deliberate flatness, the first painting I see gives you depth,” he said. His wife looked over. “Roger’s been doing a lot of painting,” she said. “Well, he does a lot of looking at his canvas and swearing.”

At the third gallery, Corman leaned on his cane, contemplating “Four Panels,” a horizontal piece in bright red, black, and white. “It’s a weird word,” he murmured, “but the paintings look optimistic.” This reminded him that a young Sandra Bullock starred in his “Fire on the Amazon.” “She played an environmental worker who was preventing the destruction of the rain forest, and we had one sequence in which she was nude, briefly.” He ventured a thematic rationale: “She met a cynical journalist, and the coming together of their two viewpoints seemed to be best symbolized by the coming together of their two naked bodies.” Then he laughed, his gaze returning to the bright surfaces before him. “As I say that, I’m aware that it’s essentially a nonsensical statement.” ♦

BOTTOMS UP
Seaweed on the Rocks

by Nicholas Schmidle

Shortly after noon on a blustery Saturday, Bren Smith parked his Toyota in the bike lane of a leafy side street in the West Village. Smith, the owner of Thimble Island Oyster Company, had been up since 4 A.M., when he’d gone out on Long Island Sound to harvest kelp, oysters, and clams on his forty-acre plot. After exchanging words with a miffed cyclist, he unpacked an industrial cooler from the back of the truck and headed toward a new restaurant called Louro. “It helps when you’re ocean farming if you’re really close to the high-end markets,” Smith said. “That’s the secret.”

These days, those markets may be as interested in kelp as they are in bivalves. Smith, who has the second-largest kelp-farming operation in the country, was bringing a supply to Louro for a kelp cocktail hour. “This is the coming-out party for kelp,” he said. Smith, who is forty years old, is short, and wore work boots and a purple hoodie. He is also bald and asthmatic and, despite a life spent on the water, cannot swim. After dropping out of high school, at fourteen, he took a job on a factory trawler in the Bering Sea, netting cod for McDonald’s. “It was the height of the rape and pillage of the oceans. They gave me a shotgun full of buckshot to shoot as many birds as possible before they stole the bait.” Now, as a member of the Young Climate Leaders Network, he visits schools to advocate sustainable farming techniques.

Smith carried a crate of oysters into the restaurant. Mayur Subbarao, the bartender for the day, greeted him and took a straw-sip from one of the kelp concoctions he’d been working on. “A great bartender needs to know about the chemistry of interaction,” he said. “That’s where it becomes interesting with kelp.”

In the kitchen, Smith delivered the oysters to David Santos, the chef. Santos unscrewed the lid of a widemouthed glass jar containing a kelp vinegar he had prepared two months earlier. “If you have the opportunity, work with something new that no one else is working with yet. That’s fun,” he said. He would use the vinegar to season rice for scallop and halibut sushi he was rolling.

By 2 P.M., the barstools were filled with customers who had paid forty-five dollars each. Santos put out crostini with kelp butter, along with some pickled kelp, and Subbarao called the party to order. “Welcome to ‘Drink Like a Fish,’?” he said. (Later, Smith explained the name: “Fish don’t make Omega-3s and all the great nutrients they contain—they eat them.” He added, “Let’s eat what the fish eat!”) Subbarao served the first round: a Thimble Island oyster shooter made with mescal and kelp. Smith abstained—he is allergic to oysters.

After Subbarao poured the next drink—the Green Blood Maria, made with kelp, tequila, tomato water, celery, habanero pepper, and lime—the guests began to mingle. Scott Hines, an architect, said, “I tend to like savory cocktails, but often find them very ham-handed.” Holding up his glass, he said, “This is a very interesting take on it.” About kelp, he added, “It sounds odd until you consider what most liquors are made out of: gin is juniper, and Scotch is peat.” Hines’s wife, Melissa, confessed to feeling “a little weary” when she agreed to spend an afternoon drinking seaweed.

Behind the bar, Subbarao was preparing a final drink: a variation on an Old-Fashioned, with Madeira and kelp-infused Famous Grouse. “It’s such a common cliché, when people talk about island malts, to talk about peaty, briny elements,” he said. “I wanted to see what bringing in actual seaweed did.”

Smith leaned against the back of a booth, watching his wares put on display. “Because I eat at the gas station, I’m not considered a foodie,” he said. “But I think it’s a good sign that the food movement now includes people like me.” In June, he launched a Kickstarter campaign, hoping to triple the amount of kelp he grows. “I think, ten years from now, I’ll have succeeded if I’m not the spokesperson for this stuff anymore, if kids from agriculture school or out-of-work fishermen take this up,” he said. “Then I can go back to laboring alone.” ♦

LETTER FROM CAIRO
The Showdown

Winners and losers in Egypt’s ongoing revolution.

by Peter Hessler

On July 1st, after the Egyptian military issued its ultimatum, and crowds of celebrating people began to stream into Tahrir Square, I walked down the street to the headquarters of Tamarrod, a political-activist group. A neat line of Apache helicopters flew overhead, trailing Egyptian flags. Everywhere around me, citizens were chanting, “The people and the Army are one hand!” The previous month had been full of rumors, and the last time that the Minister of Defense, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, had issued a public statement, a week earlier, it had been cryptic enough that it was welcomed by both the opponents and the supporters of President Mohamed Morsi. But this time the military’s intentions couldn’t have been clearer. The armed forces had given the President forty-eight hours to respond to the protesters’ demands, and if he didn’t, they said, “it will be incumbent upon us . . . to announce a road map for the future.”

All of this had started with Tamarrod, which means Rebellion. In late April, five activists, who ranged in age from twenty-two to thirty, had come up with the idea of a petition campaign that rejected Morsi’s Presidency. He had been elected less than a year earlier, the first Egyptian leader to be chosen after the revolution of 2011 toppled the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Morsi was a longtime member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist organization that had been banned and repressed by the old regime; he was briefly jailed during the revolution. He ran for President against a former Air Force commander, and there had been concerns about whether the election would be stolen, since the military was governing Egypt during the transition period. But Morsi won a vote that was widely hailed as free and fair, and crowds spontaneously gathered in Tahrir to celebrate what seemed to be an important step toward democracy.

His first year in office turned out to be disastrous. He governed with an autocratic style, refusing to offer concessions to opponents and making little effort to gain new allies. In November, he issued a Presidential decree that temporarily granted him powers beyond the reach of any court; the decree allowed a Brotherhood-dominated assembly to draft a new constitution, which most experts described as badly flawed. During the spring, Morsi’s government threatened to shut down some television stations that broadcast opposition views, and a few prominent critics were investigated on charges of insulting the President. But the worst problems were economic. The administration was incapable of meeting obligations for a much needed loan from the International Monetary Fund, and Egyptians suffered through frequent power blackouts. By the end of June, drivers in Cairo had to wait in line for four or more hours to get gasoline.

In this climate, the Tamarrod campaign rapidly gained support. On June 24th, when I first visited the downtown apartment that the group used as an office, activists claimed to have collected more than fifteen million signatures, each on a separate sheet of paper. The forms had been piled three feet high in old plastic shopping bags and cardboard boxes. About twenty volunteers were sorting papers, and people constantly arrived with more; at one point, a blind man appeared at the door with a big stack of them. Organizers seemed uncertain what to do with all this material—they talked vaguely about having it certified by the Supreme Constitutional Court, or maybe by the United Nations. They acknowledged that there was no legal basis for impeachment.

The petitions had an amateurish quality. When I asked why they didn’t include a space for phone numbers and e-mail addresses, so that the organizers could build a network for future activism, a nineteen-year-old volunteer said, “You expect me to call fifteen million people?” (Another organizer admitted that this had been a mistake, but that now it was too late.) Organizers told me that there was no external funding for the campaign; volunteers paid for photocopies of the petition with their own money. The apartment they worked out of was on the sixth floor of a grungy building on Tahrir Street, and had been loaned to them by an organization called the National Association for Change. This group had mounted a petition campaign, in 2010, to pressure Mubarak for political reform, contributing to the climate that led to his downfall, and its volunteers were active in the Tamarrod campaign. But many political figures were slow to take Tamarrod seriously. On June 18th, Anne Patterson, the U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, gave a speech in which she dismissed the group’s efforts. “Some say that street action will produce better results than elections,” she said. “To be honest, my government and I are deeply skeptical.”

Nevertheless, organizers seemed confident. “We know our Army,” Doa Khalifa, a member of Tamarrod’s central committee, told me on June 24th. “We know they will side with us.” On the last day of June, Tamarrod called for demonstrations, which turned out to be even larger than the ones that had toppled Mubarak. Huge crowds filled Tahrir and the streets around Cairo’s Presidential Palace, and there were protests in every major Egyptian city, with plans to hold sit-ins until Morsi left. A military source said that as many as fourteen million people had participated, out of a population of eighty-three million. Tamarrod gave a final count for the petition campaign: 22,134,465. The day after the protests, the military issued its ultimatum.

That afternoon, the Tamarrod headquarters were almost empty. Three young volunteers sat in a darkened conference room, watching the Muslim Brotherhood’s television channel. On one wall of the office, somebody had hung a picture of Morsi behind bars, with the inscription “WANTED—Escaped from Prison.”

I asked one of the men, a twenty-three-year-old accountant named Mohamed Nada, if he was pleased with the military’s statement. “Happiness will come after the road map,” he said, through a translator. “But this is a step. We were expecting it—although it happened faster than our expectations. We said that it was going to take more than a week, maybe ten days. El-Sisi surprised us.”

They were convinced that Morsi, who had a reputation for stubbornness, would never negotiate, and that the military would remove the President. “Tamarrod is only sixty days old,” Mohamed Belkeemi, another volunteer in his twenties, said. “The Muslim Brotherhood has been around for more than eighty years. And yet it was destroyed by this sixty-day-old organization.”

Nada grinned. “Anwar Sadat said that the Muslim Brotherhood should be put on trial for political stupidity,” he said.

“Failed rulers are much more dangerous than corrupt rulers,” Belkeemi said. “The corrupt ones survive because they have to be functional enough to continue to profit. But the failed ones don’t survive. That’s why Mubarak lasted for thirty years, but Morsi only a year.”

Some of the stacks of petitions had toppled over and fanned across the dirty floor. I asked Nada what the organization planned to do with them. “After el-Sisi’s statement, these papers won’t merely go into the database,” he said. “They will go into a museum. This is a historic day.” Then he said, “I have a personal question for you. What do you think of the Revolution of June 30th?”

Earlier that day, I had stopped by the Muslim Brotherhood’s national headquarters, in Moqattam, a neighborhood situated on a limestone escarpment that rises high above Cairo. The Brotherhood was founded in Egypt, in 1928, and became an Islamist organization that hoped to depose the country’s colonial overlords and spark a religious renaissance across the Middle East. In its early years, the Brotherhood had engaged in political violence, but it eventually rejected such tactics. In the seventies and eighties, though, a pattern emerged in which radical Brothers left the group to join more extreme organizations. The Brotherhood was officially banned in 1954, but some of its activities were tolerated under Mubarak, and it had maintained an unassuming office in central Cairo.

Soon after the revolution, though, the Brotherhood had opened an impressive new headquarters in Moqattam. At the time, the building seemed to represent a fresh start, but now it looked ready for demolition. On the night of June 30th, it had been attacked and gutted by men with guns and Molotov cocktails. Armed Brothers had been holed up inside, and a gunfight broke out, in which eight were killed and dozens were injured. A foreign diplomat who had studied videos of the attack told me that she didn’t believe it was spontaneous. “The guys who attacked were seasoned,” she said. “Even though they were under fire, they were very cool, very calm. I’m sure that was funded. That could have been police or intelligence personnel in plain clothes. They were probably funded by the old regime. The old regime is still here.” She believed that the Brotherhood’s building had been a symbolic target, because the headquarters of the National Democratic Party, Mubarak’s old party, had been gutted during the revolution of 2011. The N.D.P. had since been disbanded, but former adherents continued to play a role in the political scene.

When I arrived at the Brotherhood’s headquarters, inspectors from the prosecutor’s office were examining bullet holes in the walls of buildings across the street. At the back gate, a police officer directed his men to search for bullet casings amid the rubble. He found one and held it up. “Machine gun,” he said. “Foreign-made.” I asked him why the police hadn’t been there the previous evening. “Because the Interior Ministry announced that we would not defend their headquarters,” he said. He showed no particular interest when a private security guard from a neighboring building wandered over and mentioned that he had donated two cans of gasoline to the arson.

The building’s furnishings had been looted, and now people were carrying out piles of documents. Somebody showed me a Brotherhood booklet that described the glories of the post-revolution period: “Who could have expected Dr. Morsi’s success after just twenty-eight days of campaigning?” An Egyptian journalist asked me to look at a stack of English documents that he had found inside. They consisted of dozens of pages of correspondence involving the United States Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction; later, I learned that they had come from an unclassified audit of Iraq’s Police Development Program. I had no idea why the Brothers had been reading U.S. government audits while their country’s economy was collapsing, but now it would probably be fodder for new Egyptian conspiracy theories. For months, people had claimed that the American government supported the Brothers. At protests, it became common to see photographs of Ambassador Patterson, a big red “X” drawn across her face. On the Tamarrod petition, one of seven reasons listed for rejecting Morsi was that “you are subservient to the Americans.” Such notions were simplistic, but it was true that the Obama Administration had seemed reluctant to criticize Morsi during his aggressive moves of the past year.

Periodically, people drove by to look at the ruined building, waving Egyptian flags and honking their car horns. A striking number of these celebrants were women, who often seem to have particularly strong reactions to the male-dominated Brotherhood. “Do you have any rooms to rent?” one older woman called out as she stopped in front of the building. The policemen laughed and cheered. “By the honor of our martyrs,” she shouted, “we’ll bring them down!”

The Brotherhood has always had many enemies, but it also has a reputation for successful grass-roots organizing and charitable work, especially in provincial cities and towns. And the Brothers are known for their financial integrity, which is one reason that they performed so well in post-revolution elections—voters were disgusted by the corruption of the Mubarak regime. The Freedom and Justice Party, the Brotherhood’s political wing, won every vote in the new Egypt, although its margin of victory diminished over time. Even as criticism mounted, there was never a sense that the Brothers were engaged in profiteering.

But the Brotherhood’s culture remained profoundly undemocratic. It has a rigid hierarchy, with a number of figures occupying higher positions than Morsi’s had been. Many Egyptians were disturbed when these unelected leaders issued public statements during national crises. Brothers who held public office continued to function with the secrecy and the insularity of a banned group, and they seemed incapable of trusting outsiders. When I talked to people who had left the Brotherhood, they always emphasized how friends in the organization immediately cut off all contact. This response might have made sense when the Brotherhood was semi-underground, but, in a competitive political environment, former associates could have been a valuable source of information, perspective, and constructive criticism.

Within the organization, there’s a tradition of strict obedience to superiors. This makes the Brotherhood highly disciplined but also unresponsive to change. Leaders struck me as out of touch, perhaps because subordinates told them what they wanted to hear. As their popularity plummeted in Cairo, Brotherhood leaders often said that the situation in the capital was an anomaly, and that their national network still reported strong support in places like Upper Egypt, which is home to almost forty per cent of the population. During the spring, I spent time in the region, where I decided to visit a series of offices of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Freedom and Justice Party. I planned to start at the governorate level, descend to the district, and finally reach a pair of villages called el-Araba and Beni Mansour.

“Those who say that the Freedom and Justice Party has lost popularity in the street are only talking from air-conditioned offices in Cairo,” Youssef el-Sharif, the top Party official in the governorate of Sohag, told me. “We have a presence all the way down to the neighborhood level. There’s a Party office in el-Araba.” Next, an official at the Brotherhood headquarters in the district of el-Balyana also assured me that I’d find an office in el-Araba. But, when I pressed, he acknowledged that el-Balyana was the lowest organizational level, and that there wasn’t a single member in el-Araba or in Beni Mansour, which have a total population of seventeen thousand. In el-Balyana, which is home to more than three hundred and fifty thousand people, I was told that there were only a hundred and fifty Brothers.

The el-Balyana official also claimed that there had been no drop in popularity, and he said that the Brotherhood often sponsored activities and medical drives in the villages. In el-Araba and surrounding villages, though, many people complained bitterly about Morsi and the Brotherhood. They said that they had voted for him out of a desire to have a religious man in office, but they had no specific affection for the organization; the Brotherhood seemed to have won because of weak competition, not strong support. And it had no presence at the grass-roots level. Nobody could tell me about a Brotherhood activity being sponsored in the villages, other than past voter drives. “People just come before the elections, and then you never see them again,” a farmer said. “I won’t vote for the Brotherhood again.”

Late on the evening of July 2nd, the day before the military’s ultimatum was set to expire, I called Gehad el-Haddad, a spokesman for the Brotherhood. I asked if the President was negotiating with General el-Sisi.

“There is no dialogue with el-Sisi,” el-Haddad told me. “He is an arm of the state. He follows the leadership of his President, Mohamed Morsi.” Like other Brothers, el-Haddad seemed to be operating on a theoretical level—he insisted that Morsi’s election made him more powerful than the Army, despite the ultimatum. El-Haddad continued, “The outcome has to come from democratic means, and not from one part of the population using the military to bully others.”

I asked what the Brothers would do if the Army tried to remove Morsi from office.

“We will stand between the tanks and the President,” he said.

The foreign diplomat I talked to had told me that some prominent Brotherhood leaders had approached sympathetic Egyptian academics who sometimes functioned as informal advisers. They had recommended that Morsi offer concessions quickly and publicly, as a way of gaining the moral high ground. But their advice had been ignored. “They still believe that since they were elected they should not step down,” the diplomat told me. “It’s denial.”

Shortly before midnight, Morsi appeared on Egyptian television. He wore a black suit and a black tie, and he spoke calmly. It was the most Presidential I had ever seen him, and the speech was angry and defiant. “If the price of protecting legitimacy is my blood, I’m willing to pay it,” he said. The statement seemed to energize both sides, and later that night, near Cairo University, a gunfight broke out between Morsi’s supporters and his opponents. The violence killed eighteen, including one Tamarrod activist.

The next day, somebody hung two large banners from the top floor of the shell of the N.D.P. headquarters. The building is near Tahrir Square, and for more than two years it has sat there untouched, a reminder of the violence of the revolution. One banner read “Tamarrod,” and the other read “End the Rule of the Brotherhood: Morsi = Mubarak.” Three kids had climbed up to the tenth floor and were trying to remove the last air-conditioning unit from the building. Originally, there had been more than a hundred; from a distance, the empty steel frames looked like staples punched into the concrete. The kids seemed to be having a hard time getting the last one out. There was less than an hour until the ultimatum expired, and it was a good bet that cops were too preoccupied to worry about N.D.P. air-conditioners.

In Egypt, members of the military, the police, and other security forces do not have the right to vote. This was first established in the 1923 constitution, and the theory was that officers and soldiers should remain politically neutral. But one can also interpret such a law, especially in a military dictatorship, as an implied acknowledgment that the Army gains its power through something other than direct democracy. Since the revolution, there has been talk about changing the law, which was recently deemed unconstitutional by the courts. Egypt has an estimated two million security personnel, and, in 2012, Morsi won the Presidential election by 882,751 votes. He probably would have lost if soldiers and officers had had the franchise.

In fact, Muslim Brotherhood members are banned from both the police and the Army, which have always had a secular culture. The basic terms of Morsi’s election—no soldiers or officers voting, no Brothers in the Army or the police—made for a sensitive transition. And yet there seemed to have been little caution on the part of the President. One of his first acts in office, in August, 2012, was to purge the military of its top leaders, some of whom were in their seventies and had been contemporaries of Mubarak.

Morsi appointed as Minister of Defense el-Sisi, who, at fifty-seven, was a full generation younger than the man he replaced. El-Sisi was known to be devout and sympathetic to political Islamism, but soon there were signs of tension. In December, during the battle over the new constitution, Brothers and other Islamists attacked peaceful protesters at the Presidential Palace, and they interrogated and tortured citizens. Later, Brothers told me that they defended the palace because they couldn’t trust the police. But their actions infuriated the security forces, and throughout December I saw clear signs that officers disliked protecting Morsi. During this period, el-Sisi invited all parties to talks but was reportedly rebuffed by Morsi, who refused to negotiate.

As the national crisis worsened this spring, one of the biggest complaints from Egyptians concerned reduced security. The police were notably absent, especially in routine tasks like traffic management; they seemed uninspired to work under the new regime. In mid-June, while the Tamarrod campaign was gaining strength, Morsi appointed a member of the Islamist group al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya as the governor of Luxor. Although the group had renounced violence by 2003, in 1997 it organized a terrorist attack in Luxor that killed fifty-eight tourists. The memory of that massacre remains strong for public-security officers in the region. After Morsi’s appointment, the protests were so large that the new governor couldn’t enter the state building, and he resigned without ever sitting at his desk.

The Brotherhood had always claimed that institutional prejudices were stacked against it, and this was certainly accurate. But the Brothers antagonized old enemies, and made new ones—even among the Salafis, the more conservative Islamists. In incidents like the fight over the constitution, the Brotherhood cited its electoral victories as justification for undemocratic behavior—a defense that alienated liberals who otherwise might have opposed military intervention. As the threat of a coup arose, Brotherhood spokesmen talked about the terrible precedent that such an action would set for democracy in Egypt. But their own behavior had also set a terrible precedent, and after a certain point such arguments became largely theoretical. When you evaluated the situation on the ground—the way people felt, the way people acted—the past mattered much more than the future. Since the revolution, Egypt may have aspired to democracy, but it retained many features and institutions that were highly undemocratic. In order to survive in such an environment, a political player had to be nimble, pragmatic, and connected to reality.

And he had to understand how quickly all the threats could converge. Tamarrod represented the popular mood and the new democratic currents; the ultimatum represented entrenched institutions like the military; the attack in Moqattam possibly represented the vengeance of the defeated Mubarak regime. When I spoke with Mohamed Kadry Said, a retired major general who leads the military-studies unit at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, in Cairo, he told me that he was impressed by the energy of the Tamarrod activists. “And also there is some smell of connection between them and the military,” he said. He believed that the military had followed the progress of the activists closely, coördinating its own activities accordingly. Tamarrod organizers told me and other journalists that they had had no contact with the armed forces. But one of their activists told Reuters that she had quit during the last week of June because she sensed a sudden infiltration of security agents.

I met with Said on the day before the ultimatum expired. He seemed optimistic; he believed that this could be a new start for Egypt. I asked what would happen to Morsi.

“They will put him in some place,” he said. “They will find a reason.”

I asked if he thought there would be violence.

“Yeah,” he said softly.

At nine o’clock on July 3rd, five hours after the deadline expired, el-Sisi appeared on national television. He had always been a cipher. Like many Egyptian military leaders, he had studied at the U.S. Army War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Robert Springborg, an expert on the Egyptian military, has noted that at the war college el-Sisi wrote a paper arguing against a fundamental separation of powers, because Islam should be the reference point for all government branches. This idea is very much in line with Brotherhood ideology; it also directly contradicts the constitutional reality in Egypt. El-Sisi had never cast a vote in his life. On television, he looked every bit as calm as the President had the night before.

At the Presidential Palace, where tens of thousands had gathered, there was a hush while people listened to radios and phones. When el-Sisi announced the suspension of the constitution, a roar went up. After that, it was impossible to hear the rest. El-Sisi explained that an interim President would come from the judiciary, and then Egypt would hold a national election. He said that the military had been forced to take this step because of the national crisis and Morsi’s refusal to negotiate.

Afterward, I left the celebrating crowds and headed to Rabaa al-Adawiya Square, in the Cairo suburb of Nasr City. Thousands of Morsi supporters had been camped out there for days, to show their strength, especially on television. In post-revolutionary Egypt, this has become a crude instrument of democracy: news channels train live cameras on major protests, so viewers can gauge the numbers. On the day of an important political event, the screen might show as many as six sites at once. Often there’s no commentary—you watch the crowds in silence, like a mall cop with his closed-circuit screens.

Since midafternoon, the Army had been steadily surrounding the area around Rabaa al-Adawiya Square with troops and barriers. Earlier in the evening, Hassan, my translator, and I hadn’t been allowed in, but now we took a back road where soldiers let us through. An Apache helicopter rumbled overhead; the streets were empty. Nasr City is situated in the eastern desert, and it has the ambitious, overbuilt feeling of many distant Cairo suburbs. Large stretches consist of military installations—it would be hard to pick a worse place for a face-off against the Army. But, up until the end, Morsi’s rank-and-file supporters hadn’t seemed to realize what was happening. The night before, men had told me that the Army would definitely back the President, and a speaker was rallying them with a story about a woman having had a vision of the angel Gabriel flying over Nasr City.

Hassan and I reached a Brotherhood checkpoint, where men sat in formation, wearing construction helmets and clutching simple weapons: clubs, nightsticks, nunchakus. They looked stunned, and they examined our I.D.s without saying much. Down the street, we talked with a thirty-year-old civil engineer and Brotherhood member named Ahmed el-Hawat. He carried a long club, but he had a friendly, gentle manner, and his helmet made him look like a building engineer on site—glasses, button-down shirt, slightly overweight. He told us that all of Egypt’s Islamist television channels had been shut down at the moment of el-Sisi’s statement. While we were speaking, another supporter wandered over, weeping, and began to pound on a parked car.

“We will see more blood in all the streets of Egypt,” el-Hawat said. There were reports that Mohammed Badie, the top Brotherhood leader, had been arrested near the Libyan border. I asked el-Hawat if he thought the people here might be arrested, too.

“It’s very possible,” he said. “This does not really concern me. Our message and our goal is to have this country rise up.” He continued, “If we are assaulted—we have a huge number of people, and we are armed. This is the simplest tool that I’m carrying, but there are other weapons.”

I asked him what they were.

“There are machine guns, shotguns, nine-millimetre pistols,” he said. “Every one of us is already a time bomb.”

Then he pointed out that the roof of the building across the street was full of Army snipers. Their silhouettes were clear against the night sky: prone at the edge of the roof, guns at the ready. “They showed up a couple of hours before the military issued its statement,” el-Hawat said.

I decided that it was time to wrap up this conversation. But then an angry roar came from the crowd down the street, and somebody opened fire with an automatic weapon. Hassan and I turned and walked away fast, heads down. More gunfire: probably somebody was just shooting into the air, but I didn’t look back to check. After we had walked for a few minutes, there was another explosion, this time from up ahead—fireworks. The Presidential Palace was three miles from the square; that was all the distance that separated the victors and the losers. Later, I rode through streets that were thronged with Cairenes celebrating Morsi’s ouster. When I got home, I thought about the men who were cornered in Nasr City, and I turned on the news, but those live feeds had been removed. All the Islamist channels were blank.

That week, in most parts of Cairo it was hard to tell that anybody was upset about what had happened. People hung national flags above their homes and shops, and the mood was happier than it had been for months. There weren’t any lines at gas stations, and the electricity wasn’t cut off—such problems seemed to magically disappear. Anybody in uniform had a smile on his face. If you wanted to find anger, you had to search for it. But for two years the violence in Cairo had always been highly localized—problems usually occurred around Tahrir, while life went on as usual in the rest of the city.

The Morsi supporters remained in Nasr City. After a day, the military relaxed the checkpoints and the snipers vanished, and it was clear that the authorities had decided to allow the protest to continue. As time passed, the group changed in subtle ways. Before Morsi’s ouster, almost everybody I met was a Brotherhood member, and the energy often flagged; organizers were constantly running through the crowd, shouting at protesters to gather and chant so that it would look better on television. But now I encountered more people without a Brotherhood affiliation, and they seemed more energized. They had chosen to be there—it wasn’t just a matter of obeying an order from a superior. Many seemed particularly upset because the activities of the movement were no longer televised. They tended to be older than the Tahrir crowd, mostly in their forties, and often they were lower-middle-class men from the provinces. They had painted new graffiti all around Nasr City: “No to the Coup”; “Down with the Agents of America”; “Hey el-Sisi You Coward, You’re the Agent of the Americans.”

On July 5th, protesters crowded in front of the headquarters of the Republican Guard, in Nasr City, where they believed that Morsi was being held. Soldiers fired on the crowd, killing four. A video showed one of the men being shot after making no clear provocation. I spoke with a man named Mohamed Ibrahim Ahmed, who said that he had been standing next to one of the protesters who died. Ahmed was a retired Air Force veteran from the city of Mansoura. “I’m not a Muslim Brotherhood member—you can’t join if you’re in the military,” he said. “But I voted for Morsi. It’s my right to fight to defend my vote.” He told me that the military shouldn’t interfere in politics, and he believed that the Americans were behind everything. I asked about the speech in which Ambassador Patterson had criticized Tamarrod.

“Would she say openly that she’s the one who supported all those protests?” Ahmed said. “So of course she said the opposite.”

A group of soldiers stood behind a nearby wall, and passersby yelled, “You’re our family! Don’t betray us!” I walked down the road to the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque, where Badie, the top Brotherhood leader, was scheduled to deliver a speech before the evening prayers. Both the Egyptian and the foreign press had reported Badie’s arrest, but now his voice boomed over the loudspeakers: “I have not been arrested, and I’m not running away! Those are lies! I’m free!” An Apache helicopter approached and hovered low over the mosque; Badie’s voice grew louder. “Film us, man, film us!” he shouted. “I say to the great Army of Egypt: the people and the Army are one hand! Leave, el-Sisi, leave!”

The crowd roared, chanting pro-Army slogans. Men around me began to weep. In Egypt, the faith in the military runs so deep that people called on it for assistance even after their leader had been removed in a coup. Badie said that Morsi supporters should occupy every public square in Egypt, and, after the speech, men marched on Tahrir and other parts of Cairo. When they encountered anti-Morsi crowds, street fighting broke out, and it continued into the early morning. Ten people were killed.

At the time of Morsi’s election, an Egyptian video producer who disliked the Brotherhood had told me that it was the best thing that could happen, because people would quickly learn the true face of the organization. Now that the Brotherhood had been overthrown, it reverted to occupying what seemed like a much more natural role. For decades, it had been in the opposition, and most leaders had been hounded and imprisoned; men like Badie were brilliant at rallying supporters during a tough time. In Cairo, everything had been neatly reversed. The volatile protests had shifted from Tahrir to Nasr City, where a different group called on the same Army for help. During the spring, the Brotherhood had tried to intimidate journalists and television stations; now the Islamist media were being silenced. Even the Americans had apparently switched sides. It had been all of six days since the Tamarrod demonstration.

On July 8th, a fight broke out in front of the Republican Guard headquarters, and fifty-one civilians were killed, along with one soldier and two police officers. Two days later, the new government issued arrest warrants for Badie and other Brotherhood leaders, accusing them of inciting violence. It was the worst single episode of bloodshed in Cairo since Mubarak had been removed from office. Each side blamed the other: protesters claimed that they had been attacked while praying, but the military said that it had been fired on first.

That evening, I stopped by the old Tamarrod office. The group no longer had a formal headquarters; the premises were once again occupied by the National Association for Change. I talked to Ahmed Salama, a young man who had also worked on the Tamarrod campaign. He blamed the morning’s violence on the Brotherhood—he believed that its leaders were inciting aggression. “Their families are not in these clashes,” he said. “It’s the poor people.” After the massacre, statements by the Brotherhood called for an “uprising.” That afternoon, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, condemned what he described as “explicit calls to violence made by the Muslim Brotherhood.” Obama Administration officials had made few comments about the week’s events, and they still refused to say whether they considered the Army’s intervention a coup—a designation that could end the $1.5 billion in U.S. support that Egypt receives every year. But new sources of funding had quickly appeared. The day after the massacre of the protesters, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates pledged eight billion dollars in aid, a reflection of their distaste for the Brotherhood.

In Cairo, a judge named Adli Mansour had been named interim President, and a transition process had been mapped out, with parliamentary and Presidential elections to be held in the coming months. But an argument had already erupted over the first suggestion for prime minister, Mohamed ElBaradei, a liberal who was eventually rejected after complaints by the Salafis. The Islamists had agreed with Morsi’s ouster, and their presence was critical to any political consensus; soon they expressed concerns about the proposed constitutional committee, which was to consist of a small group of legal experts. The Brotherhood still refused to participate in any negotiations, insisting that Morsi remained the legitimate President. Nobody would say for certain where he was.

From a distance, the labels seemed to be all that mattered: Islamists and secularists, military and civilian, democracy and dictatorship. There was a great deal of talk about how to define a coup. But such discussions implied a coherence that simply wasn’t relevant in Egypt, where so much of day-to-day life has always been makeshift and improvised. The most important actor in all these events, el-Sisi, was a deeply religious man who had defended the principles of political Islam from a leafy campus in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In Cairo, though, he acted as a pragmatist. Theories tend to evaporate in a crisis, leaving behind elemental human qualities: stubbornness, frustration, fear, anger, want. The question in Egypt is whether the next elected government will remember these forces, or chase another abstract idea.

At the former Tamarrod office, Salama, the organizer, told me that he was optimistic. “We were like kids in democracy and revolution,” he said, remembering the movement of 2011. “We are becoming mature now.” Three days earlier, he had been wounded in the leg by a shotgun pellet while defending Tahrir Square against Morsi supporters. There was a scar on his head from a wound he’d received while fighting Mubarak’s forces. His sinuses had been damaged by tear gas at the end of 2011, when he had protested the military’s first transitional government. But Salama still believed in military guidance for the time being—he pointed out that it had taken Brazil almost a quarter of a century to transition to full civilian rule.

In Egypt, more than half the population is under the age of twenty-five, and in the capital a generation of young people are spending their formative years in the ongoing revolution. It’s hard to tell what they’re learning—some of the educated ones, like Salama, are engaged in organizing, but many are there for the thrill of the fight. Opposition has always been the easiest stance; until now, no one has been able to build something that works for a positive change. Tamarrod, for all its energy, has an uncertain future. “Tamarrod was an idea instead of a political organization,” Salama explained. He didn’t believe that it should become a political party or movement; in his description, it almost seemed a kind of performance art. “It’s a quick idea that comes and you do something,” he said. “It’s a tool.” He rolled a cigarette and smoked it, ignoring a sign on the wall that said “Smoking Outside the H.Q. Only.” The place was a firetrap: stacks of petitions now rose six feet high around us. Salama told me that most of the papers were hidden in four locations around the city, but no journalist or independent group had verified their existence. It didn’t seem important to the organizers: from their perspective, that idea had served its purpose, and now it was time for something else. ♦

ANNALS OF PREVENTION
A Raised Hand

Can a new approach curb domestic homicide?

by Rachel Louise Snyder

Dorothy Giunta-Cotter knew that someday her husband, William, would kill her. They met in 1982, when he was twenty and she was fifteen: a girl with brown eyes and cascading dark hair. Over the course of twenty years, he had kidnapped her, beaten her, and strangled her with a telephone cord. When she was pregnant with their second child, he pushed her down the stairs. After visits to the emergency room, he withheld her pain medicine and, at one point, forbade her to wear a neck brace.

Dorothy and William had two daughters, Kaitlyn and Kristen. Once, in a rage, William sat on Kristen’s chest until she couldn’t breathe; she was eleven. Another time, angered by what she was wearing, he hit her repeatedly in the head. That day, Dorothy took Kristen from their home, in Amesbury, Massachusetts, and drove to a shelter for victims of domestic violence in Maine. (Kaitlyn, who was seventeen, stayed behind in order to graduate from high school on schedule.) Dorothy feared that William knew the local network of domestic-violence shelters; in Maine, she felt, she would be safe.

There she filed a restraining order, telling the judge that her husband would kill her when he found her. But the judge denied the order, citing a lack of jurisdiction. So Dorothy returned with Kristen to Massachusetts, where she met Kelly Dunne, who worked at the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center, a local domestic-violence agency. The center helped Dorothy file a restraining order and found a room for her and her daughters in a longer-term shelter. But Dorothy refused. She told the center’s lawyer, “If I’m going to die, I want to do it in my own house.”

Under the terms of the order, William was required to move out. The crisis center changed the locks and gave cell phones to Dorothy and her daughters. Ten days later, William violated the restraining order. He hid in the garage until Dorothy, who was on her way to a job interview at a local supermarket, came in. He grabbed her and put his hand over her mouth. “Stop screaming or I’ll shoot you,” he told her. Kaitlyn, hearing the struggle, ran downstairs to find her mother being held hostage by her father. “Her mouth was bleeding . . . and she appeared terrified,” Kaitlyn later wrote in an affidavit. “I . . . stood with my mom and dad to make sure nothing was going to happen.” After two and a half hours, William left; the next day, Dorothy went to the police station and filed a report with a detective named Robert Wile. She told Wile, “Every time I talk to him, he scares me.”

Wile issued a warrant for Cotter’s arrest, and on March 21, 2002, William, accompanied by his lawyer, turned himself in at the Newburyport District Court. His previous record showed only a few traffic violations and bad checks. He had a steady job as a cable installer and coached a local youth sports team. The judge released him on five hundred dollars’ bail.

Five days later, William arrived at Dorothy’s house armed with pepper spray, handcuffs, ammunition belts, and a sawed-off shotgun. Kaitlyn was at a friend’s house; Kristen opened the front door. William pushed past her, broke down the door to Dorothy’s bedroom, and dragged her out. Kristen ran upstairs and called a neighbor, who called 911. The police arrived minutes later. When the dispatcher called Kristen back to confirm their arrival, William picked up the downstairs phone and told her to call off the police or “someone’s gonna get hurt real bad.” Outside, the police could hear Dorothy screaming. When Officer David Noyes kicked down the door, William shot Dorothy at close range; it was as if a grenade had gone off in her body, Noyes later said. Then William reloaded the gun and turned it on himself. Kristen had been hiding under her bed, the phone to her ear; the entire episode was captured by the 911 operator.

The Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center is situated in a secured red brick building in downtown Amesbury, an hour north of Boston. To insure the safety of clients and employees, no signs mark its presence. The waiting room provides toothbrushes, toys, secondhand clothes, self-help books, and boxes of Kleenex. Behind the reception desk is a large playroom.

Kelly Dunne, who is forty-two, is the center’s chief operating officer. After graduating from college, in 1997, she became a volunteer at the center, working at the district court as an advocate for victims of domestic violence. On her first day, thinking that she might handle one or two cases in the divorce stage, she brought a book to occupy her in her spare time. When she arrived, five women were waiting to file restraining orders. One had spent the weekend locked in the basement; another had been kicked down the stairs. “I remember thinking, Are you kidding me?” Dunne said. “This is what’s going on in this town over the weekend?”

One in every four women is a victim of domestic physical violence at some point in her life, and the Justice Department estimates that three women and one man are killed by their partners every day. (Roughly eighty-five per cent of the victims of domestic violence are women.) Between 2000 and 2006, thirty-two hundred American soldiers were killed; during that period, domestic homicide in the United States claimed ten thousand six hundred lives. This figure is likely an underestimate, as it was pulled from the F.B.I.’s Supplementary Homicide Reports, which gather data from local police departments, where homicide reporting is voluntary.

Dunne attributes the prevalence of domestic violence, in part, to a deep cultural misunderstanding of how violence operates. We assume that victims incite abuse, or that if the situation at home was truly threatening they would leave. Restraining orders, when filed, are thought to keep perpetrators away. And, if a woman fails to show up in court to renew a restraining order, the assumption is that the problem has somehow been resolved. “We now know that it means exactly the opposite,” Dunne told me.

In 2005, Dunne created the Domestic Violence High Risk Team, coördinating the efforts of her agency with those of local police departments, hospitals, state legislatures, and the courts to prevent domestic-violence homicide. The crisis center is funded by federal and state grants, private foundations, and fund-raising. Last autumn, the center received a four-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar grant from the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women, in Washington, D.C., to help the high-risk team adapt its model to several other communities around the country. Vice-President Joseph Biden has championed the high-risk program; in October of 2010, at an event to mark domestic-violence-awareness month, he said, “We need to replace what we have been doing, and replicate this kind of success.” The high-risk team’s methodology is simple: it strives to prevent domestic-violence homicide by predicting when it might happen.

After Giunta-Cotter’s murder, newspaper editorials skewered the local police and the judge who had released William on bail; Bill O’Reilly, on his Fox News show, called for the judge’s resignation. Suzanne Dubus, the chief executive officer of the crisis center, convened a meeting between the district attorney and members of the police department, including Detective Robert Wile, who had taken Dorothy’s final police report, in order to analyze why the standard response procedures had failed. Everyone appeared to have done his or her job correctly. The only real digression from protocol came from Dorothy, when she refused to return to a shelter. “This was our ‘Oh, shit’ moment,” Dunne said. The team had no plan besides offering shelter. “Shelter was our plan.”

Since the nineteen-seventies, shelters have been viewed as the best protection for battered women, but they can be profoundly disruptive. Most shelters in Massachusetts are single-family homes in residential areas, where victims and their children are allotted a room and share kitchens, bathrooms, dining, and living rooms with five to seven other families. Historically, boys older than twelve and pets have not been allowed in shelters, and most contact with friends or family, including a victim’s employer, has been forbidden. Dunne says that shelters are often, in effect, a “ticket to welfare.” Staying in a shelter may mean quitting a job and removing children from school, or being unable to care for elderly parents, or missing a doctor’s appointment. Shelters have saved lives, Dunne said, but the burden of change falls on the victim, not the perpetrator.

In the past decade, shelters and clinical-treatment providers have tried to better accommodate the needs of abuse victims. Many now allow teen-age boys to stay with their mother, and families to bring their pets; others permit contact with friends, family, and employers. But most shelters remain chronically underfunded, and advocates like Dunne are criticized for speaking out against the shelter approach. “It’s not a popular opinion to be putting forth in the domestic-violence world,” she said.

In 2003, Dunne attended a conference on domestic violence in San Diego, where she heard a talk by Jacquelyn Campbell, who teaches at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and is widely recognized as the country’s leading expert on domestic homicide. In the nineteen-eighties, for her doctoral dissertation, at the University of Rochester, Campbell interviewed two thousand victims of domestic abuse in Dayton, Detroit, and Rochester, and sifted through police homicide files, looking for patterns. She found that half the women killed by their partners had sought help from the police or the criminal-justice system at least once, and that the single biggest indicator for domestic homicide was a prior incidence of physical domestic violence. The risk of homicide unfolded on a timeline, spiking when a victim attempted to leave an abuser, or when there was a change in the situation at home—a pregnancy, a new job. The danger remained high for three months after a couple split, dipped slightly for the next nine, and dropped significantly after a year.

Campbell identified twenty risk factors for homicide, which she used to develop what she called a Danger Assessment tool. Some risk factors were obvious: substance abuse, gun ownership, a record of violence. Others were more specific: forced sex, threats to kill, choking. The sole demographic factor Campbell identified was chronic unemployment; poverty alone is not a risk factor. Campbell then devised a weighted scale based on the risk indicators. A score of eighteen or more represented extreme danger; fourteen to seventeen was severe; eight to thirteen indicated increased danger; and anything less than eight signified variable danger. In San Diego, as Dunne listened to Campbell speak she realized that Dorothy Giunta-Cotter would have scored an eighteen.

Dunne and Dubus began to outline how they might use Campbell’s work to predict which domestic-abuse cases were most likely to end in homicide. During the following year, Dunne and her staff met with police officers in Amesbury and Newburyport; district attorneys; probation and parole officers; batterers-intervention group counsellors; and hospital representatives in order to devise a program that would identify potentially lethal cases. Their first meeting, in 2002, revealed that each department had operated in isolation. Neither the judge nor the hospitals were aware of Dorothy Giunta-Cotter’s history of abuse. The police knew about the restraining order against William, but the judge and the prosecutor handling the hearing didn’t have access to his file, or to Dorothy’s affidavit, which chronicled the two decades of abuse. “It’s in the cracks that murders happen,” Dunne told me. Her goal was to identify high-risk cases and create a plan of action to keep victims safe and out of shelters; the crisis center would serve as the central point of communication. In early 2005, the Domestic Violence High Risk Team began accepting cases.

One morning last fall, Dunne met with three staff members from the crisis center: Sara Hammond, a case manager; Kate Johnson, the community-services coördinator; and Connie Martyn, an advocate and a counsellor. The day before, Lisa Morrison had called. She had first come to the center several years earlier, when she was married to a man named Glenn. (These are not the couple’s real names, and the details of the case have been modified slightly in order to protect Lisa’s identity. She was frightened at the prospect of being quoted; the details that were included are common to many of the cases that Dunne and her colleagues see.)

Over the years, Glenn had pushed Lisa repeatedly, once shoving her into a wall as their children watched; on another occasion, he twisted her leg as she tried to run away from him. After a tour with the military, he was given a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Lisa considered a divorce, but she feared his response; he was an alcoholic and had begun monitoring her whereabouts. The crisis center provided her with an attorney and a clinical social worker, and, two years ago, helped negotiate an end to the marriage. Lisa got a full-time job and now had a boyfriend, whom I’ll call Thomas. She maintained a cordial relationship with Glenn, who had visitation rights with the children every other weekend. But Lisa and Thomas had decided to move in together, and when Lisa told Glenn he began calling her repeatedly. When she stopped answering, he left messages warning that he would take his own life, that everything would soon be over, that he didn’t know what he was capable of doing. He asked Lisa to send him recent pictures of the children, and told her to take good care of the family. One day, he left more than forty messages.

Although Morrison’s case hadn’t made the high-risk roster during her divorce, Dunne and her colleagues were now concerned. Lisa’s children were due to spend the upcoming weekend, unsupervised, with Glenn. Pickups and drop-offs are particularly dangerous times for victims and their children. Several years earlier, a victim and her abuser, who had been divorced for years, met for a routine child visitation, and the ex-husband locked the children in the car, then bashed their mother’s face into a wall as they watched.

Dunne asked Johnson whether they had grounds to suspend Glenn’s visitation rights. They didn’t, and Johnson reminded her that Lisa felt that the children’s presence would help Glenn control his behavior. Dunne asked if an unmarked police car could be stationed in front of Glenn’s house, but he lived outside the team’s jurisdiction. She asked whether there were guns in the house; no one knew of any. Reviewing the couple’s history, the team noted that Glenn was supposed to be seeing a psychologist but had stopped. Dunne and Johnson conducted a risk assessment using Campbell’s research, and Lisa scored an eight. She wasn’t in the most hazardous bracket, but Dunne knew that situations can change rapidly.

Dunne said, “This is really provocative behavior on his part,” and again argued that the team should find a way to stop the visitation. But Lisa didn’t want to file a restraining order, fearing that it would exacerbate Glenn’s erratic behavior, and there was no other legal recourse. So, on Friday afternoon, Lisa dropped the children off at Glenn’s house. On Saturday, Glenn stopped taking Lisa’s calls.

Alarmed, Lisa drove to the police station and filed a restraining order. The police went to Glenn’s house to serve him with papers, and Lisa retrieved the children and went home. Later that weekend, Glenn sent Lisa several e-mails in which he alluded to an impending death. The e-mails were a violation of the restraining order, so the police arrested Glenn, and held him in custody, pending what in Massachusetts is called a “dangerousness hearing.”

The dangerousness hearing is one of the most effective tools available to the high-risk team. A standard hearing determines bail based largely on flight risk. With a dangerousness hearing, even defendants who have clean records can be held until trial if they are deemed to be a sufficient threat to their victims or to their community. At the time of William Cotter’s threats to Dorothy, the statute was seldom used in cases involving domestic violence. Although many states have some version of preventive detention, very few advocates are aware of it, Dunne said.

Historically, such statutes have been used in gang or drug cases, though Massachusetts has seen a marked increase in their application to domestic violence. Viktoria Kristiansson, a legal adviser for AEquitas, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that supports the prosecution of violent crimes against women, noted that a dangerousness hearing “automatically provides a different context for a judge to analyze the evidence.”

Nevertheless, advocates have to contend with the difficult legal issue of preventive detention. “The Constitution tends to frown upon punishing prospective behavior,” Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., the director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute, told me. Randy Gioia, the deputy chief counsel of the Massachusetts Public Defender Division, says that his office tries to fight dangerousness hearings because people who are held don’t benefit from the rights that someone accused of a crime would get at trial. He said, “Our system is set up to decide what happened as best it can; it’s not set up to decide what will happen in the future.”

Holding an abuser before trial provides victims with time to relocate, save some money, and seek counselling and perhaps find a job. Dunne told me, “We know that arrest, in and of itself, is protective. You’re trying to disrupt that escalating cycle of violence.” Before Dorothy Giunta-Cotter’s murder, Dunne said, the statute was employed “maybe five times in three years” at the local district court. She added, “Now we see an average of two a month.”

The day after Glenn’s arrest for violating his restraining order, he appeared at his dangerousness hearing. The judge ordered him held until his pretrial date the following month. Typically, offenders are held in jail, but because Glenn had a history of threatening suicide he was transferred to a psychiatric ward for evaluation. For Lisa, the team, and even Glenn, this offered the one crucial element that was impossible to adjudicate: time.

Dunne’s team, through the courts, often requires that, as a condition of probation, abusers attend forty weeks of specialized group counselling. In the past two decades, batterers-intervention groups have proliferated. The first, Emerge, a counselling and education center in Cambridge, was founded in 1977; there are now fifteen hundred nationwide.

David Adams, a co-founder of Emerge, told me that abusers seldom appear to be angry people, because they reserve their anger for the partner or the partner’s immediate family. “The average batterer is more likable than his victim, because domestic violence affects victims a lot more than it affects batterers,” he said. “Batterers don’t lose sleep like victims do. They don’t lose their jobs, they don’t lose their kids.” In contrast, “a lot of victims come across as messed up.”

Often, victims are substance abusers, or they live in extreme poverty. Many have suffered traumatic, abusive childhoods. These cases are the most difficult to prosecute, not least because the victims can be unreliable witnesses. “This is why batterers are so often able to fool the system,” Dunne told me. “They’re so charming, and the victim comes off as very negative.”

Batterers-intervention groups typically provide the court with information about an abuser’s compliance and willingness to change. They file a monthly report with probation officers and are in regular contact with victims about a batterer’s participation in the group. “We can be the eyes and ears of the court,” Adams said. “Victims are trying to make decisions about staying or leaving; if she’s hearing back from us that he’s still blaming her, that’s useful to know.”

In addition to preventing abuse and intimidation, intervention groups try to help an abuser recognize his own dangerous tendencies. One day, I had lunch with a man who had been ordered by the court to complete Adams’s program. He admitted that he had lied to his group the night before about drinking alcohol—a violation of his probation. Yet he told me that the program had helped him. “When you find yourself in a class like that, you can’t lie to yourself about the decisions you made,” he said. “My life has taken me to a point where I can’t tell myself I’m not that bad.”

A week after Lisa Morrison’s case came to Dunne’s office, the high-risk team gathered for its monthly meeting at the police headquarters in Newburyport. The meeting brings together Dunne and Johnson, from the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center; Wile and other police-department representatives from Amesbury, Merrimac, and Newburyport; parole and probation officers; an Essex County batterers-intervention group; and a nurse from the local hospital. The cases are referred largely by the crisis center or by one of the local police departments.

Fewer than five per cent of the cases from Dunne’s center make it onto the high-risk roster, but, once they do, a response strategy is put in place. Because each office has slightly different legal restrictions, one challenge is to maintain a client’s confidentiality. The district attorney’s office can share basic information about a case, such as a pending court date, but nothing more. Probation officers can suggest terms of supervision, which might include measures like drug and alcohol testing or psychiatric counselling, but they cannot disclose anything about an offender’s private life—a job, where he lives, the results of a drug test. Parole officers can provide information only about when an abuser is on or nearing parole. Dunne and the crisis center can discuss cases with the team only after getting written permission from the victims.

Dunne’s office now sees police reports on the cases that the center has accepted, and they are often chilling. In one report, a woman told officers that her husband “made threats to me in the past about killing me, putting me in the chest freezer, and then taking my body out onto his boat and chumming me into the ocean. He also stated that he could kill me and put my body in his septic tank.”

As team members went down the list of cases, they looked for changes that might indicate trouble: a victim’s attempt to leave, an abuser going off probation or parole, the violation of a restraining order, the loss of a job, an incendiary Facebook post. In one case, a man assaulted his partner on the way to his batterers-intervention meeting, and was arrested again. In another, a man who had tried to stab his wife with a fork and then threatened to kill her was arrested and held without bail; he had a history of violating restraining orders and probably would be monitored by G.P.S. upon his release from prison. (Domestic abusers violate restraining orders forty per cent of the time.) One team member noted that the G.P.S. was not likely to stop the man. Dunne said the crisis center would try to make sure that the charges weren’t dropped, and organize a plan of action when he was released, in eighteen months.

Team members reviewed their options in each case. Police officers can conduct extra drive-bys or home visits to check for signs of unusual behavior. In Massachusetts, as in most states, if the abuser has a gun it can be confiscated when a restraining order is issued. Time can be added to an abuser’s sentence by combining domestic-violence charges with other criminal charges, such as theft or the possession of illegal drugs. Visitation with children can be supervised or suspended, or the judge can refer cases to the crisis center’s attorney in order to craft visitations that take into account the individual risks.

The team also helps victims find transitional housing and free legal assistance. Team members work with clients to improve their safety; this can involve rehearsing emergency situations, erasing their profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media outlets, and even changing daily habits, such as where they shop or the route they take to work. In rare instances, the team places victims in a kind of state-sponsored identity-protection program, in which the residential address is kept secret and mail is delivered to a post-office box.

All but seventeen states have passed or introduced legislation to allow the use of G.P.S. in cases of domestic violence. If an offender enters certain “exclusion zones”—ranging in size from a few blocks to an entire township—an alert is sent to the local police and an arrest warrant is issued. “We contain the offender so the victim doesn’t have to be contained,” Dunne told me.

The Morrisons were the final case of the morning. Some troubling facts had emerged. Before Glenn entered the psychiatric ward, he had repeatedly called Lisa’s boyfriend, Thomas; one morning, he drove to Thomas’s house and parked his car out front, where he sat for hours. Moreover, Dunne and her team had learned from Lisa’s counsellor that Glenn had been released by the ward; strict confidentiality laws had barred the hospital from informing them or the court. But, by the time of his pretrial hearing, he had been readmitted and the case was extended to the following month. In the meantime, the police had begun stopping by Lisa’s house once or twice a day to walk around and make sure nothing was amiss. Dunne was frustrated by the gaps in the system, but by now nearly three months had passed and, statistically, at least, Lisa and her children were safer. “Think about where we were originally,” Dunne said. “What increases safety is you go from no containment options to all kinds of people having their eyes on this case regularly, so if there’s any escalation there’s an ability to react.”

Late last fall, just before his upcoming court date, Glenn broke his restraining order again and followed Lisa in her car. He was charged for the second time with violating an order. Finally, eight months after the first call came in to the crisis center, the court gave Glenn eighteen months’ probation and required him to attend psychiatric counselling. Visitations with the children could continue, but only under third-party supervision.

In the Morrison case, Dunne’s team managed to intervene while the situation was still in the misdemeanor phase. Without the high-risk team, Lisa told me, “I honestly don’t know if I would be where I am.” But she and Thomas feel uneasy much of the time: “We say to each other, ‘Always be on the lookout.’ ” Unlike other crimes, in domestic violence the abuser maintains a presence in the life of his victim, and remains a potential threat, especially when children are involved.

I spoke to a woman whose husband had abused her for years. At one point, he threatened to slit her throat with broken CDs. She is divorced now, lives in a secured, secret location, and has a lifetime restraining order against him; he is not allowed to enter the town limits. Finally, she feels safe enough to go jogging—but she would not speak on the record, fearing that he would somehow find her and retaliate. She said that “the only way to describe what happened to me is like part of me died. It was just about survival.”

In the decade before Dorothy Giunta-Cotter’s murder, in 2002, a domestic-violence-related death occurred nearly every year in Amesbury. Since the formation of the high-risk team, in 2005, Dunne has not had a single case end in homicide. “When I listen to the stories of the victims who have been involved with the high-risk team, there is no question that many of them would have been killed,” Mary Lauby, the executive director of Jane Doe Inc., a domestic-violence advocacy organization in Boston, told me. Of the offenders now monitored by G.P.S., not one has committed another act of domestic violence; nearly sixty per cent were held before trial using a dangerousness hearing. Dunne also notes that, of the hundred and six high-risk cases documented in the team’s most recent report, only eight women were forced to seek refuge in shelters. She estimated that, before the formation of the high-risk team, ninety per cent of similar cases would have resulted in the women’s going into shelters.

Dunne and Wile have trained more than five thousand people from thirty states, including three thousand in Massachusetts. Groups from California, Louisiana, Florida, Illinois, and more than a dozen other states have contacted them. Framingham, Massachusetts, was the first to replicate the high-risk team based on Dunne’s model. Mary Gianakis, the director of Voices Against Violence, a Framingham crisis center, and a lead member of the area’s high-risk team, told me that, previously, shelters were the primary resource available to victims. “Now we can say, ‘Look, we’re going to bring the full power of all these resources to keep you safe and monitor your partner,’ ” she told me. To Suzanne Dubus, the need to create a model in which victims are protected, rather than isolated, seems obvious. “Here’s the outrage,” she told me. “It’s really cheap to do what we’re doing. It’s a lot cheaper than murder investigations and prosecutions and jail time.”

In their training sessions, Wile and Dunne walk through the timeline of Dorothy and William Cotter’s relationship. The violence began within a year of their meeting; each time that Dorothy threatened or tried to leave, William increased the degree of abuse—what experts call “retribution violence.” In 1996, she married him, a fact that often baffles Dunne’s trainees. “It’s counterintuitive,” Dunne says. “He strangled her, held her hostage. Why would she ever marry him?” But, she adds, “William showed her he would never let her go. So she thinks if she marries him he’ll get less violent.” In its way, it was a rational response to a support system that offered her little means of escape; her final attempt to leave failed when her request for a restraining order in Maine was refused. “We give them this message that the system won’t protect them,” Dunne says.

One evening, I drove around Amesbury with Officer David Noyes, who had broken down Dorothy’s door on the night of the murder. In his cruiser, we passed open fields and low-income apartments near the baseball diamonds of Amesbury Town Park, lakeside mansions, and the Amesbury Golf and Country Club. Green Street, where the Cotters lived, is a single block of lower-middle-class homes built so close together that there is barely room for someone to squeeze between them.

Noyes parked in the small lot beside Dorothy’s old house. A tricycle was on the lawn next door. Noyes said that it was so quiet when he and his team first arrived that he walked around the driveway with the other officers trying to figure out if they had the right house. Then he heard Dorothy: “No, he’s gonna kill me!” Noyes ran up the front stairs, and he heard her struggling with the door lock and the sound of William hitting her several times. When Noyes broke in, Cotter fired, and Noyes was blinded for a moment—a sawed-off shotgun emits a dazzling muzzle flash. Then he saw Dorothy fall. “I had trouble sleeping for years after, ” he said.

Dorothy was thirty-five years old. In the days before her death, she had told Detective Wile that if she and the girls moved to a shelter William would find them and kill them all. She attempted to avert the worse of two terrible outcomes: the loss of her daughters’ lives along with her own. “If I’m over there,” she told Wile, referring to her house, “there’s a better possibility that it’s just going to be me.” ♦

OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS
The Beach Builders

Can the Jersey Shore be saved?

by John Seabrook

Jonathan Oldham is the mayor of Harvey Cedars, a small town on the Jersey Shore. He grew up there, on Long Beach Island, where his father, a Presbyterian minister, ran the well-known Bible Conference. He is just old enough to remember the Ash Wednesday Storm, the March, 1962, nor’easter that was, until recently, the worst storm in living memory to strike the Shore. Because it lingered for five high tides, it was also known as the Five High Storm. Jonathan, his parents, and fifty of the town’s residents found shelter at the Bible Conference complex, which was on higher ground. From there, they watched the destruction of Harvey Cedars.

In the town’s Borough Hall, where I spoke with Oldham recently, there are several dozen black-and-white pictures of the devastation the storm left behind, uniformly framed and spaced along all four walls, a grim Presbyterian reminder of the doom that awaits us all. In the photographs, the tops of three-story houses can be seen bobbing like corks in the waves.

“My mother took that shot right there,” Oldham said, pointing to a photo taken from the Bible Conference. The ocean has cut a wide channel straight through the narrow barrier island to Barnegat Bay. “So, you see, for those of us who have been here for a long time, this is the demon that we’ve lived with, and it was never a matter of if a storm of great magnitude would come, it was always a matter of when.”

That was the conviction that Oldham brought to the mayor’s office, a volunteer position to which the town’s three hundred and thirty residents elected him in 1997. Like virtually all the beaches along New Jersey’s hundred-and-twenty-seven-mile coastline, the natural beach at Harvey Cedars had eroded away long ago. The town had been putting sand on the beach from time to time, but it never stayed there long; after the ’62 storm, the Army Corps of Engineers rebuilt the beach, but eventually that eroded, too. With no sandy buffer to protect it, except for the low dunes that municipal workers had bulldozed into place, the town was terribly exposed to storms. “We were very vulnerable,” Oldham told me. By the time Oldham became mayor, there was often a six-foot cliff at the base of the dunes, where the beach had been; at high tide, waves slapped against the dunes, which were all that separated the ocean from the oceanfront properties.

Fortunately, salvation was at hand, in the form of “the Project.” The Army Corps of Engineers had secured funding to build a wide beach at Harvey Cedars, a berm that would stretch not less than a hundred and twenty-five feet from the back of the beach to the water’s edge. The Corps would also create dunes, rising at least twenty-two feet above sea level, which is the projected height of the waves in a hundred-year storm. The Saharan amount of sand needed for this operation, 2.7 million cubic yards (a large dumpster holds thirty cubic yards), would be dredged from an offshore “borrow site,” pumped to the beach, and sprayed and bulldozed to conform to the Corps’s design specs. The Project would cost nearly twenty-six million dollars, but Harvey Cedars would pay very little: the federal government was picking up about sixty-five per cent of the cost, and the state nearly thirty-five per cent, leaving the town responsible for barely one per cent. Best of all, the Corps was offering to “nourish” the beaches and dunes with more sand, as the need arose, for the next fifty years, apparently guaranteeing the town’s residents a wide beach for their lifetimes and beyond.

There were conditions. In order to get the Project, the beachfront owners would have to sign easements giving the government the right to build the dunes on their property. The landward toe of the dune would sit on the non-buildable, riparian portion of their real estate, and the crest of the dune would block their view of the ocean from the main floor, unless the house was elevated. The easements also gave the Corps and the State of New Jersey the right to access the property “in perpetuity” in order to maintain the dunes. And Harvey Cedars was required to make the beach accessible to the public and to conform to federal guidelines governing water quality, beach grooming, placement of Porta-Potties, and so on.

The majority of residents signed the easements readily. The protection the Project offered outweighed their reservations about federal encroachment on their land and privileges. When homeowners objected to one aspect or another of the Corps’s plan, Oldham would invoke his experience with the Ash Wednesday Storm. “I’d be talking to this guy and he’d say, ‘Yeah, I don’t know if I’ll sign the easement, because I like to see the ocean from my deck,’ and I’d say, ‘Well, do you want to have a deck?’ ” By the end of six months, Oldham had managed to get ninety-three per cent of the easements signed.

Twelve holdouts remained, however, and they didn’t seem likely to budge. The Corps would not undertake the Project unless all the easements were signed. After about a year of fruitless wrangling, Oldham resolved that the town had to act. “We were in a vulnerable position, and it got to a point where we decided to take a calculated risk, so we went to eminent domain,” he said. In eminent domain, which municipalities often invoke in building roads, the government takes private land for the public good, in return for “just compensation.” “We went onto people’s property and built a dune to protect their home,” Oldham explained. The Project was finished in time for the 2010 summer season.

Among the holdouts were Harvey and Phyllis Karan, an older couple, who, like most beachfront owners, were seasonal residents. Their place, on Sixty-eighth Street, is a three-story wooden house with a gabled roof and a white-bannistered deck that runs around the raised main floor. They liked to sit there and watch their grandchildren play on the beach. After the Project, they looked at a weedy sand pile. The Karans wanted compensation for their lost view, which, their lawyer, Peter Wegener, argued, diminished the value of the $1.9-million house by five hundred thousand dollars. Harvey Cedars offered them three hundred dollars at first, and later raised the amount to seven hundred dollars. The Karans went to court, and a jury heard the case in 2011. The attorney for Harvey Cedars, Lawrence Shapiro, contended that the Project had added the value of security to the house, which offset the value of the lost view. Wegener argued that the whole town benefitted, while the Karans’ property value suffered the loss. The judge in the case ruled that the jury could consider the dune only as a general benefit to everyone in the town. Not surprisingly, the jury decided that the Karans had been unfairly saddled with the cost of the dune, for the benefit of all, and, after visiting the house and taking in the lost view from the deck, the jury awarded them three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. The case went to the Appellate Division, in Trenton, and, in March, 2012, the verdict was upheld.

“When we were losing in court,” Oldham told me, “I really started to question myself. Was it really the right thing to do, to take these people’s property?” But he’d always come back to the Ash Wednesday Storm. “Because, in my world, this didn’t make any sense. People who don’t live here year-round, who only come when the weather’s nice, they don’t understand how bad it can be.” The town pursued the case to the New Jersey Supreme Court. Harvey Cedars could manage to pay the Karans for their view—the town had privately settled with other holdouts. But by now many other coastal communities on the Shore, which also wanted the Project, couldn’t get all their easements signed, either, because some property owners thought they could hold out for a Karan-like payment.

Then, on Monday, October 29, 2012, came Sandy, the doomsday storm that had haunted Oldham for fifty years. (Following in his father’s footsteps, he now runs the Bible Conference, where his family sheltered in 1962.) In all, the storm was estimated to have removed some thirty-seven million cubic yards of sand from the beaches of New York and New Jersey, according to Cheryl Hapke, of the U.S. Geological Survey. Towns that had the Project—Harvey Cedars, Surf City, and a section of Brant Beach—came through the storm with relatively minimal damage. Towns without the Project, such as Holgate and, north of the Barnegat Inlet, Mantoloking and Ortley Beach, were badly damaged. The Karans’ property came through largely unscathed. The dune, which was washed away like a sand castle (temporarily restoring the Karans’ view), performed as it was designed to. However, although the offensive dune had saved their house, the Karans’ bid to be compensated for their lost view continued.

The Jersey Shore was the first developed coastline in the United States. The Shore was where Americans learned to love the beach, an infatuation that would shift our national identity away from the rugged stoicism of the pioneers and toward the hedonism and exhibitionism of this day—“life’s a bitch” became “life’s a beach.”

The Shore was Florida before Florida existed. Disneyland and Las Vegas might never have been conceived without Atlantic City, which had its heyday in the first decades of the twentieth century, or Wildwood, which was in its prime from the twenties through the sixties, when I went to the Jersey Shore with my parents. I remember that first sight of the ocean. We’d drive through miles and miles of scrubby pine trees and sand, and then the blue would fill the windshield and there it was: the ocean, the beach, and the sky. We rented a house in Avalon, from which you could hear the sea all day and night, crashing and seething.

In the seventies, partly thanks to the success of those latter-day vacation spots, some of the Shore’s landmark tourist attractions entered a long period of decline, which mostly continues to this day. There are more than forty Shore communities, whose inhabitants are a blend of wealthy out-of-towners on the beach, local merchants and businessmen, and, several blocks inland, low-income families, many living in Section 8 housing. Religious communities like Ocean Grove, a Methodist settlement, sit hip-to-hip with fleshpots like Asbury Park.

In addition to teaching Americans to love the beach, the Shore has been a laboratory for developing standards and practices in coastal engineering, many of which were later applied elsewhere, for better or worse. Orrin Pilkey, a distinguished coastal scientist and author from Duke University, calls the state’s approach to coastal engineering “New Jerseyization.” The term is not complimentary. In his 1996 book, “The Corps and the Shore” (written with Katharine Dixon), Pilkey writes, “The long sea-walled beaches of New Jersey, covered by the clutter of previously destroyed walls, are arguably the most unsightly beaches in the world.”

Most of the Shore is built on sand spits like Long Beach Island, or L.B.I., which are in many places less than two hundred yards wide. (Long Branch, Asbury Park, and Cape May are the only Shore cities that are situated on the mainland.) Had the barrier islands never been developed, they would form natural buffers between the sea and the mainland. But, as America’s infatuation with the beach grew, so did the value of proximity to it. A house with an ocean view is prime real estate, no matter how shoddily constructed; in Harvey Cedars, Peter Wegener told me, the exact same house is worth sixty per cent less if it’s behind the house with the view. Boardwalks, which were built to keep sand on the beach, became popular promenades (they were called “flirtation walks”) and promoted ever more elaborate amusements, restaurants, and games of chance, culminating in the high-rise hotels (now casinos) in Atlantic City.

The problem is that beaches and barrier islands aren’t permanent. They move as wind and water reshape them. (Exactly how sand moves in water is a matter that even the most complex mathematical models don’t really explain. Einstein reportedly advised his son Hans not to pursue a career in sedimentary transport, because it was too complicated.) Coastal engineers are tasked with keeping these capricious sand piles in place. The Shore’s formative years, around the turn of the twentieth century, were relatively quiet ones for Atlantic hurricanes. But, in the nineteen-thirties, a number of strong storms struck the Shore, followed by a disastrous hurricane in 1944. These storms revealed just how vulnerable and foolishly situated much of the development was. With so much invested in the oceanfront already, retreat was unthinkable; increased coastal defense was the only option. Both private-property owners and public-works departments armored the Shore with jetties and groins, which extend at a right angle from the beach, into the ocean, and with seawalls, which are placed at the back of the beach and are generally made out of heavy timber, reinforced concrete, and large rocks.

These structures succeeded, temporarily at least, in protecting the buildings. But armoring turned out to be bad for the beaches. Seawalls violently repelled wave energy, which churned up the sand and sucked it out to sea. The jetties and groins also impeded the “littoral drift”—the giant floating beach that waves push up and down the coast—blocking sand from going to neighboring towns (these structures are sometimes called “spite groins”). Starved of sand, the most heavily armored towns soon had no beach at all, which was the whole reason that the Shore had been attractive in the first place. At that point, the process of New Jerseyization was complete.

In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, coastal-engineering philosophy shifted, as reflected in “Design with Nature,” an influential book by the Scottish landscape architect and writer Ian McHarg. The new thinking advocated protecting coastlines with less invasive “soft structures,” such as beaches and dunes. Even the word that engineers used for beach building, “nourishment,” suggested a holistic, almost maternal concern for a beach’s well-being. Unlike a seawall, a beach absorbs wave energy as the water sinks into the sand, and a dune spreads and dissipates the wave along its hips and shoulders, rather than flinging it back against the next wave. Of course, the hard structures built by previous generations of coastal engineers remained in place, which meant that the artificial beaches were likely to erode more rapidly, and would have to be continually replaced. But with so much of New Jersey’s economy based on beach tourism, political leaders had no choice but to persist in this Sisyphean task.

The precursor to the Army Corps of Engineers was formed in the eighteenth century, by George Washington and the Second Continental Congress, to assist in designing and building fortifications during the Revolutionary War. In peacetime, Corps engineers dredged inlets and rivers, built levees and dikes, maintained ports, and assisted in waterborne commerce. The Corps began building artificial beaches in Ocean City, New Jersey, in the nineteen-fifties, and became more involved after the Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962. Since then, many of the great beaches of the East Coast, from Martha’s Vineyard to Miami Beach, have been nourished. (On the West Coast, where, as long as the rivers are not dammed, there is lots of new sediment washing into the ocean from the mountains, beaches tend to last longer. On the East Coast, where the mountains are much older and lower, there isn’t much fresh material to replace what’s carried out to sea.) Nourishment works better on some beaches than on others. No two grains of sand are the same, and beaches have different characters depending on the kind of sand they’re made of. Miami’s nourished beach has fared pretty well, partly because its sand grains, with a high proportion of crushed shells and coral amid the pulverized rock, are small, and they pack together firmly; that’s why the beach is so hard. New Jersey beaches, which consist of coarser sand made from ground-up rock, tend to erode far more quickly.

Since 1970, the Corps has nourished beaches, mostly on the East Coast, four hundred and sixty-nine times, placing more than three hundred and seventy million cubic yards of sand on them, at a cost of $3.7 billion in today’s money, the bulk of it paid by taxpayers who don’t live anywhere near the ocean. As Andy Coburn, a coastal scientist at Western Carolina University, who provided these figures, noted in an e-mail, “The cost of nourishment, measured on a per unit basis, has steadily increased from the 1970s ($1.71/cubic yard of sand) to now ($14.38/cubic yard of sand), and the projected future cost of nourishment will continue to go up as demand increases and as the easiest-to-get, best-quality sand is used up.” However, in the near term at least, the Corps has plenty of money. Earlier this year, Congress gave the Corps $5.4 billion “for necessary expenses related to the consequences of Hurricane Sandy”—much more than it has spent on beaches since nourishment began.

One bitterly cold day last January, the Corps was working at Sea Bright, in Monmouth County, replacing the beach that Sandy had erased. I rode to the site from the city with Lynn Bocamazo, the chief design engineer on the Project, and Dan Falt, its manager. Bocamazo, who is in her early fifties, has brown hair and glasses, and the demeanor of an enthusiastic science teacher. We parked in the empty lot of Moby’s, a local seafood joint. The wind coming off the ocean made my eyes water. No tourists were around, but there were a lot of contractors, warming themselves in their big pickups, drinking coffee. We put on hard hats, safety vests, and goggles, and negotiated the icy gangway onto the small boat that would take us out to the dredge.

Sea Bright has a plausible claim to being the spot where Americans’ dangerous liaison with the beach started in earnest. A beachfront hotel capable of accommodating three hundred people, the Ocean House, was built in 1842; patrons arrived from New York by steamboat. By the turn of the twentieth century, a rail line brought the city’s huddled masses to the Sea Bright beach, a short day trip. In 1931, a seventeen-foot-high seawall was completed from Sea Bright to Monmouth Beach, to protect the oceanfront houses. Eventually the rail line was abandoned and removed. The wall remained, and it accelerated beach erosion, earning Sea Bright a new distinction as one of the first beachless beach towns.

The Corps has nourished the beach at Sea Bright twice since 1995. It is supposed to be re-nourished every six years, but, when Sandy hit, ten years had passed since the last nourishment; the state had decided that other beaches were in more dire need of the sand. By 2012, as Bocamazo put it, the Sea Bright beach was “not in its designed condition.” It had lost some nine hundred thousand cubic yards of sand. The beach was scheduled to be re-nourished early in November, 2012—as it turned out, just a few days too late.

During the morning of October 29th, waves as high as twenty-eight feet crashed into Sea Bright. What remained of the engineered beach did little to stop them. Stewart Farrell, a coastal scientist at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, told me, “The storm simply bulldozed the sand up against the seawall and used it as a ramp to launch waves onto the houses on the other side,” flooding the town with five feet of water and flinging tons of sand onto Ocean Avenue and the streets behind it. (Snowplows were deployed to clear the streets afterward.) The damage to homes and businesses was catastrophic. I asked Bocamazo whether Sea Bright might have been better protected had the beach been nourished sooner. She said it wouldn’t have mattered, because “the water level was so high it just came over the beach.” She added, “Sandy overwhelmed the project, especially in Sea Bright.”

Bocamazo, a hydraulic engineer with a degree from Cooper Union, has been with the Corps for twenty-nine years. She was the engineer on the original Sea Bright nourishment project, in the nineties. On the ride out to the dredge, she explained some of the challenges of beach design: “First, you need a lot of sand.” To re-nourish the twenty-one miles of coastline from Sea Bright to Manasquan will require twenty-two million cubic yards of sand. New Jersey gets its sand from the remains of a beach, now a couple of miles offshore, that was created by the Wisconsin glaciation during the last Ice Age, when the sea level was almost sixty feet lower. “You try to match the sand to the beach,” Bocamazo continued. If you placed smaller-grained Florida sand, sometimes called sugar sand, on Jersey beaches, it would erode even more rapidly. North Carolina put sand that contained cobbles of limestone, about the size of grapefruit, on the beach at Oak Island in 2001, and the beach has never recovered.

The dredge was named the Dodge Island, and was owned by Great Lakes Dredge and Dock, of Oak Brook, Illinois. The ship is two hundred and sixty-six feet long and weighs about thirty-two thousand five hundred tons. From the bridge, where the captain and his officers worked under a large glass canopy, one could see down into the dredge’s hopper, which is capable of holding some thirty-five hundred cubic yards of sand at a time.

As we reached the borrow site, the underwater sonar showed the contoured bottom of the sand deposit, which varied from thirty-five to sixty feet below the surface—the remains of primeval dunes and, possibly, barrier islands long ago submerged by the rising sea. It was a chilling glimpse into the Shore’s distant future.

There were two big drag heads, one on either side of the ship, which vacuum sand from the seafloor. When we were right over the borrow site, the heads were lowered in and started blasting the seabed with jets of water, to loosen the sand and make it easier to suck up. Before long, a gray slurry of water and sand began to pour into the hopper.

Watching the hold fill, the dredge’s captain, George Hoffman, said, “Some sand just jumps into the hopper, some you got to work.”

When the hopper was full, we took the small boat back to the beach, while the dredge made its way toward the pumping station. There the crew attached a half-mile-long, thirty-six-inch-wide pipe that ran along the bottom of the ocean to the beach. When they were finished, the sand would lie up to fifteen feet deep, with a two-hundred-foot-long berm raised to twelve feet above mean low water, a one-to-twenty slope to the water and a one-to-ten slope after that. If the berm were any higher, the beach would “scarp,” or form small ledges; any lower and tidal pools would collect on it.

A worker yelled, “Water on the hill!,” as the gray slurry from the Dodge Island began to spew through a three-quarter-inch-mesh screen intended to catch large rocks and other objects. (The borrow site is near an old artillery practice range off Sandy Hook, and the dredge sometimes sucks up unexploded ordnance.) A loader and a couple of bulldozers were working down on the beach, moving the sand around. On a finished section, an excavator was smoothing the bulldozer tracks out of the sand by dragging a section of pipe. A long hill of sand constructed by the Corps caught and diverted the slurry so that it couldn’t run off the beach and back into the ocean. Great Lakes is paid only for the sand that can be measured on the beach, so the workmen wanted to keep the sand there until a large three-legged contraption called the CRAB, which stands for Coastal Research Amphibious Buggy, could be maneuvered into place to measure the beach’s profile.

The work went quickly, and by the end of the day the re-nourishment of Sea Bright was nearly complete. There was a brand-new, totally artificial beach, where future memories would be made.

In the months after Sandy, people who hadn’t signed their easements were the villains of many a town-hall meeting along the Shore. Not only were their fellow beachfront owners furious with them; so were inland residents whose houses were also damaged because there were no dunes. The mayor of Long Beach Township, Joe Mancini, proposed that the holdouts should have to pay for the cleanup around their homes. He also published their names on the town’s Web site. “I view this as a public-safety issue,” he told me. “Neighbors had a right to know they were living next to a holdout.”

The Governor himself showed up at an April 30th town-hall meeting on L.B.I., and took on the issue of easements in classic Chris Christie form. Addressing beachfront owners’ concerns that making the beaches accessible to the public would lead to commercial development, he said, “I don’t want to build a hut. I don’t want to build anything except a dune, O.K.?” Warm applause followed. Christie continued, “Any knucklehead neighbor of yours who’s telling you, ‘Uh-oh, you sign that easement, Christie’s comin’ in here buildin’ showers for people, a bathroom, a hot-dog stand, before you know it there’s going to be a Dairy Queen’ . . . Let me use a word that’s indelicate.” Now fully in his element, the Governor admonished the children in the room to cover their little ears. “It’s bullshit! That’s what it is!,” he roared. “Here’s why they’re really concerned. They don’t want their view blocked!” He noted the three hundred and sixty-five thousand houses that were destroyed, the memories washed away forever. “We are not going through that again, so that you could sit on the first floor, rather than the second floor, and see the ocean!”

The state Department of Environmental Protection has been promoting an ambitious plan to gird nearly the entire Jersey Shore, from Bay Head to Cape May, with engineered beaches and dunes. But, of the two thousand easements needed to buffer the state with dunes, only about eight hundred had been signed. Christie had signalled that the state would take over the risk of invoking eminent domain on the holdouts, but so far that remained the towns’ responsibility. A great deal depended on whether or not the three-hundred-and-seventy-five-thousand-dollar award that the Karans received for their lost view was upheld.

The state Supreme Court heard arguments in May, in a courtroom in Trenton. The justices questioned the attorneys on both sides closely about whether or not the dune constituted a special benefit to the Karans or a general benefit to the town. The commissioner of New Jersey’s D.E.P., Bob Martin, was in the audience; later, he told reporters that the case “is extremely important for the state over all—we want to make sure that we recognize the value of these dunes.” Mayor Oldham told me he was encouraged by the line of questioning that the justices pursued. “I don’t know how you can say, post-Sandy, that the dune wasn’t a specific benefit to the Karans’ house. I mean, go look at it. It’s standing!”

The justices agreed with him. Last week, they overturned the Karans’ award, saying that it “disregards the home’s enhanced value resulting from a public project.” They sent the case back to Superior Court for a new trial. Phyllis Karan told the Newark Star-Ledger that she wasn’t sure she and her husband would continue with the suit, adding that their interest had never been the money. “All we wanted was our view,” she said.

But does the Project really work? And would the Project, were it to be applied all along the Shore, actually protect New Jersey? Orrin Pilkey, the Duke coastal scientist, has called beach nourishment a “sham,” because artificial beaches rarely last as long as the Corps claims they do, and because the Corps’s beach-design principles are unproven. The raised profile of the Corps’s beaches means that waves hit them harder, he told me, which causes them to erode more quickly. “Basically, beaches are made by throwing sand up on the beach and hoping for the best, despite a costly design process,” he said. (Surfers also dislike engineered beaches, because the waves break on the shore, leaving little to ride; also, the steeper beaches have been known to cause neck injuries when swimmers hit them.) Pilkey and the Corps also disagree about where the sand that erodes from nourished beaches goes. Is much of it washed far out to sea, as Pilkey says, rarely to return? Or does it mostly stay on the Jersey Shore, as the Corps maintains, drifting north and south and collecting in substantial deposits at Sandy Hook and Cape May?

Pilkey’s larger objection to beach nourishment is that it encourages development, and clouds the public’s appreciation of the risks that come with an ocean view. Thanks to the ready availability of the Project, the long-range solution to New Jersey’s coastal problems, which is to pull back from the barrier islands, has not been seriously discussed at a policy level. Inevitably, there will be more development, including, perhaps, high-rise condos. “High-rises are the single most important roadblock to any sort of flexible response to sea-level rise,” Pilkey wrote in an e-mail. “They can’t be moved even if there was a place to move them. To demolish them would put all sorts of stuff into the water. It puts New Jersey right in the hopeless camp of Florida, where they have hundreds of miles of high-rise-lined shorelines. They don’t have a prayer.”

Mark Mauriello, a geologist who was the D.E.P. commissioner under Governor Jon Corzine, told me, “The problem is you nourish and then people have the feeling of security and come right back, the beach erodes, and then you have another storm.”

Rob Thieler, a research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, raised other questions about the dredging involved in building man-made beaches. “How much seafloor disturbance can you do before you interfere with fish-spawning habitats?” He also pointed out that some of the best underwater sand-mining sites are already supplying beaches with sand, under natural processes. “Which raises the issue of resource utilization. Are you using the resource in ways that are going to substantially alter the natural patterns that are mitigating the erosion process already?” I asked Thieler if he considered nourishment a long-term sustainable solution to coastal protection. “I don’t think we have a complete understanding of what the long-term costs and benefits and physical sustainability are,” he replied.

Sea-level rise, or S.L.R., and the increased severity of storms as a result of climate change (by the end of the century, hundred-year events like Sandy could likely occur every ten years or so) are the variables that make gauging the Project’s long-term prospects difficult. The central range of estimates calls for the ocean to rise between seven and sixteen inches by 2050; the upper range, which factors in the rapid melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, is around twenty-four inches. By 2100, the intermediate high estimate is 3.9 feet and the highest 6.6 feet. “Are these islands going to migrate, are they going to disintegrate, or some combination of that?” Thieler asked. “Do we have enough sand to hold them in place? Again, I don’t think we know the answer.”

At what point does the cost of keeping the Jersey Shore from being inundated, using both soft and hard structures, surpass the cost of abandoning the barrier islands and pulling back? I asked James E. Neumann, an owner of Industrial Economics, a private consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He and his colleagues have created a model that shows the economic impact of sea-level rise on developed coasts around the country. “Beach nourishment won’t be sufficient for S.L.R. above about one foot,” he replied. “At that point, if you want to keep a beach, you’ll have to keep raising the profile of the beach to keep up with a rising sea and build a hard structure”—such as a seawall—“behind it to control periodic storm surges.” (Indeed, since Sandy, a lot of Shore towns have discussed building seawalls, and Bay Head has already extended its wall.) Neumann went on, “Will people still want to live near the beach if the environment is so highly managed by engineering?” However, according to his model, which extends to 2100, he said, “The property values are so high, and the density of property value so high, in many parts of the barrier islands in New Jersey, that these areas are never abandoned in our study period.”

If the federal government tires of paying for the Project—Presidents as far back as Bill Clinton have tried to get the government out of the beach-building business, only to butt heads with powerful political interests in coastal states—will the beachfront owners and shore towns pick up the cost themselves? And will the thing that made these properties valuable in the first place, which is the view of the ocean, continue to command a premium? After a couple more hundred-year storms, people may not look at an ocean view the same way they do now. They may see only the menace.

Governor Christie has spoken eloquently about rebuilding the Shore. “As a kid who was born and raised in this state and who spent a lot of time over my life—both my childhood and my adult life—at the Jersey Shore, we’ll rebuild it. No question in my mind we’ll rebuild it,” he said the day after Sandy. He browbeat the U.S. Congress into passing a generous Sandy relief package. The storm and its aftermath generally showed Christie at his best, and if he goes on to capture the Republican Presidential nomination in 2016 he’ll have Sandy to thank.

Christie has said very little about efforts to adapt to climate change. He has yet to give anything close to the speech that Mayor Bloomberg delivered in June at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, outlining New York’s plans to protect the city from the dangers posed by rising seas and strengthening storms. In an appearance on the “Today” show, broadcast from the boardwalk at Seaside Heights on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, the Governor refused to attribute Sandy to climate change. “I haven’t been shown any definitive proof yet that that’s what caused it,” he said. “Listen, this is distraction,” he went on. “I’ve got a place to rebuild here, and people want to talk to me about esoteric theories. We’ve got plenty of time to do that later on.”

Owners of destroyed homes are mostly free to rebuild them on the same spot, although new floodplain maps have expanded the areas that require houses to be elevated, and, in some of the most vulnerable areas, raised on thirteen-foot stilts. The state has no plan to buy destroyed oceanfront properties and preserve them from development. Mark Mauriello, the former D.E.P. commissioner, told me, “Unfortunately, the Governor was so hellbent on getting things open, there was no discussion of acquisition and resettlement, and now there is no need, because the government is going to come in and do this four-billion-dollar nourishment. But in five years we’ll need it again.” However, the state did set aside twenty-five million dollars of federal funds for a public-relations campaign, to let people know that the Shore was open for business. The theme of the campaign is “Stronger than the Storm.”

On Memorial Day, after a cold and wet weekend, the beach at Sea Bright was lightly populated with families and small groups, finally enjoying some nice weather. No one was swimming—the water was still too cold for that, and the uncertainty about what storm debris might remain on the ocean floor wasn’t exactly tempting people in, either—but children played at the water’s edge, their feet slapping the slick, wet, fresh sand as they raced the incoming waves.

I sat there, staring out at the ocean. I picked up a handful of sand and let it run through my fingers. The color was yellowish brown and the grain was a little coarser than usual, owing to the chunks of brownish crystal in it. There was also some pea gravel, and black specks of what appeared to be obsidian. But the beach’s slope felt good to lie back on, and the sand molded to my hip when I turned on my side to read.

Overhead, banner planes towed news of extraordinary holiday mattress deals, while bored-looking lifeguards, with no one to save, lounged in their chairs. There was the coconut smell of tanning lotion. Someone broke out a paddle-ball set, and with the lazy thwack of the rubber ball against the wooden paddles it was possible to believe that life is a beach after all. ♦

A REPORTER AT LARGE
Operation Easter

The hunt for illegal egg collectors.

by Julian Rubinstein

On the afternoon of May 31, 2011, Charlie Everitt, an investigator for the National Wildlife Crime Unit in Edinburgh, Scotland, received an urgent call from a colleague in the Northern Constabulary, the regional police department whose jurisdiction includes the islands off the country’s western coast. The officer told Everitt that a nature-reserve warden on the Isle of Rum, twenty miles offshore, had reported seeing a man “dancing about” in a gull colony. Everitt looked at the clock. It was 4 P.M., too late to catch the last ferry, so he drove halfway to Mallaig, a tiny port town four hours away, where he could take the first boat out in the morning.

The Isle of Rum, a forty-one-square-mile rock, is inhabited by about forty people, many of them employed by the Scottish Natural Heritage, an environmental organization charged with protecting wildlife. Rum has red deer and an assortment of rare birds, including merlins and white-tailed sea eagles, and it is a principal breeding ground for the Manx shearwater, a seabird with a distinctly eerie call. For this reason, as Everitt knew, the place was also a target for egg collectors, a secretive network of men obsessed with accumulating and cataloguing the eggs of rare birds.

The ferry ride the next morning was choppy; clouds hung almost to the water. Everitt, a moonfaced man of forty-six, wondered what kind of day lay ahead. In Victorian times, egg collecting in England was the quaint province of natural historians, but, as laws protecting endangered birds were passed, the activity became a criminal act. Collectors had gone underground; some communicated with one another using code numbers as aliases. In his ten years on the job, Everitt had never encountered a collector.

Halfway across the sound, Everitt was contacted by radio. It was the Northern Constabulary: the suspect was on the jetty. As Everitt disembarked, he saw a rangy man dressed in camouflage leaning against a bulging rucksack. He looked to be in his late forties, with sunken brown eyes. Everitt approached and asked his name. “As soon as he said it, I thought, We’ve found our person.”

The man was Matthew Gonshaw, the most notorious egg collector in Britain. An unemployed Londoner, Gonshaw had already served three prison terms on egg-collecting charges. When he was last apprehended, in 2004, investigators had seized nearly six hundred eggs, a hundred and four of them hidden inside a secret compartment in his bed frame.

There is no police station on Rum, so Everitt took Gonshaw to the Scottish Natural Heritage office, where Gonshaw consented to a search of his rucksack. It held several small syringes, which collectors use to forcibly blow out the contents of eggs; topographical maps of the area; a loop of rope; and a military survival guide. Everitt had also noticed shredded newspaper sticking out of some food containers. Inside them were twenty eggs, including eight of the Manx shearwater.

Gonshaw refused to answer questions; he knew the police would raid his apartment and asked that they get the key from the landlord instead of breaking down the door. Everitt called his Edinburgh office, which informed the Metropolitan Police, in London. Within hours, a joint special-forces team from the police and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the U.K.’s largest conservation organization, were preparing to search Gonshaw’s flat. Mark Thomas, a senior investigator for the R.S.P.B. who had become a minor celebrity on the environmental-crime circuit for his work on egg-collecting cases, told me recently that, when he got the call, “I put down the phone and literally ran to my car.”

Most of the bird eggs collected by Britain’s preëminent natural historians are housed at the Natural History Museum at Tring, forty-five minutes north of London. The Tring museum has the largest zoological collection ever amassed by a single person and is situated on the former estate of its founder, Lord Walter Rothschild, the banker and zoologist, who was famous for driving a zebra-drawn carriage. Rothschild died in 1937; more than two hundred animal species, including a worm, bear his name.

Today, the museum at Tring comprises six galleries, housing thousands of taxidermy specimens, among them crocodiles, domestic dogs, wild asses, and every known species of zebra, including the now extinct quagga, the last of which died in Amsterdam in 1883. It is also home to the largest bird-egg collection in the world, with around two million specimens, which has made it a leading institution for researchers. In the nineteen-sixties, the collection figured prominently in a study by the conservationist Derek Ratcliffe, who wanted to know why peregrine falcons were failing to produce offspring. By comparing recent eggs with older ones at the museum, Ratcliffe discovered that the shells had become perilously thin, likely owing to pesticides that the birds were eating. The attention led to a Europe-wide ban on DDT.

Oology—the study of eggs—is “one of the most exciting areas of ornithology and, in many respects, one of the least known,” Douglas Russell, the curator of the egg collection at Tring, told me. But Russell, a small, serious man with an orange goatee, was not eager to show me the collection. It has been, he said, “completely locked down” since 1979, after Mervyn Shorthouse, a regular visitor posing as a wheelchair-bound invalid, stole ten thousand eggs in a three-year period. I’d been directed to a side entrance next to a dumpster, where a guard took my bag and identification and escorted me to Russell, who held my passport to my face and gave me a hard stare. “That will be kept on file for five years,” he said, and led me down an echoing corridor to a photocopier, where he scanned my documents.

The museum’s eggs are kept in an acrid basement filled with row after row of temperature-controlled steel cabinets, some arranged by collector. Russell grabbed a key off his belt loop and took me to one of the cabinets, which opened like a bank vault. Inside a glass-covered drawer, like rare jewels, were groups of small eggs, speckled blue, beige, and gray, each with a small round hole where its contents had been extracted. “These are Stuart Baker’s cuckoos,” Russell said. “Look how much variety there is.” I followed him to another cabinet; inside was a single white egg from a Samoan wood rail, collected in 1873. Russell paused to wipe his eyes. “That is the only egg there ever will be,” he said. “Because it’s extinct. But at least we have that one window.”

At the turn of the twentieth century, as the conservation movement began raising awareness of endangered species, the collecting of wild-bird eggs came under scrutiny. In 1922 in London, Earl Buxton, addressing the annual meeting of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, warned of the “distinct menace” posed by egg-collecting members of the British Ornithologists’ Union, of which Lord Rothschild was a member. Indignant, Rothschild split off and, with the Reverend Francis Charles Robert Jourdain, a cantankerous Oxford-educated ornithologist who bore a scar across his forehead from falling off a cliff in search of an eagle’s nest, formed the British Oological Association. The group, which renamed itself the Jourdain Society after Jourdain died, in 1940, proclaimed that it was the only organization in the country dedicated to egg collecting.

It has not fared well. In 1954, the Protection of Birds Act outlawed the taking of most wild-bird eggs in the U.K. In 1981, some ninety species were declared Schedule 1; possession of their eggs, unless they were taken before 1954, is a crime. Meetings of the Jourdain Society, to which members wore formal attire and carried display cabinets full of eggs, became the target of spectacular raids and stings. By the nineteen-nineties, more than half of Jourdain Society members had egg-collecting convictions, according to the R.S.P.B. One member recently agreed to a radio interview only after insuring that his voice would be disguised.

“An awful lot of the ornithological knowledge we hold dear is based on the work of both professional and amateur naturalists over the course of the last two hundred years, and that involved significant amounts of collecting,” Russell said, as we passed an aisle with Jourdain’s eggs. “But today’s collectors are not what I would call ornithologists. These are obsessives who have chosen eggs as a particularly attractive thing. The suspect part of the attraction is that you’re not allowed to do it.”

The two men every serious egg collector knows are Mark Thomas and Guy Shorrock. They are senior investigators for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which keeps a database on wildlife-crime offenders and has assisted law enforcement in the prosecution of dozens of egg collectors. Founded in 1889 by women denied membership in the British Ornithologists’ Union, the R.S.P.B. was granted a royal charter in 1904, around the same time that, in the U.S., Teddy Roosevelt proclaimed his support for the Audubon Society. Today, the R.S.P.B. is one of the most influential protectionist groups in the world, with more than a million members; in Scotland, it is the eighth-biggest landowner.

The organization’s headquarters are in Sandy, an hour north of London, on a sprawling forty-acre nature reserve. Six hundred employees work there, in buildings named for birds. The investigations office—a small open space with six desks, in the Bittern building—overlooks a manicured garden and a pond. “Once, an e-mail went out to the entire staff that there was a honey buzzard outside, and within minutes four hundred people were there,” Thomas told me, shaking his head.

Thomas, who is forty-one, wears a buzz cut and round wire-rimmed glasses and has the earnest disposition of a schoolboy politician, which belies his determination; colleagues liken him to “a terrier with rats.” When I arrived last August, he was standing at his desk in a T-shirt and parachute pants, and gazing at an ordnance map on the wall. The previous week, he had accompanied police in Suffolk on the raid of a suspected egg collector who was also a police officer. They found six hundred and fifty eggs in his home, and two sets of handwritten data cards with scientific notations. One set dated the eggs to the nineteen-forties and early fifties, when taking eggs was still legal. The second set—found inside an empty water tank in the attic—contained the same notations but with the real dates of collection. “It was the perfect crime,” Thomas told me. “Except he’s kept all the evidence.” Thomas had been working twelve-hour days, feeding the information into an Excel spreadsheet in preparation for an upcoming pretrial interview. “The guy is snookered, basically,” he said.

In the corner, Shorrock, who is lanky and handsome at fifty-one, with light-blue eyes and sprouts of silver hair, was preparing two large overnight backpacks. He was going “somewhere up north”—he wouldn’t say where—to investigate a possible crime: an estate owner allegedly had set traps for birds of prey in order to protect his young pheasants for the hunting season. Shorrock would be camping out for at least two nights.

Despite Britain’s fervor for wildlife preservation, it has no central government agency like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In terms of fighting wildlife crime, its closest equivalent, the National Wildlife Crime Unit, created in 2006, has only eight full-time employees. Both the public and law enforcement rely on the R.S.P.B. investigative team to help prevent bird crimes.

Egg-collecting cases make up about twenty-five per cent of the team’s work, but egg collecting is the only wildlife crime that warrants an ongoing nationwide police initiative, called Operation Easter. The program, which Shorrock helped launch in 1997, has enabled the R.S.P.B. to combine decades’ worth of intelligence on egg collectors into a national police database. “It’s very rare in the U.K. to have a national police operation of this kind,” Alan Stewart, the police officer who started Operation Easter with Shorrock, told me. “The others are for drug trafficking, human trafficking, and football hooliganism.”

It had been a busy season for the investigators. Aside from the bust in Suffolk, the R.S.P.B. was guarding a red-backed-shrike nest in the South of England twenty-four hours a day. Two pairs of shrikes appeared in 2010, the first time the species had been seen nesting in the U.K. since the mid-nineteen-eighties; many blamed its disappearance on egg collectors. When word of their reappearance got out, dozens of people volunteered to protect the nests. “With all the crimes I’ve dealt with, egg collecting is always the one that upsets the public the most,” Shorrock, a former Manchester cop, told me.

On the table next to him was an embossed photo album titled “Egg Collectors and Their Associates.” Under one photograph of a group of men around a picnic table, someone had written, “Who are these guys?” Most egg collectors don’t seem interested in selling or even trading eggs, only in possessing them. “They’re not normal criminals,” Shorrock said. Thomas estimated that there were about fifty active collectors left. “We know who they are,” he added.

Between them, Thomas and Shorrock had been inside many of the collectors’ homes, some of them several times. It was like one big family, almost. Daniel Lingham, whose home contained thirty-six hundred eggs, broke into tears when Thomas and the police arrived in 2004. “Thank God you’ve come,” he said. “I can’t stop.” In 2006, when Colin Watson, an infamous collector, fell to his death from a tree while attempting to reach a sparrow-hawk nest, a Jourdain Society member called the R.S.P.B. as a courtesy. (The headline in the London Daily Mirror read “NEST IN PEACE.”) Another time, during a raid on a collector’s house, Shorrock found a piece of paper with his own name and address on it; he subsequently moved.

Thomas hadn’t eaten breakfast, so I went with him to the Snipe cafeteria; he ordered an egg on a roll. Unlike Shorrock, Thomas had been a bird fanatic since his childhood, in Sheffield, where he was a member of the R.S.P.B.’s youth brigade. After getting a conservation degree, he took a research position with the R.S.P.B. at the age of twenty-five. “I knew I couldn’t face a job that wasn’t directly involved with a tangible benefit to birds,” he said. In 1999, with no investigative experience, he beat out a pool of applicants for a position as an investigator.

His tenure began as Operation Easter was getting under way. Two weeks into the job, he went to the county of Devon, where he joined a police raid of the home of a suspected egg collector. When they arrived at the house, the man immediately handed over a large display cabinet containing about five hundred stolen eggs. “I thought, This is strange,” Thomas remembered. As they were leaving, an officer smelled marijuana; it prompted the unit to go back to the door. “We asked if there was anything else he wanted to tell us,” Thomas recalled. “He pulled out a box and he said, ‘I don’t know why I got this, but it’s an automatic weapon.’ ” The police seized about fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of cannabis. That night, as Thomas made the long ride back to Sandy, the story was already on BBC Radio. “I thought, If this is what it’s like, it’s going to be amazing,” Thomas told me.

The bust had come about because the suspect’s brother was overheard in a pub in Scotland, talking about bird eggs. Someone followed him out, took down his license-plate number, and called the R.S.P.B. Before Operation Easter, R.S.P.B. investigators had resorted to putting microphones in trees, hoping to hear collectors as they climbed toward nests. Now license-plate numbers could be fed into a police database. The man was an associate of other known collectors; a judge granted a search warrant.

At the time, the R.S.P.B. was receiving about one report of nest theft per day, some from wives bitter about their husbands’ all-consuming hobby. All tips were kept on file. Collectors were mostly English, and most of the U.K.’s rare-bird nests were in Scotland. Surveillance cameras on the two main roads between the countries were programmed to log the license plates of cars that passed by. Thomas noted two patterns: cars belonging to suspected collectors appeared with greater frequency between March and June, the breeding season; and many of them were registered to members of the Jourdain Society.

The Jourdain Society’s eggs, which it referred to as “the national collection,” were housed in a museum in Oxford. Thomas talked a secretary there into forwarding him the quarterly Bulletin of the Jourdain Society, which announced upcoming dinners, held in Gloucester at the Fleece Inn. Thomas started staking them out, “just to get an idea of who was who.”

In the spring of 2001, the R.S.P.B. received a call from a bird-watcher on South Uist, in the Outer Hebrides. It is a Gaelic-speaking area with severe weather, rough terrain, and a number of endangered birds, including golden eagles. About four hundred and fifty pairs of them are left in the U.K.

The birder had reported seeing a man scrambling along the side of a rock face in a hailstorm. Eagles often build their nests, or aeries, among rocks like the ones the man was scaling. An island-wide manhunt commenced. It culminated two days later, at the Howmore Hostel campground, where the suspect was found near his tent. His name would become synonymous with the defiance of the modern egg collector: Matthew Gonshaw, from London.

Thomas and Shorrock were puzzled: not only had they never heard of Gonshaw but they weren’t aware of any egg collectors from London. Gonshaw had no eggs on him, but he was held in custody. The next day, Shorrock met up with police and headed to Gonshaw’s apartment, located in a row of drab three-story units in the East End. The police forced the door. Inside, they found maps, climbing equipment, and bird books. There was a book by a Jourdain Society member, “Cryptanalysis of Ornithological Literature,” which explained how to decipher nest locations by piecing together details from mainstream bird literature, and a photograph of a legendary early-twentieth-century egg collector, John Walpole-Bond. “In memory of Jock—The Man,” Gonshaw had written on it. Shorrock told the East London Advertiser, “There is somebody else involved here.” He was sure Gonshaw was connected to other known collectors.

But Gonshaw, who was then thirty-eight, turned out to be an anomaly. He was single, unemployed, and living on public assistance. He had eluded road surveillance because he didn’t drive or own a car. Unlike the prototypical collector of means, Gonshaw, as his journals revealed, was a man who struggled to afford a pastime that consumed him. He carefully plotted his routes, bought advance-saver bus and train tickets, and calculated the cost of everything he would need, from butter to packets of instant custard made by a company called Bird’s.

He had slept in tents and hiked through the hinterlands of Scotland and England. Once, while trying to find shelter in the rugged Scottish Cairngorms, he unexpectedly encountered a wader directly under his feet. “My heart almost jumped to my mouth,” he wrote in his journal. “A purple sandpiper it was.” He also kept a close watch on London’s birds, noting at one point an increase in peregrine falcons in central London to “at least five pairs . . . as I predicted many moons ago.”

Shorrock found no eggs in Gonshaw’s apartment, but Gonshaw’s journals described the breeding schedules of dozens of protected birds and suggested that he had taken full clutches, or nestfuls, of eggs from choughs, red-throated divers, dotterels, and marsh harriers—all Schedule 1 birds. Nest locations were listed, with dates. Shorrock matched these with the R.S.P.B.’s own information about the locations of nests where eggs had gone missing.

Gonshaw was assigned a court-appointed attorney and pleaded not guilty. Despite not having physical evidence of eggs in his possession, he faced two trials, in England and Scotland, and was convicted on eight counts: one of disturbing a golden eagle (later overturned); two of possessing collecting equipment; four of taking Schedule 1 eggs; and one of attempting to pervert the course of justice by giving a fake name to investigators when he was apprehended. “In all my years, I’ve never lost a case,” Shorrock told me.

Worse for Gonshaw, an environmental bill that the R.S.P.B. had been pushing for twenty years had just passed. It included new sentencing guidelines, allowing custodial sentences of up to six months for taking Schedule 1 bird eggs. Gonshaw was among the first collectors who were sent to jail. When he heard the verdict, Gonshaw yelled, “I’ve never seen anything so sick in a court in my life!”

Gonshaw was not a member of the Jourdain Society, but his journal contained the names of society members and notes to himself on how he might gain entry. One of the members whom Gonshaw contacted was Jim Whitaker, who had long been on the executive board. Whitaker, who is seventy-eight years old, lives in Yorkshire, four hours north of London, in a house on a hill, from which he operates a publishing company called Peregrine Books. Peregrine has put out sixty-one titles. Some are about dogs, but most are about the U.K.’s rare birds and its early egg collectors, including a volume of profiles: “The Egg Collectors of Great Britain and Ireland.” When I reached him by phone, he seemed nervous. “Have you been speaking to the R.S.P.B.?” he asked me. He told me to call back the following day. When I did, his wife answered and promptly hung up on me. The next day, I reached Whitaker again, and he seemed more relaxed. “It’s hard on the women,” he explained. “There’s a limit to the support they’ll give you. They don’t have the same obsession the husbands have.”

Whitaker began egg collecting in Yorkshire as a child after the Second World War. “All the beaches were covered in barbed wire, so those my age went out bird nesting.” He made a career as a corporate business consultant, and collected as a hobby. For Whitaker, the appeal was both the beauty of the eggs and “the fieldcraft” involved in acquiring them. Some collectors are renowned for their climbing skills in reaching nests. Whitaker was revered as a “nest finder,” which requires careful research and patience. He once spent twelve hours tracking a short-eared owl to see where it would return to so that, when it left its nest again, he could take its eggs.

Whitaker does not believe that serious collectors are endangering birds. They track breeding schedules so that they can get to a nest early, when the contents of the eggs are still liquid and the shells thicker and less likely to fracture. They take the entire clutch of eggs. “That way, the bird will typically lay again,” Whitaker said. An adage repeated by collectors is that they are only stealing a bird’s time.

Shorrock disagrees. “I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard that,” he told me. “When a bird loses a clutch of eggs, some species will re-lay. This is designed to cope with natural failure, not the criminal hand of man. For many species, such as golden eagles and ospreys, once the eggs are taken, it is very rare for the birds to re-lay, and the breeding season for that pair is over.”

Whitaker was inducted into the Jourdain Society in 1974. The group operated as a social club. There were quarterly meetings that began with toasts to Jourdain and to the Queen, followed by presentations of eggs by its members. “People in the society then, they were businessmen, Army officers,” Whitaker said, his voice trembling. “There were three doctors. In those days, it wasn’t an arrestable offense.”

The society’s membership began to dwindle after July of 1994. Shorrock was part of a six-member investigations unit that went to the Red Lion Hotel in Salisbury, where a Jourdain dinner was taking place. The investigators booked rooms overlooking the hotel courtyard and positioned an attractive female colleague at the bar before the meeting. Several society members appeared. One of them approached the R.S.P.B. plant and began chatting with her. Before long, the man pulled a photo album from his bag and began showing her pictures of nests. “You must be with the R.S.P.B.,” she said to him. Shorrock, who was straining to listen from his room above, almost fell out of the window.

“This is the cream of British ornithology,” the man objected. Two hours later, the society’s dessert course ended abruptly when a squadron of police broke into the banquet room. “If my memory serves me right, there were sixteen policemen,” Whitaker told me, incredulously. “We acted like gentlemen.” As a result of evidence obtained from the raid, a nationwide series of stings was carried out three months later. On one day, police seized eleven thousand eggs from homes in seven counties. Six Jourdain Society members were convicted and fined.

“It’s a business,” Whitaker told me. “Years ago, an R.S.P.B. chap told a friend of mine that for every successful egg-collecting case they get thirty thousand new members,” each paying yearly dues. (The R.S.B.P. says it does not assess membership in that manner.)

Whitaker’s home had been raided three times. On one occasion, two thousand eight hundred and ninety-five eggs were found; he was convicted of possession of a hundred and forty-eight. In 1997, he was the target of a hidden-camera television documentary, in which he was captured on tape talking about the locations of eagles’ nests. Afterward, convinced that he was being followed by the R.S.P.B. on a trip to Scotland, he mailed himself a box of chocolate eggs from a remote post office. Two days later, a postman appeared at his door with the package. When Whitaker signed for it, the man told him to open the box. “I said, ‘I thought you were a postman,’ ” Whitaker told me. “He said, ‘I’m an undercover policeman.’ ” Whitaker bit into one of the eggs to make his point. “I’m an honest man, generally,” he told me. “I’m a conservationist in a big way.”

In 2004, Whitaker got his revenge by publishing a new book, “The Golden Eagle, with Chapters on the Sea Eagle,” which would become of significant interest to the R.S.P.B. and collectors. Whitaker had gathered intelligence from his contacts about eagles’ aeries, and in an appendix he listed their six-digit G.P.S. locations. He printed three hundred copies of the book and sold them exclusively out of his home. Among his buyers was Gonshaw.

“He used to ring me up,” Whitaker said. “And he came up to see me.” They had at least one thing in common: as a teenager, in the nineteen-seventies, Gonshaw collected eggs with friends from bombed-out, overgrown lots. The East End’s Club Row was an animal market; Gonshaw sold his eggs at the Birdcage, an eccentric pub where live birds were kept in cages. After high school, Gonshaw worked odd jobs as a driver and a lifeguard.

When I asked Whitaker to tell me more, his tone grew sharp: “If you get associated with people like Gonshaw, you’re likely to bring the wrath of the law down on you even though you’ve done nothing.” After he calmed down, he said, “I felt sorry for him. He was so alone.”

Whitaker wouldn’t tell me why he didn’t help Gonshaw get into the Jourdain Society, but it’s likely that he was considered a security risk. Whitaker acknowledged that the society’s board had concluded that it had no choice but to take on new members in order to survive. The decision proved fateful. In 2002, the police and the R.S.P.B. raided the Liverpool home of a collector who had begun attending meetings, whom they had followed for five years. When they got inside the house, they found the suspect in the bathroom, flushing hundreds of eggs down the toilet. Shorrock ran downstairs, shut off the plumbing, and spent the next several weeks piecing shells back together as evidence.

The home also contained a trove of incriminating coded letters to and from collectors, which led to a series of busts. “Dear 15,” one of the letters began. It praised “JS top eggers”—Jourdain Society members—who had procured “ ‘affidavits’ from about 3 or 4 persons” attesting that their eggs were taken before it was illegal to do so. (Eggs are unusual among animal remains in that there is no way to determine their age.) Such precautions are “not just a good idea, but absolutely essential. Yours ever, 86.”

The R.S.P.B. worked out a key that matched names to the numbers. Among those with whom the collector had corresponded was Phil Beard, a self-employed carpenter who had been recently inducted into the Jourdain Society. “You had the well-to-do gentry here and the commoner here,” Beard told me, describing the group in its earlier days. “They hardly ever spoke to each other.” After he joined the group, Beard was pulled aside by a board member and warned that if he was caught he would be thrown out. Some members began procuring safe houses for their eggs.

Meanwhile, in 2004, Gonshaw was sent to jail again after being caught raiding a nest on the Isle of Tiree, in Scotland. The subsequent raid of his apartment turned up a correspondence with the onetime Jourdain Society member Mike Dawson, a.k.a. 86. Dawson, the author of the book on cryptanalysis that Gonshaw owned, warned Gonshaw against continuing his activity. “Moving to places in Scotland would be very dangerous as you would stick out wherever you went,” he wrote to Gonshaw, adding at the bottom, “Hope you destroy all my letters.”

A few days after speaking to Whitaker, I accompanied Thomas to the undisclosed location in Devon, along England’s southwest coast, where the R.S.P.B. was keeping its twenty-four-hour watch over the red-backed shrikes. Thomas hadn’t been down to see the birds yet, and when he picked me up in his family minivan he seemed pumped, like a kid going to a big football match. “The young birds from this nest will determine the future of the shrike in the U.K.,” he said. “The whole thing’s on a knife’s edge.”

It was a long day, involving three trains and an off-road car ride. Thomas wore hiking boots and had a backpack filled with rain gear, snacks, and sandwiches. He moved quickly through the stations when we transferred, boarding early.

According to conservationists, the fact that the shrikes had returned for a third year meant that they were recolonizing. But in the previous two years two pairs had come and there had been two broods; this time there was just the one nest. It had also been one of the rainiest seasons on record. A first nest had failed: the eggs never hatched, possibly owing to the weather. “The last thing these birds need are collectors,” Thomas told me. Nonetheless, two of them had already shown up, hiking along a path next to the nest, the location of which had never been made public. Thomas was hardly surprised. “It’s a Venus flytrap,” he said. “They have to go there.”

The nest site was situated half a mile into a nature reserve lined with tall Norway spruce trees. When we arrived, a staffer in shorts and a baseball cap was training a Swarovski telescope on the nest, about two hundred metres away. Another guard, on break, was sunning himself next to a green camper, which functioned as an office for coördinating volunteers, who had been given photographs of known collectors. They recognized the two collectors instantly and phoned the local police, who responded by paying them a warning visit.

We continued down a hiking trail and over a small ravine to a second guard station, closer to the nest. Colin Marker, an affable white-bearded retiree in his third year as a volunteer guard, was seated on a rock with a pair of binoculars and a steno pad. “1300 Visit by Mark Thomas and a journalist,” his entry documenting our arrival read. Next to him were two handmade wooden paddles. “It’s a clapper,” Marker said—a noisemaker to scare off animals. Collectors weren’t the only predators the birds faced; magpies could attack. Thomas used to run after kestrels, but he quit. “One day, I was chasing one and I said, ‘I’m just not doing it anymore—this is completely mental,’ ” he said.

The nest was in a vexing location, only thirty yards from the hiking trail. Nest sites are picked by the males, two of whom had arrived from somewhere in East Africa in June, a week before the female. Both presented her with food, and then sat upright on their respective branches, singing. The female chose her mate; the other male hadn’t been seen since.

My binoculars were trained on a barely visible clump of branches when the female appeared on the edge of the nest. She was tiny, with a barrel-chested posture. Her mate sat on a nearby branch, his fuzzy light-blue head twitching in all directions. Thomas guessed that the eggs had just hatched, and that the nest contained at least two chicks. The previous two years, the R.S.P.B. had been able to announce the nest’s success at the Rutland Bird Fair, one of the world’s largest annual birding events. “It’s absolutely mega,” Thomas said. “Even the collectors go.”

Marker winced. “If I got them in a room . . . there’s no punishment too harsh,” he said.

One of the R.S.P.B. contract guards living at the site took a more practical view: “If it weren’t for the collectors, I’d be out of a job.”

On the morning of June 2, 2011, the day after Gonshaw was arrested on the Isle of Rum, his apartment was raided by an eight-man squad in riot gear from the Metropolitan Police. When Thomas got to Gonshaw’s third-floor landing, the apartment door was splintered on the floor and the officer in charge, Stephen Rodgers, was on the phone with the building manager. “That’s it,” the manager said. “That’s the last time I fix that door.”

Thomas pulled out his video camera and began recording as the officer, in a bobby hat and coat, solemnly narrated an ascent on a ladder through a small hatch in Gonshaw’s ceiling. He found hundreds of eggs neatly arranged by species in three handmade wooden cabinets, the dimensions and pencil sketches of which were in Gonshaw’s journals. Gonshaw had systematically replaced his entire collection since his last arrest. He had six hundred and ninety-seven eggs. Among them were eggs of a rare osprey and of the beloved avocet, the long-legged wader that adorns the R.S.P.B.’s logo.

Thomas spent a month cataloguing the eggs. Eventually, he came upon the evidence that he knew would break the case open. It was a clutch of three golden-eagle eggs, already a rarity, as eagles typically lay only in twos. The shells were heavily damaged by large holes in the sides. Gonshaw must have reached the nest in mid-April, well into the bird’s nesting cycle; it appeared that he had removed live chicks. Thomas photographed the eggs and later distributed the images to the media. The Guardian likened Gonshaw’s crime to a third-trimester abortion, referring to the “almost full-term chicks.”

Even Whitaker was appalled. “The thing must have been nearly hatching,” he told me. “He punched a hole in the side and dragged the chick out. Now, any sort of responsible collector would never do that.”

Gonshaw was unrepentant. In fact, he said almost nothing in two pretrial interviews with Thomas and Rodgers, who typed up the transcript. “It was twenty-four thousand words,” Rodgers told me. “They were all our words.” At one point, they asked Gonshaw if he wanted mental-health counselling. He refused.

Thomas began to research the Anti-Social Behavior Order, a controversial penalty in the U.K. which amounts to a restraining order. No one had ever received an ASBO for a wildlife crime. In order to prove its merit, the prosecution would have to show that Gonshaw had caused “harassment, alarm or distress.” Thomas set up interviews with volunteers and employees at nature reserves. “When they were told, ‘Your nest has failed because it was taken by Mr. Gonshaw,’ we asked them, ‘Did you feel harassed, alarmed?’ And the majority of them did,” Rodgers, who helped Thomas conduct the interviews, told me.

Gonshaw pleaded guilty to ten egg-collecting and possession charges. On the day of his sentencing, in December of 2011, he entered the courtroom with his face hidden behind an army-green mesh mask and flipped his middle finger at photographers. The judge, William Ashworth, was not amused. “This represents a methodical and meticulous planned venture by you,” he said to Gonshaw, “targeting rare breeding birds, placing them in peril, and causing great loss to local communities.” He gave Gonshaw a six-month sentence and accepted the Crown’s argument that his eggs be destroyed rather than allow Gonshaw the satisfaction of seeing them go to a museum. (In a separate trial, Gonshaw was sentenced to six months in prison in Scotland.) When Ashworth read his decision, Gonshaw shouted, “It’s a free country!” The decision also drew a complaint from Douglas Russell, the curator at the Tring museum, who wanted the eggs. “The loss of data-rich material, in my view, compounds the crime,” he told me. “I’ve already spoken to Mark Thomas on this and made my views clear.”

While Gonshaw was in prison, first in England and then in Scotland, hearings in the two countries resulted in both imposing the ASBO on him. In effect, Gonshaw was banned from Scotland during the breeding season, for life. Gonshaw’s lawyer called the English ruling “draconian.” Gonshaw immediately appealed.

Gonshaw was released from prison last August, just as the entire birding community was headed to the Rutland Bird Fair. The event draws twenty-five thousand people; six football-field-size white tents housed hundreds of booths, featuring birding equipment and clothing, bird-watching vacations, books, and representatives from conservation organizations. Thomas didn’t expect Gonshaw to be there. “It’s not his thing,” he told me.

When I saw Thomas at the R.S.P.B. booth on the first day, he caught my eye and indicated that we should rendezvous behind a tree. “The shrike failed,” he told me. Having seen no signs of life, one of the volunteers had finally approached the nest. There was one chick inside; it was dead, from malnutrition. It seemed unlikely that the red-backed shrike would return to the U.K. “Maybe it’s not meant to be,” Thomas said.

There was other news. Several collectors were on the premises, including one of the only serious collectors the R.S.P.B. had never been able to nab. The team had raided his house several times but come up empty. The man was believed by the R.S.P.B. to have moved his collecting to Spain, Portugal, Turkey, and Scandinavia and to be shipping eggs to secret locations; Thomas had been in touch with Interpol. Gonshaw had not been seen.

As I walked away, an announcement came over the public-address system: “Jim Whitaker, please come to the information booth.” Soon, I was standing with four other people, all of us looking for Whitaker. The next day I found him walking around in a beige safari hat, shorts, and long white tube socks reaching almost to his knees. He was carrying a single copy of his new book, the second volume of “The Egg Collectors of Great Britain and Ireland: An Update.” “I brought it for you,” he said, when we sat down in a shaded rest area. Only dead collectors had been included in the book’s first volume; it was too risky to include anyone living. This time, Whitaker had allowed himself to be featured along with an old Jourdain colleague, also in his seventies. “I figured it’s going to be the last one,” he told me.

Egg collecting may be dying out in the U.K., but not in other parts of the world. Last June, police seized ten thousand eggs from a man’s house in Finland. The culprit was believed to belong to a network in Scandinavia, some of whose members were trying to sell the eggs. Nevin Hunter, the head of the National Wildlife Crime Unit, said that Britain’s collectors had shifted their focus to photographing clutches of eggs as evidence of their having reached nests. No one had been jailed for it yet, Hunter said, but “the penalty is available.” Another wildlife group, the League Against Cruel Sports, had started using drones to do its own surveillance of hunters.

The next time I passed the R.S.P.B. booth, Thomas was standing with Phil Beard, the carpenter and Jourdain member. Beard, who is in his fifties, had a snaggletooth and wore a black baseball cap pulled low on his head. On his polo shirt was a pin featuring a spoon-billed sandpiper, a bird that breeds in Russia and is near extinction. “I hope to God they save that species,” he said. “What a beautiful bird it is.”

Beard said that he had quit collecting. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I still photograph the occasional nest site,” he said. He also went to Jourdain Society meetings, but attendance was down to only fifteen or twenty people. “I’m probably one of the youngest members there,” he said, then corrected himself: officially, there were no members left. Afraid of legal exposure to prosecution as a criminal enterprise, the Jourdain Society had deactivated all its members, reinstituting them as “honorary members.” “We wanted to, if you like, clean the group,” Beard said.

His opinion on Gonshaw was simple: “What he’s doing is lunacy.” But he said that big industry, not collectors, was the real threat to endangered birds. “Guys like Shorrock, they go around the country doing everything they can to find egg collectors,” he said, raising his voice and pointing an index finger, which was wrapped in gauze, at me. “These guys breathe and sleep what they do. They’re extremists. At least they get paid.”

When I asked Shorrock later for his reaction, he threw his hands in the air. “This country, through Parliament, has decided we don’t want grown men wandering around the countryside, taking eggs out of birds’ nests,” he said. “That’s the reality of it.”

Gonshaw lives in the back half of the last apartment building at the end of a long L-shaped cul-de-sac. On my last day in England, I decided to stake it out.

The neighborhood is a multicultural, working-class area that has begun to gentrify; rents were going up, and several new pubs had opened. For a while, I sat on the curb at the entrance to the street, watching for people who looked like Gonshaw, and once rang his buzzer, which was draped by a spiderweb. Finally, I retreated to one of the pubs, from which I made three more sorties. On the third, a voice barked back from the intercom: “Yeah?”

I had sent Gonshaw a letter in prison and I asked if he’d received it. The connection went dead. I was about to leave when, through the glass door, I saw a man bounding down the stairs. He was wearing only a pair of tight black underwear. As he reached the foyer, he pulled a royal-blue T-shirt over his head, opened the front door, and leered at me. Photographs from his younger years depicted Gonshaw as a handsome man, but his face had become gaunt and his hairline had receded. He looked slim, fit, and unpredictable; his eyes darted nervously back and forth. “I don’t give a fuck about my reputation,” he said.

He had spent twenty years planning and executing demanding excursions to assemble a prodigious egg collection. The loss of it seemed to be something he was still figuring out how to process. “It’s not so much the prison,” he said. “I had some really rare eggs. It’s all gone now. It doesn’t matter, you know what I mean?” He paused, as if he could picture them in his mind. “If I had my own way, I’d have a big room full of cabinets of eggs and bird books. It would be my study room.”

I had just seen Gonshaw’s eggs: they were sitting on cotton balls in a locked evidence room at the R.S.P.B. headquarters, where Thomas would soon destroy them with a hammer. When I mentioned this to Gonshaw, he flew into a rage. “They’re house thieves,” he said of the R.S.P.B. “Common bloody house thieves!” He began to rant about big business and agriculture—removal of hedgerows, drainage of marshes, loss of habitat. “That’s why birds are becoming scarce,” he said. “All the seabirds are becoming scarce because all the Scottish fishermen are leaching everything out of the sea.”

A loud commuter train drowned him out, screeching past only fifty metres from the building. I asked Gonshaw if he planned on continuing to collect, but he wouldn’t answer directly. “It’s just something that is ingrained in some people,” he later said. Our conversation ended when I mentioned that I’d spoken to some members of the Jourdain Society. “What?” he said, opening the door wider and stepping toward me aggressively. “Are you trying to fuck with my head?” He slammed the door and went back upstairs.

On September 7, 2012, Thomas took the train down to London for the appeal hearing of Gonshaw’s ASBO. The hearing would set a precedent, whichever way it was determined. If upheld, Gonshaw would face five years in prison and a fine of up to twenty thousand pounds if he was caught in Scotland again. “I don’t see it stopping him,” Thomas said. He waited in the courtroom all day, but the case was not heard. By default, the judgment was upheld: Gonshaw never showed up. ♦

SHOUTS & MURMURS
Guards’ Complaints About Spartacus

by Jack Handey

“Spartacus said he had a secret to tell me, then burped loudly into my ear. I still have some ringing.”

“I noticed Spartacus sitting in his cell, writing. I asked him what he was writing, and he said poetry. I encouraged him, and the next day he showed me his poem. It was a vulgar, obscene poem about my mother. It didn’t even rhyme.”

“Spartacus smells.”

“While I was guarding the master’s chariot, Spartacus asked if he could drive it, just around the courtyard. Against my better judgment, I said yes. Spartacus whipped the horses into a frenzy and crashed the chariot. Now, as punishment, I am to be crucified. When I told Spartacus, he just laughed.”

“As you know, I have a limp from my service in Gaul. Whenever I escort Spartacus someplace, he imitates my limp.”

“Spartacus is always spitting at me. When I went up to him and asked him to stop, he pretended to think for a second, then spat at me again.”

“I was praying at the shrine to the goddess Minerva when Spartacus tiptoed in and drew a phallus next to her head.”

“Spartacus has never once mentioned all the weight I have lost.”

“When I make my rounds at night, Spartacus pretends to be dead. As I approach closer, he suddenly opens his eyes wide. It scares the daylights out of me.”

“Right before he was to fight in the arena, Spartacus showed up drunk. He could barely stay on his feet. Old Marcellus stood up, grabbed a sword, and offered to fight in Spartacus’ place. Spartacus became confused and stabbed Old Marcellus.”

“I loaned Spartacus two hundred denarii, but when I asked him about it he said it was two hundred centarii. What?! It’s like a bad joke.”

“Maybe this is mean to say, but sometimes I wonder if the only thing Spartacus cares about is Spartacus.”

“Never let Spartacus see you cry.”

“Spartacus told me he had received a letter from his son. That’s good, I said. He looked embarrassed and said there was a problem: he couldn’t read. I offered to read the letter. I opened it and there was a drawing of me performing oral sex on a Cyclops, while being raped by another Cyclops. I hate to admit it, but Spartacus is actually a pretty good artist.”

“I have nightmares about Spartacus.”

“Someone left the front gate open, and Spartacus escaped. The gate is still open. Unless it is locked shut, Spartacus may return.” ♦

A CRITIC AT LARGE
Sins of the Father

Do great novelists make bad parents?

by James Wood

Almost twenty years ago, George Steiner suggested in these pages that doing philosophy was incompatible with domestic life. Speaking of the troubled French thinker Louis Althusser, Steiner proposed that sometimes it might be necessary for a philosopher to strangle his wife. (As, alas, Althusser did.) There is something vulgar and absurd, he continued, in the notion of a Mrs. Plato, a Madame Descartes. You cannot commit to taking out the garbage or doing the dishes while also solving the problem of the cogito or announcing the death of God. Being George Steiner, he charged his argument with bolts of existential electricity. In his reading, Zarathustra is at best a rough, undomesticated beast and at worst a murderous lunatic. Up on Olympus you feel free, not in the kitchen or the faculty lounge.

It is easy to mock Steiner’s romantic provocations. But, minus the murderousness (and the intense maleness of the proposition), perhaps Steiner is onto something. Can a man or a woman fulfill a sacred devotion to thought, or music, or art, or literature, while fulfilling a proper devotion to spouse or children? The novel may be the family’s ideal almanac, but only a handful of the great novelists of either gender had a successful family life. I have always liked Tolstoy’s diary entry from 1863: “Family happiness completely absorbs me, and it’s impossible to do anything.” Tolstoy is indeed the great novelist of family happiness, but delight is tempered by the vision of the father and husband he became—selfish, tyrannical, more faithful to his literary and religious followers than to his biological successors. Even gentle Chekhov joked that he would prefer a wife “who, like the moon, won’t appear in my sky every day.” He contrived to marry late in his short life, and spent much of his marriage in Yalta, while Olga Knipper worked a thousand miles away, in Moscow.

Perhaps the storyteller is especially ill suited for happy family life. For even as the fiction writer tells humane stories about behavior and motive and family relations—what one might think of as a sympathetic skill—so he or she is also a little like the proverbial choirboy at the funeral: coldly observing, carefully pillaging, rearranging, impersonating, and re-voicing the very material that constitutes “family.” There is an eerie moment in “Home Before Dark,” Susan Cheever’s remarkable memoir of her father, John Cheever. She explains that Cheever, by the mid-nineteen-sixties, after years of struggle, had become an established success—a National Book Award, a reception at the White House, lots of money, a big house in Ossining, New York, and a flattering cover story in Time, entitled “Ovid in Ossining.” The family enjoyed the novelty, though later this success “took a big toll on my father and he became quite pompous about himself.” Susan Cheever then quotes a passage from her father’s journal, in which he imagines being his daughter, and writes up his success as her complaint about it:

After they put Daddy’s picture on the cover of Time, he seemed to lose something. . . . Once I lost my temper at him and said I don’t think anybody’s impressed by the fact that you had your face on Time magazine. . . . It hurt his feelings, you could see.

John Cheever belonged to a generation of (mostly male) American writers who held a romantic idea of what it meant to “be a writer.” But theirs was also a notably vulnerable time in American society: a moment of utmost domestic conventionality that coincided with the waning of American patriarchy. Great writer, paterfamilias, loyal husband, comfortable householder—unsurprisingly, the pressure of maintaining this royal conglomerate was often intolerable, and the breakage was visited on the courtiers. It is probably no accident that this era has produced not one but three memoirs by the daughters of literary fathers: in addition to “Home Before Dark,” which appeared in 1984, there is Janna Malamud Smith’s “My Father Is a Book” (2006), about the novelist Bernard Malamud, and Alexandra Styron’s memoir of William Styron, “Reading My Father,” which was published in 2011.

These are tender, scouring portraits, whose stories often overlap. All three intelligently analyze the asymmetries of growing up in a household dominated by the needs of a male creator, and the costs to the women who enabled that creativity. The men sounded the gong; the women managed the silence around the vibrations. William Styron and John Cheever were drinkers and depressives, and their lives were full of bravado and collapse. These histrionic undulations were exhausting. Both daughters confess to a certain fatigue; Styron says that she was relieved when her father died. Bernard Malamud was quieter, and was in many respects a devoted father, alive to the otherness of his intelligent daughter. Janna Malamud Smith conjures a cherishable intimacy: “My father and I were intensely attached, at ease with each other, deeply compatible.” Still, even she confesses to a “dreamlike vision” of her father as a hot-air balloon, “at once lifting the family and consuming all our heat to fire his updraft.”

All three are vibrant storytellers, alert to scene and detail, almost sickeningly sensitive to the way that large male egos stage themselves: they know that, in some odd combination of respect and revenge, they are turning their fathers into novelistic characters. We see William Styron, almost insanely ambitious to write the next Big Book, teasing his daughter with his rather sadistic humor, and bursting into petty rages: “Avoiding my father’s wrath was a complicated business. . . . His rage could be almost laughable—I once saw him curse, chew apart, and hurl across the room a pencil that had the gall to lose its point—or it could be unexpectedly frightening.” Styron notices that she became invisible during the day, while her father was working: “He might wander into the kitchen, or pass you while walking his dogs around West Chop”—on Martha’s Vineyard. “But he wasn’t exactly there. . . . In the evening hours, however, his humanity usually made a swim for the surface.” Malamud Smith writes, “Dad was not openly domineering in his requests, but he assumed a prerogative.” Her mother “rigorously downplayed her own abilities,” and acquiesced in the shared marital understanding that “my mother’s labors were necessary but inconsequent, while my father’s work mattered. He wrote; she typed his drafts.”

But the cold eye of these adult children is cast in the service of a warmer, more comprehensive vision. As writers themselves, they understand the necessities and the inequalities of talent. The men wrote the books, but it doesn’t follow that in doing so they stole unwritten books from their wives. All three write movingly about the holy centrality of writing in their fathers’ lives. Styron is devastatingly honest about it: “But if each creation is, in effect, an artist’s offspring, I think Daddy put his nonfiction in the category with his four, living, breathing children. There was affection for what he’d made and, frequently, pride. But the Novel owned his heart.”

The great scandal, you could say, is not that these men were writers first and husbands and fathers second but that they arranged their lives in such conventional ways that they kept on choosing, and ceaselessly inflicted that choosing on their familial audiences. How, really, could the drama of paternity have competed with the drama of creativity? For a man, creating a child—though certainly not raising one—is almost accidental, whereas writing a book takes years of thought and effort. Or put it another way: raising a child can seem as ordinary, as continuous, and as “easy” as life itself, while writing a book is like staying up all night. Or yet another way: few sixteen-year-old boys dream of being a father, yet every good writer spent his or her teen-age years dreaming of being a writer, plotting how to become one, rehearsing and practicing, fantasizing and preparing. It is part of the poignancy and psychic healthiness of these memoirs that each writer understands this about her father. “Each phase of my youth is joined in my mind to the novel my father was writing at the time,” Styron writes. Malamud Smith recalls, as a little girl, hearing her father shaving in the bathroom, and “announcing to all within range, firmly, audibly, ‘Someday I’m going to win.’ ” More simply, Susan Cheever seems to measure the effort of will involved in any serious creative act, when she writes, “It had taken my father twenty-five years to publish a novel and two collections of short stories.”

For a number of reasons, Greg Bellow’s book, “Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir” (Bloomsbury), does not belong in the same company as the portraits by Styron, Cheever, and Malamud Smith. (This despite the fact that Bellow tells us that he gained the courage to write his book after talking to Malamud Smith.) It covers similar terrain but dies amid the difficult landscape. It is a hard book to read, and even harder to write about, because it is really a child’s complaint, with much unfinished business. It is less a memoir than a speaking wound—and understandably, because Greg Bellow was eight years old when his father told him that he and Greg’s mother were separating. After that, Greg seems to have been only fitfully involved in his father’s life. Father and son were sitting on a bench in Central Park when the news was delivered. It is one of the most affecting scenes in the book:

I responded by making a snowball and letting fly at a nearby pigeon. What I really wished for was the courage to hit my father with the snowball. Under the childhood anger my father expected and hoped to see was sadness born of losing the parent who understood me best. At eight, I felt like a deep-sea diver cut off from my air supply.

At sixty-nine, Greg Bellow is still the drowning deep-sea diver; this book is his flailing. The tone is sometimes determinedly wistful, as if he were convincing himself of the special bond that existed between father and son, and sometimes angry, because his father’s behavior put that bond into question:

Every other weekend and for one summer month I had emotionally sustaining visits with Saul that I tried desperately to prolong but that ended in sadness at being away from the person who was essentially my best friend. . . . He was often late and sometimes did not show up at all.

Styron, Cheever, and Malamud Smith wrote books about complicated, sometimes monstrously selfish fathers who stuck around. “They stayed married for more than forty years—a constancy that seemed alternately noble and ludicrous,” Susan Cheever writes of her parents. Greg Bellow, a psychotherapist, has written a book about a complicated father who left, and the difference is indeed wounding. The children whose fathers remained married to their mothers have learned, paradoxically, how to let go of their dead fathers; they understand that their fathers had literary existences that were religiously absorbing, selfishly independent. To bestow on one’s parents their independence is also to announce one’s own independence from them. (It is a signal strength of “Experience,” Martin Amis’s vivacious memoir of Kingsley Amis: the son, confident in his own literary powers, grants his father an equivalent liberty.) Greg Bellow, by contrast, is still clutching his father, and clutching for his father. He seems to struggle with resentment at the very idea of Saul Bellow’s having an independent literary existence; which is to say that he finds it hard to credit that his father was a writer at all. Terribly, he appears not quite to know this about himself. So he constructs narratives that are plausible only to him. The unconvincing arc of the book is that he had been carrying a lot of anger toward his father; that this was stirred up again by his father’s death and the insensitive way that the literary world claimed its champion; but that in rereading all of Bellow’s novels (“in temporal sequence as my way to sit shivah”), and in writing his book, he has moved through what one of his generous blurbs calls “his passage from pain to acceptance.” He’s at peace, has achieved closure.

In fact, despite several gentle and illuminating reminiscences of Saul Bellow as a young man and a loving young father, the book is raw and lividly unclosed, the pain bubbling up every few pages. His father was selfish; he compartmentalized his life (so as “to behave as he wished without palpable guilt, and to deceive”). As he became well known, he became enamored of vulgarly “lavish tastes” and his “newly acquired wealth”; after the publication of “Herzog,” in 1964, and throughout the late nineteen-sixties and seventies, he was corrupted by his love of literary fame. (“A long line of admirers now flocked to my father’s door.”) The ardent father, whom Greg Bellow dubs “young Saul” (full of optimism, hope, humane idealism), slowly became the “old Saul” of later public renown—conservative, cranky, sexist (“buried under anger, bitterness, intolerance, and preoccupations with evil and with his death, which lasted for the rest of his life”). He was a lousy grandfather, evincing a notable lack of interest in his eldest son’s family, and as he got older he “lost the ability to laugh at himself or at the comic side of life’s contradictions.” A good deal of his art involved worldly theft, which wounded the real-life models he pillaged for his characters. (“Such literary license can and often does bleed into blatant thievery. And stealing someone’s personhood is not a victimless crime.”) He “chose a life of singular literary purpose and a lifelong pattern of selfish conduct that he could neither deny nor completely bury.” His apparently pleasant fifth wife, Janis Freedman, soon became less pleasant, and essentially “kidnapped” Greg’s father. (“Over the next five years, Janis gradually broadened her control over every aspect of my father’s life.”) After his death, what should have been intimate memorial events were turned into marketing opportunities. (“I remember thinking that Saul Bellow, who was being promoted even in death, was now clearly in the grip of the Philistines, people who emphasized money rather than culture.”) And on and on.

Although I knew Bellow somewhat in the last years of his life (and taught a class with him at Boston University), I cannot claim to judge the accuracy of these very intimate complaints. But the literary assessments are so wrongheaded as to give the book a migraine of unreliability. “Saul Bellow’s Heart” ends pretty much where it begins, with Greg Bellow complaining about the literary reception of his father’s death. At the funeral, he feels that Bellow’s numerous literary children, eager for a piece of the famous corpse, displace the three actual, grieving sons. The obituaries and literary tributes seem to him “distinctly filial,” and he irritatedly asks himself, “What is it with all these filial narratives? After all, he was my father! Did they all have such lousy fathers that they needed to co-opt mine?” He grew up, he says, in a household that valued culture, “which included the quiet solitude that my father thought essential to writing. His study door was firmly closed every morning, a sign of the barrier Saul drew between writing and living.” For decades, he says, he had “ferociously protected” his father’s “privacy, literary and personal, which both of us connected with those hours of his writing day.” He goes on, “As a child I learned not to disturb him. As an adult I turned a blind eye to the literary persona and to the public furor over his fame, which reached an apex in Stockholm. After 1976 I boycotted all events held in his honor.” (Bellow received the Nobel Prize in Literature that year.) “Saul became offended, but I felt the limelight contaminated the private bond I was trying to protect.”

Greg’s son, Andrew, exclaims to his father, “What was all the fuss about Grandpa changing American literature? He was just a grouchy old man.” Instead of pointing out that his grandfather could have been both a great writer and a grouchy old man, Greg Bellow comments, “Andrew’s response succinctly captured a distinction between the private man and the literary lion that was just beginning to dawn on me.”

What can he mean by this? The distinction is not a meaningful one, and it cannot just have begun to dawn on him, since he has already told us that he had been boycotting his father’s public literary events since 1976. Perhaps what really dawned on him only after his father’s death was that Saul Bellow was a great writer, not just a terrible dad. That indeed appears to be the engine for the book’s fake narrative of psychic closure. Bellow informs us that he has written his memoir for a number of reasons—but one of them is that continuing to ignore his father’s literary fame “would also be to ignore lessons I learned right after my father’s death: that writing was his raison d’être.” One can only imagine how much the son has had invested, for so long, in the hope that he was his father’s raison d’être.

For, despite his admission, Bellow still displays an unconscious hostility toward his father’s writing. Throughout the book, he divides his father into private man and public writer. “My deep respect for Saul and his writer friends fueled the fierce way I tried to protect his privacy and my acceptance of the line he drew between art and life. As a result, I was predisposed to react negatively to Saul’s fame, and it got worse when it spilled over onto me.” According to Greg, the media circus in Stockholm, when Bellow received his Nobel Prize, was outrageous, and reinforced his determination to “keep my relationship with my father strictly private from then on.” Near the end of his memoir, he says that rereading all his father’s novels—the proffered closure narrative—“became an opportunity to appreciate his public side.”

But, when Greg Bellow talks about protecting his father’s privacy, it should be obvious that he really means denying his father’s publicity, as a way to keep his father to himself. Humanly, this is utterly forgivable. In literary terms, it is incoherent. Really protecting his father’s privacy would mean acknowledging that Saul Bellow’s most private self was expressed in writing, not in paternity. For any serious writer, the private self is the writing self. That closed study door, which Greg Bellow imagines as a symbolic frontier between “writing” and “living,” was no such thing; for Saul Bellow, the writing was the living. And to write means turning privacy outward. Writing fiction is a kind of publicized privacy; you feel, in the greatest novels, the ghost of the author’s soul rustle into life. “When you open a novel—and I mean of course the real thing—you enter into a state of intimacy with its writer,” Saul Bellow wrote:

You hear a voice or, more significantly, an individual tone under the words. This tone you, the reader, will identify not so much by a name, the name of the author, as by a distinct and unique human quality. It seems to issue from the bosom, from a place beneath the breastbone. It is more musical than verbal, and it is the characteristic signature of a person, of a soul.

Bellow wrote these beautiful words in 1990, which perhaps gives the lie to Greg Bellow’s easy Biblical conceit that sometime around 1964 sweet young Saul turned into hideous old Saul. Saul the father may well have become bitter and vain; Saul the writer did not. But Greg Bellow pays Saul Bellow’s writing little serious literary attention in this book. He summarizes the content of the major novels, picking through them for autobiographical residues. He almost never quotes from them in praise.

A small but telling example: in 1977, Saul Bellow gave the Jefferson Lectures in Washington, D.C., and Chicago, which Greg characterizes as “two stern lectures about the uneasy balance between the fragility of art and the fate of the artist in a materialist American culture.” Later, in “The Dean’s December” (1982), Bellow apparently used the protagonist, an academic who has written a series of controversial articles about contemporary Chicago, to indirectly chastise himself, Greg says, “for falling victim to the seductions of fame by making pronouncements in his Jefferson Lectures that went well beyond literature.” Yet, far from being “stern,” the Jefferson Lectures are among the loveliest things that Bellow wrote. They are jewelled with details, not plump with “pronouncements.” In them, he pays lavish tribute to Chicago, to its muscle and mess, while anxiously returning again and again to the question of how the young writer and intellectual grew up in, and also outgrew, this domineering city:

On winter afternoons when the soil was frozen to a depth of five feet and the Chicago cold seemed to have the headhunter’s power of shrinking your face, you felt in the salt-whitened streets and amid the spattered car bodies the characteristic mixture of tedium and excitement, of narrowness of life together with a strong intimation of scope, a simultaneous expansion and constriction in the soul, a clumsy sense of inadequacy, poverty of means, desperate limitation, and, at the same time, a craving for more, which demanded that “impractical” measures be taken.

Bellow dwells on his literary anxieties, on the fundamental deviancy (as he puts it) of the American writer. This great brutal rich city—and, by extension, modern capitalist America—has very little interest in the writer, and seems to make no space for him. The vulnerable, uninsured novelist seems like a footling flâneur, a daydreamer in danger of being coöpted by the big salaried reality of American life:

So you sat in your three-dollar room, which you had anxiously civilized with books (your principal support in life) and with a few prints from the Art Institute: a Velázquez Job who said Noli Me Condemnare, a Daumier Don Quixote riding featureless over the Castilian wasteland; and in this dusty cubicle you recognized that you were out of line, you were a strange deviant. With the steelmaking dinosaurs just to the south, and the stockyards, the slaughter rooms blazing with aereated blood where Croat or Negro workers sloshed in rubber boots, right at your back, and the great farm-machinery works and the automobile assembly lines and mail order houses, and the endless railyards and the gloomy Roman pillars of the downtown banks, this was a powerful place, but the power was something felt, not shared. And what had these labors or these transactions to do with you and your books?

How to be a bohemian in the United States? Bellow’s self-questioning is profoundly American. In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the preface to “The Scarlet Letter,” bemoaned the peculiar difficulty of proclaiming oneself a writer in practical-minded America: “What is he?” Hawthorne imagines his disapproving Puritan ancestors asking of his career. “A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in life . . . may that be?” Henry James understood Hawthorne’s shrinking apologias. As he put it in his little book on Hawthorne, “It is not too much to say that even to the present day it is a considerable discomfort in the United States not to be ‘in business.’ ”

Bellow dramatized this discomfort in “Seize the Day” (1956), which makes a distinction between the world’s business—that of the New York stock markets—and the “real business,” the business of the soul. Bellow enacted this struggle in his own life, and the true story of Greg Bellow’s memoir, the narrative that briefly comes alive in his book, is another lifelong battle between father and son—between Saul and his father, Abraham, an abusive patriarch who appears to have held his son’s vocation in contempt. Saul remained touchy about his family’s incomprehension of his achievements. When his sister fell asleep during his Nobel Lecture, Saul “complained bitterly on the way back to the hotel that she typified the family’s attitude toward his devotion.” Perhaps, in this case, there is no great distinction between being rendered invisible, as a writer, by American “business,” and being rendered invisible, as a writer, by the all-consuming business of one’s own family. Bellow’s fiction is ambivalent, at best, about family life, tending to see it as tragicomic theatre, in which tender sentiment gets crowded out by distortion, avarice, and humiliating pettiness. In “A Father-to-Be” (1955), an unsettling early story wisely passed over by Greg Bellow, Rogin, a young chemist, imagines the “curse” of having a “dull son” who disappoints him. Rogin anxiously anticipates an empty relationship between two people who have nothing in common, a state in which “father and son had no sign to make to each other.” Readers of Greg Bellow’s memoir can’t help but notice that Saul replicated, in his apparent indifference toward Greg’s career, Abraham’s lack of interest in his own.

What is he? Hawthorne’s uncertainty is visible in William Styron’s slightly unstable parody of the angry male novelist, pacing around the house, always hunting the Big Book; it can be detected in the exaggerated air of privilege that John Cheever bestowed on his fairly modest social origins, and the purchase of his large house in Ossining. (According to Susan Cheever, The New Yorker’s lawyer at the time said, “What makes John think a writer can live in a house like that?”) It is there when Bernard Malamud, behind the bathroom door, announced that someday “I’m going to win.” And it was there when Saul Bellow, at the height of his success, was hurt by his sister’s sleepy indifference in Stockholm. Each of these writers struggled to create something out of nothing, and had to justify that scandalous magic in conventional, unmagical, mid-century America. This justification expressed itself all too often as self-justification, and the storm of assertion cleared a brutal path. The history of that private destruction is briefly alluring, sometimes appalling. In two or three generations, that story will have faded from memory, outlived by what it enabled. ♦

BRIEFLY NOTED
This Town

by Mark Leibovich (Blue Rider)

Washington is a capital of biographies, histories, policy tomes, and even thrillers, but the fiction is invariably cartoonish and satirical or glumly portentous in the way of Allen Drury. The city lacks its Trollope or Balzac in both fact and fiction; “The Education of Henry Adams” is the singular masterpiece, the exception that proves the sad and puzzling rule about the capital’s literary portrayals. “This Town,” which is already the obsession of the political class in D.C., is no masterpiece—it is too broad, too haphazard in its structure and voice—but its aim is true. Leibovich, a wised-up but ultimately forgiving writer for the Times Magazine, provides a lancing, often hysterically funny portrait of the capital’s vanities and ambitions, its folkways, fixtures, and climbers. The city, to Leibovich, is a vast hustle of “self-branding,” conflicts of interest, and sucking up. It’s a greed-ridden city in which congressmen and cabinet members skeezily “ ‘monetize’ taxpayer-subsidized government service” and glide into big, easy money. Leibovich’s Suck-Up City is a place without shame. ♦

BRIEFLY NOTED
Dreadful

by David Margolick (Other Press)

John Horne Burns rose to fame in the late nineteen-forties with “The Gallery,” a novel about American soldiers stationed in Italy during the Second World War. Praised for its “unsanitized” evocation of wartime, “The Gallery” was notable for frank portrayals of homosexual soldiers, making it, as Margolick puts it, in this vivid biography, “America’s first great gay novel.” But Burns squandered his early promise, and, after two failed followups, he died in 1953, in his mid-thirties. Margolick reveals a fascinating, troubling character: Catholic, closeted, and alcoholic, charming and cruel, Burns inspired admiration and confusion. Gore Vidal called “The Gallery” a “masterpiece,” but thought its author “an awful man.” By placing Burns’s witty, elastic prose front and center, Margolick’s account makes a case for him as one of the best writers of his generation. ♦

BRIEFLY NOTED
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

by Adelle Waldman (Holt)

This engaging début novel features many affairs but very little love. We watch from behind our hands as Nate, a New York writer enjoying recent literary success, gallivants about the city’s intellectual scene, bouncing from one dysfunctional relationship to the next, all the while feeling very sorry for himself. He chases after women who are bad for him and sabotages any promising situation. Waldman writes with great acuity about the hazards and rewards of dating in an age when thirty is the new twenty. The voice of reason comes from Nate’s sole platonic female friend, the shrewdest in Waldman’s post-feminist cast of characters: “We hope that at the end of it we wind up happier than our grandparents, who didn’t spend this vast period of their lives, these prime years, so thoroughly alone.” ♦

BRIEFLY NOTED
The Blind Man’s Garden

by Nadeem Aslam (Knopf)

This novel, set in the months immediately following 9/11, is the chronicle of a Pakistani family irrevocably drawn into war. A pair of foster brothers travel across the border to Afghanistan and become pawns in tribal warfare; at home, their father slowly loses his vision as he grapples with the moral complexities of faith. Invasion is an unchanging fact, etched into the landscape: centuries of conflict, from British colonial rule to the current American aggression, echo across the narrative. Aslam approaches themes of religious devotion, nationalism, and war with delicate ambivalence. “The opposite of war is not peace but civilisation, and civilisation is purchased with violence and cold-blooded murder. With war.” The prose is visceral but exquisite, emotionally affecting yet unsentimental. ♦

BOOKS
The Counterlife

Lionel Shriver’s speculative fictions.

by Christine Smallwood

It took the American novelist Lionel Shriver a long time to get our attention. Her first six books, published in the course of two decades, were met with a critical shrug and sales that Shriver later described as “in the toilet.” Her seventh, an epistolary novel narrated by the mother of a school shooter, was rejected by thirty publishers before a small house in England (Shriver’s adopted homeland) paid her all of two thousand pounds for the manuscript. The book made her name, and her fortune. Published in 2003, “We Need to Talk About Kevin” became a best-seller, won Britain’s Orange Prize, and was turned into a vermillion-smeared film starring Tilda Swinton.

Since then, Shriver has used her novels to explore the vicissitudes of recognition, and the fate of the almost-made-it that she herself almost became. “The Post-Birthday World,” published in 2007, includes a fable along these lines. It describes a children’s book, illustrated by the novel’s protagonist, about a boy named Spacer, who very much wants to win the sack race at his school’s Sports Day. Spacer practices diligently, but on race day he doesn’t place. It is typical of Shriver, a writer who relishes delivering bad news, that the book’s author “refused to wrap up his tale with any tried-and-true moral, like it’s not whether you win or lose. He was adamant the story not suggest that Spacer just needed to try harder, or that Spacer might prevail next year. Rather, the narrative underscored that Spacer had tried as hard as he could but his best wasn’t good enough.”

How we cope with the fact that life’s resources—talent, beauty, wherewithal in the sack—are not evenly distributed is a concern to which Shriver’s novels repeatedly address themselves. Many of her memorable characters—the mulishly dutiful Shep, in “So Much for That,” whose dreams of absconding to a Third World paradise are delayed when his wife is diagnosed with a rare and incurable cancer; the frustrated, self-pitying Edgar, of “The New Republic,” whose desire to stand out leads him to concoct an imaginary terrorist organization—can be seen as grownup versions of Spacer: also-rans, whose redemption, such as it is, hinges on how they bear the fact of their ordinariness. Her most memorable character is Kevin Khatchadourian, who, rather than accept the fate of being like everybody else, blows the whole sack race to bits.

Shriver is a tart, unsanctimonious writer. Her characters like to joust and provoke. In “The New Republic,” a privileged man named Henry Durham complains that there’s nothing to spend money on that will make him happy. When another character suggests philanthropy, Henry scoffs, “People have to die of something.” Henry’s wife chimes in, sharing her dismay that no one can even fantasize about wealth properly:

When I taught remedial English in the East End, I had my students compose their own best- and worst-case scenarios for ten years later. The nightmares were fabulous: lush with fantastic fears, hilarious with misadventure. The pipedreams were all the same: a string of products and brand names. They read like mail-order catalogs. My students’ visions of the Good Life were so vapid and depressing that you could have got the two assignments confused.

If this morbid exchange is indicative of Shriver’s illusionless candor, it also points toward another one of her abiding preoccupations: the counterfactual. For a writer so insistent on an unvarnished apprehension of things as they are, Shriver often seems less concerned with the events that take place in her novels than with how her characters imagine, and mourn, the events that do not. “What possessed us?” the narrator of “We Need to Talk About Kevin” writes to her husband:

We were so happy! Why, then, did we take the stake of all we had and place it all on this outrageous gamble of having a child? Of course you consider the very putting of that question profane. Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it’s against the rules, isn’t it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn’t. But a Pandoran perversity draws me to prize open what is forbidden. I have an imagination, and I like to dare myself.

In “Kevin,” Shriver takes the dare further than we at first realize: the book concludes with the revelation that the husband to whom Kevin’s mother has been writing is dead—he was killed by their son on the day he murdered his classmates. “The Post-Birthday World” plays a more literal game, alternating between two story lines, one in which the protagonist stays with her partner of almost a decade and one in which she leaves him for a famous snooker player. The novel is not about which choice is right but about how both choices lead to lives haunted by unmet expectations and thwarted possibility.

Shriver’s new novel, “Big Brother” (Harper), is another ghost story, a broad, sometimes grotesque satire about how things might have turned out. The book is narrated by Pandora, a forty-something entrepreneur, who lives in quiet satisfaction with her husband, Fletcher, an unsuccessful maker of custom furniture. The action revolves around a visit that Pandora receives from her older brother Edison, an obnoxious jazz pianist who has recently gained a lot of weight: he now weighs three hundred and eighty-six pounds. Edison is another Spacer, of sorts. For a while, he had seemed destined to place first in life’s sack race, or, at least, he talked that way. But lately the gigs have dried up, and his refrain—“I’ve played with some heavy cats”—has become pathetic.

Biographical inference can be a mug’s game, but readers of the English press, where Shriver moonlights as a waspish and galvanizing social commentator, will be aware that the author is herself the real-life sister of a fat older brother. In 2009, Shriver wrote a column for the magazine Standpoint, later republished in the Guardian, in which she reported his weight (three hundred and thirty pounds), height (once five feet seven, vertebrae compressed to five feet three), and “genius-level IQ.” She accused the fat-pride movement of aiding and abetting, and declined to accept that obesity is “an unassailable state over which we have no control.” At fifty-five, Shriver’s brother was considering a gastric bypass, and his doctor had asked for her assistance in sticking to a post-surgery diet. She was still deciding what to do when she wrote the column. A few days after she sent it to her editor, her brother died of a heart attack. “Big Brother” explores the possibility that he might have been saved.

Many of Shriver’s plotlines trace a downward trajectory, in which one step off a straight and narrow path leads to chaos, often of the sexual kind. In her first novel, “The Female of the Species,” a sixty-year-old virgin anthropologist falls in shattering love with a charismatic graduate student; “The Post-Birthday World” pivots on a kiss. This kind of deterministic plotting puts Shriver in the company of naturalists such as Zola and Dreiser. Like them, her characters are not so much free actors as they are socially conditioned animals, helplessly participating in their own demise. Naturalism came to the fore in the late nineteenth century, when human actions were increasingly chalked up to social and biological forces. In such periods—and we might include our own early-twenty-first-century moment of chronic debt and MRIs—we become interested in who controls us, and what happens when we get out of control. Shriver typically presents collapse as a loss of discipline over the body. When her characters reach for an extra glass of wine after dinner, or eat an extra slice of cake, trouble is usually afoot.

In “Big Brother,” the unravelling is not about gaining weight but about losing it. Pandora, who has put on some weight herself, assumes the role of Edison’s sponsor and sergeant, and together they embark on a liquid diet. Whereas many recent novels about obesity abound with lavish inventories of consumption, “Big Brother” starves its two main characters, who limit themselves to protein powders and cups of tea. In short order, dieting becomes an obsession as dangerous as chocolate-chip pancakes and baby back ribs. Too much control, in Shriver’s vision, is another form of anarchy. Both evade the responsibility of moderation. “Eating nothing is easy,” Pandora says to Edison when she finally forces him to take down a spoonful of canned cream-of-chicken soup. “Eating something but not very much is an ever-loving bitch.”

Shriver constructs her novels tightly around governing motifs; here Edison is opposed to Pandora’s husband, Fletcher, a health nut named in honor of Horace Fletcher, the Great Masticator of the late nineteenth century, who recommended chewing each bite of food thirty-two times before swallowing. Whereas Edison smashes a wineglass and breaks a chair with his “wide berth of shielding flab,” Fletcher takes his whole-wheat toast dry, and avoids dairy. He and Pandora are serious, careful people, with no use for leisure time; she fell for Fletcher when she saw him shaking water from his hands in the sink to avoid splattering drops on the floor. They share a home with Fletcher’s two teen-aged children from a previous marriage, which ended when his wife got addicted to crystal meth, a habit she finally kicked with the help of Christianity.

In Shriver’s world, characters must go it alone, even if their power over their own lives is tenuous. “Big Brother” suggests that Edison’s quest is hopeless: more than once, Shriver tells us that, of those who manage to lose more than thirty pounds, the long-term average weight loss they maintain is only seven pounds. Whereas the psychological coup de théâtre of “Kevin” had a satisfying sense of inevitability, the twist ending of “Big Brother” is jarring. Shriver seems to suggest that Pandora is at once impotent and morally culpable. That might be a fine way to sum up the feeling of being in a family.

For Pandora and Fletcher, Edison’s obesity is a symptom not merely of his thwarted aspiration but of a broader cultural sickness that they are trying to inoculate their kids against: the fate of joining a nation of prima donnas who can’t cope. Edison’s obsession with making it turns him into a selfish monster, and, worse, a wanna-be “artist.” Pandora, who has recently become wealthy from a custom-doll company, prefers an approach in which the daily, humble rounds of work and routine make living itself a form of craft. This is a politics, equal parts escapist and entrepreneurial, that turns inward for meaning.

The medicine that the novel prescribes is a course of anonymous toil. “Only gradually do you come to appreciate that the occupation you aspire to is harder than you thought, that the supply of other young, self-anointed apples of their own eyes is inexhaustible, and that you’re not as uniquely gifted as you’d thought,” she says. Far better to spend ten years “fetching lattes” than fall victim to a big break: “It’s surely a fine emotional art—dousing your hollow hauteur without quenching the fire in your belly altogether—but the kids who master it come out the other side both shit-hot at their professions and bearable as human beings.”

A theory of satisfaction slowly emerges from this novel about insatiable appetites. “However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse,” Pandora thinks. “We are meant to be hungry.” Edison burned hot and young, and when things got tough he despaired, and pigged out. Unlike little Spacer, he never confronted his dashed hopes manfully. For Shriver, disappointments do not occur in spite of meaningful work—they are what make work meaningful, by giving us something to work for.

This isn’t to say that Shriver gives out gold stars just for showing up: her novels, far from dispensing with competition, welcome the tough knowledge that comes with both winning and losing. Having spent decades building a body of work in relative obscurity, she knows the virtue of keeping your head down and slogging it out. Still, what writer isn’t ambitious when it comes to Sports Day? Shriver recently told a reporter that after fourteen years in the U.K., she is considering applying for citizenship. She wants to be eligible to win the Man Booker Prize. ♦

THE CURRENT CINEMA
Grim Tidings

“Pacific Rim,” “Only God Forgives,” and “The Act of Killing.”

by Anthony Lane

Does size matter? It does to Guillermo del Toro, whose new film, “Pacific Rim,” pays homage to the humongous. So what if the script is feeble, the plot is perforated, and the characters are so flimsy that you wouldn’t risk blowing your nose on them? The point is the fight between the big guys. It’s like watching a pair of angry cathedrals going dome to dome. In one corner, Kaiju—scaly monsters that rise from a cleft in the ocean floor and lay waste to large conurbations. When they roar, which is most of the time, their open mouths give off a bright-blue glow, as if they had just breakfasted on a bowl of crunchy police cars. Ranged against them are the machines built by man and known as Jaegers: metallic giants, kitted out with missiles, superswords, nuclear reactors, corkscrews, bottle openers, and so forth. Each is driven by two pilots, one for each side of the device’s brain. For added focus, they are taught to meld their minds in a process known as “drifting.” Funny. That’s what I was doing for most of the movie, too.

This is one of those well-drilled films in which each protagonist comes supplied with a small, portable backstory. Thus, Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) lost his brother in an earlier standoff with the beasts. Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), his co-pilot, was orphaned in a similar attack. Then, there’s Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), who should be a Pilgrim preacher from 1683; in fact, he is the commander of the Jaeger program, although he is prey to ominous nosebleeds, which can be a pain when you try to save the world without a handkerchief. Add a couple of quirky yet unamusing boffins, a snarling father-and-son duo, and some Chinese triplets, and you end up with a rich variety of people not to care about.

To be honest, after half an hour I was rooting for the Kaiju. In terms of temperament, they are unlikely to be mistaken for Roger Federer, but they’re inventive and well travelled, and their gaze and their gait remind you of the lanky faun—at once haunting and quizzical—in “Pan’s Labyrinth,” del Toro’s great film set in the wake of the Spanish Civil War. The rough rule appears to be that his Hispanic movies, such as “Cronos” and “The Devil’s Backbone,” remain troubling and tight, whereas, when he steps onto Hollywood’s patch—for “Mimic,” “Blade 2,” or the “Hellboy” franchise—the beauty of his images grows more fitful, and our astonishment tails off. No genre is wilder than horror, but none asks more insistently to be rooted in time and place, and to be keyed to touchable objects. Hence del Toro’s fondness for clockwork, and for mechanical thinglets that scuttle and click; the bugs in “Cronos,” locking onto human skin, were no bigger than a mouse. So what is he doing with a film about mobile mountains?

The clue to “Pacific Rim” is in the title. It represents not just an important location for the plot (the Kaiju have their eye on Hong Kong) but a courteous nod to the market where films such as this are intended—or designed—to thrive. Overseas sales account for an ever-swelling percentage of Hollywood’s box office, and it’s naïve to assume that forthcoming products will not reflect that cultural spread. That is why, in this instance, the stars are a mélange of British, Asian, Russian, and Australian, some speaking with American accents, some not. What’s more, even as the story hops between Alaska, San Francisco, Sydney, Vladivostok, and the Far East, you begin to realize that it could be happening anywhere, or nowhere. Small wonder that it ends up beneath the waves. It is possible to applaud “Pacific Rim” for the efficacy of its business model while deploring the tale that has been engendered—long, loud, dark, and very wet. You might as well watch the birth of an elephant.

The new film from Nicolas Winding Refn, “Only God Forgives,” is set in Bangkok. His previous work, the doomy “Drive,” took place in Los Angeles. In both cases, we get to share his peculiar vision of urban life. Here is no hive of human swarming; the major scenes contain only two or three people, their unlovely deeds echoing in a carefully calibrated void. Cities appeal to Refn not because they draw a crowd but because they infect the soul. Where else can crime be guaranteed to break out and suppurate?

From the start, “Only God Forgives” is suffused with a sticky red light, which brings with it the tint of a bordello and the shine of Hell. So often does it glaze the face of Julian (Ryan Gosling), our dolorous hero, that not until halfway through the movie do we see his complexion in daylight. Julian runs a kickboxing club and deals drugs for a living, although, as ever in Refn’s world, living is but a slow rehearsal for dying. One night, Julian’s brother, Billy (Tom Burke), rapes and murders a teen-age girl. Her father kills Billy, with the connivance of the police, and is, in turn, confronted and deprived of his right arm by an older cop, Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), who carries a long, swishing blade for just such a purpose. The cycle of vengeance is already spinning; there are plenty more horrors to come, one involving a wokful of hot oil. If you think that sounds painful, meet Julian’s mom.

From the top: a tsunami of long blond hair, Jackie O. shades, pale-pink lipstick and tangerine nails, dialogue straight from the sewer, and a sideline in narcotics. Such is Crystal, newly landed in Bangkok to avenge the death of Billy. Told of his misdeeds, she replies, with airy nonchalance, “I’m sure he had his reasons.” The twist is that Crystal is played by Kristin Scott Thomas, the doyenne of Anglo-French panache, striding so far out of her comfort zone that the shock of recognizing her is greater (and more fun) than anything else in the film. “I’ll have the crab,” she says, at dinner with Julian. “And he’ll have the spicy chicken.”

The poor boy cowers and wilts, and you can’t blame him. He has to endure not just maternal put-downs but a merciless barrage from the fists and feet of Chang, who performs his savage acts with a high solemnity, as if they had some sacramental function. At one alarming moment, all the themes congeal. Crystal is cut, and Julian, like Doubting Thomas, slips a hand into her wound. Is Refn really tendering his grandly named film as a religious parable? If so, I’ll pass. Directors who dramatize intense violence tend to distinguish—or betray—themselves less in the filming of the mayhem than in the styling of the buildup, and, where Tarantino perfumes his air of suspense with a long, literate monologue, preferably delivered by Christoph Waltz, Refn uses a throb of patient dreaminess, as heavy as incense but impelled by little more than a craving for cool. However mystifying, or downright boring, you find the result, rest assured that the Refn faithful will swoon. Peace be with them.

There are good reasons to see “The Act of Killing,” a new documentary directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, but pleasure is not among them. A more likely response will include convulsive nausea and disbelief. The setting is Indonesia, where, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, a plan of mass murder was carried out against anyone suspected of being a Communist, and against the ethnic Chinese. At least half a million died. We see no footage from that time, nor do we meet survivors; rather, Oppenheimer interviews a number of perpetrators, who, far from fearing exposure or justice, are keen to discuss their deeds. And why not, when the purges are still celebrated by a current government minister and, even worse, by the smiling female presenter of an Indonesian chat show?

One of her guests is Anwar Congo, whom we follow throughout the film. Elderly, personable, and light on his feet, he shows us how to snuff out a life with a simple garrote of wire and a length of wood, and he recalls his use of a machete for decapitation. When you recall that a similar technique was choreographed in “Only God Forgives” for the sake of aesthetic suavity, Refn’s film becomes still harder to defend; and yet Oppenheimer’s work is itself subject to bizarre embellishment. He invites Congo and a fellow-killer, Adi Zulkadry, to restage—or reflect upon—their activities in any way they choose. We get musical sequences, and passages of grotesque cross-dressing; scenes in which torturers play their former selves, or, pasted with fake blood and flesh, their own victims; and the reconstruction of an assault on a village, in which local women and children are hired as extras and left in traumatized tears. This is difficult to watch, and, by the end, even the implacable Congo is affected, retching and groaning like an animal at the acknowledgment of his sins. Yet the project gave me pause. Although Oppenheimer has called it “a documentary of the imagination,” whatever that means, would a measure of investigation have spoiled it? We hear that Congo personally exterminated a thousand people. Does that figure stand up, and does it not matter more than his dawning remorse? There is no disputing that we are right at the heart of darkness, but around it is a larger body of evidence, which awaits another explorer. ♦

FICTION
“From a Farther Room”

by David Gilbert

After dubious sleep, Robert Childress woke up feeling like crap. Not a surprise. The night before, he had gone out with Stearns, to a steak joint in midtown, where they split a massive porterhouse along with two types of potato, onion rings and creamed spinach, shrimp cocktails to start, plus other cocktails, and bread and wine, profiteroles for dessert, and finally a complimentary plate of cookies, after which Stearns happily—thank God—picked up the tab. A possible trip to a gentleman’s club was mentioned, like in the old days, Stearns said, which was a joke, since Stearns was single and still lived in those days. But not Childress. Childress was married and suburbanized in North Salem, and even though this was a Friday in October and his wife and three kids were visiting the in-laws for the weekend, and Becka herself had suggested this boys night out—“Call Stearns and have some stupid fun”—the idea of strippers was not very appealing. A lap dance would go bust on his stomach, his boner as ludicrous as a raised pinkie. Oh, Stearns tried to sway him with a V.I.P. card pulled from his wallet, but he had to settle for one more drink at a bar around the corner, where he talked endlessly about his dad, this great gregarious guy who had suddenly clammed up in the face of cancer. Childress offered vague yet heartfelt sympathy, avoiding talk of his own troubles, like the stubborn premonitions of fading love, or the less than robust bank account. Alert the media: unhappy, middle-aged white man on the loose. After two beers, the two friends parted. Strippers would have been easier.

Childress—without Stearns, just plain old Robert—contemplated rushing for the 12:01 train, but then he spotted a white stretch limo trolling for fares and decided to ask about a trip north. The quoted price was absurd, but Robert managed to haggle it down to merely outrageous and jumped in. Halfway home, he discovered the depressing truth of riding alone in a white stretch limo. Thank God Roscoe went nuts upon his arrival. Dumb happy beast. For ten minutes Robert tossed him a tennis ball in the back yard, throwing it as far as he could—in high school, Robert was an excellent fielder, though a hopeless hitter—and every time that Roscoe returned from the darkness with that slob of yellow lodged in his mouth it seemed a small miracle. Good boy. Robert grabbed those ears, kissed that forehead. Good fucking boy. It wasn’t until he collapsed into bed that he realized just how drunk he was: everything started to spin, even with a foot kickstanded to the floor. Instead of sleep, survival was the goal. Relax and breathe. Remain still. Despite these efforts, somewhere in the middle of the night Robert Childress leaned over the side of the bed and threw up.

And now the digital read 7:06.

The sad part: this was sleeping late.

Robert heeled his hands against his eyes—deeper still, against those sockets—and moaned in an almost ritual performance of hangover. This is my body, fucked. And it seemed as if he had smoked a pack instead of the single butt grubbed from that twentysomething on Lexington. “Fuck cancer,” he’d told her, his exact meaning unclear. There was a brief worry that he might never feel good again. His head had all the charm of an empty container of ice cream. Had he really got so drunk? Because he thought he had been good. No tequila, no cocaine. No strippers. One lousy cigarette. Robert spent a few moments threading together the end bits of the previous night—Stearns and his dying father, Stearns and his big old Stearns hug—then he flashed onto the limo and figured he must have been drunk. Even worse was the dreaded possibility of a hundred-dollar tip.

Robert closed his eyes on competing images: a noose being tossed over a beam; a muzzle being pressed to his temple. Not that Robert had any overt desire to kill himself—he had no barn, no pistol. It was just that the idea of suicide provided an almost practical comfort, like the thought of a vacation to a distant island from which you never came back. He was in the process of sinking into that warm sand when he heard a noise—specifically, a whimper—coming from the foot of Becka’s side of the bed. It was Roscoe. Maybe he was hungry. Maybe he needed to go out. Maybe he just missed Becka, the master of them all. “Yeah, O.K., boy, O.K.,” Robert muttered, and he patted the bed in the hope of bribing the dog with the rare privilege of curling up beside him. But there was no leap, and the noise persisted. God damn it. Robert allowed himself a brief vision of waking clearheaded tomorrow. He’d go running. He’d read the entire Sunday paper. He’d even try to tackle the— Roscoe started to growl. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Then Roscoe barked. Before Robert could muster the strength to throttle the dog, the sound of crying, high-pitched and breathless, came from the vicinity of the floor. Robert sat up without actually sitting up. What the hell? Had Roscoe dragged in some creature from the woods? Was something dying right there on the rug, half ripped apart? Waaaaaaaaaaa. And the rug was new. Fucking Roscoe. Fucking goddam dog.

All this projected hassle finally gave way to Robert rolling to the other side of the bed, this movement spurring a memory of the battle against nausea before the fast humiliating defeat, but at no point did Robert recall throwing up anything quite like this: it was about the size of an eggplant, though in color more reddish brown, its body a mishmash of textures and lumps, a goulash molded into a ghoul. There was a shape that resembled a head, plus four distinct parts that roughly corresponded with two arms and two legs, further articulated by an assumption of ten fingers and ten toes, presently wriggling. Robert winced. His feelings of disgust were still confined within the narrative of the dog, though Roscoe looked equally stumped. Regardless, this thing was unhappy. It flailed about as though tormented by a thousand stings. Despite the obvious freakishness of the situation, a dim sympathy arose within Robert as the surreal backed into the practical, the impossible losing its singular meaning. This was no dream. This was a life, however struck. Before Robert could come up with a proper plan, Roscoe jumped in with all the passion of his breed and turned those cries into even worse screams.

Robert continued to call until Stearns picked up.

“What time is it?” His throat sounded crumpled with dollar bills.

“Around eight-fifteen.”

“It’s Saturday morning, you realize.”

“Yeah, yeah, hey—”

“You missed quite a night.”

“You kept on going?”

“Wasn’t even midnight,” Stearns said.

Robert allowed himself a quick glance toward the bed, where the thing from the floor now lay swaddled in a towel. Fortunately, Roscoe had a soft mouth, and Robert had acted—“Give, give!”—before any real damage could be done, rushing it into the bathroom and using a washcloth to clean its, well, its body, he supposed. It weighed only a few slippery pounds, its most distinct feature being its mouth, essentially a nest for that quivering tongue, the remainder of its face falling under the guise of guesswork, those slits likely eyes, those outcroppings ears. There was no nose, only a nostril smear. Still, Robert found himself rocking the thing until it settled down, after which he wrapped it in a towel and noticed that it was most definitely a male of its species. “I’m curious,” he said to Stearns. “How’re you feeling?”

“Like crap.”

“But your stomach, how about your stomach?”

“Like a fat shit—nothing new there.”

“Because I got kind of sick.”

“What, like throw-up sick?”

Robert looked toward the bed again. “Yeah, I think.”

“You think? And how do you think you’re feeling now?”

“Kind of weird,” Robert said.

“Like you might throw up again?”

The towel started to stir.

“I hope not,” Robert said. He wondered if he should try to explain things to Stearns, but where to start, and what to say, and, once the inkling was given weight, when would madness set in? Um, there’s a chance I vomited up a baby last night, a severely deformed baby but a baby nonetheless. A boy, I think.

“I didn’t eat anything different from you, right?” Robert asked as sweat unstitched his hairline.

“Yeah, you don’t sound so good,” Stearns said.

“I’m kind of in a fucked-up place.”

“You should call the restaurant and complain.”

“Well—”

“I’ll call the restaurant. For what we paid, it’s not right.”

The stirring grew more agitated. There was obvious frustration on that bed, a rooting about that Robert recognized from years ago. This thing was hungry. The food needed food. Robert backed toward the bathroom.

“Childress?” Stearns said.

“Huh?”

“I said do you want me to come up? I got nothing going on today and a drive in the country would do me some good. I could bring you real chicken soup and proper bagels. You got ginger ale? That’s what my mom always gave me. We could also smoke some pot—for purely medicinal reasons, of course.”

“No,” Robert said quickly, even though this was Stearns at his best, the go-to guy when you were in trouble, who would drop everything to help, this terrible asshole a hero to a hundred friends. But even Stearns would be repulsed by this. “I mean, no thanks,” Robert amended less sharply.

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

A testing cry came from the bed, followed by a shriek that seemed almost peristaltic, its grip and release pushing consciousness through the grimmest of openings. An awful thought came to Robert: What if I throw up again and somehow produce its sibling?

“What’s that noise?” Stearns asked.

“Um, birds.” Robert stepped into the bathroom.

“Does Westchester have pterodactyls now?”

Robert closed the door and took a defensive position, remaining perfectly still and listening for signs of approach. On the phone, Stearns was saying something about cockatoos in Australia and how they’re pests and loud as shit, nothing exotic about them, and Robert realized that his friend would probably go on talking until he was actively disengaged.

“Remember that show ‘Baretta’—”

“Stearns?”

“Yeah?”

“I gotta go.”

Robert hung up, gripped the phone to his chest like a missionary his Bible. There must be an answer, he thought, but all reason was overwhelmed by helplessness adrenalized, as if the bathroom were plummeting from thirty thousand feet. Robert had always pictured himself calm in a crisis, the person with the wherewithal to comfort the kid travelling alone. “It’s going to be O.K.,” he would say, hand on shoulder, his years of expecting the worst having prepared him for this moment. On good days, this reflex seemed almost Buddhist. Becka, on the other hand, was a rationalist; all problems could be diagnosed, therefore fixed. A sore throat was always the beginning of strep, a sniffle allergies. She probably would have tried to convince him that the thing on the bed was his partially absorbed twin, forty-plus years conjoined to his gut and now finally free. Twins ran in the family. Maybe he would start to feel better now.

Robert wondered how long he should wait, when was time time enough? The bathroom floor seemed to rack into focus, as though predicting his fall; Robert reached for the sink to steady himself and in the process met his face in the mirror. Was that thing screaming for him?

It was beautiful outside, high sixties and crisp, the blue with its attendant white seemingly composed by a bored painter painting another goddam sky. If Sean and Robert, Jr., had been here, the three of them would be heading to soccer, the twins just decent enough athletes to make life impossible, what with the soccer and the hockey and the baseball, though it was obvious they would never be great. Nine years old and Robert already glimpsed mediocrity in their gait. He would watch them from the sidelines with those other conscripted parents, overcoming his innate shyness for the sake of community, cheering the boys on without embarrassing them, he hoped. “Good try” was mostly what he shouted. “Good try” and “Almost” and possibly a murmur of “Fucking A, that Gilroy kid can play.” And, of course, that Gilroy kid’s mother would be there, Janice of the South African accent and squinty demeanor, as though she were a shark among pilot fish. “Everyone’s feeding on scraps around here,” she once told Robert during an endless scrimmage. “Scripts?” he asked. “No, no, scraps,” she repeated. “Bits of leftover flesh.” “Scraps.” “Yes, scraps,” she said, exaggerating his American pronunciation, like a hard flat serve in tennis, then she smiled and put a touch of spin on the ball. But Robert was basically content, if almost always exhausted, to be living here, and he certainly would have preferred to be standing on those sidelines watching his sons chase after far speedier scraps than to be walking toward the back of his property, to where the trees were thickest and many seasons’ worth of leaves covered the ground. In one hand he carried a shovel; in the other, a rectangular box. It was something he’d made in fifth-grade woodworking class, probably the best thing he’d ever made in any class, carefully tapping in the nails and sanding the edges, carving his name on the lid—“Bobby”—then screwing in the hinges, screwing in the latch secured by a small padlock, the loss of its key remedied by a single blow from a hammer. Inside, baseball cards, hundreds of them, stacked like rubber-banded bricks of gold. Robert had come across the box last year after his mother died and he was emptying her attic of Bobby-related artifacts: the crates of records and tapes, the Technics turntable and Yamaha receiver-equalizer, the speakers like substantial pieces of furniture—man, he used to love his music—plus the old posters in poster tubes, the tapestries. So much forgotten stuff. Robert had moved it all into his basement, with plans of someday re-creating an analogue existence. “This is sound!” he would shout. But the baseball cards he gave to Sean and Robert, Jr., who spent a weekend cataloging them and checking their values online before sliding them into a binder—1975-1980. They would have tossed the box. And God bless the boys’ lack of nostalgia. They would never miss things the way Robert missed things, memory sometimes taking his breath away.

The best spot for this business was the far corner of the back yard, in the middle of a thicket of arborvitae that concealed the deer fencing, fencing in name only, since the deer came and went with impunity. Robert backed through the branches. Inside, it was like a room within a turret, with a hidden view of the pool, the terrace, the bay window of the kitchen. He imagined a madman crouching here, envying his family. The roof needed reshingling. That was an expense he and Becka had balked at during the big renovation six years ago, when they had actual money to spend; instead, they had opted for a screening room and had even bought one of those old-fashioned popcorn poppers which forever stank up the house. But Robert had a childhood fantasy about a screening room. It seemed the height of success. Of course, Becka complained about the surround sound being too loud, and the kids cared only about their handheld devices, which left Robert alone with old favorites, like “The Towering Inferno” or “A Bridge Too Far,” feeling ridiculous and friendless and wondering how he had become so ridiculous and friendless, and if he told this to Becka, like really told her, she would say go pick up the phone and call someone, you have to make an effort, Robert, and he would mutter something about being tired and retreat back to Anthony Hopkins at Arnhem. What a bloody mess.

Robert eased the box to the ground, its contents having cried itself to sleep. He figured he should dig beyond a canine sense of smell. A stomp on the shovel and the blade sank in and gave up a satisfying wedge of earth, followed by another wedge, no less satisfying, and for a moment Robert forgot the grim task and simply enjoyed the basic labor, wishing that life presented more opportunities to dig holes. Once he hit two feet, he stopped.

This is my only option, he thought. Whether this is miraculous or merely bizarre but true, I have no choice. Robert lowered the box, not without ceremony. Nothing stirred within, and he had hopes of possible suffocation; perhaps his long-ago care with carpentry had created a perfect seal. Then he saw his old name on the lid and his mood darkened. Was he so different from that easily injured boy? Sometimes it seemed that the only point to life was death. Dirt slid from the shovel back into the hole. Robert hoped it sounded like peaceful rain, because after that the rest was a storm.

Stripping down, Robert checked his phone and noticed multiple messages from Becka, beginning with a text—You up?—and ending with a voice mail, which he snubbed. Just finished a ten-mile run, he texted back, and jumped into the shower. Every now and then a horrific burst of imagination shook him: the cold darkness, the rising hunger, the first and final fear, of dying without ever understanding death. He began to revise his thoughts, distance insisting on reason. It must have been an animal, right, dragged in by Roscoe, some unfortunate creature deformed by fertilizers and pesticides.

Around ten o’clock, he called Becka back. She was giddy from being in that childhood home of hers, with the tennis court and the swimming pool, the two guest cottages, her parents with those pleasant parent smiles and easy parent love and natural parent abundance, whether of manners or of money or of pedigree—all this turned Becka into an overly excitable teen. “Mom wants me to go to India with her because Dad refuses—you know, the poverty—and I’m, like, hello, I can’t, not with the kids, and she’s, like, it’s just three weeks, like three weeks is nothing, like sure, three weeks, great.”

Robert stared out the bay window.

“Of course, it would be fascinating,” Becka said.

He called her bluff. “Go, then.”

“Oh, c’mon, I can’t.”

“If you want to go, go. We can figure it out.”

“Please.” She sounded almost mad at the suggestion. “How was Stearns last night?”

“His father’s really sick.”

She hummed with sympathy, then asked, “You out late?”

“Home before midnight.”

“But you had fun?”

“Sure.”

“Good,” Becka said, as if she had granted him this fun. “You’re lucky you’re not here. My mother is driving me nuts.” Robert let the sentiment pass, since he knew that Becka worshipped her mother and often trumped up charges against her in hopes of obscuring this love with easier outrage. “Everyone’s asking about you,” she said.

“I’ll see them over Thanksgiving,” he said, and over Christmas, too, and spring vacation in the Bahamas, and August on Martha’s Vineyard. All this was undeniably nice, and Robert never did complain—his parents were dead, and his brother and sister had their own family dynamics in Michigan—though he sometimes wished Becka would just embrace their existence, however modest in comparison.

“What are you up to today?” she asked.

“Not sure yet.”

“But you went for a long run?”

“Yeah. I’m kind of beat from that.”

“Wish I could find time to exercise.”

When did being husband and wife turn into a zero-sum proposition?

“How’re the kids?” he asked.

“Having fun with their cousins.”

“That’s good.”

“That Peter is a nightmare, though.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Grabs everyone’s stuff.”

“He is only three.”

“But they spoil him,” Becka said.

Robert could hear how his quick defense annoyed her, the same as when he used to defend Robert, Jr., during his hard-core mermaid phase, five years old and drawing nothing but large-breasted mermaids and wanting to be called Ariel and watching “The Little Mermaid” over and over, and how Becka hated it and searched for a reason and for possible strategies to counteract the impulse, while Robert had no problem with the fantasy, so strange and exotic, so goddam special—my mermaid son. Plus it had taken the pressure off the more traditional paternal duties, which could scare Robert blind. Baseball was fine, but he would rather play Ursula or Sebastian the crab.

“Why do I bother?” Becka said. Robert was unsure of the referent, whether meaning rested on him or on her family or on a combination of the two; either way, there was no winning, so he stayed quiet.

“What are you doing for food?” she asked.

“Eating.”

“O.K.—”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, trying to step back from his tone.

“It’s just—”

“I know, I know.”

“I’m here and you’re—”

“I’m sorry.”

“And—”

“Totally.”

“Sometimes—”

“I hear you.”

They were much better at these partial articulations.

“But all is well?” she asked. “Basically?”

“All is well, basically,” he said, hearing her honest concern. They talked a bit more, about logistics mostly, then said goodbye, and Robert wondered if he was simply good at lying, or withholding, or whatever it was that he often did, or if Becka was too trusting and a savvier wife would have seen through him. Not that he ever lied about anything important, just small things, like what he had had for lunch, or if he had returned So-and-So’s call, random aspects of his boring day that he used to trick his wife for no apparent reason. For practice, maybe? For the big, inevitable lie? Standing there, Robert found himself questioning his own sense of the truth. How was any of this possible? Had he been seeing things? Misreading things? Imagining things? And though he was certain, or near certain, of what had happened, this growing doubt seemed a far greater threat to his sanity than any potential monster.

He was back among the arborvitae, with the shovel once again in hand and Roscoe on a leash—despite his being just a dumb dog, Robert needed a third presence to triangulate existence. It was obvious that the ground had been disturbed, so that much was true. Of course it was true, all of this was true. Robert lowered his ear and listened. Roscoe’s frantic sniffing interfered with a clear assessment, but Robert thought he heard something bundled within the normal outdoor chirps, something that sounded like a muffled cry, as if the earth were a heartbroken pillow. But he needed to be sure—sure of what? Life? Death?

He tied Roscoe to a nearby tree. This time the dirt gave up without satisfaction, the blade going in like a sigh, but as Robert dug deeper he became more convinced that he did in fact hear crying, terrible crying, coming from below, that there was something down there that needed saving, having forgotten his own agency in the matter. Shovel hit lid, and Robert fell to his knees and brushed the dirt away from his childhood name. As he freed the box, he could feel the wood vibrate. Inside, a thousand bees could’ve been mourning their lost queen. Robert flipped open the lid. The thing, either startled or relieved, went instantly silent. It looked up at him, its eyes like the gunk that stops the drain, and then it blinked.

The taxi headed toward the Brewster train station. Robert sat in the back, on his lap a Prada box stolen from Becka’s closet, the boots replaced by this, this—Robert still had no proper name for the thing, though he had taken to calling it You, as in, “You hungry?,” which led to his feeding it applesauce, the spoon disappearing into that wound of a mouth and hitting against something hard, something that Robert chose not to investigate. But it seemed satisfied. “You like that, huh?” Robert said, wiping its chin. The unfortunate visuals had re-formed into a certain familiarity, a habituation that bordered on hope. Robert ditched the towel for a Rangers T-shirt pulled from the twins’ bureau—“You comfy now?”—and decided on a more practical means of conveyance, hence the Prada box. He had briefly debated leaving it in the house while he went to retrieve the car, but even a thing like this deserved responsible parenting.

As the taxi powered through the curves of Titicus Road and thank-you-ma’amed the hills near Peach Lake, Robert could feel the box’s contents start to shift and roll, the movement growing in velocity until he peeked in. “You O.K.?” Those chapped lips cracked open, reinjuring themselves for the sake of a smile. “You enjoying the ride?” Robert reached down and unbundled the T-shirt from around its neck, his touch provoking a shrill giggle.

“What you got back there?” the driver asked.

“What’s that?”

“In the box?”

“A bird,” Robert said, leaning on his youth and those birds with broken wings slipped into old shoeboxes. It was never any use. “It knows it needs to die,” his father would tell him, and Robert would disagree until his father was proved right one way or another.

“Is it O.K.?” the driver asked.

“It flew into a window, I think.”

“Is it a parrot? Sounds like a parrot.”

“No,” Robert said, sticking to the truth of his past.

“So you going to a vet for a random bird?” The look in the rearview mirror was the upstate version of incredulous, otherwise known as you’re fucking nuts.

“Something like that,” Robert said.

“Not to be harsh, but unless that’s a California condor it ain’t worth it.”

Sometimes it seemed that his father was everywhere.

At the train station, Robert picked up his car and drove to the supermarket, where he tucked the Prada box into the fold-down basket of the shopping cart and started to browse the aisles, grabbing things long forgotten, like baby food and baby formula, baby bottles, baby lotion, baby wipes and baby diapers, though none of the advertised babies looked anything like his particular baby. The supermarket was bustling at this hour. Most of the shoppers seemed more rugged than the typical suburban crowd, as if they were the secret farmers of northern Westchester County, the honest laborers who gathered when Bedford played tennis and Katonah played golf. Baseball caps were in abundance, the same with facial hair and affordable clothing, and Robert was at ease in their blue-collar midst. He was a straightforward dad doing his straightforward share, with no worries about yield-curve risks or duration gaps, and, while there were still sporadic sightings of preppy women in quilted jackets and oversized sunglasses, they were like picadors whose job was to provoke and fatigue.

An aisle later, one of these picadors pricked Robert by calling his name. He was contemplating a turkey baster and recognized her only when she removed her sunglasses and squinted.

“Janice,” Robert said, the baster like a rogue exclamation mark in his hand.

“We missed you at soccer today.”

“I thought there wasn’t a game.”

“There wasn’t, just a practice.”

“I probably should’ve called someone. My wife and kids are away.”

“And I see you have plans for a wild night tonight.” Janice reached into his cart and removed a can of baby formula. “Ah, Similac, I knew you well. Where be your gibes now?” She spoke with a theatrical lilt, after which she grimaced and let the can drop. “Sorry,” she said. “It was one of those endless practices and I had no one decent to talk to. But enough of me. Is there happy news on the Childress horizon? Shall I start tongues wagging?”

“Tongs?”

“Tongues”—Janice re-served, flattening the schwa.

“No, no, no—God, no,” Robert said. “You can put the tongs down. My daughter volunteers for a local women’s shelter and they need baby supplies, so here I am.”

“How nice.”

“My daughter, not me.”

“Yes, yes, always the kids.” Janice said, sounding almost disappointed, as if she were forty years too late to try to save the world. She was flirty and sexy and also distracted, not in the clichéd way of suburban mothers, with their aloof husbands and preoccupied children, but more like a keen scientist who has discovered, after years of study, that time is in fact fleeting. She tapped the top of the Prada box. “And doing some good-will work for the wife, I see.”

Robert almost slapped her hand away.

“What did you get her?”

“Nothing too exciting, just boots.”

The boots, Robert feared, had been awakened.

“Nothing too exciting?” Janice said. “Now you’re showing off.”

They both grinned and a question seemed to drape between them, a question often sensed but never spoken between the wives and husbands of husbands and wives: What would have happened if I had married you instead?

“Anyway” from Robert.

“Yes, yes, anyway” from Janice.

They said their goodbyes, Janice moving toward the snack aisle while Robert aimed for a speedy exit, the sharp turn toward the cashier eliciting a kick and a yay from inside the box—shit!—followed by more kicks and more yays—shit, shit, shit!—as if a game had been invented, Robert getting in line and leaning hard on the top—shit!—pretending to read one of those magazines that served up celebrities on a platter. It was like a scene in a movie, he thought, a farce, judging by his clumsy attempts at hushing up. But in this particular Westchester version no one noticed anything; the shoppers put their food in motion and the cashiers collected their beeps without looking up, the whole exchange so oddly serious that a blessing could have been involved.

“You got a Stop & Shop card?” the cashier asked him.

“Uh, no,” Robert said, nonchalantly battling the box.

She grabbed a nearby card and scanned its bar code for a ten-per-cent discount, and while Robert was pretty sure she did this for everyone, it seemed at that moment a great and unexpected kindness.

On the drive back, Robert took the curviest route possible, the windows rolled down, the stereo forsaking Top Forty for some hard-core Hüsker Dü, nobody complaining about the volume, certainly not his fellow speed freak riding shotgun. “You fucking love this!” Robert yelled, seeing arms, or armlike arms, rise up from the box, like any kid on a roller coaster. Robert started to half sing, half shout the chorus to “Chartered Trips”:

I thought I owed myself a trip away.

I wanted to go to places, I have never been away.

I looked at the pictures, imagine where they lay,

Away, on a beach, by the sea, where their clothes all lay away.

From the box came an accompaniment of wooo-wooo-wooo.

Once home, Robert positioned “You must be tired of this box” between two pillows on the couch and took stock of the groceries. The smallest diaper size would have to do. He cleaned the reddish-orange growths that composed its backside and fastened the diaper as best he could. The addition of this piece of everyday baby gear seemed to burnish the nightmare, like seeing pictures of the Elephant Man in jacket and tie, and, as with the Elephant Man—Merrick was his name, something Merrick, Robert remembered, played by John Hurt in the movie—there was a deep sense of understanding, however excruciating, beneath the skin. Robert touched its head. He tried feeding it a bottle, but its ability to suck seemed compromised, so Robert moved on to the purées—the apples and the bananas and the pears—all of which were happily accepted, though sweet potatoes were the obvious favorite, causing an enthusiastic shimmy. The spoon still hit something hard, and Robert peered in and noticed two incisors breaking through the soft palate, a discovery that was more curious than unpleasant. “You have teeth!” Robert was pleased to remind himself of his childcare abilities, how he’d been right there when Eloise and Sean and Robert, Jr., were babies. Maybe he was less of a man, but he was more of a father, especially when the children were younger. Nowadays they seemed so heavy. Robert put the spoon down and, working from memory, picked up “You need to slow down” and laid it over his shoulder and started to pat its back, searching for a burp from within that knotted terrain.

The ball disappeared across the lawn. It was early evening, and Robert stood in the middle of the back yard and watched his house get doled out in lamplight. Best case, he would receive no bonus this year. Roscoe reappeared from the growing darkness—good boy. In terms of being screwed, he was hardly alone. The ball disappeared. Sky and roof smudged into universal gray. On the second floor, “You should sleep” snoozed in a crib improvised from pillow and cushion, like Eloise with her dolls, when she was younger, before they took up jury duty on her bed. Roscoe reappeared—good boy. Earlier, Robert had given “You stink” a bath in the biggest of the salad bowls, and “You little fish” had splashed around and grunted, as if remembering its warm liquid beginnings. There had been—the ball disappeared—a moment when the phrase puke in a bowl got stuck in Robert’s head, which he found unspeakably funny, and he started to laugh, the long day having turned his brain to mush, and the actual puke in a bowl looked up with eyes pinched tight and laughed, too—huh-huh-huh—laughed for the sake of hanging on, it seemed, which made Robert want to cry. Roscoe reappeared—good boy. Maybe Stearns could set him up with a job. The ball disappeared. After the bath, Robert had rubbed lotion onto that burled skin and grabbed a fresh T-shirt from the twins’ bureau, this one of penguins surfing, “Look at You, dude,” already appearing bigger, stronger, too, like something hot that had cooled. Roscoe reappeared—good boy. For the first time, Robert allowed himself the thought of what “You sleep tight” might grow into, the possible story of its future care, the presumptions and formulations, the decisions spreading before him like the evening spreading across the sky, the question beyond answer, only a bit of yellow tumbling toward the horizon.

Near five o’clock on Sunday, Becka and the kids pulled into the driveway. Robert and Roscoe greeted them outside, Roscoe spinning in tight circles, Robert recently showered and shaved. The hours in the car played across all their faces, with Becka taking on the higher definition of spending the weekend alone with kids and parents and siblings, her exhaustion nearing 3D.

“Mom almost wrecked, like, a hundred times,” Sean said.

Robert, Jr., staggered out as though escaping near-death.

“It wasn’t that bad,” Becka said.

Eloise, as both prosecution and defense, rolled her eyes.

Becka forced a smile. “Either way, we made it, you little assholes.”

Sean and Robert, Jr., ran for the yard, kicking up soccer balls and footballs where previously there seemed to have been none, with Roscoe on their heels, his doggy ways almost human in their company. Eloise watched her brothers for a moment, arms crossed, as though trying on the mantle of parent, after which she grabbed her bag and asked Robert about his weekend, her tone both curious and not. Sometimes he wondered if, rather than living, Eloise was building a case for life. But she was undeniably beautiful. And smart. And his boys were confident and enthusiastic, their kidding never turning cruel. Robert stood there in awe. It was obvious that much of their goodness came from Becka, that her genes were an entire language, while he had given them only a few words. But here they were, within sight again, his limited vocabulary servicing a kind of poetry.

“I’m wiped,” Becka said.

“I bet.”

“And I really did almost crash. I wasn’t paying attention, so stupid of me, and I drifted into the oncoming lane. It could’ve been bad, like no-survivors bad.”

“Scary,” Robert said, unloading the bags.

“And it happened early, and for the rest of the drive I was so freaked I almost got into a dozen more accidents. I didn’t think the kids even noticed.” Becka shook her head. “It’s all because my mother told me to drive carefully. ‘Drive carefully,’ ” she said, trying to impersonate, but sounding only a little less like herself.

“Well, you made it,” Robert said. He noticed in the nearby pachysandra an old tennis ball, only its top visible, like a monk’s tonsure.

“You have a good weekend?” Becka asked.

“It was quiet.” Robert stepped in and grabbed the ball.

“In a good way?”

“In a quiet way.”

It was worn and dirty, elementally aged.

“Next time come with us. Please,” Becka said.

“Maybe.” Robert yelled toward the boys and gestured with the ball overhead as if knocking on a large wooden door. Sean and Robert, Jr., instantly understood the solicitation and jostled about, arms elbowing as Robert cocked his arm and launched the ball into the air, a true high fly, both boys trying to balance themselves on its descent. Neither got within five feet.

“So pizza tonight?” Becka asked.

Roscoe returned with the ball in his mouth.

“Sounds fine,” Robert said.

In bed that night, Robert and Becka made love, their hands moving in almost mechanical memory, bending and folding as if constructing a paper airplane, and though the design was basic, their bodies managed a bit of glide before sliding to a stop.

Soon after, Becka said, “I feel like I’m always saying the wrong things.”

“What?”

“To you, that I’m annoying you.”

“But you haven’t said anything.”

“I mean in general.”

“In general? No.”

“I can’t read your mind.”

“I know, I know. But didn’t we just have a nice little . . .”

Becka settled into her pillow. “That’s not communicating.”

“It’s a form of communicating.”

“No. It’s more of an expression of all the previous communication. It doesn’t just stand alone.”

“That doesn’t sound like much fun.”

“You’re right,” Becka said. “It’s more like studying before a test.”

“Should I say something here about grade inflation?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know, I know.”

“But do you?” Becka asked, seeming to wonder aloud.

Robert grew silent. He knew that more needed to be said, and he wanted to say more, but he had nothing explicit to add, and so, unmoored, wrapped his arms around his belly as if in a pinch it could act as a flotation device. He lay there, suspended, until Becka finally turned and faced him, her left hand sliding under his head and rubbing the bony indent where spine met skull, and Robert found himself sort of falling through the floor, and the floor below that, all the way down to the basement and the far corner, where his old stereo and speakers remained stacked, the crates of records and tapes, the bygone music waiting, along with You who never made a sound. You were being brave. You need to be quiet, you were told, and you seemed to understand, but maybe you were just cold and frightened and those nods were yet another misunderstanding. You should know that there were fantasies of stealing you away and moving to northern Michigan, to the woods, to a hand-hewn cabin in the middle of those woods, to see what you might grow into, if you might settle into a viable existence, but you must have heard the sorries raining down and had some sense of what lay behind that word, the suffering and the failure. There was work tomorrow. And there was this family upstairs. There was that spring when Robert was twelve and an invisible barrier seemed to descend over the neighborhood, and over the course of a month a handful of birds appeared with broken wings and Robert became skilled at capturing them, sneaking up with soothing words and a ready towel. The beginning was always an adventure, the end a hard truth, until his father got fed up and grabbed the box and took the last bird into the yard and wrung its neck. There is mercy, and then there is mercy. Understand? He returned the box, empty, like some kind of receipt.

“You O.K.?” Becka asked.

She wiped Robert’s face.

“What is it, my love?” ♦

POEMS
“The Greeter”

by Robert N. Watson

He’s not the Reaper, but he does stop by

To say, to everything that’s ever lived, “Nice try.”

POEMS
“The Morning After”

by Ellen Bass

You stand at the counter, pouring boiling water

over the French roast, oily perfume rising in smoke.

And when I enter, you don’t look up.

You’re hurrying to pack your lunch, snapping

the lids on little plastic boxes while you call your mother

to tell her you’ll take her to the doctor.

I can’t see a trace of the little slice of heaven

we slipped into last night—a silk kimono

floating satin ponds and copper koi, stars falling

to the water. Didn’t we shoulder

our way through the cleft in the rock of the everyday

and tear up the grass in the pasture of pleasure?

If the soul isn’t a separate vessel

we carry from form to form

but more like Aristotle’s breath of life—

the work of the body that keeps it whole—

then last night, darling, our souls were busy.

But this morning it’s like you’re wearing a bad wig,

disguised so I won’t recognize you

or maybe so you won’t know yourself

as that animal burned down

to pure desire. I don’t know

how you do it. I want to throw myself

onto the kitchen tile and bare my throat.

I want to slick back my hair

and tap-dance up the wall. I want to do it all

all over again—dive back into that brawl,

that raw and radiant free-for-all.

But you are scribbling a shopping list

because the kids are coming for the weekend

and you’re going to make your special crab-cakes

that have ruined me for all other crab-cakes

forever.

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
London Calling

by Hilton Als

Caryl Churchill was born in London just before the start of the Second World War; when her family emigrated to Canada, in 1948, her native city was still marked by deprivation, and the cultural and emotional habit of soldiering on. Churchill returned to England to go to a women’s college at the University of Oxford in 1957, when sexual politics were becoming something of an issue. Wherever Churchill went, history followed. So what else could she become but a playwright, a recorder of newsreel realities? This year features two Churchill revivals: in October, Yale Rep will put on the wrenching “Owners” (1972), and, now through Aug. 4, at Atlantic Stage 2, PTP/NYC presents “Serious Money” (1987), directed by Cheryl Faraone. These plays center on the fantasy of money and power being redemptive. The occasional awkwardness of Churchill’s writing—she’s a latter-day Brecht without all the famously unlauded female collaborators—works best when her ideas grow out of situations, rather than the other way around. That’s when we really stop and take in all that rigor and invention. ♦

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Drawing Power

by Andrea K. Scott

Hanging right now at the Morgan Library is a Lee Lorenz cartoon, titled “Proust Orders from the Cart,” which ran in these pages in July of 1989. The caption reads, “I’m out of madeleines, Jack. How about a prune Danish?” Visitors on the prowl for Old Masters or medieval manuscripts may feel a bit like Marcel when they encounter the museum’s latest—and most radical—foray into contemporary art, the engrossingly abstruse exhibition “Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney.” The artist, now forty-six, gained instant fame (and notoriety) in 1991, when, naked and harnessed, he scaled the walls of a New York gallery using a pair of ice screws. It was drawing-in-space as a mythopoetic endurance test, coupling machismo and masochism. The pièce de résistance here is a muscular wall work, the remnants of an action that the artist performed in the space using Olympic-grade weights; it relates to his upcoming film, “River of Fundament,” which links subjects as various as Norman Mailer, Chrysler automobiles, the Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris, Harry Houdini, and the chimeric artist James Lee Byars. But even Barney’s tamest drawings exude an exquisite perversity (Hans Bellmer comes to mind), with pencil lines so fine and winding they might be strands of hair. Exhibited in “self-lubricating” plastic frames, they surround vitrines filled, wunderkammer-like, with objects from the Morgan’s collection, selected by the artist. One fitting inclusion is an 1855 copy of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” Like the poet, Barney contains multitudes. ♦

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Enduring Voice

by Russell Platt

Back in the late nineties, the mezzo-soprano Jennifer Larmore was one of American opera’s official up-and-comers, with plum roles (Rosina, Giulio Cesare) at the Met and a burgeoning discography on Teldec and Deutsche Grammophon. Then, for some reason, things thinned out to a cameo part in “An American Tragedy,” in 2005, and the house didn’t cast her again until 2010, when, opposite Simon Keenlyside, she roared back with a fiery appearance as Gertrude in Thomas’s “Hamlet.” Her warm, slightly dusky tone—come-hither, yet commanding—may not haunt the memory as Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s did, but her way of putting that voice inside the essence of the character she is portraying gives her performances a thrilling sense of realism. Whatever plans the Met may yet have for her, New York is still taking notice: she’ll tear into the role of Princess Eboli in the original French version of Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” at Caramoor on July 20, and sing Jocasta in Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex,” at the Bard Music Festival on Aug. 18. ♦

TABLES FOR TWO
The Cleveland

25 Cleveland Pl. (212-274-0900)

by Ariel Levy

Though it is situated on a distinctly urban block, just up the street from Mexican Radio and across scrubby Petrosino Square from La Esquina, the Cleveland, unlike those other two Nolita eateries, offers an almost pastoral dining experience. The most obvious explanation is the lovely back garden, a serene space bordered by beds of lavender and leafy heucheras, shaded by striped umbrellas and brightened at night by strings of amber lights. Its quirky aesthetic touches are more English country cottage than slick downtown boîte: whitewashed brick walls, a bar made from rustic pine and zinc, a macchiato that arrived on a saucer with a ceramic green frog rising up off its lip. But what really brings the flavor of flora to the Cleveland is the cuisine: on a menu that shifts with the seasons, vegetables are the stars of the show.

A bulgur salad with eggplant, water spinach, and red peppers looked like a delicious box of crayons. Kale with apples and bacon was such a treat it was hard to remember that it was (mostly) healthy. A dish of lentils with duck confit was good, but what really elevated the dish were the slices of caramelized onion that came with it. It isn’t that the Cleveland forgoes fauna. They do an excellent skirt steak, and it happens to come with trumpet mushrooms, asparagus, sliced snap peas, and okra—a welcome change from the usual pile of potatoes. The roasted half chicken was golden and savory, but what made it memorable was the mixture underneath, of sumac, kale, chickpeas, and quinoa flavored with the Middle Eastern spice blend of basil, thyme, oregano, and sesame seeds called zatar.

Even the best desserts have a hint of the garden—there’s a carrot-chocolate biscotti and an olive-oil cake with a green sprig parked in a sidecar of mascarpone. Of course, this cultivated bucolic mien runs the risk of seeming affected and twee. But the Cleveland escapes that by keeping the music gritty, loud, and old-school. It’s a rocking garden party, indoors and out. (Open weekdays for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and weekends for brunch and dinner. Entrées $18-$29.) ♦

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
This Week

The Theatre

CUT TO THE CHASE

“Summer Shorts,” Throughline Artists’ annual festival of new one-acts, includes works by Neil LaBute—“Good Luck (in Farsi)”—Lucas Hnath (“About a Woman Named Sarah”), Paul Weitz (“Change”), and Alan Zweibel (“Pine Cone Moment”).

Night Life

FUN PERIOD

The singer Nate Ruess, the guitarist Jack Antonoff, and the multi-instrumentalist Andrew Dost, who are the group fun., packed their second album, “Some Nights,” with all the earnest emotion and energetic bravado implicit in the title of their hit single “We Are Young,” and the world took notice, bestowing on the group a Grammy for Best New Artist. The trio plays Pier 26, with the Canadian twin sisters Tegan and Sara.

Art

WOMEN STUDIES

Using Conté crayon, a drawing medium favored by the likes of Georges Seurat, the Houston-based artist Robert Pruitt makes stunning large-scale portraits that contain pop-culture references to subjects from Sun Ra to superheroes. The Studio Museum in Harlem exhibits a selection of his works in “Robert Pruitt: Women.”

Classical Music

NEW BLOOD

The Emerson String Quartet, one of the world’s leading classical ensembles, is welcoming a new addition to the family: the admired British cellist Paul Watkins, who makes his U.S. début with the group at Caramoor this week. Music by Beethoven (the “Razumovsky” Quartets Nos. 2-3) and Britten is on the program.

Movies

THE FABRIC SCREEN

The designer Agnès B. offers her selection of modern classics of world cinema at Anthology Film Archives, including Luchino Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers” and Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Conformist.”

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
The Theatre

OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS

Please call the phone number listed with the theatre for timetables and ticket information.

THE DESIGNATED MOURNER

Andre Gregory directs the 1996 work by Wallace Shawn, in which three artists lament the fate of the increasingly conservative policies of their country. The play, starring Deborah Eisenberg, Larry Pine, and Shawn himself, is part of the Wallace Shawn–Andre Gregory Project, co-presented by Theatre for a New Audience and the Public. In previews. Opens July 21. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555.)

FIRST DATE

This new musical, starring Zachary Levi (“Chuck”) and Krysta Rodriguez (“Smash”), follows a high-strung young man and a skeptical young woman—and the voices in their heads—as they make their way through a blind date. With music and lyrics by Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner and a book by Austin Winsberg (“Gossip Girl”). Bill Berry directs. In previews. (Longacre, 220 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200.)

HARBOR

Primary Stages presents the New York première of a comedy by Chad Beguelin, about a woman who brings her fifteen-year-old daughter to her brother’s idyllic home in Sag Harbor. Mark Lamos directs. Previews begin July 23. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200.)

I FORGIVE YOU, RONALD REAGAN

In this play by John S. Anastasi, an air-traffic controller is plagued by a rebellious political decision he made twenty years earlier, in the eighties. Starring P. J. Benjamin and Patricia Richardson; Charles Abbott directs. In previews. (Beckett, 410 W. 42nd St. 212-239-6200.)

LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST

The Public’s Shakespeare in the Park concludes with an update of the Shakespeare comedy, directed by Alex Timbers, with music by Michael Friedman. The cast includes Daniel Breaker, Rachel Dratch, and Rebecca Naomi Jones. Previews begin July 23. (Delacorte, Central Park. Enter at 81st St. at Central Park W. 212-967-7555.)

MURDER FOR TWO

Scott Schwartz directs this farcical musical comedy revolving around a murdered novelist. Joe Kinosian wrote the music and Kellen Blair wrote the book and the lyrics. Part of Second Stage’s Theatre Uptown series. In previews. (McGinn/Cazale, 2162 Broadway, at 76th St. 212-246-4422.)

NOBODY LOVES YOU

Second Stage concludes its season with the New York première of a musical comedy about a philosophy graduate student who ends up as the star of a reality-TV dating show. With music and lyrics by Gaby Alter and a book and lyrics by Itamar Moses. Michelle Tattenbaum directs. In previews. Opens July 18. (305 W. 43rd St. 212-246-4422.)

SOUL DOCTOR

Eric Anderson stars in this biographical musical about Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, who befriended Nina Simone and went on to write and perform religious Jewish music in the style of soul and gospel, which became popular during the era of free love. With a book by Daniel S. Wise, lyrics by David Schechter, and music by Shlomo Carlebach. Wise directs. In previews. (Circle in the Square, 235 W. 50th St. 212-239-6200.)

STORYVILLE

York Theatre Company presents this musical, with a book by Ed Bullins and music and lyrics by Mildred Kayden, about the birth of jazz, in a small Louisiana town in the early nineteen-hundreds. Bill Castellino directs. In previews. Opens July 23. (Theatre at St. Peter’s, 54th St. at Lexington Ave. 212-935-5820.)

SUMMER SHORTS 2013

The annual festival of one-act plays includes new works by Neil LaBute, Marian Fontana, Lucas Hnath, Tina Howe, Paul Weitz, and Alan Zweibel. Opens July 19. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200.)

VIOLET

“Encores! Off-Center” presents a semi-staging of the 1997 musical by Jeanine Tesori and Brian Crawley, set in 1964, about a young woman who becomes disfigured in an accident and travels from North Carolina to Tulsa with the hope of being healed by a televangelist. Sutton Foster stars; Leigh Silverman directs. July 17. (City Center, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212.)

NOW PLAYING

EAST TO EDINBURGH FESTIVAL

The annual presentation of American productions heading to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe includes Bill Bowers’s “It Goes Without Saying” and “American Gun Show,” by Chris Harcum. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200.)

ICE FACTORY 2013

The annual festival continues with a presentation by Collaborationtown of “Help Me to Make It” (July 17-20), written by Boo Killebrew, Geoffrey Decas O’Donnell, and Jordan Seavey. Lee Sunday Evans directs. (New Ohio Theatre, 154 Christopher St. 888-596-1027.)

MONKEY: JOURNEY TO THE WEST

The centerpiece of the Lincoln Center Festival is this epic Chinese opera, based on a sixteenth-century Buddhist allegory about a hyperactive simian seeking immortality. Along the way, he crashes a peach banquet, battles a shape-shifting skeleton demon, and gets trapped under Buddha’s giant blue palm for five hundred years. To Western eyes, the story may seem cryptic—let’s face it, “The Magic Flute” is no more coherent—but it’s pumped up with acrobatics, flying, and kung fu, as well as a hypnotic score by the Britpop star Damon Albarn, of Blur, and scenery, costumes, and manga-inspired animations by Jamie Hewlett, Albarn’s partner in the virtual band Gorillaz. The director, Chen Shi-zheng, also wrote the libretto, which is sung in Mandarin with English supertitles. (David H. Koch, Lincoln Center. 212-721-6500.)

SERIOUS MONEY / THE CASTLE

PTP/NYC presents two plays in repertory. “Serious Money,” Caryl Churchill’s 1987 satire of the British stock market, directed by Cheryl Faraone, and “The Castle,” Howard Barker’s 1985 historical drama about Crusaders in the thirteenth century, starring Jan Maxwell and directed by Richard Romagnoli. (Atlantic Stage 2, at 330 W. 16th St. 866-811-4111.)

OUT OF TOWN

BARD SUMMERSCAPE

The Spiegeltent returns; guests include John Kelly (July 19), performing songs by Kurt Weill, Jacques Brel, and more. Through July 21, Janos Szasz directs an adaptation, by Szasz and Gideon Lester, of Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1937 novel, “The Master and Margarita.” (Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. 845-758-7900.)

HUDSON VALLEY SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL

For this riotous production of “All’s Well That Ends Well,” running in repertory with “King Lear” and “The Three Musketeers,” the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival is blessed, first of all, with a glorious setting—an intimate, tented stage on the grounds of Boscobel, a couple of hundred yards from the high banks of the Hudson. Playing multiple roles, sometimes in the same scene, Wesley Mann, as rubbery of face as he is precise of diction, stands out in an excellent company of comedians. Helena, the smart, striving, wronged center of the action, is appealingly played by Jessica Frey, the only woman in the cast; Dan Matisa (Countess) and Jeff Gonzalez (Diana) are funny and moving in the other important female roles. Without ignoring the themes of dishonesty, self-interest, and callousness that give the play some weight, the director, Russell Treyz, goes for broad laughs—and gets them. (Garrison, N.Y. 845-265-9575.)

POWERHOUSE THEATRE

Vassar and New York Stage and Film’s annual summer festival continues with Mozhan Marno’s “When the Lights Went Out” (July 17-28), directed by Kate Whoriskey, and James Lecesne’s “Mother of Invention” (July 19-21), starring Linda Lavin and directed by Michael Wilson. (124 Raymond Ave., Poughkeepsie, N.Y. 845-437-5599.)

WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL

On the Main Stage, Nicholas Martin directs Robert Sean Leonard as Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” (July 17-27). On the Nikos Stage through July 21, Evan Yionoulis directs Tom Stoppard’s “Hapgood,” starring Kate Burton and Reed Birney. (Williamstown, Mass. 413-597-3400.)

ALSO PLAYING

THE ASSEMBLED PARTIES: Samuel J. Friedman, 261 W. 47th St. 212-239-6200. BUYER & CELLAR: Barrow Street Theatre, 27 Barrow St. 212-868-4444. KINKY BOOTS: Hirschfeld, 302 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. MATILDA THE MUSICAL: Shubert, 225 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200. NATASHA, PIERRE & THE GREAT COMET OF 1812: Kazino, W. 13th St. at Washington St. 866-811-4111. A PICTURE OF AUTUMN: Mint, 311 W. 43rd St. 866-811-4111. PIPPIN: Music Box, 239 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. RODGERS + HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA: Broadway Theatre, Broadway at 53rd St. 212-239-6200. THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL: Stephen Sondheim, 124 W. 43rd St. 212-239-6200. THE TWO-CHARACTER PLAY: New World Stages, 340 W. 50th St. 212-239-6200. VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE: Golden, 252 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. THE WEIR: Irish Repertory, 132 W. 22nd St. 212-727-2737.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Night Life

ROCK AND POP

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

BOWERY BALLROOM

6 Delancey St. (212-533-2111)—July 18: The South African-born singer-songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov delivers introspective folk rock. David Ramirez opens with his harmony-driven acoustic balladry. July 19: Skaters. Michael Ian Cummings, the lead singer of this local garage-rock trio, has admitted that no one in the band knows how to skateboard, but that hasn’t stopped them from adopting the attitude of the sidewalk-surfing set. This clever posturing has resulted in a deal with Warner Bros.; you can expect to be hearing more from Skaters soon. With Drowners, a cookie-cutter male-model-fronted pop-punk band. July 23: Future Bible Heroes, featuring the Magnetic Fields members Stephin Merritt and Claudia Gonson, play songs full of synth effervescence and heavy sardonic woe. The act’s third album, “Partygoing,” is a trove of short, catchy tunes and crotchety witticisms like “Listen up, my children, I’ve come back to tell you this: Don’t drink the water, ’cause water’s mostly piss.” For health reasons, Merritt is sitting this tour out.

BROOKLYN BOWL

61 Wythe Ave., Williamsburg (718-963-3369)—July 20: The tireless d.j. Jonathan Toubin keeps dancers moving at his Soul Clap & Dance Off parties. Toubin, who is as attached to sixties soul records and old rock 45s as some people are to Twitter, ups the ante in the dance-floor game by including a contest with a hundred-dollar prize, at 1 A.M.

CELEBRATE BROOKLYN!

Prospect Park Bandshell, Prospect Park W. at 9th St. (718-683-5600)—July 18: With any luck, there won’t be water, water everywhere—except in your imagination—as the British cabaret-punk artists the Tiger Lillies present their multimedia version of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The musician and performance artist Cynthia Hopkins will prime the pump with a set of sea chanteys and ghost stories. July 19: The Scotsman Mike Scott has been the driving force of Celtic folk rockers the Waterboys since the eighties. The band’s latest project is “An Appointment with Mr. Yeats,” an album that gives a musical setting to the Irish poet’s verse. Another Scottish folk artist, Alasdair Roberts, opens. July 20: The trio the Lone Bellow bring rich harmonies to their contribution to what they call “Brooklyn country music.” With the gritty Americana of the Low Anthem and the folksinger Joe Purdy.

GRAMERCY THEATRE

127 E. 23rd St. (800-745-3000)—July 20: New York’s PUi describes its exotic hard-metal sound as “neo-primal rock” and has engineered a night of interactive drum circles, body painting, and initiation tattoos for its extreme fans—or, as the act refers to them, its tribe members.

IRIDIUM

1650 Broadway, at 51st St. (212-582-2121)—July 22: José Feliciano. Which version of “Light My Fire” would you rather hear these days, the Doors’ or Feliciano’s? The phenomenally talented singer and guitar player is sure to pull that jam out here.

LITTLEFIELD

622 Degraw St., between Third and Fourth Aves., Brooklyn (718-855-3388)—The soul-music party Dig Deeper, which specializes in finding obscure artists from the sixties and coaxing them back onstage, recently celebrated its fifth anniversary. On July 20, it presents the Detroit singer Spyder Turner, whose 1967 cover of “Stand By Me” charted nationally, thanks in part to his impressions of Jackie Wilson, Smokey Robinson, Chuck Jackson, and other singers on the track. For this show, Turner will be revisiting his singles from the early sixties.

“LIVE ON PIER 26”

July 17: In 1981, the English ska revivalists the Specials captured the politically downtrodden spirit of working-class London with their horn-filled lament “Ghost Town.” The band soon fell apart, and it wasn’t until 2008, after several short-lived reunions of various sorts, that a few key members came together again, and added several new ones. They perform their hits in their signature rude-boy style, though their main songwriter and original keyboardist, Jerry Dammers, is not along for the ride. July 22-23: The Grammy-winning trio fun. With Tegan and Sara. (Pier 26, N. Moore St. and the Hudson River. ticketmaster.com.)

MUSIC HALL OF WILLIAMSBURG

66 N. 6th St., Brooklyn (718-486-5400)—July 18: The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. In the nineties, this savage New York group delved deep into the mysteries of the blues and served up ragged, distorted treasures. After a hiatus, the band returned last year with a barbed album, “Meat and Bone.” With the Pittsburgh band Shockwave Riderz, which uses samplers and sequencers to elevate its trippy surf-rock-tinged songs to wild and swirling heights.

STAGE 48

605 W. 48th St. (212-957-1800)—July 17: Mobb Deep, the hip-hop project of emcees Havoc and Prodigy, celebrates its twentieth anniversary. The duo’s classic 1995 album, “The Infamous,” established its straightforward hardcore lyrical style depicting urban life and crime. A good fit for the night, Atlanta’s Waka Flocka Flame raps with simple yet hard lyrical flows. With HEEMS, of the now defunct indie rap satirists Das Racist, whose unrelenting lyrics and thought-provoking humor are delivered with an effortless feel.

SUMMERSTAGE

Rumsey Playfield, Central Park, mid-Park at 69th St. (212-360-2777)—July 21: The Zimbabwean singer and guitarist Oliver Mtukudzi has been layering upbeat rhythms with politically charged messages for decades. With his longtime band, the Black Spirits, who join him here, he delivers breezy, catchy tunes that address universal concerns from the perspective of his homeland. With Fatoumata Diawara and the Krar Collective. July 22: Trombone Shorty, a.k.a. Troy Andrews, grew up in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans (and he’s appeared on the HBO series of the same name), and he favors a high-energy funk that brings the traditional music of his home town well into the twenty-first century. With the grooving sounds of Soulive.

TERMINAL 5

610 W. 56th St. (212-582-6600)—July 17: Hailing from Liverpool, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark—OMD—was a pioneering early-eighties British synth-pop act. Originally a quartet, the band pared down to a duo, Paul Humphreys and Andy McCluskey, and carved out an accessible sound that meshed the coldly synthetic aesthetic of Kraftwerk with a soaringly emotive pop vocal style. It scored them some solid hits, even in the U.S., including “If You Leave,” from the era-defining “Pretty in Pink” soundtrack. After a reunion of the original four members in 2005, OMD returned to its envelope-pushing origins in 2010 with a new album, “History of Modern.” Its latest album, “English Electric,” came out earlier this year, and is its twelfth release.

TERRA BLUES

149 Bleecker St. (212-777-7776)—July 18: Lil’ Ed & the Blues Imperials, steaming out of Chicago, mix serious electrified boogie with uninhibited onstage shenanigans.

WILLIAMSBURG PARK

50 Kent Ave., at N. 12th St., Brooklyn (800-745-3000)—July 20: The L.A. rap collective Odd Future may be young, but has already stirred things up. Earlier this year, for example, its leader, Tyler the Creator, produced a Mountain Dew ad that the author and activist Boyce Watkins called “arguably the most racist commercial in history.” Some lash out against the group’s antisocial tendencies, while others see their work as a refreshing alternative to mainstream rap. Controversy aside, its command of hip-hop is unquestionable, and the group has already spawned one megastar, the singer Frank Ocean. With the Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill.

JAZZ AND STANDARDS

BIRDLAND

315 W. 44th St. (212-581-3080)—July 16-20: Billy Childs, a Grammy-winning West Coast-based pianist and composer who has more than a passing interest in blending jazz and classical forms, leads a quartet full of fine East Coast players, including the saxophonist Steve Wilson.

CORNELIA STREET CAFÉ

29 Cornelia St. (212-989-9319)—Offering intriguing new-jazz ensembles is par for the course for this intrepid club, but the shows this week are worthy of special attention. They include the saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock’s Anti-House with the guitarist Mary Halvorson and the pianist Kris Davis, on July 18; the veteran drummer Tom Rainey’s Obbligato, on July 19; and the saxophonist Tony Malaby’s quartet, with the guitarist Ben Monder, on July 20.

DIZZY’S CLUB COCA-COLA

Broadway at 60th St. (212-258-9595)—July 16-17: The guitarist Joel Harrison leads a nineteen-piece ensemble through his eclectic compositions. July 18-21: Blithely laughing off age, the Heath Brothers Band unites the magisterial eighty-six-year-old saxophonist Jimmy Heath and his seventy-eight-year-old brother, Albert (a.k.a. Tootie), a drummer of unerring swing. The bassist David Wong has replaced the late Percy Heath; Jeb Patton mans the piano with aplomb.

54 BELOW

254 W. 54th St. (646-476-3551)—July 18-22: Patti Lupone, a Broadway grand dame most assuredly in her prime, will fill this venue with her outsized theatrical persona.

“JAZZ IN JULY”

This venerable festival at the 92nd Street Y, now under the artistic direction of the astute pianist Bill Charlap, casts its net over a broad swath of jazz history. It includes a celebration of the songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen (on July 17); an overview of West Coast jazz (July 18); a tribute to the present-day jazz legend Chick Corea (July 23); a program featuring the works of the composers Henry Mancini and Johnny Mandel (July 24); and a night dedicated to the swing-era icon Benny Goodman (July 25). Participants include the vocalists Sandy Stewart and Freddy Cole and the instrumentalists Renee Rosnes, Bucky Pizzarelli, Houston Person, and Chris Potter, among many others. (Lexington Ave. at 92nd St. 212-415-5500.)

JAZZ STANDARD

116 E. 27th St. (212-576-2232)—July 18-21: The Watts Family Reunion Band. The drummer Jeff (Tain) Watts leads a powerful big band stocked with such outstanding players as Ravi Coltrane, Don Byron, Lew Soloff, and Robin Eubanks.

SMOKE

2751 Broadway, between 105th and 106th Sts. (212-864-6662)—July 19-20: The pianist Bruce Barth is joined by the equally adroit vibraphonist Steve Nelson. The two are frequent collaborators—expect sparks to fly.

VILLAGE VANGUARD

178 Seventh Ave. S., at 11th St. (212-255-4037)—July 16-21: The Bad Plus. Though an outsider’s edginess is still central to the band’s mystique, this trio has become, more than a decade into its existence, a part of the mainstream jazz community.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Art

MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM

Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“The Civil War and American Art.” Through Sept. 2. |  “Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective.” Through Sept. 22. |  “Photography and the American Civil War.” Through Sept. 2. |  “Punk: Chaos to Couture.” Through Aug. 14. |  “The Roof Garden Commission: Imran Qureshi.” Through Nov. 13. |  “The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia: Charting a New Empire.” Through Aug. 4. |  “Legends of the Dead Ball Era (1900-1919) in the Collection of Jefferson R. Burdick.” Through Dec. 1. |  “Everyday Epiphanies: Photography and Daily Life Since 1969.” Drawing on the museum’s little-seen collection of contemporary photography, the curator Doug Eklund surveys a popular subject: the revelation of the extraordinary in the quotidian. Photographers have long sought out—even staged—such moments; the post-Pop visual landscape is largely defined by them, and the Internet overflows. Eklund rounds up an insightful group of artists, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Larry Sultan, Carrie Mae Weems, and Gregory Crewdson, but he can only scratch the surface of a theme that so many have tried their hand at. Nonetheless, there are many highlights, from Mike Kelley’s luminous dust ball and Gabriel Orozco’s eviscerated sofa to the plastic bags, newspapers, and toilet-paper roll blowing across the sidewalk in Svetlana and Igor Kopystiansky’s absorbing video, “Incidents.” Through Jan. 26. (Open daily, 9:30 to 5:30, and Friday and Saturday evenings until 9.)

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9400)—“Claes Oldenburg: The Street and the Store/Mouse Museum and Ray Gun Wing.” Through Aug. 5. |  “Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes.” Through Sept. 23. |  “Bill Brandt: Shadows and Light.” Through Aug. 12. |  “XL: 19 New Acquisitions in Photography.” Through Jan. 6. |  “Rain Room.” Through July 28. |  “Projects 100: Akram Zaatari.” Through Sept. 23. (Open daily, 10:30 to 5:30, and Friday evenings until 8.)

MOMA PS1

22-25 Jackson Ave., Queens (718-784-2084)—“Expo 1: New York.” Through Sept. 2. (Open Thursdays through Mondays, noon to 6.)

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

Fifth Ave. at 89th St. (212-423-3500)—“James Turrell.” Through Sept. 25. |  “New Harmony: Abstraction Between the Wars, 1919-1939.” Through Sept. 8. (Open Fridays through Wednesdays, 10 to 5:45, and Saturday evenings until 7:45.)

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

Madison Ave. at 75th St. (212-570-3600)—“Hopper Drawing.” Through Oct. 6. |  “David Hockney: The Jugglers.” Through Sept. 1. |  “Robert Irwin: Scrim Veil—Black Rectangle—Natural Light (1977).” Through Sept. 1. (Open Wednesdays, Thursdays, and weekends, 11 to 6, and Fridays, 1 to 9.)

BROOKLYN MUSEUM

200 Eastern Parkway (718-638-5000)—“Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui.” Through Aug. 4. |  “The Bruce High Quality Foundation: Ode to Joy, 2001-2013.” Through Sept. 22. |  “John Singer Sargent Watercolors.” Through July 28. |  “Valerie Hegarty: Alternative Histories.” Through Dec. 1. (Open Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 to 6, and Thursday evenings until 10.)

AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

Central Park W. at 79th St. (212-769-5100)—“Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture.” Through Aug. 11. |  “Whales: Giants of the Deep.” Through Jan. 5. (Open daily, 10 to 5:45.)

AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

Columbus Ave. at 66th St. (212-595-9533)—“Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.” Through Sept. 22. (Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 7:30, and Sundays, noon to 6.)

DIA ART FOUNDATION AT THE FOREST HOUSES

Tinton Ave. between 163rd and 165th Sts., the Bronx (212-989-5566)—“Thomas Hirschhorn: Gramsci Monument.” Through Sept. 15. (Open daily, 10 to 6.)

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY

1133 Sixth Ave., at 43rd St. (212-857-0000)—“A Different Kind of Order: The I.C.P. Triennial.” Through Sept. 8. (Open Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 to 6, and Friday evenings until 8.)

JEWISH MUSEUM

Fifth Ave. at 92nd St. (212-423-3200)—“As It Were . . . So to Speak: A Museum Collection in Dialogue with Barbara Bloom.” Through Aug. 4. |  “Six Things: Sagmeister & Walsh.” Through Aug. 4. |  “Jack Goldstein x 10,000.” Through Sept. 29. (Open Saturdays through Tuesdays, 11 to 5:45, Thursdays, 11 to 8, and Fridays, 11 to 4.)

MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM

225 Madison Ave., at 36th St. (212-685-0008)—“Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney.” Through Sept. 2. (Open Tuesdays through Thursdays, 10:30 to 5, Fridays, 10:30 to 9, Saturdays, 10 to 6, and Sundays, 11 to 6.)

MUSEO DEL BARRIO

Fifth Ave. at 104th St. (212-831-7272)—“El Museo’s Bienal 2013: Here Is Where We Jump.” Through Jan. 4. (Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 to 6, and Sundays, 1 to 5.)

NEW MUSEUM

235 Bowery, at Prince St. (212-219-1222)—“Llyn Foulkes.” Through Sept. 1. |  “Erika Vogt: Stranger Debris Roll Roll Roll.” Through Sept. 22. |  “Ellen Gallagher: Don’t Axe Me.” Through Sept. 15. (Open Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 to 6, and Thursday evenings until 9.)

STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM

144 W. 125th St. (212-864-4500)—“Robert Pruitt: Women.” Opens July 18. (Open Thursdays and Fridays, noon to 9, Saturdays, 10 to 6, and Sundays, noon to 6.)

GALLERIES—UPTOWN

JANE ALEXANDER

The Gothic Revival setting is ideal for the South African artist, whose figurative sculptures, seen lurking throughout the church, suggest refugees from Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.” Since the eighties, Alexander’s work has addressed the brutality of apartheid, albeit obliquely, and her work can feel didactic. In this exhibition, organized by the Museum for African Art, a gaggle of cranelike creatures are being monitored by an overseer with a simian face, while one of the birds stands nearby, isolated in a chain-link pen. But the church’s dim lighting enhances the Kafkaesque air of the installation. Through July 29. (Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Amsterdam Ave. at 112th St. 212-316-7540.)

ALFRED GESCHEIDT

Working in the advertising world in the fifties and sixties, the New York photographer perfected his brash, satirical style—equal parts Madison Avenue and Mad magazine. His specialty was the photomontage, a seamless mash-up of imagery seen here in his 1964 series, “30 Ways to Stop Smoking,” which was turned into a book that was less a how-to manual than an essay on compulsion and excess. Gescheidt’s poster-ready Pop surrealism packs a bracingly vulgar, subversive punch: in one picture, a smoker lights his cigarette with a few blazing sticks of dynamite. Through July 19. (Higher Pictures, 980 Madison Ave., at 76th St. 212-249-6100.)

Short List

JOHN CHAMBERLAIN / SAM FRANCIS: Van Doren Waxter, 23 E. 73rd St. 212-445-0444. Through Sept. 27. PAUL MCCARTHY: Park Avenue Armory, Park Ave. at 66th St. 212-933-5812. Through Aug. 4. “MADE IN SPACE”: Venus Over Manhattan, 980 Madison Ave., at 76th St. 212-980-0700. Through Aug. 10.

GALLERIES—CHELSEA

MAC ADAMS

Staged black-and-white diptychs, most made by the Welsh-born American photographer in the nineteen-seventies, insinuate an ambiguous narrative. It’s not clear how much time has elapsed between Adams’s first and second frames, but it’s enough for an assault, a kidnapping, or a murder, the victim of which is invariably a woman. At times, the camera shares the point of view of the shadowy perpetrator, lending the work an uncomfortable intimacy. As a result, Adams implicates his viewers in the crimes, not only as voyeurs but as witnesses. Through Aug. 9. (Dee, 545 W. 20th St. 212-924-7545.)

“NOA NOA”

The curator Alexander Ferrando lifted the show’s title from Paul Gauguin’s memoir, but the closest it comes to a Tahitian jungle are the plants in Adrien Missika’s towering bamboo planters, which put an equatorial spin on midcentury modernism, or Nina Beier’s leopard-print fabrics framed behind glass. Sam Falls, a rising star of rough-and-ready painting, contributes two fifteen-foot-tall banners of blue and orange canvas. The ever-glib Alex Israel contributes a sculpture of an outsized sunglasses lens, keeping a spring-breakers eye on the proceedings. Through Aug. 2. (Metro Pictures, 519 W. 24th St. 212-206-7100.)

Short List

RICCI ALBENDA: Kreps, 535 W. 22nd St. 212-741-8849. Through Aug. 9. FRANCIS CAPE: Murray Guy, 453 W. 17th St. 212-463-7372. Through Aug. 2. SIMON FUJIWARA: Rosen, 525 W. 24th St. 212-627-6000. Through Aug. 9. HANK WILLIS THOMAS: Shainman, 524 W. 24th St. 212-337-3372. Through Aug. 17. FRANCIS UPRITCHARD: Kern, 532 W. 20th St. 212-367-9663. Through Aug. 2. “FOLK DEVIL”: Zwirner, 519 W. 19th St. 212-517-8677. Through Aug. 9. “REINVENTING ABSTRACTION”: Cheim & Read, 547 W. 25th St. 212-242-7727. Through Aug. 30. “ROVING SIGNS”: Marks, 522 W. 22nd St. 212-243-0200. Through Aug. 16. “SOMETHING ABOUT A TREE”: Flag Art Foundation, 545 W. 25th St. 212-206-0220. Through Sept. 7.

GALLERIES—DOWNTOWN

ANNE-LISE COSTE

The mid-career French artist makes her début at the gallery with a project that is either masochistic or admirably ambitious or both: deconstructing Picasso’s “Guernica.” Twelve medium-sized black-and-white paintings isolate elements of the antiwar icon—one zeros in on a wailing mother clutching her dead child, another features the screaming horse, and so on. Had Coste ditched the buyer-friendly canvases and worked directly on the walls, as she has in the past, her fluency with spray paint and keen-eyed composition might have seemed more subversive. Instead, she’s turned a masterpiece into Muzak. Through Aug. 9. (Eleven Rivington, 195 Chrystie St. 212-982-1930.)

JIMMY DE SANA

He was one of the most provocative artists on the East Village scene, but at the time of his death in 1990, at age forty, the action had already moved elsewhere. Seen anew, his photographs remain emblematic of a body-conscious, anything-goes era, but they’re also wildly idiosyncratic and gleefully perverse, and as timeless, in their way, as the most personal work of Hans Bellmer, Pierre Moliner, or Robert Mapplethorpe. De Sana’s staged scenes of nude men and women suggest a clown version of S & M, at once comic and alarming. Figures, often bathed in lurid light, are bound, hooded, pinched, poked, and twisted out of shape in the course of private performances that look like Guy Bourdin fashion shoots minus the clothing. Through Aug. 9. (Salon 94 Bowery, 243 Bowery, at Stanton St. 212-979-0001.)

Short List

JAMES LEE BYARS / COREY MCCORKLE: Maccarone, 630 Greenwich St. 212-431-4977. Through July 19. PETER COFFIN: The National Exemplar, 381 Broadway, at White St. For more information, visit thenationalexemplargallery.com. Through July 21. ALICE MACKLER: Schuss, 34 Orchard St. 212-219-9918. Through July 26. “I WANT THAT INSIDE OF ME”: Feature, 131 Allen St. 212-675-7772. Through Aug. 2. “MADE IN SPACE”: Brown, 620 Greenwich St. 212-627-5258. Through Aug. 10.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Dance

SUMMERSTAGE / RENNIE HARRIS COLLECTIVE

For this free program, dancers from the master hip-hop choreographer’s main company, Puremovement, and his junior troupe, R.H.A.W., join forces with special guests, including Mailé Ho, from France. The selections include two parts of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a story of unjust incarceration, set to Queen. Who says you can’t pop and lock to rock? (Queensbridge Park, Vernon Blvd. at 41st Ave. 212-360-2777. July 19 at 8.)

BALLET IN CINEMA / “LA SYLPHIDE”

A reverie set in nineteenth-century Scotland, “La Sylphide” is the quintessential Romantic ballet, with its misty forest, floating port de bras, light footwork, and sisterhood of sylphs in diaphanous skirts. Originally created in Paris for Marie Taglioni by her father, the ballet was preserved mainly by the Danish choreographer August Bournonville’s version. The Bolshoi adaptation, created for the company in 2008 by Johan Kobborg, another Dane, closely follows the 1836 staging, with storybook sets and appropriately decorous dancing. Do not expect Bolshoi fireworks here. Ekaterina Krysanova, a principal, is an appropriately lyrical Sylph. Vyacheslav Lopatin is light-footed as James, the young Scottish farmer who loses his heart to a wood nymph. This is a replay of a performance from last September. See balletincinema.com for locations nationwide. (Big Cinemas, 239 E. 59th St. 212-371-6682. July 21 at 11 A.M. Clearview Chelsea, 260 W. 23rd St. 212-691-5519. July 23 at 11 A.M.)

SUMMERSTAGE / MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANY

The venerable modern-dance company presents a selection of works, old and new. “Chronicle,” a powerful evocation of militarism, made before the start of the Second World War, was revolutionary for its time. It opens with a dramatic solo for an Athena-like character, her physical dimensions augmented by a voluminous dress that conceals the platform beneath her feet. “Acts of Light,” from 1981, is rather less compelling, a late exercise in ersatz earth worship performed in gold spandex and black coulottes by Halston. The other works on the program consist of a series of brief, imaginative études by contemporary choreographers—Bulareyaung Pagarlava, Larry Keigwin, and Richard Move—inspired by Graham’s angular solo “Lamentation.” (Rumsey Playfield, Central Park, mid-Park at 69th St. 800-745-3000. July 23-24 at 8.)

OUT OF TOWN

JACOB’S PILLOW

The dynamic Canadian contemporary dance ensemble Ballet BC performs at the Ted Shawn Theatre. Led, since 2009, by Emily Molnar, a former William Forsythe dancer, the troupe bears the imprint of post-Forsythe ballet, with slicing limbs, buckling torsos, and knotty partnering. The program includes “A.U.R.A. (Anarchist Unit Related to Art),” a work by another former Forsythian, Jacopo Godani. It is set to a throbbing electronic score and performed beneath a bank of fluorescent tubes that rises and falls. Medhi Walerski’s “Petite Ceremonie” is more reminiscent of Pina Bausch, with its angst-ridden cast, clad in evening clothes, moving to a collage of music that ranges from Vivaldi to industrial noise. The closer is Molnar’s “Aniel,” an upbeat piece enlivened by John Zorn’s klezmer syncopations and a bright, friendly palette. | Tere O’Connor brings “Cover Boy,” his gossamer poem about the closeted gay experience, to the Doris Duke Theatre. Four male dancers whisper and kiss, haunted by ghosts and the spectre of disease, turning on one of their own. (Becket, Mass. 413-243-0745. July 17-21.)

FIRE ISLAND DANCE FESTIVAL

Beyond a worthy cause, this annual benefit for Dancers Responding to AIDS normally brings to its waterside stage a lineup dazzling enough to match its backdrop of sea and sky. This year’s program includes dancers from the companies of Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey, and Ronald K. Brown. New York City Ballet’s Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild dance Christopher Wheeldon’s recent “A Place for Us.” Kyle Abraham offers a première. Mo Rocca, from CBS’s “Sunday Morning,” returns as host. (Fire Island Pines, Fire Island. 212-840-0770, ext. 268. July 20 at 5 and 7 and July 21 at 5.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Classical

CONCERTS IN TOWN

LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL

The Lincoln Center Festival, with an impressive array of edgy contemporary-classical shows this summer, is packing the balance of them into a three-day super-festival. Toshio Hosokawa, a prominent Japanese composer, has been a growing presence in European musical capitals for some time, but is little known in the U.S.; that might change when the Festival mounts “Matsukaze” (“Wind in the Pines”), which just had its American première at the Spoleto Festival. An ethereal tribute to the world of fifteenth-century Noh theatre etched in the sounds of Western instruments, its (German) libretto illustrates a story of a travelling monk who encounters the ghostly spirits of two sisters who have spent centuries searching for the man they both love. Pureum Jo, Jihee Kim, Gary Simpson, and Thomas Meglioranza sing it; John Kennedy conducts. (Gerald W. Lynch Theatre, John Jay College, Tenth Ave. at 59th St. July 18-20 at 7:30.) | New York’s Stockhausen mania is reaching its crest, with excerpts from his quasi-Biblical weeklong operatic mega-cycle “Licht” continuing to provide the material. “Michaels Reise Um Die Erde” (“Michael’s Journey Around the World”) is taken from the second act of “Donnerstag”: the characters of Archangel Michael, Eve, and Lucifer—represented interchangeably by singers, actors, or dancers—interact in an Avery Fisher Hall that will be transformed in a daring production by Wiener Taschenoper, directed by Carlus Padrissa, a founder of the radical Catalan theatre company La Fura dels Baus; among the performers are the superb German new-music ensemble MusikFabrik. (July 18-20 at 7:30.) | After a couple of strongly Europhilic entertainments, contemporary American music gets its due with “Zorn@60,” a well-deserved birthday tribute to the New York master John Zorn, who has fused modernist classical and jazz traditions together into a powerfully personal language, often colored by a strong interest in Jewish mysticism. The first performance, “The Holy Visions,” features a-cappella vocal works based on texts from the Song of Songs and by Hildegarde of Bingen, sung by such contemporary and early-music standouts as Abby Fischer, Lisa Bielawa, and Melissa Hughes, concluding with organ improvisations offered by Zorn himself; the second is a survey of the composer’s complete string quartets (including “Cat o’ Nine Tails” and “Kol Nidre”), performed by the JACK Quartet, the Alchemy Quartet, and the irrepressible Brooklyn Rider. (Alice Tully Hall. July 18 and July 20 at 8.) (212-721-6500.)

METROPOLITAN OPERA SUMMER RECITAL SERIES

This series is a far cry from the tour of concert-opera performances that the Met staged in the parks in decades past, but it’s welcome nonetheless as a showcase for some of the company’s young talent. The first program of arias and ensembles, given by the soprano Erin Morley, the mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, and the tenor Stephen Costello, is especially inviting; Bradley Moore accompanies them. (Pier 1, Brooklyn Bridge Park. July 19 at 7. No tickets required.)

BARGEMUSIC

For some four decades, William Bolcom, the vibrantly eclectic composer-pianist, and his muse-chanteuse, Joan Morris, have been concertizing together, creating a distinctively American style of post-classical cabaret. The floating chamber-music series hosts their latest outing, an evening of songs by such icons as Irving Berlin, Harry Warren, Rodgers and Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, and Bolcom and Arnold Weinstein (excerpts from the wildly popular “Cabaret Songs”). (Fulton Ferry Landing, Brooklyn. bargemusic.org. July 19 at 8.)

OUT OF TOWN

GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL

With Francesca Zambello at the helm, the country’s leading summer opera festival mixes repertory classics with new works and revivals of favorite American musicals. July 18 at 7:30: Zambello herself directs the summer’s major effort, a new production of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman”; Melody Moore, Jay Hunter Morris, Ryan McKinny, and Peter Volpe lead the cast, with John Keenan on the podium. | July 19 at 7:30 and July 22 at 1:30: Nathan Gunn, he of the firm baritone voice and the Pepsodent smile, is a natural when it comes to leading roles in great musicals. He’ll play Sir Lancelot in a production (directed by Robert Longbottom) of Lerner and Loewe’s “Camelot,” with Andriana Chuchman as Guenevere and David Pittsinger as King Arthur; James Lowe. | July 20 at 8 and July 22 at 1:30: This season’s most innovative production is a double bill on spiritual themes. The first act, directed by Zambello, is devoted to “The Little Match Girl Passion,” a deeply affecting work in which Hans Christian Andersen’s pathetic children’s story is seen through the lens of the Bach Passions, for which the composer David Lang justly won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2008; David Moody conducts. The sub-rosa eighteenth-century influence is intensified after intermission with a dramatization (directed and choreographed by Jessica Lang) of Pergolesi’s lovely and powerful “Stabat Mater,” sung by Nadine Sierra and the renowned Met countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo; Speranza Scappucci. | July 21 at 1:30: Completing this summer’s quartet of offerings is a real novelty—“King for a Day,” in which the festival honors the bicentennial of Giuseppe Verdi by staging this, his second opera (and his only comedy before “Falstaff”). It’s an uneven, early work, but it has plenty of charm, which will be brought out in an English-language production directed by Christian Räth and with Ginger Costa-Jackson, Jason Hardy, and Andrew Wilkowske in the leading roles; Joseph Colaneri, the company’s newly appointed music director, conducts. (Cooperstown, N.Y. 607-547-2255.)

CARAMOOR

July 19 at 8: Two superb quartets appear at Westchester’s gracious festival this week, one on the way up, the other occupying the heights. To the first category belongs the Amphion String Quartet, which begins a residency with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in the fall; at Caramoor’s intimate Spanish Courtyard, it performs an early quartet by Schubert, the world première of Yevgeniy Sharlat’s Quartet No. 2, and Beethoven’s Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132. | July 20 at 7:30: The conductor-scholar Will Crutchfield’s “Bel Canto at Caramoor” is outdoing itself to celebrate the Verdi bicentennial, staging the composer’s two operas written for Paris in the original French. Last to come is the great “Don Carlos,” which Crutchfield, conducting the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, will lead in an uncut performance of Verdi’s revised four-act version, created with the librettist Camille du Locle. The impressive cast features Jennifer Check, Jennifer Larmore, James Valenti, Stephen Powell, and Christophoros Stamboglis. | July 21 at 4:30: In the first change of the Emerson String Quartet’s personnel since 1979, David Finckel, the founding cellist, has relinquished his chair to Paul Watkins, a renowned British soloist and the former principal cellist of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. In the group’s first U.S. appearance together, Watkins will join his new colleagues at the Venetian Theatre in a program offering Beethoven’s “Razumovsky” Quartets in E Minor and C Major, with Britten’s haunting Quartet No. 3, Op. 94, in between. (Katonah, N.Y. 914-232-1252.)

TANGLEWOOD

July 18 at 8: The Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel is always a compelling and audience-friendly recitalist. In an appearance at Ozawa Hall, he sings a selection of art songs in English and German, accompanied by Natalia Katyukova. | July 19 at 8:30: In a recent performance at Carnegie Hall, Jean-Yves Thibaudet brought out an unforgettable mixture of darkness and glitter in Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand. At the Tanglewood Shed, with the powerhouse Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski, he’ll be the soloist in Liszt’s “Totentanz,” which poses a similar challenge; the work will be preceded by Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger” Overture, followed by Mahler’s orchestration of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, “Eroica.” | July 20 at 8:30: Terfel returns to sing the role of Wotan, for which he is renowned, in a concert performance of Act III of “Die Walküre” that also features Katarina Dalayman and Amber Wagner, with Lothar Koenigs conducting. | July 21 at 2:30: The violinist, violist, and conductor Pinchas Zukerman, joined by members of the B.S.O. and other soloists, leads a pleasant afternoon of Baroque music, featuring favorites by Vivaldi, Telemann, and Bach (the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2). (Lenox, Mass. 888-266-1200.)

MUSIC MOUNTAIN

Connecticut’s summer shrine to the string quartet features the Arianna String Quartet this weekend, performing music by Mozart and Schubert (“Death and the Maiden”) as well as a seldom heard Piano Quartet by Schubert (with Tanya Bannister as its guest). (Falls Village, Conn. 860-824-7126. July 21 at 3.)

MAVERICK CONCERTS

The Jupiter String Quartet, a potent and lyrically inspired ensemble, continues this season’s emphasis on British music at Woodstock’s acoustically rewarding music hall, performing music by Britten and his mentor Frank Bridge (the stirring Piano Quintet in D Minor, with Ilya Yakushev), as well as quartets by Haydn (the “Rider”) and Brahms. (Woodstock, N.Y. maverickconcerts.org. July 21 at 4.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Movies

OPENING

THE ACT OF KILLING

Reviewed this week in The Current Cinema. Opening July 19. (In limited release.)

CENTRO HISTÓRICO

Reviewed below in Now Playing. Opening July 19. (Anthology Film Archives.)

COMPUTER CHESS

Reviewed below in Now Playing. Opening July 17. (Film Forum.)

THE CONJURING

James Wan directed this horror film, about a couple (Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor) who call on paranormal investigators (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson) to examine their house. Opening July 19. (In wide release.)

LES COQUILLETTES

Reviewed below in Now Playing. Opening July 17. (Museum of Modern Art.)

GIRL MOST LIKELY

Kristen Wiig stars in this comedy, as a playwright who, after a faked suicide attempt, is forced to live with her mother (Annette Bening). Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini; co-starring Matt Dillon and Darren Criss. Opening July 19. (In limited release.)

ONLY GOD FORGIVES

Reviewed this week in The Current Cinema. Opening July 19. (In limited release.)

R.I.P.D.

A crime comedy, about zombie police officers who hunt for a murderer. Directed by Robert Schwentke; starring Ryan Reynolds, Mary-Louise Parker, and Jeff Bridges. Opening July 19. (In wide release.)

NOW PLAYING

BIG STAR: NOTHING CAN HURT ME

A true labor of love, this music documentary is about Memphis’s best-kept secret, the rock band Big Star (featuring Chris Bell and Alex Chilton, among others), who, in the early seventies, recorded three seminal albums that went nowhere but influenced a generation of musicians (including the Replacements and R.E.M.). A treasure trove of home movies and photographs allows the director, Drew DeNicola, and the co-director, Olivia Mori, to document the band’s coming together and falling apart and offer a passionate tribute to its brilliant, beautiful music. The film is by turns joyous and poignant (Bell died at the age of twenty-seven), and the filmmakers unfold with great care the band’s stuttering beginnings, their record company’s fumblings, and the eventual rediscovery in the mid-eighties that brought the musicians some of the adulation they so richly deserved.—Bruce Diones (In limited release.)

THE BIG TRAIL

Raoul Walsh’s rugged, awesomely grand-scale 1930 Western—shot in 70-mm. in an early wide-screen process—stars John Wayne, lank and limber at twenty-three, as Breck Coleman, a trapper intimate with Native American ways and friendly with tribal leaders. While searching in Missouri for the killers of his best friend, he begins to suspect Flack (Tyrone Power, Sr.), a wagon-train boss, of the crime, and signs on as his scout, leading a large band of settlers along the Oregon Trail, through Cheyenne country, in order to keep an eye on him. Along the way, Breck falls in love with one of the pilgrims (Margaret Churchill), whom Flack’s oily henchman (Ian Keith) is also wooing. The plot is centered on sudden outbursts of violence from within and without (including a circle-the-wagons showdown with the warriors of two hostile tribes), as well as its avoidance, through Breck’s sagacious diplomacy. But the heart of the drama is raw survival in the face of natural obstacles, as seen in the colossal, terrifying reconstruction of the perilous trek, with horses and cattle, through rough rivers and down sheer rock faces by means of tenuous ropes. Integrating the settlers’ passionate mortal conflicts into the landscape, Walsh turns the theatrical limitations of early sound technique to an advantage, composing vast, static tableaux with the mighty breadth and noble pace of epic stanzas.—Richard Brody (Museum of the Moving Image; July 21.)

THE BLING RING

The most exquisitely crafted movie ever made about a bunch of nitwits. Drawing on Nancy Jo Sales’s reporting for a 2010 article in Vanity Fair (“The Suspects Wore Louboutins”), the writer and director, Sofia Coppola, moves swiftly and elegantly through the momentous events: in 2008 and 2009, a group of teen-agers from Calabasas, a wealthy city in the San Fernando Valley, broke into the houses of select celebrities—Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Rachel Bilson, Audrina Patridge, and Orlando Bloom—and made off with three million dollars’ worth of cash, Rolex watches, Birkin bags, Alexander McQueen sunglasses, and the like, and when they were arrested they became minor celebrities themselves. Coppola pulls together the trends of the past fifteen years—reality TV, TMZ, the Internet, social media—and has dramatized how, working together, they might produce an appalling new kind of teen-ager. Emma Watson plays Nicki, the most confident of the teens, who has no self; she’s all arch, bullying presentation. With Israel Broussard and Katie Chang.—David Denby (Reviewed in our issue of 6/10 & 17/13.) (In wide release.)

BYZANTIUM

Neil Jordan returns to the subject of blood-drinkers, which he previously explored in “Interview with the Vampire.” No Tom Cruise this time, no Antonio Banderas, and no Brad Pitt; instead, we get two women, restless and immortal, who use their fingernails instead of fangs and make do with squalid lodgings. Clara (Gemma Arterton) is older and sultrier, turning tricks for cash and, before long, opening a brothel in a seaside town; the other, Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan), is pale and wistful, forever writing stories and preying only on the elderly, to ease them through life’s end. (One of them subsides to the sound of Janet Baker singing Schubert’s “Night and Dreams”—not a bad way to go.) The film slows and slumps as it ventures into a historical backstory, complete with a mysterious brotherhood, an ancient map, and Sam Riley in a wig worse than death. On the other hand, Jordan is never happier than in miserable conditions, and the run-down coastal backdrop, with its burned-out pier, could hardly be further from Castle Dracula. Despite the sliced heads, what attracts Jordan is not the horror of the situation, the blood and guts, but the debility—how you fight and lust against it, or whether you just give in. With Tom Hollander, as a teacher, and Caleb Landry Jones, as a leukemia sufferer in need of better blood.—Anthony Lane (In limited release.)

CENTRO HISTÓRICO

Two of these four short films about the Portuguese city of Guimarães are by Portuguese directors, and they are standouts. Pedro Costa’s “Sweet Exorcist” features Ventura, the elderly Cape Verdean immigrant (and nonprofessional actor) who starred in his 2006 film “Colossal Youth,” and extends the earlier film’s triangular connection between the life of a beleaguered laborer, the mighty grind of historical forces, and the substrate of mythological fantasy. Ventura wanders through haunted underbrush and arrives at a hospital, where, in the elevator, he encounters the statue of a soldier—with whom he enters into a dialogue about the country’s 1974 military coup, the vestigial dreams of his homeland, and the enduring legend of revolution that survives like a secular vision of redemption. The centenarian Manoel de Oliveira’s documentary-based fiction “The Conqueror, Conquered” takes an aptly long and Olympian view of history, following a tour guide (Ricardo Trêpa) as he leads his flock of tourists to the city’s medieval highlights and delivers potted introductions in broken English. Oliveira offers a simple and rarefied lesson in vision, finding blazingly clear angles to reveal ancient wonders in a renewed immediacy, to look ancient heroes in the face, and to take their point of view—visual and historical, whimsical yet hopeless—against the undiscerning modern crowd. In Portuguese and English.—R.B. (Anthology Film Archives.)

COMPUTER CHESS

This intimate dramatic masterwork of historical reconstruction, set around 1980, tells the story of quietly visionary programmers from around the country who wheel their jerry-rigged PCs to a nondescript hotel for a weekend-long tournament that pits their chess programs against each other. Along the way, the director, Andrew Bujalski, brings the designs and fashions of the time—and, even better, its moods and ideas—cleverly and joyfully back to life. He uses a period video camera to conjure the feel of archival footage (mainly washed-out black-and-white) and features onscreen videographers who document the event, from the opening panel discussion that sets out the intellectual stakes of the match to its poignant anticlimax. The drama arises from tensions between and within the programming teams (Bujalski sketches the involuted, awkward characters in brisk, subtle strokes) and, especially, from one computer that, endowed with a self-correcting mechanism by an ingenious professor, seems to prefer to play against humans and (as in “Alphaville”) exhibits a puckishly domineering philosophical temperament. An encounter group that’s booked into the hotel at the same time poses the mind-body problem in practical terms; allusions to Nikola Tesla’s theories, religious revivalism, and paranoid fantasies of military complicity capture modern abstractions in their fragile, critical early stages. The result is a sort of electronic Western, with its outpost of digital duellists laying the hands-on groundwork for the vast modern virtual realm and exposing, at the outset, its unresolved peculiarities.—R.B. (Film Forum.)

LES COQUILLETTES

The title of Sophie Letourneur’s giddy metafiction means “elbow macaroni,” which its protagonists eat twice—once in an apartment where three young women, Sophie (Letourneur), Carole (Carole Le Page), and Camille (Camille Genaud), chat about love, sex, and their jaunt the previous summer to the Locarno Film Festival, where Letourneur’s real-life short film “The Shady Sailor” was screened; and again, in the apartment that they shared in Locarno as they pursued love and sex and also talked about it. Sophie is obsessed with the real-life actor Louis Garrel and spends much of the festival keeping an eye out for him or anyone who has seen him; the sexually deprived Carole hopes to score; and the uncertain Camille finds herself in a push-and-pull with an indifferent young man (the critic Julien Gester). But as the action flips back and forth between the two time frames (as if this were “Last Year at Locarno”), their retrospective view of the festival’s teeming round of awkward interactions clashes subtly and antically with the camera’s unflinching record. Along the way, they adorn their observations with a tooth-tingling array of Franglicisms (“cupcake,” “glamour,” “see you soon,” and, best of all, “la life”). Much of the action is displaced to Facebook and text messages, and the conspicuous dubbing of voices throughout gives this vertiginous, documentary-style comedy the air of a live-action cartoon.—R.B. (Museum of Modern Art.)

DESPICABLE ME 2

This is one of those rarities, an animated sequel that improves on the original. It does so by slimming down a bulky plot and accentuating the lively cartoon madness with Looney Tunes-style flair. The film again follows Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), a master criminal turned family man and father to three adopted girls—and their little pill-shaped minions—as they help a secret agent (Kristen Wiig) thwart an arch-villain. The directors, Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, and the screenwriters, Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul, have crafted a winning formula that enfolds snappy one-liners and inventive visual gags into a speedy, buoyant, inspired entertainment. The pitch-perfect voice cast includes Benjamin Bratt, Russell Brand, and Steve Coogan.—B.D. (In wide release.)

FAST & FURIOUS 6

The franchise that began with “The Fast and the Furious” has now been hurtling along for twelve years. Much has changed in that time, not least the momentous decision to drop definite articles from the title. The latest chapter, directed by Justin Lin, finds Toretto (Vin Diesel), O’Conner (Paul Walker), and the rest of the gang, all of whom have retired from active duty to lead lives of sumptuous ease, being summoned back by law enforcers (Dwayne Johnson and Gina Carano) and put to work. The backchat between the drivers feels slow, grinding, and cumbersome, the better to show off their quicksilver talents at the wheel. Just as the plot threatens to run out of gas, Lin rescues the film with a spate of vastly ridiculous and therefore enjoyable set pieces, most of which involve means of conveyance designed to make the cars look puny. The cast has a multiracial verve that would shame more sombre productions: Sung Kang, Michelle Rodriguez, Gal Gadot, Tyrese Gibson, and Chris (Ludacris) Bridges, plus a scowling Welshman, Luke Evans, in the role of the villain.—A.L. (6/3/13) (In wide release.)

FRUITVALE STATION

The director Ryan Coogler’s début feature brings a full and just measure of righteous outrage to the true story of Oscar Grant, a twenty-two-year-old Oakland man who, early on New Year’s Day in 2009, was shot and killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer despite being unarmed. (The officer was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.) Coogler reconstructs, mainly from Grant’s perspective, the events leading up to the crime. As played with searching, cerebral energy by Michael B. Jordan, Grant—who had done jail time (seen in flashback) for a drug-related offense—was attempting to become a better father to his four-year-old daughter and a better partner for her mother, Sophina (Melonie Diaz). But the movie doesn’t turn him into a pristine hero; caught cheating on Sophina, caught lying to her about his unemployment, he comes off as a warmhearted, hot-blooded young man wrestling mightily with his demons. Coogler weaves a comforting web of family around Grant, including his mother (Octavia Spencer) and grandmother (Marjorie Crump-Shears), to show all the more poignantly the intimate devastation wrought by his death. The movie is the model of decency and respect, and does honor to a life unjustly ended; it offers few surprises but is nonetheless shocking.—R.B. (In limited release.)

THE HEAT

The fusion of a sentimental tale of friendship, a mismatched-cop buddy comedy, and a bloody crime story yields a very long movie; the many formulas never mesh, and some formidable actors stumble trying to keep pace with its out-of-synch meters. Sandra Bullock reprises her familiar shtick in the role of Sarah Ashburn, a nerdy, lonely, by-the-book F.B.I. agent; Melissa McCarthy plays Shannon Mullins, the raunchy, dishevelled, violent, street-smart cop with whom the straitlaced Sarah is forced to work on a mission to catch a psychopathic drug kingpin. The movie is smothered under a pile of clichés, not least those involving the raucous vulgarity of Boston’s white working class. McCarthy’s salty-tongued pugnacity seems routine, and her ribald edge is sheathed by the story’s homiletic drift about the importance of family and friends. A dance number that threatens to break out into joyful anarchy is quickly pushed back into the lockstep of plot, character, and message. The movie’s best joke is the work of the set decorator. With an earnest Demián Bichir, who wandered in from a meatier movie, as an agency higher-up. Directed by Paul Feig.—R.B. (In wide release.)

I’M SO EXCITED!

This could be the campiest movie that Pedro Almodóvar has ever made, which is saying something. Most of it takes place on an airplane, headed from Spain to Mexico but stuck in a holding pattern—surely a bad omen for any film—with everyone in coach fast asleep, like the residents of a spellbound castle. This leaves us with the pilots, the attendants, and the vexed travellers in business class; it’s like the closed set of a murder mystery, minus the crime. Almodóvar veterans like Cecilia Roth and Lola Dueñas give their all, subscribing without complaint to the law of desire, but the horsing around of the crew, whipped up by drink and drugs, feels tiresome and forced, and those who revere the director as a reliably suave master of ceremonies may look on in dismay and even disbelief. To throw caution to the winds is one thing, but to jettison control of tone at the same time seems a liberty too far. Still, there remain, as you would expect, passages of great finesse, not least during an emergency landing, and, if you really want to see grown men lip-synch to the Pointer Sisters, this is your film. With dispensable cameos for Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz. In Spanish.—A.L. (7/8 & 15/13) (In limited release.)

LAURENCE ANYWAYS

An extraordinarily ambitious, brazenly expressive melodrama, directed by Xavier Dolan, about a man from Montreal who discovers in midlife that he wants to live as a woman. Laurence Alia (Melvil Poupaud), a writer and professor, lives with Frédérique (Fred) Belair (Suzanne Clément), an assistant director, in flamboyantly giddy love, but his decision to dress and style—and identify—himself as a woman costs him the relationship and his job, and shreds his already tenuous bond with his mother (Nathalie Baye). For Dolan, the plot is, in effect, an opera libretto for which his splashily colorful, impressionistic images are the music; joined to the elbows-out, full-throttle histrionics, they evoke an intensity and a sympathy that override the director’s vague insights and skittery ideas. Dolan’s sheer energy is admirable, but his eye candy (he also designed the clothing), though pleasantly unusual, isn’t especially audacious or original; he drenches the screen with nonspecific feelings that mostly announce the empathy that he bears and shares. Nonetheless, Poupaud’s quiet moments convey a lofty introspection, and Clément erupts with grand, if scattershot, furies.—R.B. (In limited release.)

MAN OF STEEL

When Superman was first reborn in the movies, back in 1978, Mario Puzo, Robert Benton, and David Newman worked on the screenplay, and Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder played Superman and Lois Lane. All these people knew they were working on pop, and the material was edged with irony—as Superman and Lois flirted, the movie was even sexy. Thirty-five years of superhero franchises followed, saving the studios financially (while wrecking the aesthetics of big movies), and the tone of the new Superman film is now portentous and solemn. The movie is an origins myth, which turns into another war-of-the-worlds battle between Earth and the dying Krypton, with Superman on our side. Once again, Manhattan gets levelled (don’t worry: Brooklyn is spared). The movie consists of endless declamation, endless violence. With the muscular Henry Cavill, baring his chest, as Superman; Amy Adams, as Lois Lane; and Michael Shannon, as General Zod, the military chief of Krypton. Written by David S. Goyer. Directed, with a heavy hand, by Zack Snyder.—D.D. (In wide release.)

MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ

Weary of the aggression that he faces at work and at play in New York, Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel), a ponytailed, loose-limbed, and happy-go-lucky car parker and overgrown mama’s boy, suddenly moves to California, where it becomes clear that the aggression is, in fact, his own. John Cassavetes’s 1971 romantic drama comes packed with a ready-made dose of fantasy—both Seymour and Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands), the single, middle-aged woman he rescues from a lout and loves at first sight, spend their free time at Bogart revivals—but, where the ardently impulsive man sees a touch of Lauren Bacall in Minnie, she, for her part, has few illusions and even less hope. Brutality is everywhere—as many punches are thrown as in a boxing match, and far less fairly—and there’s a special place in Hell for Minnie’s married ex-lover (played by Cassavetes, Rowlands’s real-life husband), yet, in this singular, shambling, primordial tale of punch-drunk love, it finds its redemption as an inextricable element of romantic passion. The sculptural physicality of the images, a 3-D explosion without glasses, embodies violence while preserving the antagonists’ unconscious, innocent grace; only love, fulfilled, smooths things out to a dreamy and reflective shine.—R.B. (BAM; July 18.)

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

A new adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy, and a far cry from the hearty roistering of Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 version. This time, the director is Joss Whedon, who filmed the play in his own home, in Santa Monica; one speech is delivered in a child’s bedroom, beside a doll’s house and a couple of Barbies. Most of the men, including Don Pedro (Reed Diamond), Claudio (Fran Kranz), Benedick (Alexis Denisof), and the evil Don John (Sean Maher), are hunks, of one grade or another, dressed in decent suits, and the sense that they are merely toying with the rules of love, by way of a guys’ game, is unmistakable; hence the lurch in tone, to a frowning solemnity, when the purity of Hero (Jillian Morgese), Claudio’s beloved, comes into question—often a problem, in a modern setting. Yet the movie swings along, with a grace denied to some of Whedon’s grander projects, like “The Avengers,” and the honors are shared by Amy Acker, whose Beatrice seems as self-inquiring as she is sharp at others’ expense; Nathan Fillion, who, as Dogberry, makes even the malapropisms amusing (no easy feat); and Jay Hunter, the director of photography, whose feathery black-and-white images turn the whole thing into a midsummer day’s dream.—A.L. (6/24/13) (In limited release.)

MUSEUM HOURS

A Canadian woman, Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara), flies from her home town of Montreal to Vienna—her first trip to the place, and only her second to Europe. She is there to visit a cousin, who lies in a coma, in a hospital; duty keeps Anne from leaving, yet she has little to do, and money is scarce, so she wanders the wet winter city and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. There she meets a security guard, Johann (Bobby Sommer), a wry fellow who used to manage rock bands and looks a little like Václav Havel, and who takes Anne gently under his wing. Jem Cohen’s movie is barely a story at all, and he seldom lets slip a chance to digress, whether into voice-overs by Johann, lectures by a curator, or surveys of junk on the sunless streets outside; what matters as much as the mild, middle-aged friendship are the Old Masters on the walls of the gallery—notably Bruegel, whose paintings, hung together, form one of the great rooms of the world. The camera inspects them, often in closeup, always at leisure, and no one could begrudge the movie such tranquillity. It finds the time to look at looking, and to offer a slow revelation: to the lonely and the stranded, it is art that feels like home. In English and German.—A.L. (In limited release.)

THIS IS THE END

A noisy shindig, hosted by Seth Rogen. He and Evan Goldberg wrote and directed the film, and Rogen is in evidence from the start, welcoming his friend Jay Baruchel to Los Angeles. Both of them, like the majority of the people in the movie, play themselves; we are meant to feel a pinch of awe and gratitude at being allowed into the orbit of real stars, and that bonding feeling is only heightened by the awareness that, for our comic benefit, they are forever cutting each other down to size. Does that make the actors—Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, James Franco, Michael Cera, Emma Watson, and others—good sports, or careful guardians of their own image? Either way, the film is more guileful than it looks, even though the narrative is nuts: a celebrity-crammed party at Franco’s place that suddenly turns into the apocalypse, as Hollywood, not a moment too soon, is consumed by the fires of Hell. Throughout the movie, all mouths are foul, all bellies are yellow, all drugs are on the table, and all the guys want candy—an accurate assessment of contemporary manhood, you might say, although the casual misogyny that bedecks it feels a whole lot less amusing. As for the weird eschatology that Rogen and Goldberg appeal to in the later stages, rife with rapture and damnation, don’t even ask where that came from. Just enjoy the ride.—A.L. (6/24/13) (In wide release.)

TOKYO TWILIGHT

This turbulent and grim family melodrama, from 1957, is steered away from the maudlin and given emotional depth and philosophical heft under the direction of Yasujiro Ozu. A respected businessman slowly awakens to the fact that his two grown daughters are unhappy in love. The elder, who entered into an arranged marriage with a respected intellectual (despite loving someone else), finds her husband overbearing and egocentric; the younger is running around with (and often running after) a dissolute student who neglects his studies for gambling. But as deeply buried family stories emerge—the father’s long-concealed romantic humiliations, as well as wartime disruptions and degradations—it becomes clear that secrets themselves are the problem. Ozu reveals the emotional corrosion that results from maintaining a brave front when faced with problems and shielding children from darker issues—even those regarding their own past. By the movie’s end, all Japanese society seems rotted out by the lies that pass for civility and propriety, and the ostensibly happy ending offers little but resignation. In Japanese.—R.B. (Film Forum; July 21-22.)

VIOLA

The Argentinian director Matías Piñeiro’s intricately lyrical hour-long feature, centered on a young Buenos Aires theatre troupe that’s rehearsing a production of “Twelfth Night,” plays cinematic Shakespeare smartly—for the music. He excerpts and apostrophizes the play, making its lines ricochet off the private lives of three actresses who deliver them, onstage and off, in breathlessly conversational tones and mesh them imperceptibly with daily conversations and concerns as they theorize about love. The plot involves their romantic experiment with a fourth friend—the title character (María Vilar), who works with her boyfriend in a thriving delivery service for artisanally pirated DVDs—whom they want to detach from him in the hope of then seeing them get back together. Piñeiro’s images have a kind of music, too, a fluid, modest, street-level glamour that heightens the tones of urban naturalism with the urbane poise of controlled glances and intimate choreography. The lofty, lilting, poetic mood has a joyful abstraction that forges the grit of daily life into something bright and gemlike without looking too closely at its substance. In Spanish.—R.B. (Film Society of Lincoln Center.)

THE WAY, WAY BACK

Once again, the oppressed American teen-ager lopes and shuffles to center stage, there to display his woes. (The radical choice would be to show him as blithely well-adjusted, but that may be too much to ask.) In this case, the hero, Duncan (Liam James), age fourteen, accompanies his mother (Toni Collette) and her boyfriend (Steve Carell) on a summer trip to the coast of Massachusetts. He shrinks beneath the over-cheerful cries of the drinker next door (Allison Janney) and, to begin with, spurns the friendly overtures of her daughter (AnnaSophia Robb). Salvation arrives in the form of a local water park, shabby but welcoming, that’s run by a feckless, unbothered type (Sam Rockwell) who is even more of a kid than the kid is. The film, written and directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, idles along with some grace and catches more than a whiff of seaside pathos, but you find yourself waiting for the next life lesson to be handed out and wondering whether the adults—more seriously stranded than their offspring, in truth—should have been the focus of the movie’s tender concern.—A.L. (7/8 & 15/13) (In limited release.)

WE WON’T GROW OLD TOGETHER

In Maurice Pialat’s fiercely impassioned, impulsively modernist melodrama, Jean (Jean Yanne), a fortyish small-time filmmaker who’s struggling to make a feature, is married to the smoothly bourgeois Françoise (Macha Méril) but, for six years, has been carrying on an affair—openly and brazenly—with the much younger Catherine (Marlène Jobert), an aspiring actress. Toward Françoise, Jean is merely chilly; toward Catherine, with whom his relationship is vitally carnal, he’s both verbally and physically abusive. Unable to stand his outbursts and unwilling to live any longer in fear, Catherine leaves him (but still hopes to sleep with him every now and then). Pialat captures the push-and-pull of their impossible relationship with images of a frank pugnacity and crashingly abrupt editing. The doomed couple’s story is punctuated by visits to Catherine’s parents and grandmother and to Jean’s father, all in the loamy tranquillity of provincial France. For Pialat, the wolf is on the prowl; the feral lover—and artist—is at home amid the deep-hued muscularity of the countryside but also steeped in the freethinking ways and expressive ideals of the refined capital, which he shambles through like a wounded and wounding beast. Released in 1972. In French.—R.B. (Films on the Green; July 19.)

WORLD WAR Z

The first large-scale digital spectacle in years that’s likely to have some emotional meaning for grownups. It’s just a big zombie movie, but it stirs up fears of plague and anarchy and the sense that everything is constantly accelerating; at times, it has the tone and tempo of panic. The zombies attack with lightning speed; they gather and mount on top of one another by the thousand, climbing over walls and then pouring through the streets like running water. The best scenes in the movie have a jolting strangeness. With Brad Pitt, as a U.N. troubleshooter who has the modest task of saving the world; Mireille Enos, as his wife; Fana Mokoena, as a U.N. official who is apparently the only powerful man left on earth; and Daniella Kertesz, as an Israeli soldier (“Gut up,” Pitt instructs her, after amputating her arm). Directed by Marc Forster; written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard, and Damon Lindelof.—D.D. (7/1/13) (In wide release.)

ALSO PLAYING

CRYSTAL FAIRY: In limited release. THE HUNT: In wide release. THE LONE RANGER: In wide release. WHITE HOUSE DOWN: In wide release.

REVIVALS, CLASSICS, ETC.

Titles with a dagger are reviewed above.

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES

32 Second Ave., at 2nd St. (212-505-5181)—“Agnès B. Selects.” July 17 at 7:30: “Rocco and His Brothers” (1960, Luchino Visconti; in Italian). | July 18 at 6:30: “Fahrenheit 451” (1966, François Truffaut). | July 19 at 9:15 and July 21 at 8:45: “The Conformist” (1970, Bernardo Bertolucci; in Italian). | July 20 at 4:15: “Women in Love” (1969, Ken Russell). | July 20 at 7: “La Chinoise” (1967, Jean-Luc Godard; in French).

BAM CINÉMATEK

30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn (718-636-4100)—“Brooklyn Close-Up.” July 23 at 7: “Our Song” (2000, Jim McKay). | “Big Screen Epics.” July 17, July 19, and July 22 at 7:30 and July 20-21 at 4: “The Godfather” (1972, Francis Ford Coppola). | July 18, July 20-21, and July 23 at 7:30: “The Godfather Part II” (1974, Coppola). | The films of John Cassavetes. July 17 at 6:45 and 9:30: “Faces” (1968). | July 18 at 4:30, 7, and 9:30: “Minnie and Moskowitz” (+). | July 19 at 6:45 and 9:30: “Husbands” (1970). | July 20 at 2, 4:30, 7, and 9:30: “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” (1976). | July 21 at 2, 4:30, 7, and 9:30: “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968, Roman Polanski). | July 22 at 6:45 and 9:30: “Tempest” (1982, Paul Mazursky).

FILM FORUM

W. Houston St. west of Sixth Ave. (212-727-8110)—In revival. July 17-25 at 1:30, 4:20, 7, and 9:35: “L’Avventura” (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni; in Italian). | The Films of Yasujiro Ozu. July 19-20 at 1 and 3:30: “Early Summer” (1951). | July 21-22 at 1 and 3:45: “Tokyo Twilight” (+). | July 23 at 1:20 and 3:40: “Equinox Flower” (1958).

FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER

Walter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center (212-8755610)—“Family Films.” July 20-21 at 2: “For Me and My Gal” (1942, Busby Berkeley).

FILMS ON THE GREEN

Riverside Park Pier, 500 W. 70th St. (frenchculture.org)—July 19 at 8:30: “We Won’t Grow Old Together” (+).

FRENCH INSTITUTE ALLIANCE FRANÇAISE

55 E. 59th St. (212-355-6160)—“Highlights of the Cannes Film Festival.” July 23 at 12:30, 4, and 7:30: “Viridiana” (1961, Luis Buñuel; in Spanish).

IFC CENTER

323 Sixth Ave., at W. 3rd St. (212-924-7771)—In revival. July 19-21 at 11 A.M.: “The Elephant Man” (1980, David Lynch). | July 19-25 (call for showtimes): “Escape from New York” (1981, John Carpenter). | July 19-20 at midnight: “Lost in La Mancha” (2002, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe). | “Queer/Art/Film.” July 22 at 8: “Day Night Day Night” (2006, Julia Loktev), followed by a discussion with the musician Amadéus Leopold.

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Roy and Niuta Titus Theatres, 11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9480)—“An Auteurist History of Film.” July 17-19 at 1:30: “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961, Blake Edwards).

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE

35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria (718-784-0077)—“See It Big!” July 20 at 2: “Young Mr. Lincoln” (1939, John Ford). | July 20 at 4:30: “The Night of the Hunter” (1955, Charles Laughton). | July 21 at 4: “The Big Trail” (+). | July 21 at 7: “Paris, Texas” (1984, Wim Wenders).

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Readings and Talks

“WORD FOR WORD”

The former Mets and Yankees pitcher Dwight Gooden discusses his memoir, “Doc,” with his co-author, Ellis Henican. (Bryant Park, Sixth Ave. at 42nd St. 212-768-4242. July 17 at 12:30.)

POETS HOUSE

Sarah Arvio, Roger Bonair-Agard, Will Schutt, and Cecilia Vicuña mark the start of the Summer Showcase Reading Series, which coincides with Poets House’s annual celebration of new poetry books. This year, nearly three thousand books are on display, through Aug. 3. (10 River Terrace. 212-431-7920. July 18 at 7.)

92ND STREET Y

Ian McEwan reads from his novel “Sweet Tooth.” He’ll be joined by Martin Amis, who will read from his novel “Lionel Asbo,” and Salman Rushdie, who will introduce the two. (Lexington Ave. at 92nd St. 212-415-5500. July 22 at 8.)

“POETRY ON THE HIGH LINE”

Yusef Komunyakaa, Matt Rasmussen, and Evie Shockley kick off a free summer poetry reading series run by the Academy American of Poets. (High Line Amphitheatre, W. 16th St. at Tenth Ave. poets.org. July 23 at 6:30.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Above and Beyond

CITY OF WATER DAY

Paddlers, rowers, sailors, and water lovers unite for this free annual celebration of the harbor and its waterways. The action is centered on Governors Island, where festivalgoers will converge (not to worry if you don’t own a boat—there are ferries from lower Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge Park), but there are also activities in Liberty State Park and more than two dozen other spots around the harbor. The fun includes guided boat tours, fishing, stand-up paddleboarding lessons, and a cardboard-kayak race. (July 20. For more information, visit cityofwaterday.org.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
On the Horizon

CLASSICAL MUSIC

BRITTEN SINGS

July 31-Aug. 1

Mark Morris, the most musical of choreographers, is celebrating the centenary of the composer Benjamin Britten at Tanglewood, where he will stage the intimate opera “Curlew River” on a double bill with another monument of British music, Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas.” (888-266-1200.)

MOVIES

GROUND CONTROL

Aug. 2-8

Alongside his musical career, David Bowie established himself as a major presence in movies. Film Society of Lincoln Center offers a week of his onscreen performances in such films as Nicolas Roeg’s science-fiction thriller, “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” and Tony Scott’s vampire classic, “The Hunger.” (212-875-5610.)

THE THEATRE

FRINGE BENEFITS

Aug. 9-25

The New York International Fringe Festival returns with a roster of nearly two hundred comedies, musicals, and dramas, in twenty venues. Titles include “The A-Is-for-Abortion Play,” “Cowboys Don’t Sing—A Western Musical,” and “The TomKat Project.” (fringenyc.org.)

NIGHT LIFE

ROMAN CANDLE

Aug. 10

The singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, who died ten years ago, would have turned forty-four this August. He’s being honored with a series of concerts across the country. The one in New York City, at the Bowery Ballroom, features Rhett Miller, Chris Thile, Mary Lou Lord, and many others. (boweryballroom.com.)

ART

LAKE DISTRICT

Opens Aug. 10

The National Museum of the American Indian pairs works by modern artists (including the American Chippewa painter George Morrison and the Canadian Ojibwa painter Norval Morrisseau) with such traditional tribal objects as painted drums and bags embroidered with porcupine quills in “Before and After the Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes.” (212-514-3700.)

CONTRIBUTORS
Contributors

George Packer (Comment) is a staff writer. His new book, “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America,” came out in May.

Dana Goodyear (The Talk of the Town) published her second book of poems, “The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard,” in January. Her next book, “Anything That Moves,” about American food culture, is due out in the fall.

Peter Hessler (“The Showdown”) is a staff writer living in Cairo. His latest book is “Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West.”

Robert N. Watson (Poem) is the Neikirk Distinguished Professor of English at U.C.L.A.

Jack Handey (Shouts & Murmurs) has written several humor books, including “The Stench of Honolulu,” which has just been published.

Rachel Louise Snyder (“A Raised Hand”) is the author of “Fugitive Denim” and the forthcoming novel “What We’ve Lost Is Nothing.”

Bruce McCall (Cover) collaborated with David Letterman on the book “This Land Is Your Land, but Mostly My Land,” which comes out in November.

John Seabrook (“The Beach Builders”), a staff writer, is the author of several books, including “Flash of Genius and Other True Stories of Invention.”

George Steinmetz (Photograph) is a prize-winning photographer best known for his exploration photography, as featured in “Desert Air,” his latest book. He lives in New Jersey.

Ellen Bass (Poem) teaches in the M.F.A. program at Pacific University. Her poetry collections include “Mules of Love,” “The Human Line,” and the forthcoming “Like a Beggar.”

Julian Rubinstein (“Operation Easter”) is the author of “Ballad of the Whiskey Robber.”

David Gilbert (Fiction) will publish his second novel, “& Sons,” later this month.

James Wood (A Critic at Large) is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard. “The Fun Stuff,” a collection of essays, is his latest book.

Christine Smallwood (Books) is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Columbia. She has written for Harper’s and The New York Review of Books, among other publications.

THE MAIL
Pain Management

A letter in response to Michael Specter’s article (July 1, 2013)

Michael Specter’s article on Lyme disease addresses the claims of patients and activists that there is a chronic form of the illness which deserves attention and treatment (“The Lyme Wars,” July 1st). In 2011, the Institute of Medicine issued a comprehensive report on pain, with the statistic that acute and chronic pain affects at least a hundred and sixteen million adults in the United States. Patients with symptoms attributed to so-called chronic Lyme disease might be included in this number and benefit from the report, which provides a blueprint for dealing with the type of pain experienced by those with chronic Lyme. Primary-care physicians in endemic areas would also surely welcome insights on how best to manage and treat this condition.

Phillip J. Baker

Executive Director

American Lyme Disease Foundation

Lyme, Conn.

THE MAIL
Isolated Thoughts

A letter in response to Larissa MacFarquhar’s article (June 24, 2013)

Larissa MacFarquhar’s fascinating article on the efforts of the Buddhist monk Ittetsu Nemoto to address Japan’s high suicide rate brings attention to the complexity of suicidal thoughts, an important contribution when the incidence of suicide is on the rise (“Last Call,” June 24th). Nemoto’s methods are a perfect example of the use of empathy as the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut understood it in his theory of “empathic attunement.” Because secrecy is such a significant part of thinking about suicide, the use of empathy enables us to get into the minds of those whose thoughts and behavior have isolated them. Individuals who have survived war and other trauma may become attached to suffering, which can in turn predispose them to thoughts of killing themselves. As Nemoto discovered when he suggested that suicidal individuals imagine what they might do in their final months or weeks of life, or conduct funeral rituals as if they had died, the sudden rush of energy when confronting death can mean survival for a suicidal person. Only by confronting suicide can we hope to loosen its grip, and empathy is a powerful tool in bringing the often secret realm of the imagination into reality, where it has a chance of being relieved or conquered.

Beverly Kolsky

Englewood, N.J.

THE MAIL
Matters of Privacy

A letter in response to Jill Lepore’s article (June 24, 2013)

As the authors of a new literary and cultural study of surveillance, “The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood,” we cannot concur with Jill Lepore’s conclusion that “the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets” (“The Prism,” June 24th). In fact, the significance of Warren and Brandeis’s work is precisely that they set out a new theory of privacy and defended it in advance of invasion by many “new technologies.” Privacy and surveillance are in constant conflict, with advances in one responding to changes in the other: it goes both ways. Part of the reason that the revelations about the N.S.A.’s data-collection program have inspired such divergent reactions is that while many of us, consciously or not, continue to hold to Warren and Brandeis’s pre-digital definition of privacy as being connected to the “soul,” others see surveillance as a purely technological issue, or a numbers game. Privacy and the soul don’t factor into the equation. Lepore suggests that “there is no longer a public self”; Warren and Brandeis begged to differ, and their arguments still set the tone for much of the current debate.

David Rosen, Associate Professor of English, Trinity College

West Hartford, Conn.

Aaron Santesso, Associate Professor of Literature, Georgia Institute of Technology

Athens, Ga.