In less than five months, Mexico will have a presidential election that is being described by US and international media commentators as a perilous undertaking. The problem, according to the pundits and the Trump administration, is that the leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador holds a sizable lead in the polls, and could well be Mexico’s next president. But is his possible election really such a threat? It is difficult to say how much he could do if elected, given the forces arrayed against him, both at home and from the north. But if there is a reform candidate and party in the race, it is López Obrador and his Morena party.
Books
The House of Broken Angels
There’s nothing quite like a funeral to set a novelist’s wheels in motion: All those characters forced into one place, all those chances to explore the performative nature of family relationships, all those lies and secrets to expose, all of our mortality to contemplate. In his fifth novel, The House of Broken Angels, the pleasure is in watching Luis Alberto Urrea submit to every last opportunity the setup offers—it’s a big-hearted family epic that radiates with the joy of telling stories, undercut by the knowledge that the story eventually ends. Graham Swift knew it in Last Orders. Marquez knew it in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Faulkner knew it in As I Lay Dying.
Miguel Angel de La Cruz, the patriarch at the center of Urrea’s story, is facing death twice in two days. The novel is set during the funeral for his mother and his 70th birthday party the day after, events that he privately considers his farewell; he’s been diagnosed with cancer and has weeks to live. So he savors his San Diego home becoming a gathering spot for his large extended family—three siblings and many in-laws and grandkids who together form of cross-section of the American experience. His estranged son Yndio is a “non-cisgendered, non-heteronormative cultural liberation warrior.” His half-brother Gabriel, aka Little Angel, is an English professor in Seattle, studying his Mexican heritage from an academic remove. His son Lalo is an Iraq War vet mourning the death of another son, Braulio, to gang violence.
All this is the legacy of Big Angel successfully bringing his wife across the Mexican border decades before, “when it became obvious that only hunger and dirt and rats and evil police waited for them in the poorest of the colonias where they could afford to live.” But while Broken Angels is broadly a novel about the Mexican-American experience, that conceit breaks apart like a pointillist painting . At every turn Urrea is striving to unsettle assumptions about what “Mexican-American experience means”—simple summaries are for Donald Trump and lesser stand-up comics. Big Angel, he writes, was “so famous for punctuality that the Americans at work used to call him ‘the German.’ Very funny, he thought. As if a Mexican couldn’t be punctual. As if Vicente Fox was late to things, cabrones.”
The gringo culture that spins such stereotypes is mostly off to the side in the novel—a snippet of raw-throated talk-radio chatter, a passing insult in a supermarket aisle. But Big Angel’s enclave is plenty diverse in itself. Nearly all of the characters have multiple nicknames (Little Angel is “the Assimilator,” Lalo is “Hungry Man”) as if to highlight their complex and multitude-containing status, the way a person changes depending on who’s doing the looking. Urrea carries all of this lightly, though, even sentimentally. The vibe of the novel isn’t an elegy for the end of a clan that’s lost its sense of identity, but a tribute to a family that has acquired the freedom to make multiple identities for itself.
“Little Angel thought it was all turning into an end-of-semester project for his multicultural studies course,” Urrea writes. The line is funny because it’s true: the party is filled with Dreamers, gangbangers, grandmas, and women “as magnificent as a velvet painting of an Aztec goddess in a taco shop.” And the line is serious because Little Angel has missed the point—a family is not a petri dish for pat notions about diversity. Urrea is consistently working through this tension throughout the book, keeping the tone upbeat while acknowledging the stormclouds in his characters’ stories, sometimes decades worth of them. His strategies for lightening the mood can be shameless in their contrivance. A nephew of Big Angel sings in a black-metal band called Hispanic Panic and tourettically spouts headbanger mottos, while Little Angel’s ivory-tower seriousness is undone by his lust for a sister-in-law. And Big Angel maintains a notebook in which he lists the things he’s grateful for, moments where the strings swell ever-louder: “wildflowers after rain,” “a day without pain,” “a kiss from my brother.”
But another strategy Urrea uses is to not stay in one place too long: The silly scenes give way to the richly comic ones, the sentimental ones to the moments of somber pathos. And he’s rightly confident that the mix of storytelling forms will cohere. The House of Broken Angels isn’t exactly plotless—it recalls Don DeLillo’s quip that all plots tend toward death. But Urrea wants to assert a status, not a trajectory. Big Angel is an everyman, “a rolling laugh riot … arbiter of bad jokes, spiritual insight, ice cream money, and shelter when they were bounced out of their houses or were let out of jail or rehab or needed to come in off the streets at midnight.” And likewise, Urrea’s novel is hat’s a retort to what such a novel ought to be
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In the Review Archives: 1963–1965
Fifty-five years ago, The New York Review published its first issue. To celebrate the magazine’s emerald anniversary, in 2018 we will be going through the archives year by year, featuring some of the notable, important, and sometimes forgotten pieces that appeared in its pages. That first issue included a short note, addressed To the Reader: “The hope of the editors,” they wrote, “is to suggest, however imperfectly, some of the qualities which a responsible literary journal should have and to discover whether there is, in America, not only the need for such a review but the demand for one.”
The B&N Podcast: Tara Westover
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
In her riveting memoir Educated, Tara Westover describes her childhood on an Idaho mountainside, in a family in which “home-schooling” meant no lessons, but determined isolation from the modern world Tara’s parents turned away from. The author — who left that insular life behind to earn her PhD in History at Cambridge — joins Miwa Messer on this episode of the podcast to talk about her improbably journey, and what she’s learned along the way.
Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “head-for-the-hills” bag. In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged metal in her father’s junkyard.
Her father distrusted the medical establishment, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when an older brother became violent.
When another brother got himself into college and came back with news of the world beyond the mountain, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. She taught herself enough mathematics, grammar, and science to take the ACT and was admitted to Brigham Young University. There, she studied psychology, politics, philosophy, and history, learning for the first time about pivotal world events like the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.
Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty, and of the grief that comes from severing one’s closest ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes, and the will to change it.
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The Death and Life of a Great American Building
I am one of the last tenants of the St. Denis, a 165-year-old building on East 11th Street, just south of Union Square in New York City, that is in the process of being emptied and readied for gutting. For decades, the St. Denis has been a haven for psychotherapists of every sort, but a seismic shift is taking place and the therapist buildings are getting squeezed. Imagine a future Manhattan without shrinks. What will happen to the psyche of that city?
Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language
Swearing is salubrious. William Shakespeare applied it, Mark Twain advised it — but in Swearing Is Good for You, science journalist Emma Byrne makes the case anew with éclat and choice malediction.
Let Byrne count the ways: managing stress (ask any woman during childbirth) and pain (ask the man who missed the nail but not his thumb), team building. Swearing primes you for aggression and contrariwise tunes down the likelihood of physical violence. Swear words increase your linguistic repertoire. Swearing helps to both express and cover up feelings, to make an impact, to raise a laugh. It expresses a healthy disrespect for authority. But, critically, it can be a demonstration of power, which breaks a taboo as it asserts a social/gender hierarchy. Breaking taboos is what frequently gives each nation or group its particular vulgar lexicon. “In Japanese, where the excretory taboo is almost nonexistent (hence the friendly poo emoji), there’s no equivalent of ‘shit’ ” — just in case you were wondering.
In terms of our brains, however, the major types of cussing can be sorted beyond cultural boundaries. There are two — and a provisional third — distinct types of swearing: the “propositional,” which is deliberately chosen for effect and processed in the left hemisphere of the brain; the “nonpropositional,” an unintended outburst — two very different animals. For the most part, Byrne concerns herself with the propositional, though there is a long chapter on the mysterious “unpropositional” world of Tourette’s syndrome, the famous neurological disorder characterized by uncontrollable, often profane outbursts. That symptom may have a reputation that outweighs the reality: studies show that as few as 7 percent of Tourette’s sufferers blurt swears. “Yet for those patients who experience coprolalia, coprograhia, and copropraxis, the physically injurious motor tics” — tics are a common symptom of Tourette’s — “aren’t anywhere near as distressing as the socially inappropriate urges.”
Swearing, Byrne writes, is all tangled up with emotions. “Psychologists classify emotions along two axes: Valence and arousal. Valence simply refers to how pleasurable (or not) a feeling is . . . Arousal is a measure of how strong a feeling is.” Arousal is measured by heart rate and galvanic skin response (how sweaty your palms are). A number of experiments have shown that swearing, as it is thought to help us endure pain, does so through emotional arousal. You can imagine, such tests on human subjects skirt the line of ethics, and the experiments that were used are cunning in the extreme. There is no absolute proof yet, as the tests that suppress the perception of pain have yet to be replicated (indeed, some have refuted it. Still . . . ), but evidence is measurably there.
One fine chapter covers swearing and gender. Research shows we are much more judgmental of women who swear than we are of men. “Sometime around the early eighteenth century there was a significant change in culture” — that is, in Western Europe and the Americas. The shift in language was power for men and purity for women. Women were expected to adopt a “clean” language, while men retained the right to swear and its power of expression: “Those insisting that women’s language should be pure managed to rip the most powerful linguistic tool out of the hands (and mouths and minds) of women for centuries.”
As a student of swearing, Byrne knows whereof she speaks. Yet more research shows that women are swearing with greater effectiveness than ever, but it comes at “greater social risk for women: a man swearing is more likely to be seen as jocular and strong; women are likely to be seen as unstable and untrustworthy.” The double-binds of traditional gender norms become even more pronounced the more intense or “unfiltered” the language is.
But even though we see swearing as a kind of maximally authentic language, there is, Byrne teaches us, an art to swearing. Somebody who swears between each word is as artless as someone who says “like” or “uh” at every pause. But for swearing to be effective, it must have timing and tone. It must be artful to be cheeky or funny or outrageous or aggressive, and particularly in the level of aggression. Done right, it can help build trust, since “I respectfully disagree with your position?” Or “We call B.S.”?
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A Flag Is a Flag Is a Flag
A good mythology needs a Genesis story. For Jasper Johns, the dawn of creation came in the late fall of 1954, and was instigated not by divine revelation but something close to it: a vision in a dream. A year out of the army, asleep in a loft in lower Manhattan, Johns closed his eyes and saw the Stars and Stripes in the dark, not fluttering, not flying over a battlefield, but on an easel—and he was there, too, painting it. It’s hard enough to remember a dream the next morning, let alone decades on, and Johns recounted his vision of himself painting a flag with slight variations in the decades that followed: he may or may not have told Robert Rauschenberg about it over breakfast. But the next day he was at work, and by the spring of 1955, he had completed the painting he had seen in his vision.
Today’s Eerie Echoes of the Civil War
Beneath the weight of American history, it is little wonder that today’s struggles over the status of Confederate monuments and political demonstrations by avowed white supremacists evoke anxieties about disunion. We would do well to pay heed to the old enmities bubbling up in our politics: it is not that we are on the verge of another civil war, but that the Civil War never truly ended. With the exception of slavery itself, what divided the United States then divides us still today.
Dereliction of Duty?
H.R. McMaster was known for speaking truth to power, and he appeared to have the organizational skills and command bearing befitting a three-star general. His unblinking academic criticism of national security officials reflected a conviction that officers were obliged to avoid repeating the mistakes of their predecessors, even if it meant challenging their superiors. One year ago, the optimistic view—I held it, as did others—was that McMaster would stand up to Trump. Yet as national security adviser, he has channeled Trump’s “Make America Great Again” jingoism.
Blood on the Land in Brazil
The murder of Márcio Matos belongs to a new wave of political violence in Brazil’s countryside. Rural assassinations are on the rise against a background of economic crisis and political malfeasance. As corruption trials generate a crescendo of public attention on law and order, the countryside becomes bloodier. The two events of January 24—Lula’s conviction and Márcio’s death—were thus twin symbols demonstrating both the strength and shortcomings of the Brazilian state. The government could prosecute its ex-president but not protect its own people.
Sig Nordal 