THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019 73
BRIEFLY NOTED
One Day, by Gene Weingarten (Blue Rider). This absorbing
snapshot of America draws on more than five hundred in-
terviews about a randomly chosen day in 1986, a quiet Sun-
day just after Christmas. A nursing student goes in for a heart
transplant; two fishing buddies survive a helicopter crash; a
girl defies her religious mother to play Nintendo. Weingar-
ten relates these events, and the stumbles and joys of dozens
of other people, with compassion and humor. He finds that
experiences of thirty-three years ago have shaped our lived
reality today, and reflects that “we are more connected—to
one another, and perhaps even to any single point in time—
than we know.”The Art of Return, by James Meyer (Chicago). Blending crit-
icism, memoir, and theory, the author explores the endur-
ing influence of the sixties on art today. Analyzing works
such as An-My Lê’s photos of Vietnam military reënact-
ments, Kerry James Marshall’s enigmatic elegies to slain
heroes of the civil-rights movement, and reimaginings by
more than one artist of Robert Smithson’s evanescent earth-
works, Meyer notes the tendency both to interrogate the
dreamy impulses of the “good Sixties”—“the last period of
world revolution”—and to reflect the entropy, trauma, and
war of the “bad Sixties.” Many of the artists here, and Meyer
himself, feel that they just missed out on something big: as
children in the sixties, they were “imprinted with the im-
agery of a momentous period they barely glimpsed.”Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, by Andrew Miller (Europa).
Escaping the Napoleonic Wars, the protagonist of this novel,
an English captain named John Lacroix, adopts an assumed
name and heads for Scotland. But he is followed by agents
of the British Army, which is seeking someone to punish for
a massacre of civilians in Spain. Miller acutely imagines the
war-scarred psychology of his characters—Lacroix sees con-
fusion in his soldiers’ faces, “as though they were searching
for what they might trust in”—and uses the historical set-
ting to great advantage, as when Lacroix stops to admire a
row of gas lamps: “The future, he decided, would be well lit.
Light would be a moral force.” Moments later, he is mugged
under those very lights.The Next Loves, by Stéphane Bouquet, translated from the French
by Lindsay Turner (Nightboat). In a flâneur-esque mode rem-
iniscent of Jacques Prévert and Frank O’Hara, this poetry col-
lection traces the ebb and flow of intimacy in contemporary
gay life. Bouquet’s effervescent intellect lends a philosophical
air to urban strolling and digital scrolling; hookup apps and
YouTube catalyze meditations on time’s indifference to human
affairs, and even solitude is erotically charged. But the book’s
vitality is underpinned with grief: for Bouquet, the freedom
and possibility of queer desire are tinged with isolation and
with vulnerability to intolerance. Asked by a lover, “Why, for
real, do you/ do poetry?,” he answers, “In fact it’s very simple:
it’s because we must steal constantly/ from absence.”moil” (1915). Ambitious and often im-
pressive, it was greeted in some quarters
as a candidate for that elusive grail the
Great American Novel. For the first
time, Tarkington addresses head on his
major preoccupation, the relentless
transformation of American small-
town life (seen through rose-tinted
glasses) into the ferocious and ugly
world of Progress, dominated by ruth-
less businessmen who are supplanting
the “best” families (like his own). The
old stable town is lost to uncontrolla-
ble growth; the horse is replaced by
the automobile; and omnipresent coal
dust settles over, and soils, everything.
The great mansions crumble and are
replaced by squalid (to Tarkington)
boarding houses, apartment buildings,
“machine-shops.” The well-to-do are
forced to move farther away from the
center of things.
In “The Turmoil,” the irrepressible
entrepreneur James Sheridan sees his
two older sons destroyed by his ambi-
tion, his daughter lost to an unfortu-
nate marriage, and his youngest son,
the sensitive, poetic, and bizarrely
named Bibbs, compelled to abandon
the literary life for which he is suited
in order to learn the family business
and sacrifice himself by turning into a
benign version of his father. An oblig-
atory romance between Bibbs and a
young woman from a First Family now
so financially diminished that they even
have to sell her piano (!) is no more
convincing than any other Tarkington
romance. What is convincing, beyond
his consistently fine rendering of the
details of time and place, is a new un-
derstanding and sympathy for his cen-
tral characters, as father and son strug-
gle to come to terms with who they
are and what they have made of them-
selves and of each other. This is the
first Tarkington novel to acknowledge
and respect the fact that human beings
not only have roles to play in a story
but have developing inner lives.
The Sheridans of “The Turmoil” are
interlopers. “The Magnificent Amber-
sons,” which followed in 1918, ap-
proaches the same phenomenon of a
changing society from a different point
of view—that of a great family that not
only has seen better days but has been
routed by the forces of progress. The
novel is suffused with nostalgia, but it