C6 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2019fun if you will. (I was prepared.) Those 14
words are, on reconsideration, nearly as
profound as anything attributed to Confu-
cius or Gandhi. And they rhyme.
So far, so weird. You begin reading
“Frankissstein” picturing a monster with
bolts in its neck (the Eagles) and those
thoughts mix with your sense of Shelley’s
Gothic novel, “Frankenstein; or, The Mod-
ern Prometheus,” published in 1818. Once
those things have been mentally stitched
together — not that the Eagles play much
more of a role here — a writer can go any-
where. Winterson does. In this novel, which
was longlisted for the Booker Prize, she
walks her wits on a very long leash.
“Frankissstein” relates two mirrored
stories. One begins in 1816, when the
teenage Shelley was living in the Alps with
her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shel-
ley, Lord Byron and others. It was there that
she was inspired to write her novel about a
young scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who
creates an intelligent if ill-favored creature
in a mad experiment.
The other story, set in the time of Brexit,
is about Ry Shelley, a trans doctor (Ry is
short for Mary), who falls in love with a
Botoxed, TED-talking professor named
Victor Stein. Victor is an expert in artificial
intelligence who’s conducting some under-
ground experiments of his own. Hairy little
disembodied human hands run around his
laboratory, as if they were tarantulas. Ry
sometimes sources human parts for him.
“Maybe being a bodysnatcher is bad for my
joie de vivre,” he thinks.
Along the way Ry and Victor meet not a
Byron but a Lord, Ron Lord, who manufac-
tures concierge-level sex dolls for lonely
men. Ron’s an idiot, he’s gross, he’s an
amuse-douche, but his dolls, like the gun on
the wall in a Chekhov play, are never far
from anyone’s mind. Sometimes one pops to
life and starts dirty-talking and calling for
“Daddy” at the wrong time.
Among Ron’s company’s offerings is a
braless, messy-headed, 1970s-themed sex
doll called the Germaine, seemingly after
Germaine Greer. There is quite a lot of infor-
mation in “Frankissstein” about things like
intelligent vibrators and teledildonics.
There is dark speculation about, for exam-
ple, how sexbots might spare a generation
of altar boys.
“Frankissstein” is not a particularly good
novel, if we limit our definition of a good
novel to one that, at minimum, has charac-
ters and/or a plot in which one feels in-
vested. Winterson seems to know she’s
boxed herself into a facile and jokey situa-
tion, and she’s decided to shoot herself out
of the corner. This novel is talky, smart, an-
archic and quite sexy. You begin to linger on
those three s’s when you speak the title
aloud.
“Frankissstein” also has, if you squint
just slightly, an intelligent soul. Winterson
has always been interested in gender flu-
idity and there is room, in our glimpses ofRy, for real feeling between the satire and
bickering.
Ian McEwan published his robot-sex nov-
el, “Machines Like Us,” earlier this year. (A
male robot’s breath, in bed, smelled like
“the back of a warm TV set.”) The Iraqi writ-
er Ahmed Saadawi updated Shelley’s novel
with dark grace in “Frankenstein in Bagh-
dad,” published in English last year. It’sabout a man who collects body parts after
car bombs detonate, and then gets out his
needle and thread.
Winterson is playing a game that’s en-
tirely her own. The fourth wall is broken fre-
quently, as if this were an episode of
“Fleabag.” After one bit of dialogue from
Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister, there’s
an author’s note in all caps that reads: “This
is the most profound thing Claire has said in
her life.”
As the jokes and bons mots and apho-
risms (“Love is a disturbance among the
disturbed,” “Human beings can’t share. We
can’t even share free bicycles”) fly past, the
book is anchored in soliloquies that wear
their intent and erudition lightly.
In our robotic future, Victor says: “Hu-
mans will be like decayed gentry. We’ll have
the glorious mansion called the past that is
falling into disrepair. We’ll have a piece of
land that we didn’t look after very well
called the planet. And we’ll have some nice
clothes and a lot of stories. We’ll be fading
aristocracy. We’ll be Blanche Dubois in a
moth-eaten silk dress. We’ll be Marie Antoi-
nette with no cake.”
“Frankissstein” has its grayer moments,
especially in the sometimes draggy meta-
physical conversations between the Shel-
leys and Byron. These scenes are short.
If sex dolls are on humanity’s horizon,
Winterson reminds us with one of her chap-
ter titles (“Looking for a lover who won’t
blow my cover”) that there’s an Eagles lyric
for that, too.DWIGHT GARNER BOOKS OF THE TIMESIt’s Peculiar Before the Sexbots Arrive
LILY RICHARDSFrankissstein: A Love Story
By Jeanette Winterson
340 pages. Grove Press. $27.CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter:
@DwightGarner.
Hairy little disembodied
human hands run
around his laboratory, as
if they were tarantulas.Arbery’s “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,”
which opened on Monday at Playwrights
Horizons, something of a red-state unicorn.
The astonishing new play explores the lives
and ideas of conservatives with affection,
understanding and deep knowledge — if
not, ultimately, approval.
As such, it would be a welcome corrective
almost regardless of its quality. When con-
servatives show up in contemporary plays,
they are usually laughable blowhards,
whining billionaires or troglodyte parents
whose children scorn them. What use are
they to anyone, even liberals who want to
understand what they’re up against?
But Teresa (Zoë Winters), Kevin (John
Zdrojeski) and Justin (Jeb Kreager) are se-
rious, attractive, articulate young people —
and troubled in ways we usually find sym-
pathetic, at least in characters who didn’t
vote for Donald J. Trump. (Kevin vomited
after doing so.)
Mr. Arbery brings them together, seven
years after graduation, for a reunion at
Justin’s house; he has stayed in town and
works at Transfiguration. Also at the party
— which celebrates the appointment of
their mentor, Gina Presson, as president of
the school — is Gina’s daughter, Emily (Ju-
lia McDermott), who escaped Wyoming but
has now returned with a debilitating mys-
tery illness. During the course of a some-
what drunken dark night of the soul, the
four friends catch up, argue, have crises and
regroup.
Yet “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” di-
rected with nerves of steel by Danya Tay-
mor, is no narcissistic midlife reunion dram-
edy like “The Big Chill.” The characters are
still young enough to believe they can make
significant changes in their lives — and in
the life of their country, which they think
and talk about constantly.
It’s no accident that Mr. Arbery sets the
play just after the 2017 murder of Heather
Heyer in Charlottesville, Va.; very much on
everyone’s mind are the limits of the con-
servatism they inhaled and exalted at
Transfiguration.
For Teresa, the limits come from within
the movement: a movement weakened by
craven “soy boys.” An Ann Coulter wanna-
be and self-professed Bannonite, she is a
lightning-fast debater, a glib liar and a tal-
ented polemicist. (“Liberals are empathy
addicts,” she says.) She sees herself as a
hero of the “Fourth Turning” — the pseudo-
scientific theory that predicts political
change on a generational timetable. As
such, she is almost erotically fixated on the
idea of near-term culture war, or literal war,
as both rapture and ravishment.
Her three friends stake a variety of posi-
tions on the issues that feed Teresa’s out-
rage machine. Saintly Emily, who worked in
a Chicago “pro-life women’s advocacy orga-
nization,” nevertheless counts among her
friends an abortion-rights activist and —
oh, the horror! — a drag queen. Justin, who
packs a revolver and keeps a rifle handy,
may argue that “proximity to L.G.B.T. is a
threat to Christian children and families,”
but he cares lovingly for Emily with no ex-
pectation of anything in return.
And Kevin is the screw-up, the holy fool,
struggling to locate a viable philosophy in
the aftermath of the collision of his educa-
tion and real life. “Why the heck do we have
to love the Virgin Mary?” he asks, almost
heretically. Also: Why can’t Christians test
their faith by befriending the enemy instead
of hating or avoiding him? And, most im-
portant: Why can’t he get a girlfriend?
The conflicts among the four friends, and
eventually with the formidable Gina as well,
are carried out in a series of arguments and
arias the playwright aptly likens to a fugue.
And though the play is peppered with the-
atrical interruptions — a song, a story, some
ominous sounds, fits of aggression and
feints of emotion — you will not find “He-
roes of the Fourth Turning” very entertain-
ing if you don’t believe in the dramatic po-
tential of debate.
Ms. Taymor’s uncompromising produc-
tion makes the strongest possible case for
that potential. As the play takes place at
night on the edge of the Wyoming wilder-
ness, most of Laura Jellinek’s set is forbid-
ding empty space; the lighting (by Isabella
Byrd) is unrelievedly dark. Justin Elling-
ton’s sensational sound design is almost an-
other haunted voice in the fugue. In this om-
inous environment, Ms. Taymor moves the
actors around like chess pieces, always
threatening or defending.
She also encourages them to dig for the
emotional realities beneath their discourse.
We get a strong sense, for instance, of how
mandated premarital celibacy has warped
everyone’s temperament, especially Kev-
in’s; Mr. Zdrojeski, in a big breakthrough
performance, makes the tightrope walk of
pathos and ludicrousness thrilling to watch.
And Mr. Kreager, though much more con-
tained, likewise backfills Justin’s political
positions with longings he can hardly name.
Indeed, the conflict between engagement
and recusal that is at the heart of the charac-
ters’ questioning of conservatism is also at
the heart of their unhappiness. Even Teresaworries that her wedding won’t be beautiful
because she is “too private” with her love.
And though Gina (Michele Pawk in a ter-
rific cameo) is a charismatic and even poet-
ic leader, you have to question, as you look
into Emily’s eyes, what kind of a mother
she’s been.
But insights into the devil are not the
point here, even if Teresa calls Mr. Trump “a
Golem molded from the clay of mass media”
who has “come to save us all.” (Gina calls
him “chemotherapy”: vile but necessary.)
To Mr. Arbery, conservatives aren’t devils
at all; their bad behavior is much like every-
one else’s. So is their good behavior. Surely
it’s not irrelevant that his father, Glenn Ar-
bery, is the president of Wyoming Catholic
College, a school apparently identical in phi-
losophy and location to the play’s Transfig-
uration.
That autobiographical likeness — also a
feature of Mr. Arbery’s “Plano” — gives
“Heroes of the Fourth Turning” an aura of
absolute authenticity. It may also give the
play a slight aura of overindulgence; there
are probably a few turns too many in its
characters’ convolutions.
What makes it riveting anyway is its ea-
gerness to admit, and to subtly criticize by
juxtaposition, all arguments. When Kevin,
confused and self-loathing though he may
be, articulates the desire to “let two compet-
ing facts exist in the same space,” he might
as well be speaking for the play. Without two
competing facts, we wouldn’t have much of
a drama — or a democracy.JESSE GREEN THEATER REVIEWSARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMESIn a Dark and Holy Wilderness
HEROES OF THE FOURTH
TURNINGTicketsThrough Oct. 27 at
Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan;
212-279-4200,
playwrightshorizons.org. Running time:
2 hours 5 minutes.CreditsBy Will Arbery; directed by
Danya Taymor; sets by Laura Jellinek;
costumes by Sarafina Bush; lighting by
Isabella Byrd; sound by Justin Ellington;
fight direction by J. David Brimmer;
production stage manager, Jenny
Kennedy; associate artistic director,
Adam Greenfield. Presented by
Playwrights Horizons, Tim Sanford,
artistic director; Leslie Marcus,
managing director; Carol Fishman,
general manger.CastJeb Kreager (Justin), Julia
McDermott (Emily), Michele Pawk
(Gina), Zoë Winters (Teresa) and John
Zdrojeski (Kevin).CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
Exploring the lives and
ideas of conservatives
with affection and deep
knowledge.
Follow Jesse Green on Twitter: @JesseKGreen.
Michele Pawk, right, as
the college’s new
president, debates John
Zdrojeski, an alumnus still
seeking his place in the
world, while Jeb Kreager
and Zoë Winters look on.