BY RON CHARLES
Emma Donoghue was a suc-
cessful novelist long before her
seventh novel, “Room,” eclipsed
all her previous work and brought
her international fame. If you
read it, you’ll
never forget 5-
year-old Jack,
who describes
li ving his entire
life with Ma i n a
backyard dun-
geon. We see
their lives as an
unspeakable
ordeal of depri-
vation and
rape, but Jack’s
mother makes
sure that her
son sees their
tiny cell as a
world filled
with wonder.
With her new book, “A kin,”
Donoghue returns to the story of
a child and an adult trapped to-
gether. But the circumstances are
far less bizarre, the constraints
less intense. If “Room” was a hor-
ror novel laced with sweetness,
“A kin” is a sweet novel laced with
horror. It’s the story of a man
learning late in life to expand his
sense of family, to realize as never
before who his kin are.
The protagonist is a chemistry
professor named Noah Selvaggio
who recently retired to avoid the
risk of becoming a laughingstock.
“Professor in his late seventies
sounded rather admirable,” Noah
thinks, “but professor in his eight-
ies?” No thanks. That sensible
SEE BOOK WORLD ON C3BOOK WORLDAn odd
couple goes
to France
AKIN
By Emma
Donoghue
Little, Brown.
352 pp. $28KLMNO
Style
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 , 2019. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/STYLE EZ RE C
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CAROLYN HAXA hotheaded friend put
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address that temper. C10
The awful,
lingering
price of
denials
During Brett
Kavanaugh’s
confirmation
hearings last year,
I remember
thinking there
was a better path
for him than the
shouting,
conspiracy-
peddling one he chose. I
remember thinking he should
have frankly addressed how
much he’d drunk as a youth — to
the point of stupor, several of his
friends told reporters — and used
that context when responding to
accusations of sexual
misconduct.
Something like: “I have no
memory of these events. But I
drank a lot in high school and
college. I sometimes drank until I
puked; I sometimes drank until I
blacked out or wasn’t sure of my
actions. If I did what I’ve been
accused of, I am horrified. I
welcome a full investigation. I am
ashamed, and I am so, so sorry.”
He didn’t do that, of course,
but I wished he had. I longed for
the dialogue a statement like that
could have forced us to have.
This week, we’re all catapulted
back to last year, thanks to a new
book with new revelations. Now,
it’s hard not to ask whether
Kavanaugh was lying during his
hearings — if not to the Senate,
then to himself.
In “The Education of Brett
Kavanaugh,” authors Robin
Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, both of
the New York Times, dig into
allegations by Deborah Ramirez
that Kavanaugh, her classmate at
Yale, thrust his exposed penis at
her during a party. Kavanaugh
emphatically told the Judiciary
Committee that the event had
never happened, saying that if it
had, it would have been “the talk
of campus.” One year later,
SEE HESSE ON C9Monica
Hesse
BY PETER MARKS
A night of theater can often
divide audiences. “Fairview” ab-
solutely intends to.
I mean that in the most literal
sense, and, if you avail yourselves
of the opportunity to experience
Woolly Mammoth Theatre’s
smashing rendition of Jackie Sib-
blies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-win-
ning barn burner, you’ll under-
stand what I’m talking about.
And learn a bit more about what
you’re seeing in the changing
world around you and how you
see it.
But don’t e xpect me to give you
a detailed map of Drury’s swirling
dramatic rapids. You’ll have to
discover her unique approach to
discussing race, one of the most
complex issues we face in this
country — and one some people
wish would not be discussed so
loudly — on your own. I heard
some harrumphs and expressions
of exasperation in the Woolly
auditorium, along with hearty
laughs of recognition. The former
made me want to say: Open your
hearts and minds a little. As
Drury unspools her scathingly
funny satire, listen to the voice
that’s also declaring, “This nation
does not belong to anyone. It
belongs to everyone.”
“No one can own a seat forever.
No one should,” the teenage
Keisha, played vibrantly by Chin-
na Palmer, tells us at the end of
the play. People of every race and
ethnicity will grasp perfectly
what she’s g etting at i n “Fairview.”
This exhilarating discourse on
how white people see black peo-
ple and how black people think
white people see black people is
meant to unseat those who occu-
py society’s comfort zone. Or, at
least, have them scoot over and
make more space for the rest of
the country.
As the wild structure of
“Fairview” also makes plain, this
is messy, this notion of white
people sharing their place at the
control panels of the cultural con-
versation. The play, adroitly
brought to comic life by director
Stevie Walker-Webb, begins as a
kind of familiar palliative a la
TV’s Huxtables: An affluent black
SEE THEATER ON C6THEATER REVIEW
This play aims to make you uncomfortable. That’s a good thing.
TERESA CASTRACANE/WOOLLY MAMMOTH THEATRE COMPANY
From left, Nikki Crawford, Samuel Ray Gates, Shannon Dorsey and Chinna Palmer in Woolly
Mammoth Theatre’s rendition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Fairview.”BY CAITLIN GIBSON
A
t first, it wasn’t obvious that anything was amiss. Kids are
naturally curious about the complicated world around them, so
Joanna Schroeder wasn’t surprised when her 11- and 14-year-old
boys recently started asking questions about timely topics such as
cultural appropriation and transgender rights.
But she sensed something off about the way they framed their
questions, she says — t inged with a bias that didn’t r eflect their family’s
progressive values. She heard one of her sons use the word “triggered”
in a sarcastic, mocking tone. And there was the time Schroeder watched
as her son scrolled through the “Explore” screen on his Instagram
account and she caught a glimpse of a meme depicting Adolf Hitler.
Schroeder, a writer and editor in Southern California, started paying
closer attention, talking to her boys about what they’d encounteredonline. Then, after her kids were in bed one night last month, she
opened Twitter and began to type.
“Do you have white teenage sons?” she wrote. “Listen up.”
In a series of tweets, Schroeder described the onslaught of racist,
sexist and homophobic memes that had inundated her kids’ social
media accounts unbidden, and the way those memes — packaged as
irreverent, “edgy” humor — can indoctrinate children into the world of
alt-right extremism and white supremacy.
She didn’t know whether anyone would pay attention to her
warning. But by the time she awoke the next morning, her thread had
gone viral; as of Sept. 16, it had been retweeted more than 81,000 times
and liked more than 180,000 times. Over the following days, Schroed-
SEE RECRUITMENT ON C9among the memes,
an insidious intent
Alt-right groups are targeting children online, attempting to normalize their hate
MIKO MACIASZEK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST