THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 59
eryone to stop spying, the equilibrium
of nations would be upset, and the im-
balances would probably produce more
panic than peace.
There’s a “Red Queen” phenomenon
in spying. The “Spy vs. Spy” comedy of
perpetually frustrated equilibrium is ac-
tually the safest possible state. Andrew
makes this case in a Cold War context:
the moment of greatest risk in the Cold
War occurred in the early fifties, when
the United States didn’t have sufficient
intelligence, and filled the shortfall with
wild conjectures about nonexistent mis-
sile gaps. When the intelligence ex-
panded, mostly through aerial and sat-
ellite surveillance, sanity returned.
Where we may go wrong is in valu-
ing stealthily obtained information
over unglamorous, commonly shared
knowledge. And so the disappointment
that liberals, newly sympathetic to our
intelligence services, found in the Muel-
ler report lay simply in the fact that what
was most shocking in it was already well
known. The Russian conspiracy went
on largely in the open, with most of the
clandestine bits hidden under a diaph-
anous cover. Donald Trump’s genius was,
as it so often is, his inability to dissem-
ble: no one can quite believe what he
gets away with because we assume that
a public act is unlikely to be incriminat-
ing. We interpret as strut and boasting
what is actually a confession. Richard
Nixon, a genuinely Shakespearean vil-
lain, had full knowledge of his wrong-
doing and a bad conscience about it, if
not enough of one. Trump is a figure
right out of the Theatre of Cruelty; he
just acts out, without any mental inner
workings, aside from narcissist necessity.
Had his “Russia, if you’re listening ... ”
been encrypted in a text, it would have
had the force of a revelation. Made
openly, it seemed merely braggadocio.
If there is a lesson to be taken from
the literature of espionage, it is that the
surfaces we see generally have the great-
est significance, and the most obvious-
seeming truths about other countries’
plans and motives are usually more
predictive than the sharpest guesses at
hidden ones. A corollary of this truth
is that the best way to project power is
not to do wrong secretly but to do good
openly. How intelligent is national in-
telligence? Why, exactly as smart as we
are. It’s a terrifying thought.
BRIEFLY NOTED
In Montparnasse, by Sue Roe (Penguin). This history of Sur-
realism opens in Paris in 1911, when artists and writers, seek-
ing fertile ground beyond Cubism, were trading the hills of
Montmartre for the boulevards of Montparnasse. Amedeo
Modigliani, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, André
Breton, and Guillaume Apollinaire began to explore the idea
of the unconscious and the question “What is art?” Many
answers followed, including the anarchic iconoclasm of Dada
and the “exploratory marvels” of Salvador Dali. Roe proves a
sure-handed guide on the quest for “something more real
than reality” and excels in documenting clashes both serious
and silly—as when Breton demanded that René Magritte’s
wife remove a necklace bearing a cross.A Primer for Forgetting, by Lewis Hyde (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux). Roaming from ancient myth to contemporary truth-
and-reconciliation efforts, this unusual study dwells on “cases
in which letting go of the past proves to be at least as useful
as preserving it.” Because forgetting is entwined with mem-
ory, the book is as much about the latter as it is about the
former, interspersing childhood stories and a proposal for a
performative civil-rights memorial with discussions of
anti-mnemonics and “double forgetting,” which, according
to Buddhist teachings and St. Augustine, is crucial to slough-
ing off the transitory world. Forgetting is inextricably tied to
endings, to forgiveness, and to death, and the book is at times
wrenching: victors obscure inhuman massacres; Hyde’s el-
derly mother has forgotten his name.In West Mills, by De’Shawn Charles Winslow (Bloomsbury). This
début novel flits from 1941 to 1987, charting the life of Knot,
a smart, obstinate woman in her twenties who teaches school
in a mostly African-American town in North Carolina. She
also takes lovers, spurns them, drinks to excess at Miss Goldie’s
Bar, and reads a lot. She enjoys Dickens and corn liquor, things
“that couldn’t hurt her or be hurt by her.” Accidentally be-
coming pregnant, she gives the baby to a childless couple, then
continues her solitary life—though not without consequences.
Like Dickens, Winslow widens the aperture to include a mul-
titude of characters. The town is full of secrets, and the novel
rollicks through revelations of true parentage and hidden lives.The Chain, by Adrian McKinty (Mulholland). In this thriller, a
divorced mother receives a call telling her that her daughter
has been kidnapped. The kidnappers require her not only to
pay a ransom but also to kidnap another child. That child’s
parents must then do the same. If the police are contacted, the
kids will be killed. Thus the Chain turns victims into criminals
while enriching its anonymous masterminds. The protagonist
teams up with her ex-husband’s brother to plan a kidnapping
and to attempt to break the sequence of abductions by target-
ing the scheme’s originators. Beneath the gripping plot lies an
inquiry into the power of social media and crowdsourcing.
One of the Chain’s creators calls it “the goddamn Uber of kid-
napping with the clients doing most of the work themselves.”