8 The New York Review
have been more aware,” Senator
Biden confessed over the tele-
phone line. “... Aw kiddo I feel
for you. I wish I weren’t the chair-
man, I’d come to be your lawyer,”
he added when I told him I had
not secured legal counsel. I fought
the urge to respond as I furiously
took notes of our conversation,
hoping for some useful informa-
tion. Little concrete information
was forthcoming. As he closed the
conversation, I could almost see
him flashing his instant smile to
convince both of us that the expe-
rience would be agreeable.^4“Aw kiddo I feel for you” is pure Biden.
If he could have reached through the
telephone, he would surely have mas-
saged Hill’s shoulders. There is no
reason to think he was disingenuous.
The problem is that he felt for Clarence
Thomas too. As Witcover puts it, “Joe
seemed to be trying to convince both
the judge and his female adversary that
he was their friend.” After receiving
Hill’s written allegations but before she
testified, Biden went to the Senate floor
to say that “for this senator, there is no
question with respect to the nominee’s
character... I believe there are certain
things that are not an issue at all.” He
then failed to call the two women who
could corroborate Hill’s testimony, Rose
Jourdain and Angela Wright, to appear
before his committee. Feeling is not
enough: there were great questions of
gender and power and the nature of pub-
lic deliberation at play in the Thomas
hearings, and “aw kiddo” was a bru-
tally inadequate answer to any of them.
This is not to deny the power or the
sincerity of Biden’s empathy. It is real
and rooted and fundamentally decent.
It has at its core the baffled humility
of the human helplessness in the face
of death that makes life “so difficult
to discern.” As an antidote to Donald
Trump’s grotesquely inflated “great-
ness,” it has authentic force. It is a dif-
ferent, and much better, way of talking
about distress, of making pain a shared
thing rather than a motor of resent-
ment. But can a politics of grief be ad-
equate to a politics of grievance? Can it
deal either with the real grievances of
structural inequality or with the toxic
self-pity that Trump has both fosteredand embodied? Biden’s essential ap-
peal as a candidate for 2020 is that he
(not least being older, male, and white)
is the only one who can heal a heartbro-
ken and divided America. But he cannot
embrace voters one by one. The US can-
not be made whole again because it has
never been whole. Biden’s core belief is
that injustice is a failure of benevolence
and effort: “There is nothing inherently
wrong with the system; it’s up to each of
us to do our part to make it work.” But
division is real and profound and struc-
tural—it is not just a matter of feeling.
The need is not to reconcile everyone
to the balance of power but to alter
that balance. Consolation is not social
change. Solace is not enough.
When he was vice president, Biden
became fixated on the digital clock
outside his official residence in the
Naval Observatory in Washington. As
he recalls in Promise Me, Dad, “Red
numbers glowed, ticking away in met-
ronomic perfection.... This was the
nation’s Precise Time, which was gen-
erated less than a hundred yards away,
by the US Naval Observatory Master
Clock.” The young Biden thought he
could turn the clock back to begin again
at 1960, but the Master Clock moves in
one direction only, and as the decades
pass they bring the realization that
there will be no Precise Time for Presi-
dent Biden. As his limousine pulls out
onto Massachusetts Avenue, he sees it
in his mind’s eye: “The clock was be-
hind us in a flash, out of sight, but still
marking the time as it melted away.”
The years melt away and the presi-
dential dream recedes as Biden keeps
striving toward it, driven by a sense of
destiny that has become, over the years,
less shining and more tragic. What
began in bold hope is now tinged with
despair—what else but the presidency
could make sense of all his suffering?
But the Master Clock has moved
too far forward. The Kennedys are too
long dead. “Irish Catholic” no longer
carries that old underdog voltage of
resistance to oppression. The center
of gravity of Irish-American politics
now gathers around Trump: Mick Mul-
vaney, Kellyanne Conway, Brett Kava-
naugh. A politics of white resentment
has drowned out the plaintive wail of
common sorrow. The valley of tears
has been annexed as a bastion of privi-
leged white, male suffering. Biden, who
once promised to turn back time, is an
increasingly poignant embodiment of
its pitilessness. QCLIVE JAMES
(1939–2019)JONATHAN MILLER
(1934–2019)FELIX ROHATYN
(1928–2019)ELISABETH SIFTON
(1939–2019)PAUL VOLCKER
(1927–2019)We mourn the death of these
long-standing contributors and friends.(^4) Anita Hill, Speaking Truth to Power
(Doubleday, 1997), p. 156.
The Ferrante Letters
An Experiment in Collective Criticism
SARAH CHIHAYA,
MERVE EMRE,
KATHERINE HILL,
AND JILL RICHARDS
“The Ferrante Letters is a smart,
beautiful, often moving meditation
on the experience of reading the
Neapolitan Quartet. This collection
of letters and essays deftly manages
that tricky balance of the creative,
the critical, and the personal.
A magnifi cent accomplishment.”
—Namwali Serpell, author of
The Old Drift: A Novel
The Self-Help Compulsion
Searching for Advice in Modern Literature
BETH BLUM
“Beth Blum has opened our eyes to
a fascinating area: the intersection
between self-help and serious
literature. Blum is deeply unusual
among scholars in appreciating
the extent to which ordinary
readers seek solace and insight in
literature—and she explores the
consequences of this idea in a
series of readings of important and
interesting writers.”
—Alain de Botton, author of
How Proust Can Change Your Life
V. S. Naipaul’s
Journeys
From Periphery to Center
SANJAY KRISHNAN
“Will prove invaluable
to serious readers and
Naipaul scholars alike.”
—Publishers Weekly
Shadow Archives
The Lifecycles of African American Literature
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE
CLOUTIER
“In this fascinating book,
Jean-Christophe Cloutier...
presents an original and compelling
approach to the history of African
American literature.”
—Henry Louis Gates Jr.,
Harvard University
COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU
NAMED A 2019 BOOK OF THE
YEAR by Lucy Beckett,
Times Literary Supplement
“Chilling and
compulsively
readable.”
—Lucy Beckett
A German Officer
in Occupied Paris
by ERNST JÜNGER