THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020 65
a nod in the direction of his troubles, but
with no hard look at what those troubles
meant. “Everybody has their thing sexu-
ally,” he said. “But when everyone knows
what your thing is...now Obama knows
what my thing is. Oh, God.”
In his previous incarnation as a guy
who played arenas, C.K. was tremen-
dously skillful at doing what the best co-
medians can do: collapse time and iden-
tity, be simultaneously themselves and
other people and the memory of their
former selves. “I was a child pedophile,”
he said in one of the evening’s most in-
teresting bits. “A six-year-old child pe-
dophile, and I’d go up to twelve-year-
old boys and be, like, ‘What’s up?’” I t
was a fabulous beginning to a story that
involved his obsession with a magazine-
cover photograph of the teen heartthrob
Shaun Cassidy, but—unlike the episode
of “Louie” in which Louie falls in love
with a man—it soon backed away from
the subject, which was perhaps too homo
for this crowd, and morphed into a differ-
ent anecdote, about Cassidy playing a
mentally handicapped person and the
use of the word “retarded.”
As the show went on, I began to want
to feed C.K., telepathically, the differ-
ent forms of storytelling he brought to
his work when he was at the top of his
game and unafraid of losing out on being
loved. What if he were to turn his shame
into a story? What if he imagined how
his dick looked to a woman he had hor-
rified? Couldn’t he go there, Richard
Pryor style, and talk from the vantage
point of his disgraced penis? Instead, he
let his better stories trail off, fearing per-
haps the existential ramifications of doing
what he used to do, digging and danc-
ing in the minefields of our collective
unconscious. At one point, he told us
that his mother had died recently. He
was genuinely choked up, and then he
zeroed in on his grief with an efficiency
that was shocking, cold, and fascinating,
and asked if we ever wondered how many
dicks our mothers had had in their lives.
“Wouldn’t it be amazing,” he said, “if
your mom was, like, ‘I was with a black
guy once. It was hot’?” Then he moved
on to something else. But wouldn’t it be
hot if the new Louis C.K., jettisoning
fear and self-consciousness, tapped into
his old brain and became his mother,
teetering toward that black consort, in
love with the American forbidden? ♦
BRIEFLY NOTED
A Game of Birds and Wolves, by Simon Parkin (Little, Brown).
In 1941, the British Navy faced a seemingly insurmountable
threat from the German U-boat fleet, whose “wolfpack” tac-
tics baffled Allied commanders. In this engaging history, Parkin
tells how members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, known
as Wrens, helped develop a tactical training game that led to
a decisive turning point in the war. They brought statistical and
mathematical sophistication to their task, turning the floor of
their control room into a giant game board and running count-
less reënactments and hypothetical scenarios. Parkin paints a
vivid picture of training sessions in which seasoned sailors
chafed at being tutored by “an inexperienced girl,” and captures
each maneuver in the ensuing sea battles with zeal.Dominion, by Tom Holland (Basic Books). This lively, capacious
history of Christianity emphasizes the extent to which the
religion still underpins Western liberal values. Holland argues
that Christianity is to thank for our belief in the “intrinsic
value” of human life and our respect for poverty and suffer-
ing. He traces even emphatically secular ideas, such as Marx-
ism, to religious ethics, including brotherhood and equality,
and emphasizes Christianity’s progressive aspects. St. Cath-
erine of Siena’s rejection of an arranged marriage—she claimed
that she was betrothed to Christ and, later, that her wedding
ring was the foreskin from Christ’s circumcision—is seen not
as an example of virginal virtue but in quasi-feminist terms,
as establishing the idea that “consent, not coercion,” is the
“proper foundation of a marriage.”Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu (Pantheon). The Asian im-
migrant experience is rendered as a series of stereotypical roles
in a weekly television show in this inventive and entertaining
novel. At a Chinese restaurant, the Golden Palace, workers
live upstairs and double as extras. The protagonist, Willis Wu,
starts off as “Background Oriental Male,” later rising to “Ge-
neric Asian Man” and “Special Guest Star,” on a trajectory
that he hopes will take him to the pinnacle of “Kung Fu Guy.”
Narrated in the second person, with lengthy passages pre-
sented in screenplay format, the novel incisively examines the
Asian-American reality of “being perpetual foreigners” in the
United States, a minority whose story “will never fit into Black
and White.”Stateway’s Garden, by Jasmon Drain (Random House). Linking
these stories, set in the era of Reaganomics, is Tracy, a smart
kid with a mother “as emotional as the pages of a science text-
book,” who lives in the Stateway Gardens housing project, in
Chicago. From his window, on the fourteenth floor, he can see
half the city, and, closer by, the building where a family friend,
who has “been through the dismal crevices of the world,” shares
a place with her aunt, her children, and an ambitious sister. The
buildings—a utopian idea that ended in decay and demolition—
bear witness to gnawing troubles and quiet revelations: “the
brittle taste of whiskey,” a boy’s chin like “the perfect petal of
an orchid,” “late-night horn honks...as welcome as soft music.”