The Washington Post - 13.03.2020

C2 eZ re the washington post.friday, march 13 , 2020

create an audience for serious

ideas through the lens of enter-

tainment, “Amnesty” lures the

reader into considering how any

one person might navigate such

unjust governance. To engage

with the courts is to put yourself

at their unproven mercy, a hard

fact that may need fiction to gain

traction in the public imagina-

tion.

It doesn’t spoil the denoue-

ment to which “A mnesty” inces-

santly marches to posit that

Danny’s position is impossible.

He can either ruin his own life or

he can ruin his idea of himself,

which may be worse.

What, then, did he envision?

What kind of man did he want to

be? And what kind of society do

we want to create? Denied the

meager gratifications of a costly

assimilation and haunted by

never becoming more than myri-

ad countries wanted for him,

Danny makes a hard choice,

knowing he could pay in blood.

What would you do?

[email protected]

Kristen Millares Young is the

author of “subduction,” a novel

forthcoming from red hen Press on

april 14.

spools over 11 tense hours during

which Danny debates telling the

police what he knows: the mur-

dered woman’s l over liked to t ake

her to the creek where her lacer-

ated body was found, wrapped in

that telltale leather jacket,

weighted with stones.

Allegory is a soulful premise

and a possible remedy for how

global economic discourse re-

treats into statistics. In Danny,

Adiga creates an archetype of the

human condition — a manual

laborer trapped by his basic

needs, mired in lost hope for the

flourishing of a botched migra-

tion. But no matter how taut the

plot, Adiga’s spare secondary

characters failed to break free of

two dimensions.

Should Danny phone it in? or

had Adiga already done so?

Although “A mnesty” succeeds

in wrenching attention toward

systemic injustice, its stylized,

iterative interactions are too cur-

sory to move past being concept

demonstrations. Adiga provides

just enough character develop-

ment to support the assertion

that yes, people are so like that,

and here’s an antagonist to prove

it.

Like many crime dramas that

societal recognition and emo-

tional comfort they crave, and so

they cling to their affair and

other addictions.

During bouts on the town,

Danny becomes more, and also

less, than their housekeeper —

an unseen seer of society and its

unhappiness, beginning with

his own, which is temporarily

displaced, then enhanced, by

their drama. radha — “Strong

woman, House Number five,

radha: wide-hipped, muscled”

— is beyond Danny’s romantic

reach, which imbues their rela-

tionship with pathos and degra-

dation.

radha is cheating on her Aus-

tralian husband, who sustains

and controls her after the scan-

dal she wrought when she bilked

her medicare workplace f or g am-

bling money. Prakash is a lover

whose regard comes cheap, al-

though he looks expensive in his

signature red leather jacket. re-

liant on radha for his rental

apartment and living expenses,

Prakash nevertheless hates her

authority and resents her m arital

obligations. And then she turns

up dead.

Time-stamped like a michael

Crichton novel, “A mnesty” un-

thor skewered the unprosecuted

corruption of the upper classes.

Those same tropes govern the

Australian present and Sri Lank-

an past of “A mnesty,” in which

Danny is befriended by clients

radha Thomas and Prakash

Wadhwa, compulsive Indian lov-

ers who in their adopted country

have acquired nothing like the

“darkness” of Indian society in

his brilliant debut novel, “The

White Tiger,” which won the

2008 man Booker Prize by fea-

turing an abused servant turned

cutthroat entrepreneur. In a poi-

gnant series of sarcastic letters

addressed to a Chinese premier

by Adiga’s garrulous, dangerous

and hilarious narrator, the au-

says, “At least you’re not a suit.”
Adiga shines when document-
ing the ways in which immi-
grants are marginalized by those
who claim to care about them,
for “Danny had always thought
of himself as a man who had
come to Sydney to wear suits.”
flabbergasted that he lives in
a grocery storeroom that she
refuses to visit, Sonja cannot
understand why he would give
up the beauty of his native
Batticaloa. In response to her
questions, Danny knows he’ll
“have to start lying.” His actual
thoughts are too caustic to earn
the pity she would offer in lieu of
acceptance, and to tell his true
story could expose h im t o betray-
al.
With crisp dialogue, constant
movement and occasional flash-
backs, Adiga shows Danny’s
choice to close himself off as
reasonable. facing desperate
consequences occasioned by one
misplaced secret, Danny cannot
afford to trust.
The scarcity of kindness in
“A mnesty” is the author’s lasting
accusation. Adiga faced back-
lash for his depiction of the

book world from C1

‘Amnesty’: A human story carved into the style of a thriller

fernando morales

aravind adiga’s “amnesty” unspools over 11 tense hours in the life

of a Tamil immigrant in australia.

BY MICHAEL J. WEST

There’s an awful lot of gravitas
that comes with avant-garde
jazz. It’s a side effect of being a
niche genre among niche genres.
But it can also be an obstruction
for what should, with its lack of
rules or conventions, be one of
the most playful and exuberant
forms of all.
Jaimie Branch knows this. T he
Brooklyn (by way of Chicago)
trumpeter, composer and singer
maintains a super-casual image
— T-shirts and sports jerseys,
ripped jeans, unkempt hair and,
invariably, a cocked baseball cap
— that connects her to the street
instead of the ivory tower. That
said, she also wore a flowered
robe at the Kennedy Center’s
Club at Studio K on Wednesday
night, which added an ironic
twist. maybe that was the point.
Branch and her quartet, fly or
Die, put some fun back into the
avant-garde.
Yes, there was still some gravi-
tas to be had, but they got it out
of the way early — and flippantly.
“I’ve been really psyched to play
this song in D.C.!” said Branch,
introducing her politically point-
ed “Prayer for Amerikkka Parts 1
& 2,” the second song on last
year’s “fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of
Paradise,” which the band played
in its entirety. Sure enough, she
sang and played it menacingly,
prowling back and forth onstage
like a caged animal and shout-
ing, “We’ve got a bunch of wide-
eyed racists!”
The dark stuff thus dis-
patched, the rest of the set had
not only more spice but more
dance. “Twenty-Three N me, Ju-
piter redux” had drummer Chad
Ta ylor, bassist Jason Ajemian
and cellist Lester St. Louis play-
ing odd-meter patterns together
while Branch did a light little

step at center stage, yelping out

riffs with her trumpet. Later, she

danced outright, banging on a

tambourine in between the tasty

licks of “Simple Silver Surfer.”

Eventually, everyone onstage got

moving, all four playing percus-

sion instruments on the Latin

street groove “Bird Dogs of Para-

dise.”

There was a lot of levity,

intentional or no. When the

atonal, reverb-soaked abstrac-

tion “Whales” threatened to get

too heavy, Branch interrupted

her o wn g uttural drones t o yell t o

the sound man. “ryan, turn that

up!” A few minutes later, as the

quartet was moving back into

consonance, St. Louis prema-

turely began improvising while

Branch was still going. The band

members kidded h im — “She was

right in the middle, man!,”

Ajemian said — and St. Louis

rolled his eyes.

Near the end of the set, St.

Louis got an assist from Branch.

“Can you guys hear the cello out

there?” She asked as the band

began “Nuevo roquero Estéreo.”

The audience applauded. As the

quartet began the closing, sar-

donic singalong “Love Song,”

Branch circled back to that mo-

ment. “Yo, we made it!” she

shouted cheerily. “We made it

through that whole Lester

scare.”

[email protected]

MUSIC REVIEW

At the Kennedy Center, Jaimie Branch blows a note of fun into avant-garde jazz

Peter gannushkin

Trumpeter Jaimie branch and her quartet, Fly or die, brought some cutting-edge fun to avant-garde jazz at the kennedy Center’s Studio k on wednesday night.

to long-term financial stability.
The result has been a pullback
by venture capital firms that once
showered start-up dollars on the
likes of Buzzfeed, Vice, Vox, Busi-
ness Insider and other digi-news
ingenues. There’s also been
shrinkage within: over a few days
in January last year, Buzzfeed,
AoL, Yahoo and HuffPost — the
latter three all owned by Verizon
media — collectively laid off more
than a thousand employees.
Smaller sites, such as mic,
refinery29, the outline and Pop-
Sugar, have sought financial sta-
bility by selling to larger sites.
None of the major digital play-
ers has undergone as radical a
transformation as HuffPost did
under Polgreen. The site once
emphasized “user-generated con-
tent” — a hodgepodge of political
opinion and personal essays by
celebrities, quasi-celebrities and
random writers. Polgreen, a for-
mer editor at the New York
Times, moved HuffPost toward
more original journalism.
The upshot has been that far
fewer people now visit HuffPost,
although those who do stay lon-
ger — the kind of increased “en-
gagement” that advertisers like.
figures compiled by the Com-
Score tracking firm show that
HuffPost’s monthly traffic

new media from C1 plunged by nearly half, from
66.5 million in January 2018 to
34.9 million in January while the
time-per-visit grew from 8.8 min-
utes to 11.3 minutes, a 28 percent
increase. (HuffPost disputes the
January 2020 number, which
would also mark an unusual drop
from ComScore’s records of Huff-
Post’s traffic through the final
months of 2019.)
What this means for HuffPost’s
overall financial condition is un-
clear. Verizon media said it
doesn’t comment on its financial
performance; Polgreen herself
said the answer is a bit of a
mystery.
“I wouldn’t even know how to
answer that,” s he said in an inter-
view. “I’ve asked that question
myself.”
Polgreen, who is joining the
podcast company Gimlet media
as head of content, said it’s a fluke
that she and Smith departed their
companies around the same time
and that neither departure tells a
larger story. “This [new job] was
just an opportunity that sparked
my imagination,” s he said.
Smith, in a brief interview,
made a similar comment, saying
his decision to leave Buzzfeed
was “very much a personal
choice.” He said he wanted to
return to writing, though he
didn’t explain why he couldn’t do
so at Buzzfeed. He said he re-
mains “optimistic” about the

company’s future.

Ye t Smith himself hinted at the

trouble underlying the digital-

news sector in his first column for

the New York Times, in which he

noted that the Times had re-

gained its financial footing at a

time when others are struggling.

Smith wrote that the Times has

poached “many of the [digital

journalists] who once threatened

it,” i ncluding the former top edi-

tors of sites such as Gawker,

recode, Quartz and now Buzz-

feed. The newspaper has also

stocked its newsroom with star

journalists from another digital

start-up, Politico, where Smith

himself used to work, including

White House correspondent

maggie Haberman and political

reporter Jonathan martin.

more ominously, he quoted

Josh Ty rangiel, a former senior

vice president at Vice, as describ-

ing the gulf between the Times

and other publications as a “moat

... so wide that I can’t see anyone
getting into it. There’s no new
thing coming.”
Smith’s former boss, Buzzfeed
chief executive Jonah Peretti,
says his company turned a profit
in the second half of last year, and
is on track to make 2020 its first
full-year profit since 2013. “We’re
in a better spot than we’ve ever
been,” he said. “The past two to
three years were tough, but now
we’re on the other side of it. Ben

New media su≠ers woes of old media

left us in good shape.”

But others won’t be so lucky,

Peretti thinks, as the eager ven-

ture money of years past evapo-

rates. “The smaller companies

need to find a home with the

bigger companies in the digital-

media space,” he said. “There

could be more consolidation in

this industry. We’re fortunate to

be at a scale where we can stand

alone. We’re able to operate with-

out having to consolidate.”

Even so, the digital survivors

“are unlikely to turn into the

high-margin businesses that

newspapers once were,” said Jim

Brady, the chief executive of Spir-

ited media, which formerly oper-

ated local-news sites in Philadel-

phia, Pittsburgh and Denver.

Brady, the former executive

editor of washingtonpost.com,

says there’s a simple reason for

Smith and Polgreen’s abdica-

tions.

“running digital news sites are

grueling jobs,” he says. “You’re

running 24/7. Huffpo and Buzz-

feed are constantly under the

microscope. You’re managing

huge staffs. And you have to be

active participants in discussions

about the business.”

He added, “We’re at the point

where anyone running a site cov-

ering this election needs to either

buckle up and get ready for the

ride or get out of the car now so

that there’s time to get someone

new in place and up to speed.”

[email protected]

rachel murray/getty images for makers

HuffPost editor in Chief lydia Polgreen, left, with Tarana burke at makers Conference in dana Point,

Calif., says she isn’t leaving the new-media website because of the industry climate.

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