THENEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 77ography attempt to sate the curiosity of
a public newly aware of Day because of
the effort to have her sainted. Not ev-
eryone is pleased by that possibility.
Loughery and Randolph write that some
conservatives are “horrified at the pros-
pect of canonizing a woman who had
an abortion and a child out of wedlock
and who condemned capitalism far more
frequently and vehemently than she
condemned Marxism-Leninism,” while
some progressives “fear the loss of her
radical edge,” believing that sainthood
“would be antithetical to her very un-
institutional, anti-hierarchical approach
to spiritual growth and social change.”
That controversy reflects the con-
tinuing animosity between the two cen-
tral aspects of Day’s identity. The Cath-
olic Worker Movement still exists, with
nearly two hundred houses of hospital-
ity around the world and a newspaper
that is still published and sold for a penny
(plus postage if you take it by mail), and
it still evangelizes for the “personalist”
approach—those revolutions of the heart.
But Day’s influence is also felt in the
Democratic Socialists of America, the
insurgent political organization that was
founded in the nineteen-seventies by
Michael Harrington, who had been an
editor at the Catholic Worker in the early
fifties, but who left after losing his faith.
He went on to publish “The Other
America: Poverty in the United States,”
which became the basis for John F. Ken-
nedy and Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on
Poverty. Unlike Day, who fought for
suffrage but never voted, the D.S.A. has
poured a great deal of its energy into
electoral politics to change not only
hearts, but parties and systems.
Needless to say, neither approach, per-
sonalist or structural, has succeeded. Even
before the coronavirus devastated our
economy and added millions to the un-
employment rolls, half a million Amer-
icans were homeless, twenty-seven mil-
lion lacked health insurance, thirty-eight
million lived in poverty, and forty million
relied on the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program, which the current
Administration is trying to cut. In the
face of that national emergency, one sus-
pects that Day would insist that no one
is the rightful owner of her legacy, be-
cause, as yet, no one has fulfilled it. Stop
talking about me, she’d almost certainly
say, and start talking about the poor.
BRIEFLY NOTED
Hex, by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight ( Viking). This swift-mov-
ing, sardonic novel follows Nell, a botanist, as she navigates
the fallout of her expulsion from graduate school, owing to
the accidental death of a colleague. Although Nell’s research
career ends prematurely, she persists in nurturing her inter-
est in poisonous plants by cultivating them in her apartment.
She also remains obsessed with her academic adviser, who is
otherwise occupied—by her husband’s affair with Nell’s best
friend, and, soon enough, by her own affair with Nell’s ex-boy-
friend. Dinerstein Knight paints a withering portrait of this
web of toxic romances, and of the excesses of academia, while
illustrating how both the heart and the mind can be broken
and reshaped by changing circumstances.New Waves, by Kevin Nguyen (One World). In this début novel,
two disgruntled tech workers—Margo, the sole black woman
engineer at her firm, and Lucas, the only Asian-American
non-engineer—form an odd couple whose plan to steal their
employer’s customer data is derailed when Margo is killed
in a car accident. Lucas moves to a rival startup, where he
moderates its Snapchat-like service (designed to abet whistle-
blowers, it is instead frequented by sexting teen-agers), and
sifts through Margo’s digital remains in the form of chat-
room transcripts and WAV files. While satirizing the tech
world’s social mores, Nguyen also unearths the biases that
govern our digital infrastructure, which are omnipresent in
everything from the algorithm behind Pac-Man to the un-
derpinnings of surveillance technology.Heaven and Hell, by Bart D. Ehrman (Simon & Schuster). This
elegant history explores the evolution of the concept of the
afterlife in Western thought. Tracing its development over
several millennia—from the dusty land of the dead in the
Epic of Gilgamesh to Virgil’s Elysium and Dante’s Para-
diso—Ehrman delves into the messy processes that gave rise
to doctrines like Purgatory and bodily resurrection. Well-
trod subjects are presented with engaging clarity, and more
contentious theories are laid out carefully. Examining why
certain concepts have proved so durable while others have
fallen away, Ehrman asserts that humanity’s visions of the
afterlife speak to its deepest “needs and aspirations.”Three Brothers, by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by
Carlos Rojas (Grove). This memoir of growing up during the
Cultural Revolution focusses on Yan’s memories of his fam-
ily: his father, who toiled in their field; his elder uncle, who
sold home-made socks and wore a jacket covered with patches;
and his younger uncle, thought to be the one who got away,
who worked long shifts at a cement factory. Yan recalls both
the immense pleasure brought by simple luxuries—candies,
sweet potatoes, a shiny polyester shirt—and the initial allure
of the city, where life seemed to have meaning beyond the
repetition of the harvest and building tile-roofed houses for
one’s children to get married in. He left, eventually settling
in Beijing, only to yearn for his ancestral land.