THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 67
an increasingly tetchy bar argument.
Artists, Deresiewicz contends, once
imagined worlds other than this one.
What might we forfeit if only the in-
dependently wealthy can pursue art for
a living?
“The Death of the Artist” is relent-
lessly bleak, in much the same way
that conversations around college debt
or a post-automation economy are
bleak. “You shouldn’t have to be a win-
ner not to be a loser,” Deresiewicz
writes. By the end, it has become clear
that his subject was always inequality.
Art is often prophetic; here it just
reflects the broader reality, where a
few prosper, many do not, and the
space in the middle dissolves. Dere-
siewicz’s answer to the predicament
is to “organize.”
In recent years, artists have seriously
interrogated what it means to be mem-
bers of a community. Rockefeller and
Carnegie built museums, but they were
still plutocrats. It hardly brings com-
fort to think about David Koch’s sup-
port for Lincoln Center or the Sack-
lers’ for the Louvre and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Artists have pushed
the conversation on financial divest-
ment. The recent #PublishingPaidMe
hashtag on Twitter allowed writers a
space to share information and nego-
tiation strategies.
What Deresiewicz means by “or-
ganizing” is something even grander
than new patronage models or indus-
try transparency. He dreams of break-
ing up monopolies, raising the min-
imum wage, empowering workers,
making college cheaper, and revers-
ing corporate tax cuts, all in the name
of “rebuilding the middle class.” It’s
an unromantic answer to the book’s
overarching question of what is to
be done for the struggling artist. “We
do not need the government to pay
for art, or the rich with their philan-
thropy,” he tells us. “We only need
each other.” In this moment, Dere-
siewicz’s crankiness melts away. He
seems no longer like a naysaying critic
but like someone who has converted
all the songs, stories, and visions in
his head into something else. It’s pos-
sibly the book’s most convincing an-
swer to why art continues to matter
even as it loses value. Why not ask
for what seems impossible?
BRIEFLY NOTED
Life of a Klansman, by Edward Ball (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
This brave and often discomfiting portrait examines one of
the author’s great-great-grandfathers, a Confederate veteran
who lived in New Orleans, where he eked out a living as a
carpenter and joined white-supremacist terrorist organiza-
tions to rampage against the disappearance of the South’s old
racial order. While Ball unflinchingly describes the violence
that his ancestor took part in, which left some four thousand
African-Americans wounded or dead in Louisiana alone, he
rejects a facile morality that could lead modern readers to dis-
miss these acts as barbaric crimes of long ago. The book finds
in its subject the same fears and prejudices that feed present-
day tribal identities, cautions against historical amnesia, and
invites a broader kind of reckoning.Lying in State, by Eric Alterman (Basic Books). In this history
of Presidential mendacity, Alterman, a columnist for The Na-
tion and a historian of the media, delineates centuries of lies
issued from the Oval Office, culminating in those of the
Trump Presidency. He makes plain how Trump’s elaboration
of that behavior, and also the media’s acquiescence, confu-
sion, and exhaustion have eroded the country’s institutions,
public life, and national spirit. The book joins manifestos by
Timothy Snyder, Masha Gessen, and many others in raising
the alarm against Trump’s war on truth and, by extension, on
democratic life.little scratch, by Rebecca Watson (Doubleday). This extraordi-
nary début novel records a young woman’s thoughts as she
moves through a single day. By arranging text in unconven-
tional ways, Watson conveys the shapes and the rhythms of
thought, and coheres scraps of consciousness into clear mo-
ments of impression, observation, and anxiety. On some pages,
full sentences are contained in columns on one side, while
fragments of conversation or sense perception appear on the
other; elsewhere, an unwelcome inquiry is greeted by blank
space, and repeated words conjure the feeling of motion. To-
ward the end, the narrator poses a question that disintegrates
as it runs down the page, which reveals the book’s self-conscious
preoccupations: “how many times how long will I
continue to think like this/analysing as I go warily pre-
cariously measuring what I think.”The Queen of Tuesday, by Darin Strauss (Random House).
“Half memoir and half make-believe,” this boisterous novel
relates an imagined affair between Lucille Ball, whose role on
“I Love Lucy” transformed her into a paragon of the Amer-
ican wife, and the author’s grandfather Isidore, a suburban
property developer who once dreamed of becoming a writer.
Isidore cannot reconcile domesticity with sensuality—a con-
tradiction that Lucille, in her pursuit of appearing as “a har-
ried housewife people believe in while being a star they desire, ”
lives out. Ultimately, the novel is a touching account of the
sacrifices that Lucille makes to preserve her “most genuine”
relationship: the one “between her and the public.”