The New Yorker - USA (2020-09-21)

(Antfer) #1

18 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020


Ayad Akhtar’s autofictional novel cunningly entwines outrage and ambivalence.


LIFEANDLETTERS


MAKING A SCENE


In the age of Trump, a writer explores America’s divisions—and his own.

BYALEXANDRASCHWARTZ


PHOTOGRAPH BY COLE BARASH


A


year after Donald Trump assumed
office, Ayad Akhtar was at the
American Academy in Rome, contem-
plating populism, the degradation of
democracy, and ruinous civil strife. He
had been mulling over the idea of a play
about the brothers Gracchus, plebeian
politicians in the century before Caesar
whose defiance of the senatorial élite
and championship of the poor led to an
unhappy end. Akhtar wasn’t alone in
consulting Roman history to gain per-
spective on the present. From his win-
dow, he could look out at the residence
of the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See,
Callista Gingrich, whose husband, Newt,
was studying Augustus, rumor had it,


for pointers on how to counsel a Presi-
dent who fancied himself an emperor.
Akhtar, who is forty-nine, is an ob-
sessive autodidact, with a mind like a
grappling hook for any subject that at-
tracts his interest. There are many. As a
kid growing up in the Milwaukee sub-
urbs, he studied the Quran with a rigor
that flummoxed his secular Pakistani
parents. As a theatre major at Brown,
he taught himself French, attaining
enough fluency in a year to direct his
own translations of Genet and Ber-
nard-Marie Koltès. When he was in his
twenties, working in New York as an
assistant to the director Andre Greg-
ory, he spent his free time analyzing

the prosody of Spenser’s “The Faerie
Queene” and poring over Freud, which
led to a years-long study of Jung, then
Lacan, then Winnicott. Although he
lost his faith in his teens, religion of all
kinds continues to fascinate him. “He’s
the only American I know who has read
Meister Eckhart,” the German writer
Daniel Kehlmann, a good friend of
Akhtar’s, told me, referring to the me-
dieval Christian theologian and mystic.
Success arrived late, but Akhtar has
made up for lost time. His first novel,
“American Dervish,” about the coming
of age of an innocent Pakistani-American
boy, was published in January, 2012, when
he was forty-one, the same month that
his first play, “Disgraced,” about the un-
ravelling of a jaded Pakistani-Ameri-
can lawyer, premièred, in Chicago. After
a buzzy run at Lincoln Center, where
tickets were scalped for fifteen hundred
dollars apiece, “Disgraced” won the Pu-
litzer Prize for drama, then moved to a
sold-out run in London, and to the Ly-
ceum Theatre, on Broadway.
In short order, Akhtar had three more
plays première, including “The Invisi-
ble Hand,” a thriller about an Ameri-
can hostage in Pakistan who, to pay his
ransom, teaches his fundamentalist cap-
tors how to manipulate financial mar-
kets, and “Junk,” another Broadway hit,
which transformed the dry subject of
high-yield bonds in the nineteen-eight-
ies into unexpectedly riveting drama.
“Ayad’s particular brilliance is that he
makes systems kinetic,” Josh Stern, a
producer who is working with Akhtar
to develop a television show, told me.
“He’s able to take this huge, compli-
cated infrastructure and distill it down
to visceral character drama in a way
that is unique.” As arcane as his intel-
lectual tastes can be, Akhtar is deter-
mined to appeal to a broad public.
“Proust meets Jerry Springer” is how
he described his work to me when I
met him, earlier this summer.
In Rome, Akhtar devoted himself
to the classics that lined the Academy’s
library: Livy, Tacitus, Machiavelli. One
afternoon, he opened Giacomo Leo-
pardi’s “Canti,” from 1835, and read the
book’s first poem, “To Italy”:
O my country, I can see the walls
and arches and columns and the statues
and lonely towers of our ancestors,
but I don’t see the glory...
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