THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022 61
BRIEFLY NOTED
South to America, by Imani Perry (Ecco). Structured as a jour-
ney, with chapters organized by location, this history of the
American South examines its subject from both personal and
sociopolitical perspectives. Perry, an Alabama-born Princeton
professor, encounters a Confederate reënactor in Harpers
Ferry, West Virginia, and visits the Equal Justice Initiative’s
museum, in Montgomery, Alabama, which is situated near a
parole office. She draws connections between the past and
contemporary experience—for instance, she reads Thomas
Jefferson’s racist observations on Black people in the light of
her own Ancestry.com results. Threading her protagonists’
narratives through the book, Perry admits to “a bit of navel-
gazing” but observes that, “if you gaze anywhere with a crit-
ical eye, you do have to look at your own belly, too.”The Uninnocent, by Katharine Blake (Farrar, Straus & Gi
roux). When the author of this fragmentary memoir was at
law school, a teen-age cousin had a psychotic break and killed
a young boy. Blake, now a law professor, traces the aftermath
of the killing and her attempts to comprehend it, examining
Anna Freud’s writing on defense mechanisms after a psy-
chotherapist tells her that “a psychotic break is just intense
fear.” Having kept her distance from her cousin, Blake even-
tually corresponds with him and visits him in prison. She
avoids neat conclusions or a sense of absolution, but her legal
background and her insights yield a thought-provoking con-
sideration of the limits of our criminal justice system.The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, by Hannah Lillith Assadi (River
head). Through the fog of dementia, Elle, the narrator of this
novel, recounts her life on an island off the coast of Georgia
during the Second World War. She, her husband, and a man
named Gabriel (with whom she is in love, and who poses as
her cousin) have come to mine an enigmatic mineral, Caeru-
leum, that glows blue in the coastal waters. They hope that
its gemlike properties, or perhaps even its pharmaceutical
ones, will make them rich. But events surrounding their ex-
cavations lead Elle to wonder if “beauty and death are coin-
cident, codependent.” As her thoughts move back and forth
in time, dual mysteries rise to the surface: what happened to
her grasp on reality and what happened to Gabriel?The Swank Hotel, by Lucy Corin (Graywolf ). Unfolding amid
the 2008 financial crisis, this hypnotic, antic novel revolves
around two sisters: Emilie, who works at a drab job in a
nondescript town where she has bought an “adorable starter
home”; and Adeline, who suffers from mental illness and
has gone missing. News arrives that Ad has committed
suicide, then that she survived, and Em flies to be with her
in Kansas City. Corin conveys a sense that insanity is ev-
erywhere: in the sisters’ family history, in a colleague’s af-
fair, in news items and the plot of a television documen-
tary. “The mad see the unseen,” she writes. “What the
collective suspects but can’t express, a perpetual friction-
less swing from object to subject.”source material, testifies not to the anx-
iety of plagiarism but to the relaxedness
of homage.
Plagiarists do what they do out of
weakness, because they need stolen as-
sistance. Does that sound like Led Zep-
pelin? The genius of “Whole Lotta
Love” lies in its opening five-note riff,
which has no obvious musical connec-
tion to Dixon’s song. “The Lemon
Song” makes of “Killing Floor” some-
thing entirely new. “Since I’ve Been
Loving You” is a better and richer song
than Moby Grape’s “Never.” “When
the Levee Breaks” is astonishingly dif-
ferent from Memphis Minnie’s. (It isn’t
a blues song, for starters.) And, yes,
“Stairway to Heaven” has more spirit,
along with a few other dynamics, than
Spirit’s “Taurus.” Besides, Led Zeppe-
lin did credit many of its sources. The
first album names Willie Dixon as the
composer of “You Shook Me” and “I
Can’t Quit You Baby.” Generally, on
the matter of homage and appropria-
tion, I agree with Jean-Michel Gues-
don and Philippe Margotin, who, in
“Led Zeppelin: All the Songs,” call the
band’s version of the latter song “one
of the most beautiful and moving trib-
utes ever paid by a British group to its
African American elders.”
Still, such indebtedness can rub
pride thin. It was always a bit embar-
rassing, if you grew up in Britain in
the nineteen-seventies, that the local
rock stars one so admired seemed com-
pelled to sing with fake American ac-
cents. Why was this guy even singing
about a levee? Sometimes I used to
catch myself thinking, Do they really
have to sound like that? It turned out
that they didn’t really have to; native
help was coming. A movement of punk
and New Wave bands was marshal-
ling pallid performers who would spit
and stutter in various regional accents:
“They smelled of pubs, and Worm-
wood Scrubs/And too many right-
wing meetings.” Led Zep simply had
to shuffle off and die. The Who paved
the way for British punk, or for a great
new mod band like the Jam, not just
because Townshend smashed up his
guitars but because his lyrics were
armed with a social mission: the Sex
Pistols covered the Who’s “Substi-
tute.” But Led Zeppelin made punk
dialectically inevitable. The cloudy