THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022 57
in the Time of Contagion” (Pantheon),
the film-studies professor and cultural
critic Laura Kipnis argues that women
are still far from exercising enough
agency in their sexual dealings with
men. For her, the decline in sex is one
of several signs that relations between
men and women have reached an im-
passe. “Just as the death rate from COVID
in the U.S. unmasked the enduring in-
equalities of the American political sys-
tem,” she observes, “#MeToo exposed
that heterosexuality as traditionally
practiced had long been on a collision
course with the imperatives of gender
parity.” Kipnis credits #MeToo with
unleashing “a lot of hatreds,” some of
which were warranted and overdue for
an airing, and some of which, she be-
lieves, were overstated or misplaced.
Her exhilaration during the early
stages of #MeToo curdled, she reports,
when “conservative elements” hijacked
whatever was “grassroots and profound”
in the movement, and what had seemed
to her a laudable effort to overturn
the old feudal order degenerated into
a punitive hunt for men who told
ill-considered jokes or accompanied
women on what became uncomfort-
able lunch dates.
Kipnis sees a tension between the
puritanism of the rhetoric surrounding
the movement and what she suspects
is a continuing attraction on the part
of many young feminists to old-school
masculinity. “There’s something diffi-
cult to talk about when it comes to het-
erosexuality and its abjections ... and
#MeToo has in no way made talking
about it any more honest,” she writes.
“I suspect that the most politically
awkward libidinal position for a young
woman at the moment would be a sex-
ual attraction to male power.” One sign
of the “neurotic self-contradiction” lurk-
ing within the culture, she contends, is
that, in 2018, the Oxford English Dic-
tionary’s shortlist for Word of the Year
included both “toxic”—as in toxic mas-
culinity—and “Big Dick Energy.”
Kipnis is less interested in banish-
ing such contradictions than in having
her fellow-feminists acknowledge and
embrace the transgressive nature of de-
sire. If the heterosexual compact is ever
to be repaired, she suggests, not only
will men have to relinquish some of
their brutish tendencies but women will
BRIEFLY NOTED
My Fourth Time, We Drowned, by Sally Hayden (Melville).
In 2018, Hayden, an Irish journalist, received a Facebook mes-
sage from an Eritrean man imprisoned in a migrant detention
center in Tripoli. His missive afforded her a window into the
horrors faced by African refugees seeking a Mediterranean
route to Europe. Through interviews with hundreds of migrants,
whose remarks punctuate the text, and humanitarian workers,
Hayden learns of Libyan warehouses where starving detain-
ees are held in scorching temperatures, raped and beaten, and
sold to traffickers. While documenting these cruelties, Hayden
also examines how Western institutions like the European
Union perpetuate the conditions that allow them to take place.Dream-Child, by Eric G. Wilson ( Yale). This electrifying por-
trait of Charles Lamb is the first full-length biography of the
Romantic-era essayist, poet, and satirist to appear since 1905.
Perhaps best remembered as the co-author, with his sister,
Mary, of “Tales from Shakespeare,” and as the interlocutor
of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lamb has long been regarded
as a benevolent figure who cared for his sister after she mur-
dered their mother in a psychotic break. This idealized ren-
dering elides the Lamb who confronted drinking problems
and depression, and whose urbane first-person essays—iden-
tified by Wilson as forerunners of those by Virginia Woolf
and David Foster Wallace—exhibited a complicated embrace
of city life and of modernity.Run and Hide, by Pankaj Mishra (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
An examination of “rising India” that casts a critical eye on
its self-made men, Mishra’s novel follows three college class-
mates who are bonded by sexual trauma and desperate to es-
cape their “dire lower-middle-class straits.” While two of
them—a hedge-fund billionaire and a brash public intellec-
tual—struggle with the vertiginous heights to which they
have elevated themselves, the narrator, who has retreated to
a mountain village to work as a translator, avoids becoming
ensnared in similar dilemmas until he begins a romance with
a wealthy woman. Written in lucid prose, with a keen sense
for sociological detail, the novel is a study of figures “dazzled
by their own hard-won freedom.”The White Girl, by Tony Birch (HarperVia). This novel, set
in a remote Australian town in the nineteen-sixties, centers
on an Aborigine woman, Odette, and her granddaughter,
whose unusually light complexion draws the interest of a po-
lice officer intent on exercising the state’s legal guardianship
of Indigenous children. As Odette attempts to protect her
granddaughter, she finds that bureaucracy can dictate harsh
consequences for performing innocuous actions without the
prescribed permissions. While dramatizing the legal tight-
rope that Odette must walk, Birch illustrates how Australia’s
policies dehumanized not only the Indigenous people they
sought to control—often by taking children from their fam-
ilies and placing them in white mission schools—but also
the white people who were complicit in enforcing them.