THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021 59
were when we were kids. Children tend
to draw better, Vanderbilt explains, when
they are around five years old and ren-
dering what they feel; later, they fall into
what the psychologist Howard Gard-
ner calls “the doldrums of literalism”—
trying to draw exactly what they see but
without the technical skill or instruc-
tion that would allow them to do so
effectively. Many of us never progress
beyond that stage. Personally, I’m stuck
at about age eight, when I filled note-
books with ungainly, scampering horses.
Yet I was entranced by how both Van-
derbilt and, in her far more ambitious
way, Painter describe drawing as an un-
usually absorbing, almost meditative
task—one that makes you look at the
world differently even when you’re not
actually doing it and pours you into un-
distracted flow when you are.
O
ne problem with teaching an old
dog new tricks is that certain cog-
nitive abilities decline with age, and by
“age” I mean starting as early as one’s
twenties. Mental-processing speed is
the big one. Maybe that’s one reason
that air-traffic controllers have to re-
tire at age fifty-six, while English pro-
fessors can stay at it indefinitely. Van-
derbilt cites the work of Neil Charness,
a psychology professor at Florida State
University, who has shown that the older
a chess player is the slower she is to
perceive a threatened check, no matter
what her skill level. Processing speed is
why I invariably lose against my daugh-
ter (pretty good-naturedly, if you ask
me) at a game that I continue to play:
Anomia. In this game, players flip cards
bearing the names of categories (dog
breeds, Olympic athletes, talk-show
hosts, whatever), and, if your card dis-
plays the same small symbol as one of
your opponents’ does, you try to be the
first to call out something belonging to
the other person’s category. If my daugh-
ter and I each had ten minutes to list
as many talk-show hosts as we could,
I’d probably triumph—after all, I have
several decades of late-night-TV view-
ing over her. But, with speed the es-
sence, a second’s lag in my response
speed cooks my goose every game.
Still, as Rich Karlgaard notes in his
reassuring book “Late Bloomers: The
Hidden Strengths of Learning and Suc-
ceeding at Your Own Pace,” there are
BRIEFLY NOTED
Beethoven, by Laura Tunbridge ( Yale). Focussing on nine
pivotal works, this study, equal parts musicological and
biographical, complicates the simplistic portrait of Bee-
thoven as an isolated, single-minded genius. Although he
seemed inclined to rebellion and irreverence, he still relied
upon a close circle of friends and patrons—especially as he
began to lose his hearing—and saw his fortunes as bound
up with theirs. His music also testifies to his political aware-
ness. Tunbridge writes that “Fidelio,” his only opera, “roots
him as a man of his time rather than allowing him to float
free of worldly concerns, a transcendent genius.”
The Light Ages, by Seb Falk (Norton). The figure at the heart
of this exploration of medieval astronomers, philosophers,
and physicians is John of Westwyk, a brilliant fourteenth-
century Benedictine monk who created an equatorium, a
kind of analog computer for determining the positions of
the planets. As John passes in and out of the historical rec-
ord, Falk provides an expansive survey of Eastern polymaths,
squabbling theorists, political schemers, and optimistic over-
reachers. Those dreamers can be the most beguiling: the
eleventh-century monk Eilmer of Malmesbury leaped from
an abbey tower with wings attached to his hands and feet,
flying two hundred metres before plunging to earth. Falk,
always generous, applauds him for having “piloted an exper-
imental glider, not wholly without success.”
A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself, by Peter Ho Davies
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). This semi-autobiographical
novel relates the experiences of a father through two life-
changing decisions—to have a child, and not to have one—
which he comes to see as “two sides of the same coin.” His
wife’s first pregnancy ends in a “virtuous abortion,” after tests
reveal fatal abnormalities. The couple grieve for years, even
as the father frets over the ethics of a man’s mourning a
woman’s abortion, particularly when the procedure is under
attack. They eventually become parents to a boy who is later
diagnosed as being “somewhere on the spectrum.” Davies
treats twists of fate with clear-eyed realism, humor, and grace.
“All these doubts and regrets,” he writes. “And all—miracu-
lously, paradoxically—worth it.”
Butter Honey Pig Bread, by Francesca Ekwuyasi (Arsenal
Pulp). Spanning decades, this fast-paced début novel moves
from Lagos to Montreal, Halifax, and London as it traces
the sorrows and triumphs of a pair of estranged twin sisters
and their troubled mother. The mother, seemingly schizo-
phrenic, is in fact an ogbanje, a restless spirit believed by
the Igbo to resist remaining in a human body. She strug-
gles against the compulsion to return to her spirit kin, while
the twins desperately try to shape happy, earthbound lives,
despite childhood trauma and adult disappointments. The
novel abounds with sex, death, and food—whose prepara-
tion offers these characters catharsis, knowledge, and some-
times simply pleasure.
