THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022 69
BRIEFLY NOTED
The Great Mrs. Elias, by Barbara Chase-Riboud (Amistad).
Using hitherto overlooked documents, this novel reconstructs
the life of Hannah Elias, who was born in poverty in Phila-
delphia in 1865 but became, at the turn of the century, one of
the wealthiest Black women in the country. In this telling,
Elias, confident that she is destined for greatness, joins New
York’s “sisterhood” of sex workers and meets a rich client
whose pillow talk consists of finance lessons. Putting her un-
orthodox education to use, Elias amasses a real-estate for-
tune, but the empire teeters after her unexpected connection
to the murder, in 1903, of the civic leader Andrew Haswell
Green. Chase-Riboud’s narrative challenges us to confront
the ways in which race, class, and gender inform whose lives
are deemed worthy of remembering.Last Resort, by Andrew Lipstein (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Caleb,
the protagonist of this novel of literary-world chicanery, is an
aspiring Brooklyn writer who discovers his voice by pinching
someone else’s story. An acquaintance, Avi, tells him about a
torrid affair in Greece, and Caleb, abandoning his own lack-
lustre project, fashions the material into something that nei-
ther of them could have produced alone. This gets him a lucra-
tive book deal, but Avi and others quickly recognize themselves
in the story. In the ensuing acrimony, Lipstein gleefully scru-
tinizes the nature of success in an industry that runs as much
on vanity as on financial gain. The book’s command of contem-
porary-hipster details is wincingly precise, and Caleb’s voice,
initially charming, gradually reveals his incompetent careerism.Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, by Brian Cox (Grand Central).
The author of this memoir, best known for his role as Logan
Roy, on “Succession,” offers a bold, funny account of his path
from an impoverished boyhood in Scotland to the Royal
Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, and Holly-
wood. The narrative is punctuated with gossip (“Did I for-
get to mention that I got touched up by Princess Margaret
once?”), frank appraisals of industry bigwigs ( Johnny Depp
is “so overblown, so overrated”), and reflections on his own
shortcomings as a spouse and a father. At its core, though,
the book is a meditation on craft and a paean to acting, which
is, for Cox, “an almost spiritual experience.... about reflect-
ing back to people how we are.”Index, a History of the, by Dennis Duncan (Norton). In this en-
gaging study, the humble index emerges as an unexpected site
of anxieties and tensions. From its beginnings, in the fifteenth
century, it was viewed as both a miraculous time-saver and a
threat to depth and concentration. As indexes gained in pop-
ularity, appearing in novels, poetry, and political writing, fears
about their misuse intensified, sometimes justifiably; in the
eighteenth century, the Whigs and the Tories produced mock
indexes of each other’s literature. Duncan draws rich parallels
to anxieties surrounding our own “age of search” and makes
an impassioned case for the continued relevance of the human-
crafted index, which he calls a “child of the imagination.”And he’s whistling like a little bird while
he do it.
His boots step all in it. He’s whistling and
pouring
Not rushing, just easy. He’s gonna kill me
e a s y.
Then the boots are still. Here go. Here go.
I close my eyes
but nothin happens
A full minute passes—all I hear is my breath
and you two in the kitchen giggling like
how babies giggle like they got the sun in
they mouth....
And the boots move tward y’all in the
kitchen
And I can’t talk ’cause he took the wind
outta my mouth
but in my throat is a rattle like:
“D o n’ t y o u f u c k i n g
t o u c h m y b a b i e s !!!”
But he already bringin y’all....
And ’Cine, you wasn’t scared. You said
to him
“Daddy ... whasss wrong with Mommy?
What she on the ground for?”
And he said, “Mommy’s sleepy and she
want us to wake her up. You gonna help me
wake her up, Anaia?”
And ’Naia, you was always the emotional
one, you could tell something was off and you
was scared. You say, “I I wanna I wanna go
back and watch Scooby Doo.”
“Just a minute. Let’s wake Mommy up.”
“How?”
“Like this.”
The stage direction that follows—“A
sound like a thousand matches being
struck simultaneously”—shook me to
the core when I reread the play re-
cently. I had a similar visceral reaction
when I saw it at the SoHo Rep in 2018,
brilliantly directed by Taibi Magar. I
heard Suzan-Lori Parks’s distinctive
early-career locutions in the dialogue,
but, as the play continued, it became
clear that Harris, like any young writer,
needed her predecessors in order to get
on with the business of being herself.
“Is God Is” was well received. Ben
Brantley wrote, in the Times, “Step
aside, Quentin Tarantino and Martin
McDonagh, and all you macho pur-
veyors of mutilation and mayhem with
a smile. A snarly new master of high-
octane carnage has risen into view.”
But I felt that many critics were miss-
ing the point of this fierce and sad
spectacle: that the violence, loss, ne-
glect, and grief that affect so many
Black families are handed down from
generation to generation, and where
do they come from, and where do they