The Economist April 16th 2022 Culture 75A
s hedrivesawayfroma coffeeshop,
Marshall Johnson (played by Justin
Bartha) is trailed by a mysterious tur
quoise car. It pulls up at his house, he
answers the door—and is served with a
reparations claim. His ancestors were
slaveowners and, amid a rippling resti
tution push, Marshall’s life unravels.
Colleagues frantically take dnatests to
prove they are of blameless stock. “I’m
Peruvian,” his estranged wife declares.
“You were white yesterday,” he replies.
Unsettling, funny and deadly serious,
episode four in the third and latest sea
son of “Atlanta” is—at least for white
viewers—a kind of satirical anxiety
dream. Neither Donald Glover, the
show’s creator and lead actor, nor its
other regular stars appear. These surpris
es are to be expected. Since it first aired
in 2016, “Atlanta” has conducted an esca
lating experiment in form, even as it
crafts an offbeat exposé of poverty and
racial injustice. The perfect fit between
method and message makes it a powerful
and original work of art.
At first, the show felt like a sitcom—if
Samuel Beckett and James Baldwin had
written one together. Mr Glover is Earn, a
Princeton dropout whose cousin Alfred
(Brian Tyree Henry) raps under the name
Paper Boi. Earn wants to be his manager
and has a child with Van (Zazie Beetz).
Alfred has a trippy, philosophical house
mate called Darius (LaKeith Stanfield).
From the start, “Atlanta” dispensed with
the niceties of exposition and tired ma
chinery of plot. Banality bled into surre
alism and hallucination: an invisible car,
a bowtied shaman on a bus.
Things spiralled from there. An entire
episode consisted of a mock talk show on
which Paper Boi argued with a white
activist about trans rights in a dizzying,
multifaceted satire; a spoof news reportfeatureda blackteenagerwhoidentified
as a 35yearold white man. In the second
season Darius was trapped in a Gothic
mansion by a psychopathic music legend
who resembled Michael Jackson. The gun
Earn acquired in the season premiere
went off in the finale, but not as Chekhov
might have predicted.
The guiding principle of “Atlanta”
seems to be never to compromise with the
executives at fx, the network that com
missioned it, nor with the audience (in
Britain the latest series will be available on
Disney+). After a fouryear hiatus, the new
run opens with two unknown men fishing
on a haunted lake; most of the first epi
sode tells the tale of a black child adopted
by a pair of sinister white women.
The content is as discomforting as the
form. Mostly the villains are not frothing
bigots but presumptuous white liberals,
like the condescending host of a June
teenth party in season one. The microag
gressions add up, though. Gatekeepers in
“Atlanta” will admit its black characters
only on soulcrushing, pigeonholing
terms. Charm and talent are not enough,and nor, for Earn and Van, is love. Their
mistakes count triple; small gains are
liable to be snatched back. The humour
is less laugh or cry than both at once.
Even success isn’t enough, it turns
out. Like the actors—above all Mr Glover,
not only a “Star Wars” hero but, as Child
ish Gambino, an internetbreaking mu
sician—in season three the characters
have made it and are touring Europe. But
good fortune is less an escape than a new
kind of trap. In Amsterdam they stumble
into a blackface winter festival. At a party
in London, an offkey remark is a chance
for white onlookers to perform their
piety. Racism, the show insists, tran
scends borders and bank accounts.
The drama’s elastic shape, and a mood
both urgent and woozily dreamlike, work
because they reflect the unstable condi
tions that “Atlanta” depicts. If you stop to
think about it, the story’s surreal mo
ments are no crazier than its everyday
indignities, not least the violence that
throbs at its margins, often perpetrated
by police. The narrative digressions
mirror the involuntary detours in lives
that are short on autonomy. When mun
dane errands can lead to disaster, as they
do for Alfred and Earn, or a day can begin
as screwball comedy and lurch into
horror, established genres won’t do.
Except perhaps one. The basic tem
plate in “Atlanta”—in which fantasy and
reality blur, anything can happen yet the
ending seems predetermined—is the
fairy tale. As with the consoling repeti
tions of the sitcom, fairy tales run on a
loop, but sometimes the effect is night
marish. Like Hansel and Gretel, Mr Glov
er’s characters keep getting stuck—in a
spooky forest, mazy nightclub or de
praved frat house. They search for a way
out, but sense that there isn’t one. They
are caught in a story written long ago. Back Story Once upon a time
Donald Glover’s “Atlanta” matches method with message to sensational effect artist, shows his audience footage of his
halfsister Vincent—a main character in
“The Glass Hotel”—having a similarly
strange experience in a forest. Then in 2203
Olive Llewellyn, an author, leaves her
home in the second Moon colony and jour
neys to the Atlantic Republic on Earth to
promote her novel about a pandemic, just
as a new virus is rearing its head in Austra
lia. One odd scene in Olive’s book, inspired
by an event in her life, involves a character
who, like Edwin and Vincent, suffers a hal
lucinatory funny turn, in this case in the
Airship Terminal in Oklahoma City.
These disparate narrative strands are
woven together in the book’s fourth sec
tion, set in 2401. GasperyJacques Roberts,
a detective in the Night City, is tasked with
travelling back through the centuries to
solve a mystery. What Paul thought was a
glitch on a tape turns out to be an anomaly
in time. But Gaspery’s mission comes
freighted with great difficulty—“How do
you investigate reality?” he asks—along
with considerable danger.
“Sea of Tranquility” is Ms Mandel’s
most ambitious novel yet (which is saying
something). It is consistently inventiveand occasionally mindbending, thanks to
her disrupted timelines and fully realised
vision of lunar settlements and parallel
universes. And yet her scifi realm is not
entirely alien.
Amid the speculation she prioritises
the human factor, following individuals as
they fall out of love, miss and mourn those
dearest to them and search for meaning
and fulfilment. Her depiction of a future
pandemic is recognisable and touching. It
adds up to an illuminating study of surviv
al and, in the wordsofone character, “what
makes a world real”.n