THENEWYORKER,M AY16, 2022 73
BRIEFLY NOTED
Constructing a Nervous System, by Margo Jefferson (Pantheon).
In this follow-up to “Negroland,” Jefferson merges memoir
and criticism. Drawing on material as disparate as Henry
James, “The Wire,” “Othello,” and Black spirituals, she nar-
rates moments of her life as they unfold in relation to “ava-
tars,” models against which she conducts an “identity exper-
iment.” “I must break myself into pieces,” she explains, “then
rebuild.” Thus Ella Fitzgerald’s stage presence gestures to-
ward a “black female destiny” of “scrutiny and our pity,” which
a young Jefferson works to avoid; that of Josephine Baker
demonstrates a way of embodying the influences of her pre-
decessors. “Great soloists never perform entirely alone,” Jef-
ferson writes, and the same is true of her.Serenade, by Toni Bentley (Pantheon). Taking its title from
that of George Balanchine’s first American ballet, which pre-
mièred in 1934, this personal history by a former New York
City Ballet dancer blends various accounts of the work’s—
and the company’s—creation and evolution. In addition to
providing a wealth of ballet lore, trivia, and insightful inter-
pretation, Bentley is not afraid to get technical; she describes
steps, combinations, entrances, and exits from the perspec-
tive of the corps. In endeavoring to conjure the transcendent
lyricism of Balanchine’s vision and Tchaikovsky’s score, the
book goes further, touching on deeper, stranger ideas about
the symbiosis between life and art.Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde (Riverhead). The marginal-
ized residents of Lagos in this début novel—queer lovers, rest-
less spirits, and survivors of sexual violence—rely on increas-
ingly fantastical forms of disguise in order to survive: lies,
masks, bodysuits. But true salvation comes from self-revela-
tion and the community that it forges. Village women shar-
ing stories of abuse vanish into thin air, leaving their abusers
abandoned. A dominatrix transmutes her clients’ shame until
it is “submitted, regulated, rewritten into power.” Socialites
relate their sorrows to a dressmaker, who then creates outfits
to conceal pain. In a world that seeks to consign to the shad-
ows those who don’t conform, Osunde’s vagabonds act as an
illuminating force for one another. “If they say we don’t exist,”
a woman asks her lover, “how come I can see you?”Eleutheria, by Allegra Hyde ( Vintage). In the heightened cli-
mate crisis imagined in this novel, birds drop en masse from
the sky and heat waves cause baseball players to faint mid-
game. Willa, the daughter of paranoid survivalists, leaves
Boston for the Bahamas in search of a group of eco-warriors,
led by a man who propounds a carbon-negative life style cal-
culated to appeal to society’s élite, offering “the promise of
more, not less.” Willa’s account of what happens when the
leader goes missing is intercut with scenes from her earlier
life, involving her influencer-wannabe cousins, dumpster div-
ing, and her infatuation with a Harvard professor. Partly sa-
tirical, the book is also an urgent, absorbing story that asks
how we are meant to live.sort of paraphernalia were the things that
unnerved people.” With Wittgenstein,
there were no polite formalities, but Mur-
doch failed to get much philosophy out
of him. What good was a single philo-
sophical conversation? he asked her. What
good was a single piano lesson?
His tendency to turn every human
encounter into a confrontation, a reck-
oning, sounds an awful lot like moralism.
But he was not moralistic in the sense
of imposing on people the demands of
a received body of rules. Compulsory se-
riousness might be closer to the mark,
although his seriousness was compati-
ble with a deep strain of silliness: he was
capable of writing campy letters, of join-
ing his friends at the local fairground, of
playing the demanding part of the moon
in an impromptu reënactment of celes-
tial movements. An intensely rational
man—he had, after all, started off as a
logician—he loathed mere reasonable-
ness, a squalid ideal for squalid people.
He rejected the idea that the world’s de-
mands on the individual might have a
natural limit in the reasonable.
His students at Cambridge, no less
than the beleaguered children he taught
in Austria, were victims of his appetite
for enforcing standards at which any
human—any human human—must
surely quail. He rarely doubted his au-
thority to tell people how to live. One
student, Alice Ambrose, was excommu-
nicated after she gave him “cheek.” Her
offense, she later recalled, was telling
him that “he used his power over peo-
ple to extract worship.”
In this, he was unlike Socrates, who,
for all his piety, took people as they were.
His queerness was compatible with hav-
ing a good time, with liking people and
being liked by them in turn. Wittgen-
stein, lacking a mode between the
deathly serious and the giddily silly, in-
spired more extreme reactions—alarm,
fear, contempt, reverence. Ambrose once
wrote, generously, that there was “a very
great deal in him to love.” Love, yes. But
it is hard to find anyone who liked him.
And yet this was a man who was
charmed and moved by the phrase “It
takes many sorts to make a world.”
He commended the proposition—a
byword for liberality, for reasonable-
ness—as “a very beautiful and kindly
saying.” He never said that he thought
it was true.