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      Cormac McCarthy, Author of ‘The Road’ and ‘No Country for Old Men,’ Dead at 89

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      “All the Pretty Horses,” “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” were among his acclaimed books that explore a bleak world of violence and outsiders.Cormac McCarthy, the formidable and reclusive writer of Appalachia and the American Southwest, whose raggedly ornate early novels about misfits and grotesques gave way to the lush taciturnity of “All the Pretty Horses” and the apocalyptic minimalism of “The Road,” died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 89. Knopf, his publisher, said in a statement that his son John had confirmed the death. Mr. McCarthy’s fiction took a dark view of the human condition and was often macabre. He decorated his novels with scalpings, beheadings, arson, rape, incest, necrophilia and cannibalism. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he told The New York Times magazine in 1992 in a rare interview. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”His characters were outsiders, like him. He lived quietly and determinately outside the literary mainstream. While not quite as reclusive as Thomas Pynchon, Mr. McCarthy gave no readings and no blurbs for the jackets of other writers’ books. He never committed journalism or taught writing. He granted only a handful of interviews.The mainstream, however, eventually came to him. “All the Pretty Horses,” a reflective western that cut against the grain of his previous work, won a National Book Award in 1992, and “The Road” won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Both were made into films, as was Mr. McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men,” which won the Academy Award for best picture in 2008.Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in the 2007 film adaptation of “No Country for Old Men,” which won the Academy Award for best picture.Richard Foreman/Miramax Films and Paramount VantageThat film, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, gave the world the indelible image of Javier Bardem as Mr. McCarthy’s nihilistic hit man Anton Chigurh, dispatching his victims with a pneumatic bolt gun meant for cattle.Mr. McCarthy had in recent years been discussed as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The critic Harold Bloom named him one of the four major American novelists of his time, alongside Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, and called Mr. McCarthy’s novel “Blood Meridian” (1985), a bad dream of a Western, “the greatest single book since Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying.’”Saul Bellow noted Mr. McCarthy’s “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences.”Acclaim for Mr. McCarthy’s work was not universal, however. Some critics found his novels portentous and self-consciously masculine. There are few notable women in his work.Writing in The New Yorker in 2005, James Wood praised Mr. McCarthy as “a colossally gifted writer” and “one of the great hams of American prose, who delights in producing a histrionic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquizes the King James Bible, Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner.”But Mr. Wood accused Mr. McCarthy of writing sentences that sometimes veered “close to nonsense,” of “appearing to relish the violence he so lavishly records,” and of being hostile to intellectual consciousness.The language and tone of Mr. McCarthy’s novels changed markedly over the decades. Among academics and Mr. McCarthy’s legion of obsessive readers, the essential question about his oeuvre has long been: What’s better, early McCarthy or late?Mr. McCarthy in 1965 when he published his first novel, “The Orchard Keeper.” It was a bleak fable set in the Appalachian South.Joe BlackwellHis first four novels — “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), “Outer Dark” (1968), “Child of God” (1973) and “Suttree” (1979) — are bleak fables, set in the Appalachian South, related in tangled prose that owes an acknowledged debt to William Faulkner. Indeed, the editor of Mr. McCarthy’s first five books, Albert Erskine, of Random House, had been Faulkner’s last editor.These early novels could be carnivalesque in their humor. In “Suttree,” for example, one character has carnal relations with the entirety of a farmer’s watermelon field. The farmer sues, alleging bestiality, but the man later brags, “My lawyer told em a watermelon wasnt no beast.”Mr. McCarthy’s later period began in earnest with “All the Pretty Horses,” the first volume in his Border Trilogy, which includes the novels “The Crossing” (1994) and “Cities of the Plain” (1998). These novels put on display his powerful and intuitive sense of the American landscape. His prose was now rich but austere, shorn of most punctuation. It owed more to Hemingway than to Faulkner. The location in his fiction had shifted as well, to the desert Southwest.The elegiac quality of “All the Pretty Horses,” with its existential cowboys, surprised some of his admirers. One of Mr. McCarthy’s friends, the novelist Leslie Garrett, was quoted as remarking about it, “Cormac finally has succeeded in writing a book that won’t offend anybody.”“All the Pretty Horses” attracted a vast audience, and was made into a film in 2000 starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz. It was not merely Mr. McCarthy’s first best seller; it was his first novel to sell many copies at all. None of his previous books had by then sold more than 5,000 copies in hardcover.“All the Pretty Horses,” a reflective Western, won a National Book Award in 1992 and was adapted for film in 2000.Matt Damon in a scene from the 2000 film “All the Pretty Horses.” The book was Mr. McCarthy’s first best seller.Van Redin/Columbia – TriStar, via Getty ImagesEarly Life in TennesseeHe was born Charles McCarthy on July 20, 1933, in Providence, R.I., the third of six children and the oldest son born to Charles J. and the Gladys (McGrail) McCarthy. Within a few years the family moved to Knoxville, Tenn., where Mr. McCarthy’s father, who had graduated from Yale Law School, worked as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority.According to one account, Mr. McCarthy adopted the name Cormac, a family nickname, to avoid associations with Charlie McCarthy, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s dummy. By another account, given on a website devoted to Mr. McCarthy, he renamed himself Cormac after an Irish king. Still another has it that Mr. McCarthy’s family had legally changed his name to the Gaelic equivalent of “son of Charles.”The McCarthy family was affluent for Knoxville, its large white house staffed with maids. The young Mr. McCarthy was drawn, however, to the city’s seedier side. “I felt earlier on I wasn’t going to be a respectable citizen,” he told the Times Magazine. “I hated school from the day I set foot in it.”He attended Knoxville’s Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee, where he studied physics and engineering in 1951 and 1952. He joined the Air Force in 1953 and served four years, several of them stationed in Alaska. To quell his boredom, he said, “I read a lot of books very quickly.”Mr. McCarthy returned to the University of Tennessee from 1957 to 1959. He learned that he had a knack for language, he once said, after a professor asked him read a collection of 18th-century essays and repunctuate them for a textbook. He began to publish short stories in the student literary magazine. He never graduated, however, and he moved to Chicago, where he worked in an auto-parts warehouse while writing his first novel.He sent the manuscript of that novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” to Random House, he said, because “it was the only publisher I’d heard of.”Reviewing “The Orchard Keeper” in The Times in 1965, Orville Prescott called it “impressive” but noted that Mr. McCarthy deployed “so many of Faulkner’s literary devices and mannerisms that he half-submerges his own talents beneath a flood of imitation.”Mr. McCarthy wrote for many years in relative obscurity and privation. After his first marriage, to a fellow University of Tennessee student named Lee Holleman, ended in divorce, he married Anne DeLisle, an English pop singer, in 1966. The couple lived for nearly eight years in a dairy barn outside Knoxville.“We lived in total poverty,” Ms. DeLisle once said. “We were bathing in the lake.” She added: “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”Mr. McCarthy’s second novel, “Outer Dark,” was about a woman who bears her brother’s baby; he leaves it in the woods to die. Guy Davenport, writing in The Times Book Review in 1968, praised its language as “compounded of Appalachian phrases as plain and as functional as an ax.”His third novel, “Child of God,” was about a cave-dwelling mass murderer and necrophiliac. Reviewing it at length in The New Yorker, the author and child psychiatrist Robert Coles called Mr. McCarthy a “novelist of religious feeling” and likened him to the classical Greek dramatists.Mr. McCarthy moved to El Paso in 1976 after separating from Ms. DeLisle. The couple later divorced. The settings of his novels soon changed as well.His last of his early novels to be set in the South, “Suttree” (1979), was his most autobiographical. It is set among the fringe characters who populated Knoxville’s waterfront, a milieu he knew intimately. “I was always attracted to people who enjoyed a perilous lifestyle,” Mr. McCarthy once said.Mr. McCarthy in 1979, the year “Suttree” was published. In the book, one character has carnal relations with the entirety of a farmer’s watermelon field.Dan MooreSome saw the novel as a farewell to his raucous old life. He stopped drinking before the novel was published. “The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking,” he said. “If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it’s drinking.”Mr. McCarthy was briefly living in a motel in Knoxville when he learned, in 1981, that he had won a MacArthur fellowship. (In praise of his many mailing addresses, he commented: “Three moves is as good as a fire.”)‘A Legion of Horribles’The MacArthur money gave him the time to write “Blood Meridian,” which many critics feel is his finest book. A surreal and blood-drenched anti-western about a gang of scalp hunters and outlaws in Texas and Mexico, the book features among its central characters a crazed, hairless, brilliant, seven-foot tall albino judge who put many readers in mind of Melville’s Captain Ahab.The book delineated what he called “a legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners.”After the retirement of Mr. Erskine, his longtime editor, Mr. McCarthy moved from Random House to Alfred A. Knopf and acquired a new editor, Gary Fisketjon, who also worked with Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff, among other writers. It was before the release of “All the Pretty Horses” in 1992 that Mr. McCarthy agreed to talk to The Times Magazine for his first major interview.The author of the article, Richard B. Woodward, noted at the time that Mr. McCarthy “cuts his own hair, eats his meals off a hot plate or in cafeterias and does his wash at the Laundromat.”In that interview, Mr. McCarthy named the “good writers” as Melville, Dostoyevsky and Faulkner, a list that omitted writers who, as he put it, don’t “deal with issues of life and death.” About Proust and Henry James, he commented: “I don’t understand them. To me, that’s not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange.”“All the Pretty Horses” is a gritty but often romantic narrative about a young man named John Grady Cole who, evicted in 1950 from the Texas ranch where he grew up, heads for Mexico on horseback along with his best friend. The book sold nearly 200,000 copies within six months.The next two books in the Border Trilogy also sold well, although some critics were not as taken with them. “It’s axiomatic in publishing,” Mr. Fisketjon said in a 1995 interview, “that the thrill of discovery is followed by a backlash.”Mr. McCarthy for many years maintained an office at the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit scientific research center founded in 1984 by the particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann and others. He moved from El Paso to live nearby. He enjoyed the company of scientists and sometimes volunteered to help copy-edit science books, shearing them of things like exclamation points and semicolons, which he found extraneous.“People ask me, ‘Why are you interested in physics?’,” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 Rolling Stone profile. “But why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity.” He would drive to the institute after dropping John, his young son, off at school.Mr. McCarthy published his stripped-down existential thriller “No Country For Old Men” in 2005. The next year he published “The Road,” a grueling novel about a father and son’s struggle to survive in a postapocalyptic landscape.“The Road” a grueling novel about a father and son’s struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic landscape, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007.The novel is dedicated to his son.“I think about John all the time and what the world’s going to be like,” Mr. McCarthy told Rolling Stone. “If the family situation was different, I could see taking John and going to New Zealand. It’s a civilized place. ”In the same interview, Mr. McCarthy said he had never voted: “Poets shouldn’t vote.”Writing Till the EndMr. McCarthy sold his archives, 98 boxes of letters, drafts, notes and unpublished work, to Texas State University in 2008 for $2 million. A year later, the Olivetti typewriter on which he’d written each of his novels sold at auction for $254,500. He immediately began working on a new Olivetti, the same model, purchased for less than $20.The Olivetti manual typewriter on which Mr. McCarthy typed all of his novels from 1958 to 2009, the year it sold at auction for $254,500.Christie’s, via Associated PressIn 2012, Mr. McCarthy wrote a screenplay, “The Counselor,” about a lawyer in the Southwest who falls into the drug business. Ridley Scott adapted it for a film in 2013 starring Michael Fassbender and Cameron Diaz.Mr. McCarthy was married for a third time, to Jennifer Winkley, in 1998, when he was 64 and she was 32. The marriage ended in divorce in 2006. In addition to his son John, from Mr. McCarthy’s third marriage, he is survived by another son, Chase, from his first marriage; two sisters, Barbara Ann McCooe and Maryellen Jaques; a brother, Dennis; and two grandchildren. His first wife, Ms. Holleman, died in 2009.Late in 2022, Mr. McCarthy released a pair of ambitious linked novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” to mostly adulatory reviews. “The Passenger” is about a racecar driver turned salvage diver named Bobby Western — he somewhat resembles Mr. McCarthy in his taciturnity, his Knoxville childhood and his fondness for New Orleans and its nightlife — who sees things he should not see. Before long he is pursued not only by G-men but, it can seem, also by all the ghosts of the 20th century. It’s a novel of ideas — about mathematics, the nature of knowledge, the importance of fast cars — that slips into pretentiousness at times but also contains flatulence jokes.The title of the second novel, “Stella Maris,” refers to a psychiatric hospital in Black River Falls, Wis. That is where 20-year-old Alicia Western, a doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, has checked herself in because she’s been hallucinating. Central among her visions is the Thalidomide Kid, a shambolic dwarf with flippers and a bent sense of humor. Alicia is carrying a plastic bag stuffed with $40,000, which she tries to give away to the receptionist. Alicia also happens to be Bobby’s sister. Their father was a physicist on the Manhattan Project.Shortly before Mr. McCarthy’s death, it was announced that he had been at work on a screenplay for a film adaptation of “Blood Meridian,” to be directed by John Hillcoat, who directed the film of Mr. McCarthy’s “The Road.”In 2007, Mr. McCarthy took part in one of the most unlikely cultural collisions of the new century when he agreed to be interviewed on daytime television by Oprah Winfrey. She had chosen “The Road” for her book club.He seemed uncomfortable in the spotlight. “I don’t think it’s good for your head,” he told Ms. Winfrey about being interviewed. “You spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it. You probably should be doing it.”Alex Traub More

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      Book Review: ‘Wannabe,’ by Aisha Harris

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      In her essay collection “Wannabe,” Aisha Harris argues that Black critics can both appreciate, and demand more from, shifts in popular culture.WANNABE: Reckonings With the Pop Culture That Shapes Me, by Aisha HarrisBeing a Black critic in a time of exceptional art made by Black people has immense rewards and myriad risks. “Wannabe,” the debut essay collection from Aisha Harris, a co-host of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour,” is at its best when engaging with those risks and the thorny questions of her profession. In what ways does identity inform a critic’s work? And should it?Harris can laugh about the demands of endorsing positive representations of Blackness, no matter how trite (“When encountering Black art out in the wild, be on the lookout for Black Girl Magic, Black Love, Black Excellence and the direct involvement of Common and/or John Legend”). She cheekily pushes Issa Rae’s now-famous awards show proclamation — “I’m rooting for everybody Black” — to its most absurd extent: “It’s only right we take her at her literal word and support all Black artists and art, no matter how questionable, incompetent or just plain offensive they might be.” But when a podcast listener chastises Harris for finding the Will Smith movie “King Richard” middling, she roars back. “I don’t want to ‘just be happy’ about ‘King Richard,’” she insists. “I want interiority and surprise and characters who feel as though they have a reason to exist beyond retelling history.”It’s complicated, though. Harris recounts conflictedness about being disappointed by “A Wrinkle in Time,” which was directed by Ava DuVernay, whose film career was firmly on the rise. Harris, who wrote movie reviews for Slate and is a former editor at The New York Times, worried that a lukewarm piece could mean it would “be decades before another studio handed a movie of this stature to a woman of color.” Looking back, she arrived at a place that was “true to my own reactions to the movie without being scathing.”“Wannabe” is a blend of memoir and cultural analysis, framed as “reckonings with the pop culture that shapes me.” Harris flaunts a wide range of references, moving easily between decades and arenas. She makes smart use of Roger Ebert on Fellini, revisits “Key & Peele” sketches and dissects bell hooks’s analysis of the experimental film hero Stan Brakhage. The book is especially effective when its author leans on her personal experience. Harris grew up in Connecticut, in “predominantly white and suburban circles,” and she tenderly illustrates the trials of growing up “The Black Friend” in white environments.“These Black Friends,” Harris offers, “were a reminder of my isolation and the fact that I often felt as if I was a blip on the radar of the many white peers I attempted to befriend.”Harris braids her personal pain with incisive critiques of the trope and its limitations, constructing internal monologues for famous pop culture examples, like Gabrielle Union’s Katie in “She’s All That” and Lamorne Morris’s Winston in “New Girl.” She deftly connects the rise of the personal brand and the toxic cultures of online fandom (“The overpersonalization of pop culture begets acrimony and pathological obsession”); confronts her decision to not have kids through the prism of “The Brady Bunch” and Judd Apatow’s “Knocked Up”; and quotes from her own LiveJournal about a hurtful memory involving an oft-forgotten scene in Tina Fey’s “Mean Girls.”Still, for all its range, “Wannabe” contains occasions that demand more rigorous engagement. Contending with Dave Chappelle’s thorny legacy is limited to an aside: “While I recognize that present-day Dave Chappelle suffers from transphobic diarrhea of the mouth,” Harris writes, “I cannot pretend as though some of his old jokes no longer slap.” (She goes on to quote several of them.)And the recency of the pop references in “Wannabe” is both a strength and a weakness, and risks dating the book.The groundbreaking success of Disney’s “Encanto” and the multiple Oscar winner “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is likely to matter for a long time; Warner Bros. Discovery’s cancellation of the “Batgirl” film or the Harper’s letter on “Justice and Open Debate” might lose potency for the reader not engaged with the mostly-online #discourse.But enlisting movies and TV to explain the world is Harris’s expertise, arriving at “inadvertent self-formation by way of popular culture.” For readers already inclined to read culture to understand themselves, “Wannabe” is a compelling affirmation that they’re looking in the right place.Elamin Abdelmahmoud is a podcaster and the author of “Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces,” a New York Times Notable Book in 2022.WANNABE: Reckonings With the Pop Culture That Shapes Me | By Aisha Harris | 280 pp. | HarperOne | $29.99 More

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      Can You Find the Hidden Titles of These 12 Books About Broadway Icons?

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      “Don’t be shy,” said the exhausted milliner, who was frantically finishing the hat for the ingénue’s big number at the end of Act One. “What do you need?”“I’m looking for Lorraine again,” said the assistant director. “I’ve been going from stage to stage in this building. I can’t find her anywhere and Chita wants to go over their number with the latest rewrites.”The fluorescent light failing up above her head flickered and the hatmaker flinched as she accidentally jabbed an unprotected finger with the needle. “She went home hours ago. A little bit wicked of her in the middle of the tech rehearsal, I thought.”“What would I do without you?” sighed the A.D. “The costume crew knows all.”“Don’t be shy,” said the exhausted milliner, who was frantically finishing the hat for the ingénue’s big number at the end of Act One. “What do you need?”“I’m looking for Lorraine again,” said the assistant director. “I’ve been going from stage to stage in this building. I can’t find her anywhere and Chita wants to go over their number with the latest rewrites.”The fluorescent light failing up above her head flickered and the hatmaker flinched as she accidentally jabbed an unprotected finger with the needle. “She went home hours ago. A little bit wicked of her in the middle of the tech rehearsal, I thought.”“What would I do without you?” sighed the A.D. “The costume crew knows all.”“Don’t be shy,” said the exhausted milliner, who was frantically finishing the hat for the ingénue’s big number at the end of Act One. “What do you need?”“I’m looking for Lorraine again,” said the assistant director. “I’ve been going from stage to stage in this building. I can’t find her anywhere and Chita wants to go over their number with the latest rewrites.”The fluorescent light failing up above her head flickered and the hatmaker flinched as she accidentally jabbed an unprotected finger with the needle. “She went home hours ago. A little bit wicked of her in the middle of the tech rehearsal, I thought.”“What would I do without you?” sighed the A.D. “The costume crew knows all.” More

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      Book Review: ‘Pageboy: A Memoir,’ by Elliot Page

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      In the “brutally honest” memoir “Pageboy,” the actor recounts the fears and obstacles to gender transition, and the hard-won happiness that’s followed.PAGEBOY: A Memoir, by Elliot PageThere’s a scene in the third season of Netflix’s hugely popular “The Umbrella Academy” where Elliot Page’s character, sporting a new, short haircut, walks up to the other members of the titular superhero team to suggest a plan.There’s a derisive response from one of them: “Who elected you, Vanya?”Page glances around, slightly tentative. “It’s, uh, Viktor.”“Who’s Viktor?”The subtitles describe “dramatic music playing” as members of the group eye one another. Page hesitates for a second. “I am. It’s who I’ve always been.” Another beat. “Uh, is that an issue for anyone?”There’s little hesitation: “Nah, I’m good with it.” “Yeah, me too.” “Cool.”And thus plays out what might be the most mundane — and yet quietly empowering — depiction of gender transition in popular culture I’ve ever seen. Were Page’s real-life journey to transition only as simple, straightforward or well received.Instead, as he details in a brutally honest memoir, “Pageboy,” his life story was marked by fear, self-doubt, U-turns, guilt and shame, before he ultimately seized control of his own narrative.A child actor from Canada who burst onto the scene at the age of 20 with a breakout performance in the title role of “Juno” in 2007, Page went on to take roles in films that ranged from indie (“Whip It,” “Freeheld”) to blockbusters (“Inception,” “X-Men: Days of Future Past”).But fame didn’t free him to explore his identity; instead it trapped him into a role studios wanted him to play, offscreen as well as on, as an attractive young starlet.Much of the memoir — told in non-sequential flashbacks and flash-forwards — centers on Page’s path to understand who he really was, against a backdrop of bullying, eating disorders, stalking, sexual harassment and assault. Page grew up in Nova Scotia, the child of divorced parents — a less than loving father and a mother hoping against hope for a more conventional child than the gender outlaw she seemed to be raising.“Can I be a boy?” Page asked his mother at the age of 6. He found escape in solitary play and a rich fantasy life that ultimately blossomed into a career as an actor.The nonlinear structure makes following a clear narrative difficult, but that’s less important than seeing, through his eyes, how Page slowly pieces together a clear sense of himself. In that, it follows a tradition of trans memoirs, from Jennifer Finney Boylan’s “She’s Not There” to Janet Mock’s “Redefining Realness” to Thomas Page McBee’s “Man Alive,” among others, that explore how we explore our identities.From furtive, closeted relationships — he relates how he held hands under a blanket with his then-partner as they were bused from location to location while working on a film together — to coming out as gay in 2014 (“more a necessity than a decision,” he writes), Page flirted with, but backed away several times from, the notion that he might be trans.“My shoulders opened, my heart was bare, I could be in the world in ways that felt impossible before,” he writes of coming out as gay. “But deep down an emptiness lurked. That undertone. Its whisper still ripe and in my ear.”It’s in that tortured, contradictory internal monologue — familiar to other trans people as we contemplate what seems to be an extraordinary, unimaginable truth — that “Pageboy” is most powerful. Page doesn’t really delve into questions of masculinity, or what it means to be a man, but he brings to life the visceral sense of gender dysphoria, or at least one type of dysphoria: the sense that your body is betraying you. It’s an utterly alien sensation for those who haven’t experienced it:Imagine the most uncomfortable, mortifying thing you could wear. You squirm in your skin. It’s tight, you want to peel it from your body, tear it off, but you can’t. Day in and day out. And if people are to learn what is underneath, who you are without all that pain, the shame would come flooding out, too much to hold. The voice was right, you deserve the humiliation. You are an abomination. You are too emotional. You are not real.Moments of joy pierce “Pageboy” as well: his first real queer kiss; scenes of passionate sex; the blossoming of his relationship with his mother after he came out; the reflection of his flat chest in the mirror.Page disclosed his transition in December 2020, a few weeks before I did the same. I suspect he, like me, had been prepared for a future where trans lives would be broadly accepted, or at least tolerated, albeit with sporadic incidents of hate. Both of us inhabit left-leaning spaces (media, movies) where the appearance of support is de rigueur.How could we have expected instead the tidal wave of anti-trans animus that is surging across the right, with hundreds of bills proposed — and some passed — in state legislatures that would in some cases bar adults from accessing trans care; undermine private insurance; allow medical personnel to discriminate against transgender patients; and restrict performances by drag performers and trans people, including possibly Page.Trans men and women are attacked in very different ways. Trans women are demonized as sexual predators; trans men, when people think of them at all, are portrayed as misguided and misled girls and women, confused and unable to understand their own identity. “When I came out in 2014, the vast majority of people believed me, they did not ask for proof,” Page writes. “But the hate and backlash I received were nothing compared to now.”It was an unwelcome regression to a time studios controlled his public persona: “I am sick of the creepy focus on my body and compulsion to infantilize (which I have always experienced, but nothing like this). And it isn’t just people online, or on the street, or strangers at a party, but good acquaintances and friends.”Still, Page has no shortage of fans as well, vociferous defenders of possibly the most famous trans man in the world, and one whose onscreen portrayal of a superhero offers an alternative conception of masculinity rooted in inner strength and sensitivity rather than brawn and muscles.His character’s arc from Vanya to Viktor offers hope, too, of a world where transition is matter-of-fact, accepted — and incidental. “Truly happy for you, Viktor,” another “Umbrella Academy” member concludes.Page and the showrunner Steven Blackman were at pains to ensure his character’s journey reflected the nuances of real trans lives, not least that being trans was a character trait, not the defining one. They brought in McBee to weave an authentic narrative into what was then an already tightly packed and carefully scripted season.In the memoir, Page reflects on his complex relationship with store windows, and his image in them — a reminder, pre-transition, of a body and identity he saw but did not want to inhabit. McBee crafted that memory into another telling “Umbrella Academy” scene, where Page’s Viktor pauses in front of a storefront and is asked what he sees.“Me.” A smile and a shrug. “Just me.”Truly happy for you, Elliot.Gina Chua is the executive editor at Semafor.PAGEBOY: A Memoir | By Elliot Page | 271 pp. | Flatiron Books | $29.99 More

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      Ama Ata Aidoo, Groundbreaking Ghanaian Writer, Dies at 81

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      A playwright, novelist and poet, she was a leading African writer who explored the complexities faced by modern women living in the shadow of colonialism.Ama Ata Aidoo, a Ghanaian playwright, author and activist who was hailed as one of Africa’s leading literary lights as well as one of its most influential feminists, died on Wednesday. She was 81.Her family said in a statement that she died after a brief illness. The statement did not specify the cause or where she died.In a wide-ranging career that included writing plays, novels and short stories, stints on multiple university faculties and, briefly, a position as a cabinet minister in Ghana, Ms. Aidoo established herself as a major voice of post-colonial Africa.Her breakthrough play, “The Dilemma of a Ghost,” published in 1965, explored the cultural dislocations experienced by a Ghanaian student who returns home after studying abroad and by those of his Black American wife, who must confront the legacies of colonialism and slavery. It was one of several of Ms. Aidoo’s works that became staples in West African schools.Throughout her literary career, Ms. Aidoo sought to illuminate the paradoxes faced by modern African women, still burdened by the legacies of colonialism. She rejected what she described as the “Western perception that the African female is a downtrodden wretch.”Her novel “Changes: A Love Story,” which won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book, Africa, portrays the psychic and cultural dilemmas faced by Esi, an educated, career-focused woman in Accra, Ghana’s capital, who leaves her husband after he rapes her and lands in a polygamous relationship with a wealthy man.In this work and many others, Ms. Aidoo chronicled the fight by African women for recognition and equality, a fight, she contended, that was inextricable from the long shadow of colonialism.“Our Sister Killjoy” was Ms. Aidoo’s debut novel.Her landmark debut novel, “Our Sister Killjoy, or Reflections From a Black-Eyed Squint” (1977), recounted the experiences of Sissie, a young Ghanaian woman who travels to Europe on a scholarship to better herself, as such a move was traditionally described, with a Western education. In Germany and England, she comes face to face with the dominance of white values, including Western notions of success, among fellow African expatriates.As a Fulbright scholar who spent years as an expatriate herself, including stints as a writer in residence at the University of Richmond in Virginia and as a visiting professor in the Africana studies department at Brown University, Ms. Aidoo too experienced feelings of cultural dislocation.“I have always felt uncomfortable living abroad: racism, the cold, the weather, the food, the people,” she said in a 2003 interview published by the University of Alicante in Spain. “I also felt some kind of patriotic sense of guilt. Something like, Oh, my dear! Look at all the problems we have at home. What am I doing here?”Whatever her feelings about life abroad, she was welcomed in Western literary circles. A 1997 article in The New York Times recounted how her appearance at a New York University conference for female writers of African descent “was greeted with the kind of reverence reserved for heads of state.”Although she never rose to hold that title, she had been Ghana’s minister of education, an appointment she accepted in 1982 with the goal of making education free for all. She resigned after 18 months when she realized the many barriers she would have to overcome to achieve that goal.Ms. Aidoo’s novel “Changes: A Love Story” won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book, Africa.After moving to Zimbabwe in 1983, Ms. Aidoo developed curriculums for the country’s Ministry of Education. She also made her mark in the nonprofit sphere, founding the Mbaasem Foundation in 2000 to support African women writers.She was a major Pan-Africanist voice, arguing for unity among African countries and for their continued liberation. She spoke with fury about the centuries of exploitation of the continent’s natural resources and people.“Since we met you people 500 years ago, now look at us,” she said in an interview with a French journalist in 1987, later sampled in the 2020 song “Monsters You Made” by the Nigerian Afrobeats star Burna Boy. “We’ve given everything, you are still taking. I mean where will the whole Western world be without us Africans? Our cocoa, timber, gold, diamond, platinum.”“Everything you have is us,” she continued. “I am not saying it. It’s a fact. And in return for all these, what have we got? Nothing.”Christina Ama Ata Aidoo and her twin brother, Kwame Ata, were born on March 23, 1942, in the Fanti village of Abeadzi Kyiakor, in a central region of Ghana then known by its colonial name, the Gold Coast.Her father, Nana Yaw Fama, was a chief of the village who built its first school, and her mother was Maame Abba Abasema. Information about Ms. Aidoo’s survivors was not immediately available.Her grandfather had been imprisoned and tortured by the British, a fact she later invoked when describing herself as “coming from a long line of fighters.”She said she had felt a literary calling from an early age. “At the age of 15,” she said, “a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how, I replied that I wanted to be a poet.”Four years later, she won a short story contest. On seeing her story published by the newspaper that sponsored the competition, she said, “I had articulated a dream.” More

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      Book Review: ‘Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style,’ by Paul Rudnick

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      Following a neurotic writer and a wealthy aesthete over four bumpy decades, “Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style” is a gay rom-com that tugs at the heart.FARRELL COVINGTON AND THE LIMITS OF STYLE, by Paul RudnickNate Reminger, a New Jersey-born, gay, Jewish and unabashedly horny virgin, shows up at Yale University in 1973 and instantly sets his sights on the one man he’ll be gazing at for the next four decades.As a budding writer with a knack for shrewd description, Nate spends the length of Paul Rudnick’s life-filled rom-com trying to find ways to describe that man, Farrell Covington: He is a “blinding sun god,” a “blank check,” an “unhinged cipher” and more. In so doing, Nate also reaches for a new way of seeing himself and what he believes to be possible for two men in love.To Nate’s surprise, Farrell returns his gaze with an even stronger intensity. It supersedes the look of a crush — it’s an appraisal, a reverie.And of the pair, Farrell is the one with an eye for beauty. A devastatingly handsome, unimaginably wealthy aesthete, Farrell considers style his armor — “a form of protest, against gross inhumanity or inclement weather.” As the scion of an ultraconservative family, he is not so much the black sheep as the gilded one. He speaks in a mid-Atlantic accent that sounds “as if a person had been raised by a bottle of good whiskey and a crystal chandelier.” He is, as the kids would later say, everything.He and Nate quickly become everything to each other, and though Farrell has the kind of charmed life that allows him to avoid such inconveniences as Yale’s housing rules — he has a townhouse, with an original Hockney and a butler — it will not shield him from bigoted parents hellbent on keeping their son on the straight and narrow. Nate and Farrell are separated against their will, sending Nate spiraling downward and beginning a pattern of estrangement and reunion that recurs throughout the novel.The irony of Farrell’s charmed life is that it serves as the complicating factor in the couple’s relationship, as they move from college to New York to Hollywood and beyond, all while navigating the AIDS epidemic, crises of faith and a family that rivals the Ewings of “Dallas” for wealthy wickedness.While the endeavor is quite epic in scope, it’s made deliciously bite-size by Rudnick’s densely funny writing style and the gimlet eye he has given Nate, a clear avatar for the author in this semiautobiographical tome. “I had vague theatrical ambitions,” he tells us, “as an actor or playwright or simply someone who’d call other people ‘darling.’”Though Rudnick delivers the multiple-laughs-per-paragraph pace that fans of his sendups in The New Yorker might expect, the aim of “Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style” is closer to heart-tugging than to rib-jabbing. This does create tonal whiplash in spots, as when an emotional hospital sequence is capped by the sudden arrival of a sari-wearing acolyte from Mother Teresa’s order. Rudnick’s worldview is so effortlessly, gleefully campy that even when he plays it straight — please allow the world’s largest quotation marks here — it can feel like a setup to a punchline.This tendency also directs one’s gaze to the smallest of quibbles. Farrell is a glittering bauble of a man, an architecture-loving manic-pixie dreamboat, a walking interrobang, but he’ll never be more captivating than his creator and, by extension, his creator’s stand-in. We’re in Nate’s point of view, and we spend long stretches separated from Farrell altogether. And even without Farrell’s privilege, Nate’s path from college to Broadway to a successful screenwriting career is relatively frictionless, which gives some sections the desultory feeling of a light memoir rather than a novel.Another way of considering it, however, frames the central question around neither Nate’s nor Farrell’s individual obstacles but rather their shared destiny. If we encounter the true subject in those first pages — that mutual gaze — then this novel is more about their ways of seeing each other and the world’s way of seeing their possibility.Consider what Rudnick offers almost without comment: the comparatively rare opportunity to spend decades watching two men navigate love. Like so much of the author’s work in other media — the play “Jeffrey,” the film “In and Out” — “Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style” seems less interested in serving as a gay museum piece than as a filigreed statement.Turn your gaze, it beckons, and you’ll see we were more than simply here; we made this place beautiful.R. Eric Thomas’s latest book of essays, “Congratulations, the Best Is Over!,” will be published in August.FARRELL COVINGTON AND THE LIMITS OF STYLE | By Paul Rudnick | 368 pp. | Atria Books | $28.99 More

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      in Music

      Henry Threadgill’s Musical Spring Is Varied and Extreme. Like He Is.

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      The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer has released a memoir, “Easily Slip Into Another World,” and a new album, “The Other One.”Even as a child, Henry Threadgill liked to experiment.In this Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and saxophonist’s new memoir, “Easily Slip Into Another World,” he recounts a youthful attempt to fly from a window using a “contraption” of his own devising.He managed to escape the ensuing, predictable crash without breaking any bones, but the young Threadgill did earn a reputation for daring in his Chicago neighborhood. His mother’s response — “Henry, why do you have to be so extreme?” — became, as he writes, “the refrain of my childhood.”That same question may have occurred to a few listeners. But Threadgill, 79, has done plenty of soaring, on stages, over the years: composing music intended for social dancing, and pieces for orchestra and string quartet in which players are encouraged to improvise. He has also led some of the most widely acclaimed ensembles in the past half-century of American jazz.

      kronosquartet · Henry Threadgill – SixfivetwoAppropriately, he has an interdisciplinary spirit. In addition to his book — written with Brent Hayes Edwards and published by Knopf earlier this month — Threadgill is engaged in a flurry of additional artistic activity, including a new album, “The Other One,” out on Pi Recordings.Scored for a 12-piece ensemble and recorded live at Roulette last year, Threadgill’s chamber music on this release impressed me immediately, as I wrote when it was performed. Those concerts also featured multimedia elements, which Threadgill incorporated into a documentary film that provides a fuller look at the material. That movie, which he produced and edited with D. Carlton Bright, screened at the Museum of Modern Art in late May.Both the show and the film helped Threadgill scratch a long-held creative itch. In a recent interview, he recalled having been impressed by Alban Berg’s opera “Lulu,” which, in an unusual touch for its period, makes dramatic use of a short film at its midpoint. (“That’s one of my favorite operas,” he said. “Love ‘Lulu!’”)Threadgill said that when he produced the staged version of “The Other One,” he realized: “Now is my chance to integrate art, poetry, photographs — everything — into one piece.”This can be a lot to keep up with. But as in his childhood, Threadgill comes by his extreme approach to artistic production honestly.That much was clear earlier this spring when I met him at one of his favorite spots: a combination coffee shop and plant store in the East Village. At one point, as I was peppering him with questions about his mutability, he gestured to consumers throughout the store.Threadgill writes in his new book, “I find that the less I say about my music, the better.”Rahim Fortune for The New York Times“It has to do with cognition,” he replied. “What do we really see or observe? All these people are different sizes, but it’s the same bone structure.”Put another way, all his work is connected, even if he’s not going to get into the DNA of it all with you at the drop of a hat. As he writes in his book, “I find that the less I say about my music, the better.” (And at another point: “Music is about listening. Nothing I say can mean anything once you start to listen.”)Still, a question or two may linger. For example, doesn’t the piano music that kicks off “The Other One” flirt in a surprising way with noirish harmony? And doesn’t that represent something of a break with much of his output this century, which has been conceived outside major/minor composition?

      The Other One by Henry ThreadgillWhen I brought that up, Threadgill said, with a touch of good-natured evasion: “These tonal centers, they don’t really mean anything. I love harmony and stuff. But it’s kinda like looking at those flowers over there. You keep scanning; you never really stop.”Fair enough. This piano music — laced as it is with those recognizable tonalities — doesn’t simply resolve there. At the end of that opening section, two saxophones enter with staggered lines that hustle into a more frenetic state of mind. That’s the more recognizable, recent sound world of Threadgill’s music, driven by a quasi-serialized use of intervals, that has most often been performed by his core ensemble, Zooid.Subsequent sections in “The Other One,” like the track titled “Mvt I, Sections 6A-7A,” sound more like the Zooid recording of “In for a Penny, In for a Pound,” which won Threadgill his Pulitzer.

      The Other One by Henry ThreadgillStill, there’s a sense of that language being developed on the new album, particularly in the music for strings, which is featured during much of “Movement II.” “I’ve been able to expand the language,” Threadgill said. “I have a whole ’nother freedom now, where I’m moving.”

      The Other One by Henry ThreadgillHe then leaped from his seat, seeking a piece of paper from the shop’s employees. On the scrap, he began to diagram some of the modernist composer Edgard Varèse’s ideas about flipping musical intervals — an approach he also describes toward the end of “Easily Slip” — and showed how he was building on Varèse’s example in “The Other One.”After Threadgill filled up the paper with sequences of intervals and melodic phrases — the latter built from a pattern, like Morse Code, of long and short phrases — he moved to toss his notes in the trash.I stopped him. Preserving Threadgill’s working methods is no small matter. Throughout “Easily Slip,” there are tantalizing references to recordings of vintage orchestral performances that have yet to be made available to the public. Some important collaborations, such as concerts with Cecil Taylor, ‌have not been preserved on fixed media at all.Threadgill is thinking about fixing some of these problems. One orchestral recording in his possession may eventually see the light of day on a website, currently under construction, called Baker’s Dozen, a portal that he also plans to offer to other artists who have valuable unreleased tapes in their possession. (He mentioned the pioneering Minimalist Terry Riley as someone who might wind up providing material for the site.)“The Other One” is a majestic addition to Threadgill’s discography, but its film version deserves a wider airing, too. It captures his sense of humor, which tended to emerge during this show whenever he was discussing photographs that he took of possessions abandoned in New York City streets early in the pandemic. He is currently sending the documentary to various festivals, he said, “to see what kind of credits we can pick up.”Other projects in the works, as ever, seem bound to have an unconventional slant. Threadgill said that he has been impressed by the strides that collaborators and acquaintances like Anthony Davis and Terence Blanchard have had in mainstream opera, a world he says isn’t really for him.Instead, Threadgill is planning what he called a “corrupted oratorio,” featuring two choirs: “a traditional choir and a gospel choir,” plus piano and organ, and other instruments as it develops. “I don’t like preconceived forms, you know?” he said. “I like to create new forms.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Is Now a Play in London’s West End

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      Much has changed for L.G.B.T.Q. people since Annie Proulx’s short story was published in 1997. But a new theatrical version is a reminder that homophobia is far from over.In 2016, when the theater director Jonathan Butterell was considering a proposal to adapt Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story “Brokeback Mountain” for the stage, he wondered how to translate the prose’s vast landscape and insular emotions into a play.Last month, in a central London rehearsal studio, Butterell and Ashley Robinson, who wrote the play, tried to answer that question. To help the cast connect with Proulx’s story of a cowboy and a ranch hand falling in love against the wide-stretching landscapes of 1960s Wyoming, black-and-white photographs of American plains and mountain ranges were tacked to the walls during rehearsals.“The vastness has been there from the very beginning,” Butterell said in a recent interview. When it came to evoking the story’s emotional landscape, the director had stuck one sepia-toned photograph, of a lone cowboy in a snow-covered Wyoming, behind a pillar. The image “speaks to the bit of us that feels alone in the world,” Butterell said. “Maybe he’s at peace with this, maybe it’s the source of his agony.”Butterell’s “Brokeback Mountain” opened in previews May 10 at @sohoplace in London’s West End. It’s the first time the story has been adapted for theater — an opera by Charles Wuorinen premiered in Madrid in 2014 — and each version now follows in the footsteps of Proulx’s text and the film that popularized it: Ang Lee’s 2005 Academy Award-winning adaptation, which is often cited as one of the best L.G.B.T.Q. films of all time.Faist, left, and Hedges at @sohoplace. During rehearsals, black-and-white photographs of American plains and mountain ranges were tacked to the walls.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesButterell said he was aware of his audience having expectations based on the film. “They’re inevitable,” he said, “but I don’t mind that.”This theatrical version also has some Hollywood clout. Its lead characters, Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, are played by the BAFTA-nominated actor Mike Faist and the Oscar-nominated actor Lucas Hedges.In late 2016, Robinson first wrote a treatment for what he called a “memory play” based on the short story, after speaking with the composer Dan Gillespie Sells and Butterell. Robinson’s script stated that the Wyoming setting should not be conveyed “in a purely literal sense,” and his story is set in 2013, with an older version of del Mar reflecting on the years he spent with Twist between 1963 and 1983.Proulx approved of Robinson’s vision. She has “high hopes for the play,” she said in a recent email interview. “When I read Ashley’s script several years ago, I thought he had done a fine job.”In Proulx’s story, del Mar and Twist’s interior worlds are conveyed by an omniscient narrator. In the stage adaptation, music does much of that work.“These two men can’t sing,” Gillespie Sells said, because “they don’t have an emotional dialogue.” Instead, a character called The Balladeer — played by the Scottish singer-songwriter Eddi Reader — sings with an onstage country and western band. “She takes us through time,” Butterell said. “Sometimes it’s from night to day. Sometimes it’s 10 years.”“Brokeback Mountain” will be the first time its two lead actors have appeared onstage in five years. Faist, who plays Twist, originated the role of Connor Murphy in “Dear Evan Hansen” on Broadway, and has had more recent success in film, including Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake of “West Side Story.”Hedges “hadn’t acted in a while” when he was sent the script, he said, having been focusing on writing instead. The “Brokeback” offer and playing del Mar changed that. “There wasn’t an angle I didn’t love about this,” he said.“As terrifying and frustrating as it is, I really am having the time of my life,” Faist, left, said of the production.Shona LouiseAs the project entered its final week of rehearsals, both actors were grappling with the process in different ways. Hedges said he was experiencing “tragic and triumphant ups and downs” about his own work. “I have a day where I think I’ve figured it all out, and then a day when it all disappears,” he said. The “collective experience” of theater was daunting compared to working in film, he said, adding that onstage, “I can’t use tricks to make it through.”Faist concurred: “It’s a challenge, and it’s terrifying,” mainly because of the expectations of having to match the source material and 2005 film, he said. “But as terrifying and frustrating as it is, I really am having the time of my life,” he added.Butterell said that Faist and Hedges were “as men, as actors, very different creatures.” Faist, he said, had “a sense of life and vivacity,” while Hedges “has this deeply complex interior landscape that’s very much of Ennis.”Neither Hedges, Faist nor Butterell had revisited Lee’s film since they were approached for the project. “The truth of the matter is, no matter what, he’s not Heath Ledger and I’m not Jake Gyllenhaal,” Faist said of the film’s two lead stars, who both earned Oscar nominations for their performances. He and Hedges, Faist added, would both bring their “own weird things” to the roles.The production has forced Faist to confront his “traumas,” he said. “We can take those traumas, turn them around,” he added, and, he hopes, make the audience “think deeply about their own lives.”Following the success of the “Brokeback Mountain” film, Proulx said fans of her text sent her fan fiction that rewrote the ending of her short story, claiming the original was too sad. She told the The Paris Review that those fans had “misunderstood” the story and stated that it was, most importantly, about “homophobia.”Jonathan Butterell, the play’s director, said his two lead actors had different strengths: Faist, left, has “a sense of life and vivacity,” while Lucas, right, “has this deeply complex interior landscape that’s very much of Ennis.”Suzie Howell for The New York TimesThis is the first adaptation of “Brokeback” to be released since the Supreme Court made gay marriage legal in all 50 U.S. states. Robinson — who lives in Brooklyn but was raised in the tiny town of Lockhart, S.C. — said he wrote it to remind audiences that gay trauma still exists.“These stories aren’t necessarily being told anymore because of a trend to put onstage what we want the world to be,” he said, referring to the theater community. “That’s a wonderful thing to do, but we shouldn’t cancel out all of the opportunities to talk about what’s going on underneath it.”Butterell added that the fight against homophobia was “not over” in Britain either, citing a recent spike in the number of attacks on L.G.B.T.Q. people.“This is a tragedy,” Butterell said of the play. “Of course love exists — I don’t want it to be solemn — but the tragedy of this piece is that fear wins.” More