Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia

 

On the overnight flight from New York to Moscow, the atmosphere feels carnivalesque, with everyone wanting a piece of this new Russia, whether that involves money, sex, democracy, or the salvation of lost souls. And now I’ve joined this cabal plotting to alter Russia’s future. But my alchemy is neither religion nor politics; it is a children’s television show.

In its subtitle, Muppets in Moscow promises “The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia”, and that’s exactly what author (and the television show’s original Executive Producer) Natasha Lance Rogoff delivers. As a young documentary filmmaker, Rogoff was stunned to be recruited by the Children’s Television Network and offered the opportunity to develop a Russian version of Sesame Street (“Ulitsa Sezam”), but as a Russophile who was fluent in the language and had some contacts in Moscow, she was seduced by the opportunity to bring a fun and educational show about Western-style empathy and cooperation to children raised behind the recently fallen Iron Curtain. No doubt a little naive about the challenges she would face, Rogoff’s story unspools in a series of shocks and roadblocks, and as this is also a memoir about the author’s personal and professional life, there is an engagingly intimate angle to the stakes. The writing could have been a bit more polished, but as an eyewitness account of what was probably the only liberalised window in which this kind of American-Russian co-production could have been pulled off, I found the whole thing fascinating. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Lida adds, with a look of disdain, “Russia has a long, rich, and revered puppet tradition dating to the sixteenth century. We don’t need your American Moppets in our children’s show.” I start to feel short of breath. I thought selling the Russians on the lovable Muppets would be the easy part of making this television series. But these television professionals don’t even like the American puppets. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was apparently then-Senator Joe Biden who drummed up congressional support and financial backing for a Russian version of Sesame Street, believing that the Muppets were “ideal ambassadors to model democratic values and the benefits of a free market economy to children in the former Soviet Union.” With several other international versions of the show already in production around the world, the Children’s Television Network was on board with Biden’s proposal, and Natasha Lance Rogoff — with zero television experience and little practical notion of what her role would actually involve — was sent to Moscow to secure a local co-producer (who could provide funding as part of the deal with the American government and the United States Agency for International Development), a broadcaster, and all of the talent (from directors, to animators, to writers, to puppeteers) before a single frame could be shot. Not only was there incredible pushback from all of the creatives — people raised on Pushkin and Tchaikovsky were disinclined “to replace Russian education with ‘American chewing gum for the masses’” — but as the oligarchs and kleptocrats scrambled for riches “during the greatest transfer of wealth from public to private hands in Russian history”, there was actual physical danger involved as well:

During our production, several heads of Russian television — our prospective broadcast partners — were assassinated one after another, with one nearly killed in a car bombing. The day that Russian soldiers bearing AK-47s pushed into our production office and confiscated show scripts, set drawings and equipment, and our adored life-size mascot Elmo, most of my American friends said I should get out of Moscow while I still could. But what made me stay, even in the face of physical violence jeopardizing the production, were the cultural battles that touched nearly every aspect of the show — from the scriptwriting, to the music, to the Slavic Muppets themselves. I discovered that adapting the American children’s show in Moscow often pitted Sesame Street’s progressive values against three hundred years of Russian thought. The clash of divergent views about individualism, capitalism, race, education, and equality offered a window into the cultural discord and conflict between East and West that continues to dominate relations today.

As fascinating as the details of Rogoff’s story were (and they really were), I was most interested in what she writes in the afterword about how Ulitsa Sezam could never be made today — not only was it Putin’s people who forced the show off the air in 2010 after fourteen successful years, but Rogoff believes that the brushes with violence and assassinations she experienced were linked to Putin’s rise in power (the TV studio where they filmed is now used to produce and disseminate “pro-Kremlin propaganda and fake news”) — and I’m left wondering what the long-term (hopeful?) effects might be for this one generation of Russian children raised on Western “progressive values”. An “unexpected and crazy story” indeed.

Ordinary Monsters (The Talents Trilogy, #1)

 

Talents. That’s what Dr. Berghast called them. She had seen disturbing things, biblical things: flesh rippling like water, altering the face of a child into another’s; a little boy, laying hands on a corpse and raising it, boneless, into a hulking flesh giant. Two years ago she had listened as a girl of twelve — a bone witch as Dr. Berghast had described her in a letter — whistled a skeleton up out of its coffin and into a clattering dance. The stuff of nightmares. Margaret Harrogate had no such talents herself, thank the good Lord. Nor had her husband any, when he was alive. And the truth of it was, she wasn’t even sure now whether she thought what the children could do was natural or unnatural, a right thing or a wrong one.

I have to admit I’m a bit disappointed with this. When I learned that an author I admire was releasing his first Fantasy novel under the pseudonym J. M. Miro, I was excited because even if I’m not a regular reader of Fantasy, excellent writing typically transcends genres. But Ordinary Monsters didn’t quite do it for me. Miro nails the historical elements (as he has in other novels), creates well-rounded and relatable characters (in particular, the women), and sets up an intriguing and dramatic premise, but I found the details to be a bit cinematically cliché, as though the most breathtaking scenes (a fight on a moving train that carries up to the carriage rooftops, being stalked through the gaslit fog of nighttime Victorian Whitechapel, a Nosferatu-like zombie that can spider along the ceiling towards you) were all sequences that I had seen in movies before. Having said that, however, I was never bored by this book (despite its nearly 700 pages), will probably continue with the series, and think it would make a popular movie franchise (wishing the author much success with this series, because literary fiction probably doesn’t pay the bills.) [Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.]

One April afternoon in Chicago when she was six she had been caught in a thunderstorm and she had felt something like it then, the electricity helixing all around her. Her mother had run out to her that day and bundled her inside with her swollen knuckles and had toweled her dry while the wood in their basement room hissed in the stove and lightning flashed in sheets over the lake. A scent of burning cedar. Rose-hip tea from Boston in chipped mugs. The oil and grease smell of her mother’s skin, which Alice had not smelled in a quarter century. That. She was crying. She stood in the darkness of that tent and wiped at her eyes with the inside of her wrists. She saw in the blue glow the faces of the men gathered there were also wet with tears and she raised her eyes. The shining boy grew brighter. And then brighter still.

Basically: Sometimes children around the world are born with “talents”, and for their training and protection, agents are sent to collect them and bring them to a mouldering boarding school in northern Scotland, the Cairndale Institute. Ordinary Monsters opens with the collection of two such children — Charlie (a sixteen-year-old Black orphan being held in a Mississippi jail) and Marlowe (an eight-year-old British foundling who was spirited away to a travelling circus in America) — and as the detectives (a ginger-whiskered British man, Coulton, and a weathered American woman, Alice) evade the characters and forces that might try to prevent their success, the reader is brought up to speed with this world and its dangers. I haven’t seen/read X-Men or The Umbrella Academy (both of which I’ve noted other reviewers are comparing this to), but Marlowe is reminiscent of the Boy Who Lived and Cairndale isn’t unlike Hogwarts. What’s unique to this story is the isolation that these children experience — every child who is brought to Cairndale is an orphan, overcoming a lifetime of fear and revulsion for their inexplicable “monstrous” talents — and the heartache, trauma, and gruesome fight scenes elevate this beyond children’s fiction. This becomes a story of finding family and purpose, but as so much is presented in shades of grey, it’s hard for the reader, let alone these children, to see who’s really good and who is an agent of evil. And again, I appreciate the rounded female characters that Miro has created: Brynt, the tattooed guardian; Alice, the grizzled detective; Mrs Harrogate, the widowed middleman between Cairndale and the outer world; Miss Davenshaw, the blindfolded teacher who “sees” more than most — any of them would risk their lives for the children, and I believed and appreciated it. The plot reaches a completely satisfying conclusion, while setting up the rest of the series.

“Thing is", he murmured, “you waste all this time dreaming of where you came from, cause you know no one comes from nothing. And you tell yourself, if you only knew, then maybe you could see a reason for how you got to be the way you are. Why your life looks like it does. But there isn’t any reason, not really.” He worried the ring at his knuckle, feeling the bite of it.

Despite the similarities to other magical-children-at-boarding-school-tasked-with-saving-the-world type novels, you never forget that these are children being put at risk — and especially Marlowe, the shining boy who everyone wants to save — and that creates a satisfying emotional connection: not like I identified with the children but, as was the case for the strong female adult characters, something maternal and protective was drawn out of me by these “ordinary monsters”, and that’s a satisfying sensation. Three stars isn’t meant to suggest that I didn’t like this novel, I just honestly didn’t love it (and as I gave two stars to the phenomenally successful The Name of the Wind, my enjoyment level may not be typical). And once again: wishing much success to the author.

Lucy by the Sea

I learned this about the sound of the sea: There were two levels to it, there was a deep ongoing sound that was quietly massive, and there was also the sound of the water hitting the rocks; always this was thrilling to me.

Lucy Barton returns in Lucy by the Sea, with the same likeable and informal tone that author Elizabeth Strout brought to the earlier novels in which she appears. This time around, Lucy cancels her European book tour on a gut feeling just before the pandemic shuts down the world, and at the urging of her ex-husband and good friend, William, she joins him in a seaside rented house in Maine to wait out the lockdowns. Of course this takes longer than expected, and as Lucy meets new people in Maine (at a six foot distance) and worries about her adult daughters and their husbands, Strout captures something very authentic and worthy of noting about the pandemic experience. Lucy eventually reaches some profound conclusions about life in her declining years (I believe the quote above is about recognising what is quietly massive and consistent in your life and delighting in the unexpected thrills) and Strout seems to be using this novel to look back and tie together her own lifetime of thought and writing. Short and sweet and engagingly relevant, this was a pleasure to read. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in the final forms.)

Here is what I did not know that morning in March: I did not know that I would never see my apartment again. I did not know that one of my friends and a family member would die of this virus. I did not know that my relationship with my daughters would change in ways I could never have anticipated. I did not know that my entire life would become something new. These are the things I did not know that morning in March while I was walking to William’s car with my little violet-colored rolling suitcase.

Lucy states more than once that she is not smart about the world, so it took William (a parasitologist — not an expert on viruses, but a working scientist who does follow the news) to whisk her away from Manhattan, enforcing quarantines and social distancing and masking protocols before the general public began to follow suit. It was interesting to watch Lucy in lockdown — trying to make sense of everything on the news from the BLM protests to the Capitol Riots; wanting to understand but overwhelmed by the images — and it was heart-rending to witness her isolation, with only her often annoying ex-husband for company and her beloved daughters keeping their distance. Nothing like a pandemic to clarify one’s philosophy:

I did not go back to sleep. I stayed awake and I thought: We all live with people — and places — and things — that we have given great weight to. But we are weightless, in the end.

While all of the pandemic and domestic events are playing out, I found it interesting that Strout decided to have characters from her earlier works intersect. At one point Lucy thinks (writes? I have no idea who Lucy is narrating this story to), “So there was that kind of thing that happened. There were these times, is what I am saying, where the people I met were interesting. And their stories interwove!” And that’s when I realised that the Bob Burgess who organised the house rental for William was the Bob from The Burgess Boys, and the woman he had just met at dinner through Lucy was Katherine Caskey from Abide With Me. And when Lucy at one point thinks (writes?), “I read a book a few years ago, and some character in it said something like, It’s our duty to bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can,” I thought to myself that that sounded familiar and I googled it and found it was said by Olive Kitteridge in Olive, Again. And that would be weird enough (to have Lucy read and quote from a book by Elizabeth Strout) if Lucy didn’t eventually meet a character who knows Olive Kitteridge and talks about her. (There could well be other references to earlier work that I didn’t get, but I did, overall, like these references; this did have the overarching feeling of a summing up of a lifetime of work for Strout.)

And then this thought went through my mind: We are all in lockdown, all the time. We just don’t know it, that’s all. But we do the best we can. Most of us are just trying to get through.

There’s an authentic compassion for humanity on display in this novel — William and Lucy even discuss folks from the other end of the political spectrum and acknowledge their understandable frustration and disenfranchisement — and throughout, Lucy is just so likeable and relatable that I wanted the best for her while realising that Strout would probably need to give her a “true” ending. Ultimately, I enjoyed this and I believed it. 

Liberation Day: Stories

 

Often short stories read to me like sketches, unexpandable ideas, or scenes cut out from longer works, but with George Saunders, short stories are perfect little worlds, entire unto themselves. Liberation Day: Stories can be broadly divided into weirdly imaginative and expansive near-future tales (generally with a greater class divide and the have-nots further exploited by the fat cats and their strange tech) and stories that feature extreme close-ups into folks’ inner monologues (generally with ironic or humorous results). In each story, the writing is precise, the voices varied and pitch perfect, and it all adds up to a scathing indictment of modern life. Simply masterful. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.) The stories:

What is right, what is wrong? In this situation? What a small question! What is great? That is what my heart longs to ask. What is lush? What is bold, what is daring? In which direction lies maximum richness, abundance, delight? ~Liberation Day

Clocking in at nearly 30% the length of this collection, the titular story reads like classic near-future sci-fi Saunders: In this striking examination of human nature, enslaved people (acting as Speakers or Singers) are Pinioned to a Speaking Wall in rich folks’ homes, and via input from devices implanted in the base of the performers’ necks, the systems’ owners are able to concoct spoken/sung “jams” for the amusement of themselves and their Company. Liberation Day is told from the POV of one such Speaker, Jeremy, and it’s uncomfortable to watch as his only concern is to perform well enough for Mr U and his Company to maybe get some attention from the beautiful Mrs U (who doesn’t often enjoy her husband’s jams but does engage in secret late night sessions with Jeremy in which she gets him to concoct romantic scenes and tell her how pretty she is). When the Speakers and Singers are upgraded with new tech that deepens their knowledge base, they are programmed to perform the story of Custer’s Last Stand — from the POVs of all involved — and not only does Saunders make this story intensely evocative of the senseless tragedy, but for the reader to experience the unprovoked attack on a village of Indigenous people in the past, via the performance of indentured peoples in the future, it forces you to consider your current place in the continuum of exploitation: Just who is suffering today because we (I) don’t afford them full humanity? From the line-by-line writing to the overall message, this was an absolute stand out.

Keith yelled that he was going for a run. Wow. Keith hadn’t gone running in years. It was as if reading her essay had made him want to be as good at something as she was at writing. Not to brag. But that was what good writing did, she realized: you said what you really thought and it made a kind of energy, and that sincere energy flowed into the mind of the reader. It was amazing. She was an essayist. All these years she’d just been working in the wrong genre. ~The Mom of Bold Action

A woman with a history of schlocky, unpublished writing (even her internal monologuing is schlocky) unleashes a regrettable series of consequences with her first sincere project.

I just want to say that history, when it arrives, may not look as you expect, based on the reading of history books. Things in there are always so clear. One knows exactly what one would have done. ~Love Letter

An old man in a near future police state writes a letter to his adult grandson, apologetically trying to explain how American citizens gradually lost their freedoms through small concessions to the government. On the one hand, this felt a little obvious and partisan (in a “they came for my neighbour and I said nothing” kind of a way), but on the other hand, one does read the news.

That was Brenda. Nice lady, lots of issues, okay, but come on. This was a place of work. ~A Thing at Work

This one was pretty funny: Through rotating POVs between people in an office (who all spend a lot of time judging each other and lying to themselves), we learn just how unknowable other people actually are.

She always seemed to be reading directly from a book on how to be most common. “Are those apples fresh?” someone would ask, and she’d say, “I suppose they are pretty fresh.” “Was that an earthquake just now?” someone would ask, and she’d say, “If it was, it will be on the radio.” ~Sparrow

What a sweet little love story about a woman so common that no one expected much for her: The magic is in the way that Saunders seems to subvert every fact as soon as it’s stated — she seems like this but this happens; she looks like that, but this…and then she has it all and it filled my heart.

I guess one never realizes how little one wants to be kicked to death until one hears a crowd doing that exact same thing to someone nearby. ~Ghoul

Sometimes it takes a weird mashup of Palahniuk, Orwell, and M. Night Shyamalan to shine a light on our own weird world.

Something had spoiled Paulie and Pammy. Well, it wasn’t her. She’d always been firm. Once she’d left them at the zoo for disobeying. When she’d told them to stop feeding the giraffe they’d continued. She’d left them at the zoo and gone for a cocktail, and when she returned Pammy and Paulie were standing repentant at the front gate, zoo balloons deflated. That had been a good lesson in obedience. ~Mother’s Day

A bitter old woman who always blamed others for the unhappiness in her life is forced to make a reckoning. As in A Thing at Work, we learn more about characters by what they think of others than how they present themselves.

Sometimes, to do good, there are steps along the way at which goodness must be temporarily set aside or lost sight of, says Jer. ~Elliott Spencer

In echoes of the title story, in this melancholic near future tale, the disadvantaged are moulded into mindless tools for the use of others. But what happens when your tools remember they’re human, too?

That letter exists in my mind. But I am too tired to write it. Well, that is not true. I am not too tired. I’m just not ready. The surge of pride and life and self is still too strong in me. ~My House

This brief story echoes Mother’s Day as an ageing man is confronted with his own faults in the face of death.

4.5 stars, rounding up.

Black Dove

 

“The most powerful flower of all, the rarest, most dangerous plant ever studied, was this first flower that I’m telling you about. Two of its petals rise like wings whenever night falls. It is the most dangerous because it makes whoever finds it unimaginably strong. It takes away fear. If you can find the flower, you can do anything you want.” 

“What’s it called?” asked Oliver, with his eyes closed. 

“The Black Dove,” said his dad.

I felt compellingly wrongfooted throughout Black Dove: Particularly early on, I rarely understood what was meant to be actually happening to the characters and what was in-novel storytelling — but every time I lost my footing, author Colin McAdam presented a fingerhold with just enough meaning for me to grasp and carry on. Focussed primarily on a sad twelve-year-old boy (and his well-meaning writer father), this is no Early Reader coming-of-age novel: With monsters and bullies and abusive parents, the storyline can be bloody and gruesome. But still, the uncertainty and danger and sadness of this narrative perfectly captures something of what it is to be twelve; what it is to be the parent of a sad twelve-year-old boy, trying (maybe not successfully) to prove you understand him; that you remember what it’s like to stand at that cliffedge. The language is vivid and slightly off somehow (but compellingly so; I needed to make meaning), the plot is fantastical but rooted in the muck of our own world, and the characters are like to break one’s heart: What more could a reader possibly ask for? I went into this not knowing anything about the plot and I’d urge other readers to do the same with the assurance that it all comes together in the end. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

His father spent the morning writing. Half-built scenes and old yearnings. A sense of fear creeping in more these days. Paying the bills, the world moving on from the aesthetic he was raised in, organs quietly aging. Still such a fire in him, but burning on what. He wrote every day the way kids sing in the dark to keep their fears quiet. It’s not real singing.

Oliver’s mother had been a mean drunk, and after she left, it was just him and his Dad living alone “in a tall and narrow old house on a stained and busy street” (I did love all of the recognisably Toronto references). When Oliver’s father’s writing was going well, he rarely acknowledged what was going on outside his study, so he failed to notice when his son — younger and smaller than the other boys in his class after skipping a grade, wearing uncool clothing, and bearing the shame of his mother’s reputation — had become the target of school bullies. Running from these boys one afternoon, Oliver ducked into a shabby-looking bric-a-brac shop and met its curious proprietor: Allele Princeps, survivor of a tragic childhood and current mad scientist attempting to create, essentially, an unhurtable human:

And when you walk through gardens that get heavier, swollen and corrupt, when flies walk over eyelids and the fruit starts dripping its own wine, when the mould sets in and you move to drier edges, getting pushed now at your backs to where the grass has burned and dust gets into lungs, jackals and a soldiery of vultures will stir and chatter, hybrid beasts will thrive beneath a viral sky and he will be watching, crouching, staring with the wisdom of a widow, the perfect boy.

I’m going to put my next comments behind a spoiler warning (because I really don’t want to spoil anything). ** Like I wrote above, I was so wrongfooted from the start: We understand that Oliver’s dad often tells him a bedtime story — the story of the “Black Dove” is obviously meant as a metaphor for their situation but he also tries out plots from his writing on the boy — but I was never certain what was meant to be happening, and what was from the dad’s writing. When I first read about Amon — the boy who can kill with a touch — I assumed that wasn’t meant to be “reality”, until it was (until it wasn’t), and I did like that uncertainty; what’s more uncertain than being twelve and thinking you understand how the world works and the world keeps proving you wrong? Oliver’s body changing from Principe’s gene-editing is, I suppose, plausible, (but even in the moment it read as comic book wish fulfilment; which is credible for the character). But what I didn’t find acceptable was the slate of unfleshed/absent female characters: Both Oliver’s and Principe’s mothers were cruelly abusive (which makes sense if Principe is an avatar of Oliver in his father’s story), the bullies make their fathers into characters by talking about them (the mothers are barely mentioned), the female gym teacher is a flake, but worst of all is poor Suzi: treated like Bella out of Twilight or something, she’s frightened and faintly disgusted by Oliver when they first meet but his electric touch makes her overcome her hesitation and be the understanding nonmutant who can’t help but stand by her inhuman man. The “romance” between the pair is absolutely appropriate for a pair of twelve-year-olds, but I did not like her position in the relationship and it highlighted for me just how secondary the female characters were to the story. However, I did ultimately appreciate how McAdam tied up all the stories-within-a-story, writer-using-the-tools-he-has-to-save-his-sad-son. ** In the end we learn the hard lesson: Sometimes you will be sad and need to learn to work your way through it; maybe stories can help with that.

We are animals and we will die, and in the journey of each animal is some small triumph or a path surprising and if all we can do is celebrate and sing our struggles in the dust, our fights and wants and eyes so pretty they cannot simply be eyes, then that will be music enough.

I do hope I’ve given enough of the flavour of the vivid and off-kilter writing here: McAdam has a strong and unique voice, and he uses it compellingly to say something important. And now I want to go out and find his backlist.

Dinosaurs

 

It was no longer held to be true that all the dinosaurs had gone extinct sixty-six million years ago, after the Chicxulub impactor made its crater in Mexico. Blocked out the sun. And killed off the plants the dinosaurs needed to survive. Only the ones that wouldn’t turn into birds. There were about three thousand active satellites up in the sky, he’d read. Some twenty-thousand pieces of orbital debris. At any given moment, an average of nine thousand passenger planes flying. And yet, he’d thought as he walked, without the last of the dinosaurs the sky would be empty.

I haven’t read Lydia Millet’s phenomenally popular A Children’s Bible, but it was so lauded by my goodreads friends that I decided to take a chance on her latest novel, Dinosaurs, when I saw it was available. And it was just okay. Kind of a straightforward story arc of character growth with snappy dialogue and some interesting nature writing, this certainly wasn’t a waste of time, but it didn’t really wow me either. Short and sweet and not much to dissect. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

He recognized the pattern. He went to new places because they weren’t the same as the old ones. But he wanted to feel the distance in his bones and skin, the ground beneath his feet. Not step onto a plane and land in five hours after a whiskey and a nap. And not drive, either, with the speed and convenience cars gave you. He wasn’t looking for easy. He had nowhere to be and no one who needed him.

As the story opens, we meet Gil: Incredibly wealthy and with few personal ties (he was orphaned young and claims to have only ever had three friends and one long-term romantic relationship), Gil decided to relocate from Manhattan to Scottsdale, AZ, walking the 2500 miles over five months (“I wanted the change to cost me. You know? I wanted to earn it.”) Having bought a big house (nicknamed “The Castle”) in the suburbs, sight unseen, Gil is bemused when a family soon moves into the glass-fronted home facing him, giving the solitary man a fishbowl view of a family life he’s never known. Gil has always tried to make meaning in his life with volunteer work and he soon makes a life for himself in Scottsdale: volunteering with a women’s shelter as a “Friendly Man” and getting to know the family next door. And that’s about it.

Gil is captivated by the birds he sees from his new home (the only birds he recalls in Manhattan were the pigeons in the park) and each chapter is named for a different bird — Mourning (for the dove), Quail, etc. — and each type of bird then appears in that chapter and has a metaphorical connection to the content. If I have a complaint it would be that, as awkward as Gil tells us he feels around people, he is continually intervening with the people around him, and even with the teenagers next door, he always offers exactly the right advice; everyone who meets Gil finds him attractive and smart and charming. (And if I could make another complaint: It’s not ironically clever to have a wealthy orphan grow up to wear a bat costume on Halloween and hit the street to prevent a crime. I sighed.)

You could see what was true — that separateness had always been the illusion. A simple trick of flesh. The world was inside you after that. Because, after all, you were made of two people only at the very last instant. Before that, of a multiplication so large it couldn’t be fathomed. Back and back in time. A tree in a forest of trees, where men grew from apes and birds grew from dinosaurs.

I will say again that the dialogue was snappy and charming (even if I didn’t really buy that this character, as presented, was up to this kind of banter), but also need to reiterate that there aren’t a lot of surprises: Man seeks a fresh start, meets new people, realises he is connected to humanity after all.

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks

 

These are wild tales, but they’re all true, each scrupulously fact-checked by my brilliant colleagues at The New Yorker. Together, I hope that they illuminate something about crime and punishment, the slipperiness of situational ethics, the choices we make as we move through this world, and the stories we tell ourselves and others about those choices.

After finishing Rogues, I find myself immediately going back and questioning the title. A “rogue” is defined as “a dishonest, knavish person; scoundrel. A playfully mischievous person; scamp”, and honestly, that language doesn’t feel adequate to capture the people Patrick Radden Keefe has written about here. Even the subtitle “True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks” barely covers the range of “roguery” that goes from someone like the druglord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán (reputed to have ordered the murders of tens of thousands of people) to Anthony Bourdain (decidedly more scamp than scoundrel, he definitely seems out of place in the company of terrorists, murderers, and arms dealers.) In twelve long articles that have formerly been published in The New Yorker, Keefe shines as an investigative journalist who gets to the bottom of every story, and whether he’s writing about criminals, their victims, or his own reaction to a situation, he has a real knack for emphasising the humanity behind the headlines. Overall — and this isn’t Keefe’s fault — this collection made me a little depressed: There are so many bad people out there, hurting other people in the pursuit of money (which of course I already knew), and governments supporting the rogues if it suits their mandates (which of course I already knew), and victims struggling, fruitlessly, to find justice (which of course I already knew) that reading this all at once felt a little overwhelming. Consistently well-written and globe-trottingly fascinating, Rogues should be a satisfying followup for readers of Keefe’s recent bestsellers. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Of the twelve entries, these are a few bits that made me go Hmmm for one reason or another.

Could Rodenstock have become so proficient at making fake wine that his fakes tasted as good as, or even better than, the real thing? When I asked Parker about the bottle, he hastened to say that even the best wine critics are fallible. Yet he reiterated that the bottle was spectacular. “If that was a fake, he should be a mixer,” Parker said. “It was wonderful.”

In “The Jefferson Bottles” (originally published in 2007), we are introduced to Hardy Rodenstock: a German wine collector who repeatedly uncovered forgotten stashes of rare old wine (including, as per the title, a case of French wine intended for Thomas Jefferson with his name etched on the bottles), which Rodenstock then sold for huge sums at auction. The narrative primarily focuses on American billionaire Bill Koch — avid art and wine collector — who, when he was told that the various wines he had bought that originated with Rodenstock were probably all fakes, embarked on his other great passion: suing the pants off anyone who crossed him. The article traces the investigation into Rodenstock’s sketchy career, explores the world of top tier œnophilia, and encourages us to join Keefe in feeling superior to the kitschy Koch (with his “cowboy room” [Keefe’s quote marks] filled with Remington bronzes and Custer’s firearms) as Keefe joins Koch in a glass of fine wine from the billionaire’s cellar. This is the first article in the collection and I was immediately struck by two things: There is definitely a liberal political slant to Keefe’s writing and there’s a jarring out-of-syncness to reading out-of-date investigative journalism. At the end of each entry, Keefe does update the story and this one ends in part with, “In 2018, Hardy Rodenstock died, at age seventy-six” and Bill Koch continues to pursue his lawsuits “very happily, to this day.”

Dornstein ushered me up to the third floor, where two cramped rooms were devoted to Lockerbie. In one room, shelves were lined with books about espionage, aviation, terrorism, and the Middle East. Jumbo binders housed decades of research. In the other room, Dornstein had papered the walls with mug shots of Libyan suspects. Between the two rooms was a large map of Lockerbie, with hundreds of colored pushpins indicating where the bodies had fallen. He showed me a cluster where first-class passengers landed, and another where most of the economy passengers were found. Like the coroner in a police procedural, Dornstein derives such clinical satisfaction from his work that he can narrate the grisliest findings with cheerful detachment. Motioning at a scattering of pushpins some distance from the rest, he said, “They were the youngest, smallest children. If you look at the physics of it, they were carried by the wind.”

In “The Avenger” (originally published 2015), Keefe writes about Ken Dornstein whose older brother David was on Pan Am Flight 103 that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. This was so interesting in the details but had a weird feeling as we follow along with an investigative journalist as he tells the story of an investigative journalist who was looking for answers in his brother’s death (Dornstein would go on to write the book The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky and film a three part documentary for Frontline called “My Brother’s Bomber”.) One thread that interested me in particular: The CIA linked the timer on the bomb that was planted on the plane to a Swiss electronics company whose owner doesn’t deny providing timing devices to the Libyan regime over the years, telling Dornstein “Switzerland is neutral, and I’m neutral in this thing.” Keefe reached out to this man and reports: In an email, (Edwin) Bollier told me that any suggestion that he was linked to the destruction of Pan Am 103 is a “despicable accusation” and a “fictional idea.” His email address, which I discovered on his website, is Mr.Lockerbie@gmail.com. (And even though Dornstein was seeking, and found, bigger fish than Bollier, “rogue” doesn’t feel sufficient to describe even him.)

(Mark) Burnett is fluent in the jargon of self-help, and he has published two memoirs, both written with Bill O’Reilly’s ghostwriter, which double as manuals on how to get rich. One of them, titled Jump In! Even if You Don’t Know How to Swim, now reads like an inadvertent metaphor for the Trump presidency. “Don’t waste time on overpreparation,” the book advises. At the 2004 panel, Burnett made it clear that with The Apprentice he was selling an archetype. “Donald is the current-day version of a tycoon,” he said. “Donald will say whatever Donald wants to say. He takes no prisoners. If you’re Donald’s friend, he’ll defend you all day long. If you’re not, he’s going to kill you. And that’s very American. It’s like the guys who built the West.”

In “Winning” from 2019, Keefe tells the story of producer Mark Burnett and his role in raising (and polishing) Donald Trump’s profile. It would seem, from this article, that both Burnett and Trump are rogues. Keefe recalls the 2016 Emmys where Jimmy Kimmel blamed Mark Burnett for Donald Trump’s resurrection, making it clear that Trump would have never successfully run for president had it not been for “the sneaky little crumpet-muncher” Burnett (who declined an interview with the author). In the concluding update for this story, Keefe writes that after Trump lost his bid for reelection, “He retreated to Mar-a-Lago, to plot his comeback. If he doesn’t run for president again, it will almost certainly involve television, and if it involves television, it could very well involve Mark Burnett.”

For the next two years, Soiles and a team of agents from the SOD pored over old case files, studying Kasser’s operation. But gathering sufficient evidence of his involvement in various crimes was difficult, and pursuing Kassar for the Achille Lauro charges might be barred, because it would amount to double jeopardy. By early 2006, Soiles and his colleagues had decided that they needed to attempt something radical. Rather than try Kassar for a crime he’d committed in the past, they would use the strong conspiracy laws in the United States to prosecute him for something that he intended to do in the future. They would infiltrate Kassar’s organization and set him up in a sting. Many European countries have “agent provocateur” laws to guard against entrapment, but in an American court it would be difficult for a trafficker with Kassar’s history to protest that he was in no way disposed to clandestine weapons deals.

In “The Prince of Marbella” (originally published in 2010), Keefe tells the story of fabulously successful international arms dealer Monzer Al Kassar. Like Bollier above, who takes no personal responsibility for what anyone does with the timing devices he might sell to bomb makers, Kassar was able to position himself as a mere middleman between arms manufacturers and they who would rather buy their weapons without a papertrail. This wasn’t technically illegal — and Kassar reportedly worked with the American government during the Iran Contra Affair — but the Americans eventually decided to go after him and they set him up in a sting operation. The undercover buyers said that they represented Colombia’s FARC guerrilla forces, and as American Special Forces often teamed with the Colombian government to suppress the rebels, selling to FARC could be interpreted as intending to attack Americans (and based on Kassar saying on tape that he’d be happy for Americans to die in the conflict, he has been serving a sentence at a federal prison in Marion, Illinois since 2009). I have no love for Kassar or other underground arms dealers, but even as the sympathetic Keefe describes the sting, it sounds a bit roguish, too.

All told, Bourdain has traveled to nearly a hundred countries and has filmed 248 episodes, each a distinct exploration of the food and culture of a place. The secret ingredient of the show is the when-in-Rome avidity with which he partakes of indigenous custom and cuisine, whether he is pounding vodka before plunging into a frozen river outside St. Petersburg or spearing a fatted swine as the guest of honor at a jungle longhouse in Borneo. Like a great white shark, Bourdain tends to be photographed with his jaws wide open, on the verge of sinking his teeth into some tremulous delicacy.

“Journeyman” from 2017 is an admiring biography of celebrity chef, bestselling author, and gastronomic world-traveller Anthony Bourdain. Other than some early drug abuse, nothing about Bourdain fits into the “true crime” profile of this collection, but I guess plenty of people might have described him as roguish. This was a hard one to read, knowing that this oversized personality would eventually take his own life, and it was definitely uncomfortable to read, “Bourdain often thinks about dying; more than once, he told me that if he got ‘a bad chest x-ray’, he would happily renew his acquaintance with heroin.” This is a strong article, an interesting read, but it did feel out of place here.

In addition to the above rogues, we meet mass workplace shooter Amy Bishop; banker Hervé Falciani, who leaked the details of thousands of HSBC’s secret, tax-evading accountholders (“In France, Falciani looked like a whistle-blower; in Switzerland, he looked like a thief”); Mexican druglord “El Chapo” (and as this article was mostly about the first great hunt for Guzmán, it was awkward for it to end with “they caught him but he escaped and was later caught again” and then have a parenthetical update that said “and he escaped again and was caught again”; jarring way to update the out-of-date); there is insider trading, the modern-day looting of African resources, a Dutch gangster (as well as the abetting family who eventually turned on him); and celebrated defense attourney Judy Clarke — who represents “the worst of the worst” in capital crime cases — and follow along on her failure to save Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokhar “Jahar” Tsarnev from the death penalty. (In July 2020, the death penalty was overturned, but in March of 2022, “the court voted to reinstate it”.)

Although interesting and probing, Keefe is definitely not impartial in his storytelling. When billionaire George Soros is working behind the scenes on the world stage, he’s doing good; when billionaire Bill Koch says he wants to collect rare wines and never drink them (because collecting is the point), he’s a bit of a clown; when Israeli billionaire investor Beny Steinmetz flips a mining contract (in what he calls a standard practise), he’s a criminal (and by Keefe’s account, he probably is; Steinmetz is currently appealing a conviction for bribery). I did like how Keefe puts himself in the story — I enjoyed travelling the world with him as he follows leads and don’t really mind seeing the people he meets through his eyes — but for anyone expecting journalistic detachment, this is not that. Still a highly interesting collection; but are they all rogues?

I don't think of myself as someone with a particular interest in True Crime, but as someone who is just so over scripted television, true crime stories do cross my viewing path. While reading the first article about the wine forger Hardy Rodenstock  — and likely the reason why I was attracted to that passage about “If that was a fake, he should be a mixer. It was wonderful.”  — I was reminded of a fascinating movie I once watched on a plane about wine forgery called Sour Grapes (and I was amused to learn that that film was produced by Bill Koch when I went to search for the title). In a very similar fashion to Rodenstock's story, wine expert Rudy Kurniawan would claim to have discovered some rare vintage, and some of the bottles he would sell, and some he would generously share with other œnophiles, and if it wasn't for the selling and the scamming, it raised a very interesting question to me: If someone is talented enough to perfecly replicate an experience for someone who would not otherwise be able to have that experience (and as rare wines are increasingly consumed or relegated to a permanent collection somewhere, the rare will only become rarer), is that the most evil crime? If someone had a life-changing tasting experience that they believed to be authentic, does it matter it if wasn't? I don't know the answer to that.

I watched an extraordinary documentary on TVO a while ago called There Are No Fakes — about the recent discovery that a huge percentage of the paintings attributed to Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau are forgeries — and it turns out that even in his lifetime Morrisseau knew that people from his community were faking his paintings and he didn't think it detracted from his own legacy (he was quoted as saying something like, "We are all simply taking what we need from a passing river. I do not own that river and I would not stop someone else who needs to take from it.") If a person bought a Morrisseau painting because they loved that painting and wanted to be around it, it shouldn't matter whether or not the painting is authentic if the experience is. It's only when the documentary gets around to the white man who was orchestrating the fakes — the kind of greedy and familiar rogue who would dam the river to keep it to himself — that the story began to take a nasty turn; and it all came down to money.

I was also reminded of a limited series I recently saw on Netflix, Murder Among the Mormons, about Mark Hofmann: an incredibly talented coin and document forger who kept "discovering" early letters and other paperwork from the founding days of the Latter Day Saints that church fathers were quick to buy up and suppress (due to their subversive nature). It was hard to tell from that series whether Hofmann was motivated by money, a desire to undermine the religion he no longer believed in, or just to see what he could get away with, but when he started making bombs to deflect mounting suspicion, his actions went beyond any debate about whether this could have been a mostly harmless crime. But philosophically: If someone created an absolutely true-to-life Shakespeare First Folio, Gutenberg Bible, or first edition of any favourite novel, and someone could have the pleasure of owning, displaying, leafing through one of those — what harm? 

Maybe we'll have Star Trek replicators someday and anything anyone could want — the Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, the Picasso, the original annotated Beethoven score — would be ours for the asking; if it feels authentic, doesn't that make it authentic? It would certainly cut down on roguery. Is this why rogues want NFTs, crypto, and blockchain? What would feel authentic about owning some digital artefact? That is, ultimately, pure money and the thought leaves me cold.

Signal Fires

 

The stars, rather than appearing distant and implacable, seemed to be signal fires in the dark, mysterious fellow travelers lighting a path; one hundred thousand million luminous presences beckoning from worlds away. See us. We are here. We have always been here. We will always be here.

I admire what I’ve read of Dani Shapiro’s nonfiction, so I was excited to read her latest novel Signal Fires. Starting with a car accident that will have long-lasting repercussions for one (formerly happy, “normal”) suburban family, the plot jumps POV and the timeline (from the ‘70s to Y2K to COVID lockdowns and back again), and with further dramatic events coincidentally joining neighbours together across the years, Shapiro makes the point that we are all connected: like spiderwebs; like supergalaxies; like signal fires. There are many relatable and touching scenes set inside larger, dramatic storylines, and with characters who are mostly dissatisfied with the choices they’ve made in their lives, this is a narrative that weighed heavily on my heart as I read it. I believed everything Shapiro writes about families and how individual choices can have far-reaching consequences, but there were also some quasi-mystical underpinnings that, if Shapiro wanted me to take them literally, and I believe she did, my mind was resistant to them. As a straight storyline: totally readable. If I was looking for deeper meaning: not quite satisfied. I’d rate 3.5 stars and am rounding up because it did make me feel something. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

He’d like to take this suspended moment — the new millennium already careening inexorably forward — and roll it back instead. Back, back through layers of time to a split second when things could have gone differently, if only they had known. There must be that second, bobbing and darting in the aliveness of their shared history, unmistakable, glowing like a firefly in the darkness. If only they could pinpoint it and stop it there, right there, at the small but indelible spot that somehow they missed the first time around, if only, then perhaps their whole family could begin again.

I don’t want to say much about the plot (which did always hold my interest) but want to reiterate that, for me, Signal Fires was all about the mood: the things that were never talked about (but which found ways to express themselves anyway); the families that fractured; the children that hurt (even as adults). There’s something sad about the suburbs here — the big house brings money worries, a long commute back into the city, isolation from neighbours — and as the houses on the street flip owners over the years, the only constants are the big oak tree (whose history, increasingly, no one remembers) and the constellations coldly marching through their houses in the sky. It will take a pandemic — and forced isolation — for characters to remember not to take their interpersonal bonds for granted (but while COVID makes an appearance as an outer reality, this is not a pandemic novel). The family dynamics and drama worked for me, completely.

“Yeah,” Waldo says. He’s looking straight ahead, though not at anything in particular. “Everything is connected. Everything. The lady. The doctor. Me. You. It’s like we’re part of a galactic supercluster.”

And I don’t really want to call out the particulars of the “quasi-mystical underpinnings” other than to note that while I am open to the possibility for grace and karma and synchronicity in real life, I am resistant to such things being made manifest in an otherwise straightforward, reality-based novel. (Resistant enough that I may eventually downgrade this to three stars.) Overall, I did like this very much, and as I think that Dani Shapiro is an excellent writer, I would be pleased to read more of her work.

I'll share here the kind of mystical scene that I resisted. SPOILER: After feeling responsible for a girl's death when he was fifteen, Theo Wilf felt disconnected from his family (even the mother who adored him and begged him to come home to visit as an adult) and others (never having a long-term romantic relationship) and it took COVID lockdowns and seeing people losing their jobs for Theo to feel a sense of connection to and responsibility for others, opening the kitchen of his shuttered restaurant to provide meals for those who could and those who couldn't pay:

His phone rings. Forty minutes north, a long-dead girl is sending out lassos of light. She has been doing this for many years, but conditions have to be just so. He has to be ready. Now, she crosses time and space. She is bones in a graveyard. She is cellular matter. She lives within the inner rings of an ancient tree. Every part of her that did not vanish on that summer night loops around him in an embrace he feels only as unexpected purpose and well-being. Theo Wilf, he answers the call. And again. Theo Wilf.  

I am 100% open to reading that our shared humanity connects us all together — like spiderwebs; like supergalaxies; like signal fires — but I couldn't help but resist the few times that Shapiro made the point that we are literally connected by these "lassos of light" in an otherwise straightforward, nonmagical storyline. (And as I have confessed to being open to all manner of flaky ideas in this blog, I need to stress that this is solely a literary complaint; yet, resist I did.)

Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

   

To Miss Ella Minnow Pea:

I regret to tell yew most greephos news: Mannheim is mort. I no that yew new him, were phrents with him. That yew ant he ant his assistant Tom were worging still on the Enterprise 32 shallenge…

Ella Minnow Pea was recently recommended to me as a “must read of literary playfulness”, and I have to admit that the premise sounded intriguing: On a small sovereign island off South Carolina whose inhabitants are united by a love of language — and in particular, the famous pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", whose creator Nevin Nollop has a statue in the capital city’s main square with that sentence written upon it — the citizenry have their lives and expression circumscribed by their ruling Council as the letters in the pangram fall off the statue one by one and each letter is then consequently banned from the people’s vocabulary (written and spoken), and in concert, from the book itself. I understand that author Mark Dunn is a renowned playwright (and so, presumably, a master of dialogue), so it’s strange to me that he chose a monologuing epistolary form for this, his first novel: This is a series of letters, mostly written between two cousins and their mothers (and a few others), and they go from overwrought, florid writing (to demonstrate the people’s love of language, one supposes) as they explain to one another things they should already know about the increasing restrictions on their lives, to a slightly more basic writing style as they pepper their writing with awkward synonyms to get around banned words (“she-heir” for daughter). As letters progressively fall and become forbidden, the only real interest in the book becomes: Will the people be able to fight back against the Council’s increasing fascism? And how will Dunn’s writing accommodate his self-imposed restrictions? In the end, I didn’t think that there was any logic in the plot: Dunn was simply setting up a gimmick that he ultimately undermines and does not pull off. I wish I liked this more, but to me, it failed on all fronts.

On Wednesday, July 19, the Council, having gleaned and discerned, released its official verdict: the fall of the tile bearing the letter “Z” constitutes the terrestrial manifestation of an empyrean Nollopian desire, that desire most surely being that the letter “Z” should be utterly excised — fully extirpated — absolutely heave-ho’ed from our communal vocabulary!

When the first letter falls (note: what kind of statue has its inscription written out in glued-on tiles?), the Council determines that it’s a message from Nevin Nollop himself: the people have become complacent in their devotion to language and need to become more intentional in its use; everyone over the age of seven must cease to speak or write the letter “Z” or face punishment that ranges from a warning for a first offence, to flogging, banishment, to even death. Over the course of the next four months (the glue on the tiles is analysed in an offsite lab and, as predicted, fails quickly and completely), the Council grants itself ever more draconian powers as it elevates Nollop to the status of the one-true-God. And while citizens are increasingly banished or voluntarily leave the island (and have their abandoned property seized by the Council members) as the restrictions become ever harder to comply with, Miss Ella Minnow Pea (and some few other determined citizens) make a deal with the Council: If they can find a shorter pangram than the foxy-dog sentence by November 16th (Nollop’s birthday), they will prove that Nollop is not divine and the restrictions will all be lifted and the emigrants can safely return. Because fascism is that easy to defeat. Nothing about the plot made sense to me.

As for the writing: Not only do these correspondents write in an overly verbose style, but they do so with invented vocabulary — writing of the “scissoresonance” of the bees, a protesting youth’s “boldly insolent hurlatory”, the island of Nollop is described as “a beautiful, sandy-shored haven of enchantment and delishmerelle”. Ella’s cousin Tassie writes, well into the restrictions:

”Banishment”: the next banishment victim! To become one more invisiblinguista. The 4000th, 5000th such victim? Is anyone counting? Perhaps Nollop? Expunging each entry in his Heavenly Lexicon — one at a time — until the tome’s pages stop resembling pages at all. Until they become pure expurgatory-tangibull. Ravenstriate leaves. Ebony reticulate sheets. Tenebrous night in thin tissue. Contemnation by tissue! It is almost unbearable.

And so, I was interested to see how Dunn would deal with his self-imposed restrictions as letters became less available to him in this land of inflated rhetoric, but suddenly near the end, the Council declares that it is permissible for citizens to write in homonyms for forbidden “graphemes” (leading to some nonsense-looking passages as in the first quote), while of course, not being allowed to speak aloud in homonyms (yet in an epistolary novel, the writing is all we see; there’s simply no drama here).

This is a playful concept, and I do like books that play with language, but this simply didn’t pull it off for me.