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B&AB O O K S the
A R T S
A Thing ichael apted’s great UP series, about
or Two
About Life
The education of Michael Apted
BY SUSAN PEDERSEN
M a cohort of English children, wasn’t
conceived as a series at all. In 1963,
fresh out of Cambridge and as a train-
ee at Granada TV, Apted was asked to
find a group of talkative 7-year-olds
for a 40-minute special about the children who would
be Britain’s barristers and businessmen, factory workers
and housewives, at the century’s turn. Directed by Paul
Almond and screened in 1964, Seven Up! was to have
SCENES FROM THE UP SERIES (COURTESY BBC)
been a one-off. But when someone at Granada suggest-
ed revisiting the children at 14 and again at 21, Apted
jumped at the offer to direct. Even after his career took
off and he moved to Hollywood, he made time to make
32 a new installment every seven years.
T H E N AT I O N 11.16–23.2020
With the release of 63 Up last year, the series spans nine films and six decades. It is ly commitments and personal autonomy
Apted’s most important work and one of the most revelatory documentaries about so- was spread across the social scale and
cial change ever made. It has attracted imitations, scholarly articles and comment, and revolutionized all of his subjects’ lives
hordes of passionate fans—though perhaps this is the case as much in spite of as because (especially the women’s). Apted wanted to
of Apted’s direction. raise awareness of the iniquities of class,
From the outset, he imagined the project as an indictment of class inequality. He but he provoked something else, too: a
wanted to make, as he put it, “a nasty piece of work about these kids who have it all, and group campaign by his subjects to teach
these other kids who have nothing.” Drawn to children (mainly boys) at the sharp ends this emotionally tone-deaf man a thing or
of the class divide, he recruited five of the 14 children from elite private schools and two about life.
six from London’s working-class primary schools and care homes but only two from a
middle-class Liverpool suburb and one from rural Yorkshire. In their interviews in Seven he lesson began after 21 Up,
Up! these 7-year-olds unselfconsciously performed the hierarchies of class—theater
all the more devastating for its actors’ innocence. Who can forget the now-canonical
clip of Andrew Brackfield, Charles Furneaux, and John Brisby (the “three posh boys”)
obligingly recounting their reading material (“I read the Financial Times”), their plans
(“We think I’m going to Cambridge”), and
their view that the public (that is, private)
schools were a very good thing indeed,
T and it first took the form of
abstention. In 1964 no one
thought to seek the chil-
dren’s permission to ask in-
trusive questions, but by the early ’80s some
of the interviewees had wised up. Charles,
one of the three posh boys, went to Durham
since otherwise, their schools would be “so From the outset, Apted rather than Oxford or Cambridge. At 21,
nasty and crowded”? his stringy hair, jeans, and green sweater
Riveting cinema, yes, yet troubling, signaled his dissent from the values of his
imagined his project as
too, and not only for the attitudes it an indictment of social clipped and suited peers. By 28, unwilling
exposed. Watching, one can’t help but inequality in Britain. to serve as a poster boy for class privilege
wonder about the adults behind the cam- any longer, he pulled out of the series.
era, who, after all, orchestrated the per- Apted called him up to remonstrate, but the
formances and chose the scenes most ing off their troublesome mistresses, the conversation went badly, particularly after
likely to arouse our empathy, laughter, glowing girls preposterously still tumbling Charles announced that he had decided to
or even scorn. Not surprisingly, by the into bed with an ever-wrinklier Allen. become a documentary filmmaker, too. By
time of the first sequel, 7 Plus Seven, some Apted, of course, is no Woody Allen, but his own admission, Apted “went berserk,”
of the children had become twitchy and there is a similar connection between his poisoning the relationship to the extent
resentful, and by 21 Up, they bristled at touchy character and his brilliant oeuvre. that Charles never appeared in the series
Apted’s patronizing manner and leading His initial propensity to treat his subjects again and even tried to force Granada to
questions. Sue Davis, Lynn Johnson, and as stereotypes, his urge to goad rather than remove all footage of him from the series.
Jackie Bassett (three of only four women sympathize with them, his eagerness to The defection still rankles: Apted told The
subjects) were interviewed together, as if pounce on and probe their every weakness Hollywood Reporter in 2018 that Charles had
their shared working-class background or failure drove even the mildest of them “a rather undistinguished career with the
outweighed any individuality they might to speak up—and as they did so, to make BBC.” Cross him who dares.
have. He went on to ask: Were they an- the films their own. The defections continued. John, an-
gry about their straitened opportunities? 28 Up (1984) was the tipping point. other of the posh boys, also refused to
Didn’t they resent that they would go The first film of the series widely screened take part in 28 Up, and three of the series’
nowhere in life? It is unclear whether in the United States, it was the one Apted participants skipped 35 Up (1991)—among
Apted could see that he was enacting the considered a breakthrough. Only then them Peter Davies, a middle-class suburban
very class relations he deplored, but his did he realize that he wasn’t making “a Liverpool boy who had become a teacher
subjects stoutly rejected his analysis. They political film about Britain’s social classes,” and, after expressing sharply critical views
had plenty of opportunities, they told but something much more unusual: an of Thatcherite policies in 28 Up, was pil-
him, more than enough. They intended ongoing inquiry into how individuals from loried by the right-wing press. Trauma-
to have the lives they wanted, thank you a wide range of backgrounds sought out tized, he refused to take part in the next
very much. meaning and happiness amid the rapid three films, but like other participants, he
Is it possible to fall in love with a work of social change of postwar Britain and all eventually discovered that he had leverage
art but be appalled by the artist? In “What the random incidents and accidents that and could bargain. He returned for 56 Up
Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous life threw at them. (2012) on the condition that he could pro-
Men?” the essayist Claire Dederer dissects The films after that changed as a re- mote his new band. John returned in 35 Up
her complex feelings about Woody Allen. sult. Apted still layered in clips from the to promote his charity, Friends of Bulgaria.
She can’t help loving his films, even while earlier installments, but the subjects were The concessions made to keep John in
recoiling from their narcissism and sheer now interviewed individually, in segments the films provide, in themselves, a lesson
creepiness—the plotlines about men kill- that explored their unfolding lives and in the workings of social class. The most
personalities. The films still had much opinionated and seemingly snobbish of the
Susan Pedersen teaches at Columbia University. to say about social class, but they now posh boys, he insisted at 21 that
Her most recent book is The Guardians: The attended to other transformations as well,
League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire. not least how the quest to balance fami-
well-paid autoworkers could easily
send their children to university if
33
B&AB O O K S the
A R T S
only they valued education more. But he clearly felt that he had been set up and in later films they lived in London) watched society
insistently revised the record. Though he was chosen to exemplify privilege, he said that become—relatively quickly and with a
when he was 9, his father died, leaving his mother hard up. She then worked to support the sometimes violent white response—much
family, and he worked through his school vacations, spent a year in the army, and attended more racially and ethnically diverse. As the
Cambridge on a scholarship. “I don’t regard myself as particularly typical of the type that I series zeroed in on family life, not only class
was no doubt selected to represent,” he said in 56 Up—not least because “apart from any- but much of this historical drama fell away.
thing else, I’m three-quarters foreign.” John, it turns out, is a great-great-grandson of Todor Today, when 13 percent of UK residents
Burmov, the first prime minister of an independent Bulgaria, and with this revelation, his (and 40 percent of Londoners) are people
charity work and his marriage to Claire, the daughter of a former UK ambassador to Bul- of color, the disproportionate whiteness
garia, suddenly fall into place. John, of course, reaped the benefits of his elite education. He of the Up cohort feels jarring. True, the
is a barrister and a queen’s counsel, the top rank of lawyers, and enjoys a very comfortable Black population in Britain of various eth-
and culturally rich life. This gave him the training, status, and confidence to set his own nic origins was probably under a million
terms. But his irritated objections to the series’ pieties have become one of its pleasures. when Apted went looking for his school-
Apted’s less-privileged subjects started pushing back, too. Take the two boys he found in children in 1963, but London, where he
a children’s home in 1964, Paul Kligerman, who was there because of a custody battle (he found 10 of them, was already a center for
was later taken with his father’s new family to Australia, where he still lives), and Symon the country’s West Indian and South Asian
Basterfield, the only Black child in the series. Both were anxious and diffident children, communities and was changing fast. The
and both drifted into manual labor. In the films do provide occasional glimpses into
early films, Apted quizzed them about their tion at 14 and 21 had much to do with her this transformation (we watch Bruce’s East
seeming lack of ambition: Why didn’t Paul parents’ acrimonious relationship and bit- London math classes fill with the children
try for qualifications? Was driving a forklift ter divorce, made family and children the of South Asian immigrants), but they don’t
really the best Symon could do? Very gen- center of her life. Nick Hitchon, a farmer’s explore with any seriousness a postimperial
tly, both let Apted know that their priorities son from the Yorkshire dales who became reckoning that surely touched the life of
lay elsewhere. Both married young and put a nuclear physicist and an academic in every one of these subjects. When Apted
their energy into their families. By 28, Sy- America, was open about the pain caused let go of class, he lost sight of other social
mon had five children, and those children, by the breakup of his first marriage, saying, transformations as well.
he told Apted, “have what “It was like a death.” The series is also oddly unreflective
I never had.” Which is We can understand about the sexual ferment and exper-
what? Apted asked. Sy- then why Symon, who imentation that marked the 1970s and
mon looked at him in dis- Apted had centered had recently lost his ’80s—or, at any rate, it keeps those issues
belief. “A father, innit?” his films on class, mother and went through off-screen. In the world of Up, people
he replied. a hard divorce, declined live in couples, and couples are hetero-
Apted had centered but another theme to participate in 35 Up. sexual. Even though divorces are noted,
his films on class, but an- soon displaced it: When we are introduced there is no hint from Apted that the life
other narrative was fast to him again in 42 Up course might take other forms. I can’t
displacing it. Family, it (1998), he has remarried, be the only viewer who squirmed when
the family.
seemed, was society’s and we are not surprised watching his graceless probing of reserved
bedrock and the individual’s haven. That to discover that he and Vienetta, his second Bruce’s still-unmarried state in 28 Up and
focus on family suffused the later films, wife, remain intensely family-oriented. Yet 35 Up. Could Apted really not imagine
with subjects from modest backgrounds they have directed that empathy outward, why people might wish to keep their sexu-
expressing great pride in their children’s too, working to reconcile with Symon’s al history or desires private? Bruce had an
accomplishments and bristling at any im- first family and fostering more than 100 unconventional career path for a soldier’s
plication they might have fallen short. children over two decades. Claire Lewis, son, teaching by choice in state schools in
Lynn, for example, asked if she was dis- who joined the series as a researcher for the East End and later traveling to Bangla-
appointed that her daughters didn’t go 28 Up and now serves as its producer, cap- desh, but he, too, eventually got with the
to university, answered with a curt “no.” tured the family orientation but missed the program, marrying fellow schoolteacher
Working-class Tony Walker alluded to social ethic that can undergird it when she Penny before 42 Up—which was the film
troubles that led him and his wife, Debbie, concluded, “When it’s all said and done, that captured this group’s moment of what
to raise their granddaughter but declined all people really care about is their family.” we might call peak coupledom. Was the
to elaborate. Andrew, one of the posh series, by this point, documenting its sub-
boys, and Bruce Balden, the son of a sol- f course people care about jects’ search for happiness, or was it guid-
dier stationed in what was then Southern
Rhodesia, were sent to boarding schools
while very young. (At 7, solemn Bruce said
heartbreakingly, “My heart’s desire is to see O their families. But what
happens when that “truth”
becomes the narrative
through line? The Up chil-
my daddy, and he’s 6,000 miles away.”) As dren were born in the year of the Suez cri-
adults, both refused to send off their own sis, attended school during Britain’s wars
children and married women who of decolonization, entered university and
ing them down a particular path?
Small wonder, then, that the series’
most unusual and compelling participant
stands out sharply—not only for his social
awareness but also for his anomalous un-
married and childless state. Middle-class
Neil was wide-eyed and engaging at 7 but
34 wouldn’t think of it anyway. Well- the labor market in a decade of cultural
off Suzanne Lusk, whose disaffec- and industrial strife, and (especially if
by 14 was already showing signs of anxiety.
By 21, he had dropped out of Aberdeen
T H E N AT I O N 11.16–23.2020
University and was living in a squat and extramarital “regretful behavior” in 42 Up, Jackie, too, helped drag the series to-
working on a building site. When Lewis has a look of mixed indulgence and exasper- ward a more serious engagement with
tracked him down for 28 Up (a task that ation that I wish I could patent. Tellingly, women’s aspirations and rights. On the
took her three months), she found him in the wives who are what used to be called face of it, perhaps next to Neil, she had the
a camper in North Wales; when filmed, he career women (Bruce’s wife, Penny, a busy hardest life. Married at 19 and divorced
was tramping in the Scottish highlands and head schoolteacher, and Nick’s second wife, soon after, she later had a “short, very
was in obvious psychological trouble. Artic- Cryss, an academic) don’t play this medi- sweet relationship” and a son, Charlie. Not
ulate and philosophical but rocking slightly ating role, and Nick’s first wife, Jackie, the wanting him to be “an only,” she then had
to and fro, Neil voiced open doubts about one woman who strongly defended an ideal two boys with Ian, with whom she amicably
his sanity and almost laughed when Apted of egalitarian and dual-career marriage, felt coparented even after their cohabitation
asked him, inevitably, about having a family. so bruised by the reception of 28 Up that ended. But Ian, tragically, was killed in a
“Children inherit something from their she refused to appear in the films again. traffic accident, and Jackie, diagnosed with
parents,” Neil said. Even if the mother And yet femi- rheumatoid arthritis
were high-spirited and normal, “the child nism came for Apted and unable to work,
would still stand a very fair chance of not whether invited or was forced to rely on
being full of happiness because of what he not, from a direction Despite the limits of (and be subject to the
or she inherited from me.” Viewers every- he clearly never ex- Apted’s focus, class and terrible indignities of)
where were relieved to find Neil alive at 35 pected. Lynn, Sue, the benefit system. Yet
and, remarkably, serving as a Liberal Dem- and Jackie, his three social change do form it was Jackie who, in
ocrat councilor in the London borough of working-class girls, in the films’ important 63 Up, called Apted
Hackney at 42 and in rural Cumbria at 49. some ways conformed out for his decades
(He still does this work and is now a lay to the series’ norm of of unthinking sex-
backdrop.
minister as well, something that he says family-centered life. ism. “When we were
“delights me inside.”) If we value social All three married by younger,” she told him,
commitment, Neil’s is a commendable if 25, and while Sue and “I kept asking myself,
painfully achieved life. But, the films hasten Jackie divorced quite ‘Why’s he asking me
to remind us, he is still living alone. young, all were atten- questions about mar-
tive and caring parents riage and men? Why’s
ne might have expected to children raised with he not asking me ques-
O more chafing against this
sometimes cloying famili-
alism, but perhaps because
Apted chose so few girls, no
middle-class girls, and none who would go
on to university (and, frankly, because he
had so much trouble listening to the ones
long-term partners,
although Sue, inter-
estingly, has not re-
married and described
her now two-decades-
long relationship with
tions about how the
country is?’ I felt you
treated us, as women,
totally different, and
I didn’t like it.” His
questions in 21 Up, she
Glenn as “the longest engagement known remembered, were especially obtuse and
he selected), the films slide through the ’70s to man.” And yet she and Lynn also voiced enraging. True, “when we started at 7…
without really marking the transformations the series’ strongest defense of the value of there weren’t many career women. But
inaugurated by feminism. By the ’80s, how- work, both for their own happiness and for when we hit 21, I really thought you’d have
ever, critics and audiences alike found the its social purpose. Lynn worked for years had a better idea of how the world works,
skewed gender ratio shocking, and while the in East London as a children’s librarian. shall I say. But you still asked us the most
filmmakers passed it off as just a reflection “Teaching children the beauty of books mundane, domestic questions.” Jackie had
of earlier social attitudes (although the last and watching their faces as books unfold to had enough; in 21 Up she got so angry
time I looked, boys didn’t outnumber girls them, it’s just fantastic,” she said in 28 Up. with Apted that he had to turn the cameras
10 to four in the 1960s), Apted and Lewis She spent decades battling to maintain chil- off—an intensely revelatory moment of the
scrambled to respond. Their solution—to dren’s services in the face of the country’s subject striking back, and one that Apted,
bring the male subjects’ wives more ful- austerity measures (by 56 Up, her job had to his credit, let Jackie revisit and explain
ly into the story—helped. Andrew’s wife, been cut) and insisted, in film after film, much later, with the cameras rolling.
Jane, who described herself in 28 Up as “a that the work was profoundly worthwhile.
good Yorkshire lass”; Paul’s Australian wife, Sue did various office jobs while raising o is the message of this
Sue, who was often more perceptive about
her shy husband than he was; and Debbie,
the wife of East End lad turned London
cabbie and bit-part actor Tony, have for
decades brought much-needed ballast to
the series. Their presence, though, is a
distinctly wifely one: They explain, encour-
her children—“I worked all my life, I can’t
imagine not working”—and then took an
administrative job at Queen Mary Univer-
sity of London. There, clearly talented, she S remarkable series really
that social class matters
less and personality, fami-
ly, character, and accident
flourished. By 49 Up (2005), though having matter more? Not entirely. Yes, some of
never gone to university, she had become the working-class children (Tony, Sue) did
the principal administrator for the school’s better than expected, but none became
age, and occasionally correct or chide their postgraduate courses. Did she like the re- rich or famous, whereas all of the
husbands. Debbie especially, who had to
put up with Tony’s on-camera confession of
sponsibility? Apted asked. Sue laughed and upper-class children (John, An-
said, “I was born for the responsibility.” drew, Charles, Suzy) enjoyed very
35
T H E N AT I O N 11.16–23.2020
an ethnography of everyday life, including
by writing diaries. Social scientists took up
the challenge also through cohort studies
that tracked the health, educational, and
Before All of This career outcomes of children born in 1945,
1958, and 1970 and through studies that
And as usual, early summer seems already to hold, inside it, interrogated thousands of subjects about
the split fruit of late fall, those afternoons we’ll community life at midcentury, the move
from slums to new towns in the ’50s, the
soon enough lie down in, their diminished colors, the part no one
rise of commercial culture and affluence in
comes for. I’m a man, now; I’ve seen the ’60s, and the impact in later decades of
plenty of summers, I shouldn’t be deindustrialization, political polarization,
surprised—why am I? and new social movements.
In the last few years, historians have re-
turned to those records, trying to free them
As if everything hadn’t all along been designed—I include myself—
from the conclusions that the interviewers
to disappear eventually. (much like Apted) drew before the subjects
could even open their mouths. In Me, Me,
Meanwhile, how the wind sometimes makes Me? The Search for Community in Post-War
the slenderest trees, still young, bend over England, Jon Lawrence goes back to the
interview notes from 10 postwar commu-
nity studies to see whether people really
makes me think of knowledge conquering
had abandoned solidarity for individualism.
superstition, I can almost Unsurprisingly, the truth is more subtle.
believe in that—until the trees, like People often supported what we might call
fear, spring back. Then a sad social democratic values—the belief, for
sort of quiet, just after, as between two people who have finally realized example, that the state should ensure that
prosperity lifts all boats—while embracing
they’ve stopped regretting the same things. It’s like they’ve never
aspiration (especially for their children)
known each other. Yet even now, waking, they insist they’ve woken and the post-’60s view that they ought to
from a dream they share, forgetting all over again be able to think and live as they please.
that every dream Economic crisis and, still more, neoliberal
is private… policies hit that consensus hard: Cuts and
privatization created winners and losers,
even as social safety nets were shredded.
Whatever the reasons are for the dead
And yet the cultural changes wrought by
under-branches of the trees that flourish here, that the dead persist the ’70s were deep enough and profound
is enough; for me, it’s enough. enough that no one quite wanted to see the
clock turned back. Women in particular did
The air stirs like history not mourn a past in which their horizons
were sharply constrained.
As Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite ar-
Like the future gued in Class, Politics, and the Decline of Def-
erence in England, 1968–2000, although class
Like history continued to matter—even as inequality
worsened—people resisted labeling them-
CARL PHILLIPS
selves by class; the very word seemed snob-
bish or blinkered. Most preferred to say they
were ordinary, and yet they were still able to
define complex identities for themselves. In
comfortable private (and in the case of the past half century. Film reviewers treat the a recent article, Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and
boys, professional) lives. What is striking Up series as an entirely original endeavor, three other historians (Emily Robinson,
instead is that the subjects resisted the a unique attempt to document the rela- Camilla Schofield, and Natalie Thomlin-
simple social determinism that the series tionship between individual aspiration and son) trace how the social movements of the
tried to foist on them at first, insisting that social change across a lifetime. But in fact, ’70s underwrote that shift in identification.
they were, in spite of it all, the authors of sociologists and ethnographers have been Race and gender, they argue, had become
their lives. tilling this furrow for decades. The most as generative of social identities and social
As a result, the films do tell us creative such project is, perhaps, Mass Ob- politics as class. The divergent trajectories
36 much about the nature of class and
social change in Britain across the
servation, which since 1937 has episodically
enlisted ordinary Britons in constructing
but shared optimism of Sue, Lynn, and
Jackie make sense in this framework. Much
as they deplored the harshness of austerity
B&A
B O O K S the
A R T S
for over 25 years, named its refurbished most remain loyal to the project, to one
Britain, all three felt that their lives were library after her. “I don’t think I quite real- another, and thereby, in a strange sense,
fuller, happier, more varied, and more in- ized just how much she was adored by the to the social whole they are collectively
teresting than they could have predicted. wider community,” one of her daughters meant to represent. Sue, for example, is
The world, though much more precarious, confesses. happy to take part precisely because she
had split open and let them in. Other participants are thinking about thinks of herself as quite ordinary and
their lives and legacies, too. Revealingly, hence useful. “The things we’re going
he Up series has now been both of the middle-class boys are now through, everyone’s going through,” she
T with us for a lifetime.
Countless viewers have
identified with its sub-
jects’ trials and triumphs—
especially, judging from the letters that
pour in to the newspapers after each epi-
sode, if they are of the same generation. I
doing what the aspirant and educated do says. And a few seem to love it. One is
when they want to leave a mark: writing. the ebullient Tony, who was once driv-
(Neil has an unpublished autobiography ing the astronaut Buzz Aldrin in his taxi
and Peter an unpublished novel.) But the when someone stopped them to ask for
difference between the world they faced as an autograph—Tony’s, he was shocked
young adults in the late ’70s and the one to discover. Another, more surprisingly,
facing their children and grandchildren is Jackie. Asked how she could enjoy
am close in age to Apted’s subjects, which has driven a few to an understanding— appearing in the series so much, given
made watching 63 Up a rather melancholy which the previously mentioned historians her often acrimonious relationship with
affair. Having raised children and (often) could not better—of how the collectivist Apted, she replies, “I told him off. I didn’t
buried parents, this cohort has become entitlements and values of the ’70s cush- kill him!” Indeed, she, like several of the
sharply aware of its own mortality. John’s ioned their early difficulties and under- other “children,” has grown protective
law practice seems to be winding down, wrote their later successes. Sue’s divorce of Apted, who, however old they may be
and Andrew, who had a demanding career didn’t derail her, she tells us, because she now, is older still. (He turns 80 next year.)
at a major international firm, has retired had “wonderful support from the coun- An unspoken question thus hangs over
early. He regrets not spending more time cil.” It helped her get and then later buy 63 Up: Will there be another installment?
with his family, and he and Jane want to her flat, a bit of good I am not sure that mat-
have some good years together while they luck that changed her ters. Apted’s series is
still have their health. Bruce has cut back life. With council hous- already a masterpiece
his teaching, happy to let Penny’s career ing now scarce and the An unspoken and one that will last.
take precedence. He worries about his National Health Service question hangs over Despite all the backtalk
weight and dreads not old age but the underfunded, she wor-
“disabling, degenerating conditions linked ries that the young face 63 Up : Will there be his subjects gave him
and the way the series
with [it].” So, with reason, does Neil, a much more precarious another installment adjusted to credit their
who has lived most of his life in the rural future than she did. views, the project has
areas where he feels more comfortable Peter, who so of- much to say about the
in the series?
and who has, as he says, “relied upon fended Thatcherites in power of social class,
my body very much.” Over the decades, 1984, agrees. Stuck in low-paying jobs even if people now insist on their right
we’ve watched wiry Neil tramp through in hospitality or call centers and with no to contest its strictures and to define its
Scotland or Cumbria. Now he bicycles hope of acquiring property, those in the meaning for themselves.
to the nearest village from the cottage he next generation, he says, might be the “For me, it’s still them and us,” Tony
acquired, with a small inheritance after his first to have things worse than their par- says. Asked how she sees herself, Sue re-
mother’s death, in rural France. ents. Even self-made Tony, who dreamed plies, “Oh, working class, always working
There is sadder news, too. Nick, still of owning a sports bar in Spain, has felt class”—a moving acknowledgment that
teaching at the University of Wiscon- neoliberalism’s hard edge, with Uber and while now-vanished social entitlements
sin, has developed throat cancer. He isn’t other ride-share apps cutting his and (and not just her drive) enabled her to
frightened for himself, he tells Apted, but Debbie’s cabbie earnings by a third. A prosper economically, it has not eroded
he dreads the effect on those close to him. Leave voter during the Brexit campaign, her core identity and loyalties. And even
And Lynn, who had what she thought he says he will never vote Tory again. though Jackie insists that despite every-
was just a minor accident—a bump from This reflectiveness is surely a byprod- thing (Ian’s death, her disability), she’s been
a swing when taking her grandson to the uct of the project itself: One can’t be “lucky,” she now concedes, more than 40
park—went to a hospital and suddenly and turned into a historical subject without years after she blew up at Apted for im-
incomprehensibly died. With her rock- it having some effect. Apted’s “children” plying that she had no opportunities, that
solid marriage and close family, she had al- have been forced to live examined lives, she should have stayed in school. She’s
ways been a bit irritated by Apted’s endless and this changed them in profound ways. proud of her three sons (one in the army,
questions. “I’m happy with the way my life Understandably, some have regretted another working in a warehouse, and the
has gone,” she told him shortly in 56 Up. ever getting caught in the net. In 35 Up, third “cheffing”), but she is determined
Five years after her death, her daughters John memorably called the series “a little that her granddaughter will have more
dissolve into tears when speaking of her. pill of poison” inserted into his life ev- chances. “You’re going to uni,” she recalls
Lynn is remembered for her dedication ery seven years, and in 42 Up, Suzy said telling the little girl. “What’s uni?”
to the East End’s children. St. Saviour’s
primary school, where she was a governor
the films stir up “lots of baggage.” (She the child asked. “University,” said
opted out of this last installment.) But Jackie. “You’re going.” N
37
Have You Been Online Lately?
Hari Kunzru’s fatalist comedy of errors
BY KEVIN LOZANO
ari kunzru’s RED PILL has the trappings of a thriller of a midlife crisis, but one of a more phil-
h you might buy at an airport. It involves a chase of
sorts, one that starts in the suburbs of Berlin, moves
back in time to Stasi-controlled East Germany, and
then trapezes around from Paris to the highlands
outside Glasgow and, finally, to Brooklyn. There are
spies, intrigue, Peeping Toms, conspiracy, and violence haunting the
many corners of his novel, and yet the
sensibility of the book is much more
digressive, cerebral, and torturous-
ly self-conscious. That’s because at its
core, Red Pill is a novel of ideas, probing
pens in the head of a stock character
familiar to anyone who has read contem-
porary fiction. The narrator is a guilt-
ridden, neurotic, middle-aged writer who
osophical nature.
Kunzru’s protagonist has just been
awarded a prestigious fellowship at a
Berlin arts foundation called the Deuter
Center, an haute and vaguely libertarian
residency based on ideas of collaboration.
Yet on the eve of his departure for Europe,
he admits the only thing on his mind is the
dire state of world affairs—the upcom-
ing 2016 presidential election, the global
refugee crisis, and the images of war and
death that litter his computer screen. No
seemingly disparate poles of thought: the lives in Brooklyn and spends more time amount of distance and time spent writing
conception of the self, the creation of doom-scrolling than writing. Like Kunz- will resolve any of the feral dread his news
whiteness in European Romanticism, and ru, he is a South Asian British expat, feed produces. Instead our hero spends
the threat of the Internet—the way it has but unlike his creator, he’s not a fiction the sleepless nights before his trip in tears
destroyed our sense of privacy, circulated writer but a cultural essayist—the kind and in the company of his glowing laptop.
fringe ideas, and popularized the you might recognize in the liminal space He’s crying not out of empathy but out of
38 alt-right.
Much of Red Pill’s action hap-
between the academy and the general in-
terest magazine. He is also in the throes
fear, mostly directed toward his own soft,
doughy uselessness: “If the world changed,
ILLUSTRATION BY TIM ROBINSON
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would I be able to protect my family? Could I scale the fence with my little girl on my
the
A R T S
this case examines cultural appropriation,
shoulders? Would I be able to keep hold of my wife’s hand as the rubber boat over- the prison-industrial complex, and the
turned? Our life together was fragile. One day something would break.” racism of the American music industry.
These primal impulses toward preserving the family unit and, by extension, the status The project of Kunzru’s American nov-
quo are constantly on his mind, and his worry begins to fester into obsession once he is els was to animate and satirize the highly
in Berlin. For our narrator, the first sign that things will not go well is the prospect of interconnected alienation of life in the
working in an open office at the center. His discomfort with the arrangements—an in- United States. In following the foibles of
vasion of privacy, in his opinion—eventually grows into paranoia as he begins to believe people who strain to find meaning or make
the staff is keeping an eye on his comings and goings. Passing his time eating Chinese positive changes to their lives and families,
takeout, walking around the lakeside near the center, reading Heinrich von Kleist, and he illustrated the way many of his new
binge-watching a violent and baroque police procedural called Blue Lives, he does every- neighbors find themselves at the mercy of
thing but complete the project he went to Berlin for. forces that individual actors can’t fix. Be
Here we can sympathize with him. I don’t think many would want to finish his book, a it a devilish trading algorithm or a cursed
broad and, by his own admission, pedantic vinyl record, a child lost in the desert or
study of the history and “construction of a patrician family that builds prisons, he
the self in lyric poetry” (i.e., a book about created networks—through narratives as
how poets through the ages have used the Red Pill well as characters—to make a point about
word “I”). It is precisely the pointlessness A Novel the social and economic conditions that
of this work, smashed up against his sense By Hari Kunzru crush his narrators’ abortive attempts at
of dispossession, that propels him to find Knopf. 304 pp. $27.95 more meaningful lives. We are, indeed,
new purpose, one he stumbles upon in a all connected, but not necessarily in ways
chance encounter at a gala and a kebab that we like.
shop, where he meets an avatar for every- Red Pill picks up many of the themes
thing wrong with the Western world— of Kunzru’s American novels. In it he
white supremacy, the Internet, and bad scrutinizes the malignant influence of
television. From here, the chase begins as the Internet on solidarity, love, and care.
our narrator sets off on a mock-tragic quest ures of the British New Left, it marked the Though its protagonist lives in America,
to root out the wicked forces he thinks are beginning of the form his novels now take: the novel also represents something of a
hurtling us toward a hellish future. frenetic and cinematic high/low hybrids return to Kunzru’s Europe. This is true in
On its face, this premise and the style that chart a path through a wide-ranging the book’s setting as well as in its interest
in which it is packaged are transparently ideological debate and historical inquiry. in finding the place where the freneticism
ridiculous. But ridiculousness is also the Since the release of My Revolutions, of American digital culture and Old World
motor for much of our world, especially Kunzru has lived in the United States, European racism, nihilism, and apocalyp-
the banter among self-serious people like and his novels have become even more tic thought meet.
our narrator. If there is a lasting value to antic, roving, and ambitious. Gods Without Red Pill is perhaps Kunzru’s most overt-
Red Pill, it is in its clever and thoughtful Men (2011) was a systems novel set in ly political novel. It not only engages the
critique of the urge of many creative and the dusty locales of the American West world of electoral politics but also offers
purportedly progressive people to make that explored many of the taboos and an unsparing study of the flaccid state
themselves heroes—or at the very least canards in American culture: UFO cult- of 21st century liberalism and the intel-
historical subjects—at a moment in which ists, meth lab tweakers, sensationalist lectuals and creative types who hold on
they clearly have so little agency or role to TV news networks, the mysticism of the to its false promise of order and reason.
play. To Kunzru’s credit, he recognizes how stock market, and helicopter parenting. Kunzru’s narrator disdains reactionaries,
far this kind of fatalist comedy can take us Through his exploration of these realms, but like many good bourgeois writers, he
and makes the most of it. Red Pill, after all, Kunzru showed the interconnected yet also spurns what he sees as the coarseness
is a bleak novel about how writers aren’t go- contradictory nature of belief—secular, of the politics that might be needed to
ing to save anyone—including themselves. extraterrestrial, and spiritual—that sharp- challenge them. “The only political slogan
ened the paranoid style of 2010s America, that had ever really moved me,” he tells us,
orn in London in 1969, where anti-vaxxers and free market evan- “was Ne travaillez jamais and the attempt
B Kunzru began his career gelists existed in the same body politic as
as a novelist tackling top- progressive liberals.
ics befitting a Gen Xer: In his 2017 follow-up, White Tears,
identity, globalization, and Kunzru continued to mine these para-
the end of history. His first book, The Im- doxes, telling the story of a young white
pressionist, was a magical-realist-inflected audiophile haunted by a blues song as old
historical novel about British colonialism, as recorded music who ends up on a jour-
to live that out had run into the predict-
able obstacles.” In conversations with his
wife, Rei, he also shows how willing he is
to escape into outworn historical analogies
rather than confront the present. “Have
you been online lately?” he asks her. “I
think this is what Weimar Germany must
and his second, Transmission, was a comedy ney to the South to absolve himself of the have felt like.” Then, predictably, he com-
of errors about tech and immigration. In sins committed by previous generations of pares himself to Walter Benjamin.
his 2008 My Revolutions, he began to move culture vultures. Like Gods Without Men, Like many in his milieu, our
toward the recurring themes of his more the book looks at the invidiousness of ob-
recent work. A brainy romp about the fail- session and spins a sprawling yarn that in
narrator sees the political and the
intellectual as separate strands of
39
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life, and given that the political creates so
the
A R T S
Monika, it turns out, was once a punk
much anxiety for him, he’s far more com- drummer and denizen of East Berlin’s
INCREASE AFFECTION fortable with the intellectual. Fluent in bohemian set. In those years, she ran away
critical theory and pop culture, he sees his from home and school and worked in a
Created by role as an interpreter, even if the critical textile factory, but she soon found herself
Winnifred Cutler,
Ph.D. in biology from
work of interpretation is being made ob- beset by boredom and anger. She refused
U. of Penn, post-doc solete by a world that demands action. He to join Free German Youth or to acquiesce
Stanford. Co- recognizes this tension but is so wedded to to the needs of the “piss schnapps” func-
discovered human a self-fulfilling fatalism that when called to tionaries who paid for her manual labor.
pheromones in 1986
defend his work by a fellow scholar at the Then she fell in with the punks of Fried-
Author of 8 books on
wellness and 50+ center, he justifies his inability to do so as richshain and began huffing paint thinner
scientific papers. something outside his immediate control. and moshing at secret shows. Eventually
6-Pak: Special Offer By focusing much of the book on the she joined a band led by two women she
mental and moral contortions of those met and moved into their squat. Just as she
PROVEN EFFECTIVE IN 3 liberal but often apoliti- was settling into her new
DOUBLE-BLIND STUDIES cal writers who prefer to life, a Stasi agent tried
ATHENA PHEROMONEStm see themselves as above to coerce her into keep-
increase your attractiveness. the risks and commit- Kunzru offers us ing tabs on her friends.
Athena 10X tm For Men $99.50 ments of action, Kunz- Monika refused, so the
Unscented 10:13 tm For Women $98.50
ru offers us a cunning
damning portrait of Stasi sowed seeds of
a cunning and
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my little secret; no one knows.”
by throwing this char- items at her workplace
♥ Gary (VA) 5 orders “I love the 10X product.
acter into a world of intrigue and political and in her apartment to make it appear she
It seems to make a difference! I am married and activity, he also shows the limited role had become a snitch after all. Left with no
there is a noticeable difference in my wife’s these writers and intellectuals can play. other options after her friends turned on
attitude. Friskiness I would say.” her, she became an informant, traveling
Not in stores 610-827-2200 f Kunzru were simply to around East Germany and snooping on
I
tm
Athenainstitute.com follow his unnamed nar- punks and dissidents in other cities, until
Athena Institute, Braefield Rd, Chester Spgs, PA 19425 NTN rator, the novel would she was abandoned by the Stasi once her
likely crumble under the usefulness had run its course.
weight of the latter’s drea- Our narrator sits in the restaurant and
ry inactivity and proclivity for clichéd takes in the story with as much empathy
pronouncements. But Kunzru also uses as he can muster, trying to salvage from
the story as a vehicle to explore the world this bleakest of lives some kind of connec-
around his protagonist. Through him, tion with his less-bleak but still sad-sack
we meet ex–Stasi spies, gun-toting por- one. But even if he struggles to find the
ters, alt-right television show producers, kinship he so desires, it’s clear why we
and dumpster-diving migrants, and we are hearing Monika’s story. Through her,
are given a sharp and desolate picture Kunzru offers an example of how power
of 21st century Berlin. Like many of its can be wielded—by the state or by one’s
peer cities, it is a metropole consumed peers—to destroy a person’s sense of self
“Today, it seems, we
by the contradictions and violence of the and solidarity, which contrasts with the
cherish our cinema powerful—a place where, throughout its narrator’s. (“You’re soft and selfish,” she
history, power has been exerted by the tells him. “The world will chew you up
superheroes, forgetting
state and where mass media has created a and spit you out.”) Here, Kunzru gives us a
that people like John more atomized way of life. real historical subject, an ordinary person
Monika, a maid at the Deuter Center, whose hardship comes from her attempt at
Glenn used to walk
helps bring this theme to the fore. She and creating community in the face of a state
among us—and probably the narrator first meet when she is clean- and culture hostile to it.
still do.”
ing his apartment and finds him passed out Agency, probably, is a myth for every-
in the bathroom. He sees her as someone one, writer or regular citizen. But unlike
—Neil deGrasse Tyson,
who might have the answers about the our narrator, Monika long ago has come to
Astrophysicist, American Museum dark forces he senses within and outside terms with this. Meanwhile, the narrator
of Natural History, author of Space the walls of the center. She sees him for tries to do everything he can to resist this
Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate what he is: an addled writer in the midst realization. He sees evil everywhere—in
Frontier
of a nervous breakdown. Yet she agrees television shows, in online forums, at the
to have dinner with him at the Chinese ballot box—and in the wake of her story,
chicagoreviewpress.com
@ChiReviewPress
restaurant he frequents, where she tells he struggles to overcome it. He’s just as
him her life story. ensnared in a system that wants him to be
T H E N AT I O N 11.16–23.2020
74,000 Acres of Forest Burning
The kids go out for coffee. They arrived at 3 am and we only have decaf.
They’ve left chimneys in the rubble. Contorted washers and driers.
The blistered street sign. The flaming heart of the redwood.
Even here, the air hangs umber-colored, smoke-thickened.
Ash falls, flaking the bench, the path. It gathers in the veins of leaves, in the spiders’ webs.
Sally carries photos and notebooks from the car and the lace wedding dress she still hasn’t worn.
Max brings a big bowl of heirloom tomatoes and his knives.
Janet bakes an apple galette and cries.
Here we tunnel into the day. Here we shovel the hours.
I walk the neighborhood, crushing a thin crust.
A man sleeps in his car, seat tilted back.
A woman stands at the open door of her van. Inside chickens flutter in cages. She gives them water.
Back home, kibbles in the dog’s bowl.
The sun is neon orange on our kitchen wall.
I pack a tinted photo of my mother, Janet’s silver bracelets, the ceramica we schlepped the length of Italy.
Sally vacuums.
Now she thinks she feels the baby move.
We strain toward the next briefing. The fire’s moving on the ridge. It’s .8 miles from their house.
I cut parsley from the garden, wash off the greasy film.
Bees keep on nuzzling into the blossoms.
An ant carries a broken ant across the patio.
A fire truck. Four men in profile through the windows. They look straight ahead, jaws set.
The dahlias nod their big flame-heads in the breeze that’s picking up.
Breeze is what we don’t want. The maple leaves rustle.
ELLEN BASS
41Version 01-08-2020
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alone and powerless, but he still holds on
the
A R T S
At a gala in a tony part of West Berlin, the
Join the conversation, to a notion of defiant selfhood. For both
the narrator and Monika, the institutions
narrator, still reeling from his encounter
with Monika, is introduced to Anton, and
every Thursday, that should take care of people have not after a clumsy conversation about Blue
on the Start Making only failed but participate in perpetuating Lives, the two end up having dinner at a
this lack of care. Our narrator is convinced kebab restaurant, where Anton reveals
Sense podcast. he can change this. what he really is: a high-powered troll, a
conservative “chad” counterpart for our
onika’s story is one of the “lib” narrator.
M rare sections of Red Pill For the rest of the novel, this reaction-
that is more or less earnest ary doppelgänger haunts our protagonist.
and humorless, a kind of He “lives rent free,” as Anton puts it,
step back before the book’s in the narrator’s head; Anton torments
gears of absurdity begin to grind again. him in real life, too, stopping by for a
When Monika exits from the novel, the visit at the center, where he poses as an
narrative moves into overdrive, and the acquaintance obsessed with Nazi arcana,
villain is revealed: Anton, the creator of and later as a shadowy figure in a sprawl-
the violent cop show that our narrator has ing, QAnon-style conspiracy theory the
become obsessed with during his time in narrator imagines taking place in online
Subscribe wherever you
Berlin. Like him, Anton is a stock charac- forums. While the narrator’s life was ob-
get your podcasts or go to ter but in a different sense, a composite viously falling apart before he met An-
TheNation.com/ of the loudmouthed, reactionary cultur- ton, this introduction to his nemesis tilts
StartMakingSense al ideologues who are hawkish salesmen him toward madness. As someone tasked
to listen today. for new tech and fringe ideas—a kind with interpreting culture, he becomes
of cross of Richard fixated on the idea
STACEY ABRAMS
Spencer, Elon Musk, that Anton’s show is
MARGARET ATWOOD CHARLES and Joe Rogan. An- a primary organ for
M. BLOW SHERROD BROWN ton’s television show, “We must remember,” the violent and callow
NOAM CHOMSKY GAIL COLLINS our narrator observes, the narrator reminds conditions the narrator
MIKE DAVIS ELIZABETH DREW is “very convention- sees emerging around
al, but something else us, “that we do not him. He is so disturbed
BARBARA EHRENREICH
was at work, a subtext by this realization that
DANIEL ELLSBERG FRANCES
exist alone.”
smuggled into the fa- he abandons his writ-
FITZGERALD ERIC FONER miliar procedural narrative.” In a twist ing and commits himself to combat with
THOMAS FRANK HENRY LOUIS that strains credulity, that subtext is re- Anton and his ideas, following him first to
GATES JR. MICHELLE GOLDBERG actionary philosophy, ranging from the Paris and then to a final showdown in the
AMY GOODMAN CHRIS HAYES Counter-Enlightenment to nihilism. Blue highlands of Scotland.
Lives’ characters quote passages from Things don’t go well from the outset.
MARGO JEFFERSON DAVID
figures like the French monarchist and In Paris the narrator attends a speech
CAY JOHNSTON NAOMI KLEIN counterrevolutionary Joseph de Maistre during which Anton presents his un-
RACHEL KUSHNER VIET THANH and the Romanian philosopher of pessi- varnished vision of the automated future.
NGUYEN NORMAN LEAR GREIL mism Emil Cioran, and the show’s creator, This new world “belonged to those who
MARCUS JANE MAYER BILL we later discover, is an evangelist for a gar- could separate themselves out from the
MCKIBBEN WALTER MOSLEY bled mix of tech-bro accelerationism and herd, intelligence-wise…. Everything im-
old-fashioned race science. Before meet- portant would be done by a small cognitive
JOHN NICHOLS LAWRENCE ing Anton, the narrator sees Blue Lives elite of humans and AIs, working together
O’DONNELL LAURA POITRAS as “just an elaborate illustration of some to self-optimize.” Our now-unhinged nar-
KATHA POLLITT ROBERT point of view of the writer, something to rator blurts out during the Q&A section,
REICH JOY REID FRANK RICH do with the world’s hopelessness.” After “Why are you promoting a future in which
ARUNDHATI ROY BERNIE they meet, he sees a darker agenda. Anton some people treat others like raw materi-
could reach millions of people with his al? That’s a disgusting vision.” Anton, of
SANDERS ANNA DEAVERE
work, whereas the narrator could hope to course, just shrugs him off:
SMITH EDWARD SNOWDEN influence only a cloistered few. And while
REBECCA SOLNIT MARGARET the novel’s title appears only once in the I’m sorry it gives you sad feels, but I
TALBOT CALVIN TRILLIN text, its meaning should be pretty obvious think it’s how it’s going to be. Some
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL by now: The narrator worries that Blue people will have agency and oth-
YANIS VAROUFAKIS JOAN Lives is a gateway drug for the alt-right. ers won’t…. Despite your outraged
The narrator’s fateful meeting with tone, all you’re doing is describing
WALSH AMY WILENTZ GARY Anton and the lopsided battle it spawns your own preference, which, when
YOUNGE —Hosted by Jon Wiener give shape to the rest of the book’s action. you think about it, is more or lessT H E N AT I O N 11.16–23.2020
irrelevant when assessing the truth
or falsity of a prediction.
As a character, Anton at times feels
hollow, stitched together from the catch-
phrases that a hectoring online conserva-
tive might lob in a Twitter thread. He’s a
bit of an overdetermined symbol, a stand-
in for how politics, the economy, and the
dark corners of the Internet and entertain-
ment are intertwined. But there is a deeper
problem with Anton as a character: We
learn very little about his world. While it
is true that belief in conspiracy theories is
a powerful part of everyday life (QAnon’s
growing influence on electoral politics
should indicate that), the narrator’s inabil-
ity to respond effectively to Anton tells
us only about the fecklessness of well-
intentioned but often daft liberal intellec-
tuals; it tells us very little about why people
end up taking that red pill.
Behind each alt-right forum post is a
person, but these people go entirely un-
examined in Kunzru’s novel. Its discus-
sions of race also seem underdeveloped.
Race exists as a theme and is central to
Anton’s bizarre articulations, but we learn
very little about how the experience of
race shapes the narrator’s life. All we know
is that Anton holds abhorrent views, that
the narrator has mostly admirable liberal
ones, and that Anton always wins.
The Square
ur narrator doesn’t catch up
Root of Sound
O with Anton in the end. The
next time we see his neme-
sis is on a television screen,
in a MAGA hat on election
night, when the narrator is back home
in Brooklyn. He’s watching the returns
with his wife and friends. They’re there
Jyoti’s Mama, You Can Bet!
BY MARCUS J. MOORE
n mid-july, during a 48-minute instagram live
to celebrate Hillary Clinton’s impending
victory—until, obviously, the unthinkable
happens. Here, too, Kunzru twists the
knife. While Anton has ridden the right-
wing wave to the doorstep of power, our
narrator is even more anxious and useless
than he was at the book’s opening.
After their friends leave the party de-
jected, the narrator and his wife spend a
sleepless night on their phones. Just as at
i interview with the Black culture and art website Afro-
punk, Georgia Anne Muldrow explained the meaning
behind Mama, You Can Bet!, her third album under
the pseudonym Jyoti. As she put it, single mothers
forgo their desires for the betterment of their chil-
dren; the album was written to celebrate them. “I wanted to make a
song for when a daughter sees their mother as a woman…for when
the child respects a mother’s right to have
passionate love in her life,” Muldrow said. of goblet drums, upright bass, and quiet
GEORGIA ANNE MULDROW (PRISCILLA JIMENEZ)
the start of the novel, the narrator fixates “They say after a certain age, you’re not piano chords, produced by Muldrow in
on his family and the world that awaits beautiful…. They say that this woman… her home studio—it’s meant to empower a
them. He understands that coping with who’s given her whole body [and] done the group of women who have been historically
the present will entail learning something most holiest thing known to man, has now mistreated and disconnected from their
he didn’t understand at the beginning: that depreciated in value.” On the title track, ancestry. “There’s many a man who’d love
agency cannot come through the self in its which opens the album, she speaks specif- your hand / Mama, love is waiting
isolated state. “We must remember,” he
tells us, “that we do not exist alone.” N
ically to Black mothers. And with its dis-
tinctly West African sound—a woozy mix
for you,” she sings.
Muldrow has made a career
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