Sunday, June 21, 2020

SFO Salome

Opera review: 'Salome' at San Francisco Opera

October 22, 2009 | 1:21 pm

Reporting from San Francisco

By all accounts, San Francisco is in love with Nicola Luisotti -- a 47-year-old conductor from Viareggio, Italy, and very Italian – as is he with his new city. Last month he became music director of San Francisco Opera, and his performance of the season’s opening production of Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” won unanimous praise.

Wednesday night, the gregarious conductor was on the podium for a new production of Richard Strauss’ “Salome” at the War Memorial Opera House, and when he took his curtain call, he acknowledged the crowd’s clearly delighted cheers by patting his heart with huge swings of his right hand. That’s amore.

Big-hearted amore, of course, is exactly what “Salome” is not about. Even for San Francisco, this 16-year-old seductress who toys with John the Baptist, strips for Herod and then demands the saint’s severed head on a platter, which she kisses in bloody bliss, is supposed to seem somewhat more lascivious than the normal hormonally charged teenager.

It was hard to know exactly what to make of San Francisco’s new “Salome,” with its three competing elements. Luisotti was hired “to reinvigorate the core Italian repertory that is San Francisco Opera’s birthright,” general director David Gockley writes in his program book message. Each season, Luisotti will conduct one “breakout” non-Italian work that Gockley feels appropriate, and this “Salome” was his first time leading a German opera, which he did in lyrical and luminous fashion.

Nadja Michael was presumably brought in for something a little raunchier. Last year the German soprano was a sensation in a London production of the Strauss opera that took as its inspiration Pier Paolo Pasolini’s incomparably perverse film, “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.”

The new “Salome” comes by way of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and was considerably tamer. Directed by choreographer Seán Curran, with dramaturge help from James Robinson, it looks back to the early 20th century dancers and choreographers Martha Graham, Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, especially in the “Dance of the Seven Veils.”

Michael may seem the ideal Salome. A former competitive swimmer, she is fit, moves well and carries off revealing costumes with ease. She is not without life experience, either. Born in Leipzig, she escaped from East Germany as a teenager not much older than Salome’s age, in the trunk of a car. She has the lung power to carry over Strauss’ immense orchestra.

Whether she is a sexy Salome may be a matter of taste, and that happens to be a raging debate in the opera blogosphere. Curran keeps Michael on the move. The set by Bruno Schwengl is an angular box focused towards a huge vault, the cistern in which John the Baptist is imprisoned. But Salome seemed more the prisoner in this space. A fidgety neurotic, she paced, pulled her curly hair, jumped, crouched and threw herself around like a crazed inmate in need of a straight jacket.

There may be more than one way to read this, but the production felt to me misogynistic by explaining away Salome’s behavior as craziness. Strauss may not excuse Salome’s behavior in his opera, but he makes her alluring and seductive through a score that explores a dark side of human sexuality.

Allowed a little more chance to focus on her singing, Michael may well have had fewer pitch problems, even as she thrived on the athletic challenges. After a clumsy but aerobic “Dance of the Seven Veils” (full of Duncan and Graham references), Michael was pumped up for her big final scene kissing John’s head, which she fondled and put between her legs in what was, finally, an impressive moment of real debauchery and amazing singing.

Strongest among the rest of the cast were Kim Begley’s lurid Herod and Irina Mishura’s iron Herodias. Greer Grimsley John sounded most imposing when singing through a megaphone off stage.

Curran presented the Five Hebrews, who argue about good and evil, as modern Hassidic Jews who notably (and perhaps offensively) stood out in a production that was not historically specific. There was, though, a Jesus-like figure, perhaps meant as a counterbalance. But unlike the Five Hebrews, he didn’t noticeably leer at Salome.

Were Curran looking for counterbalances, he had better material with a soft-edged conductor (who got gorgeous playing from the orchestra) and an edgy Salome. Unfortunately, though, there was no exciting offset between graceful conducting and an opera that falls far from grace.

-- Mark Swed

"Salome," San Francisco Opera, 301 War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco; 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 27 and 30; 2 p.m. Nov. 1; $15 -$310; (415) 864-3330. Running time 1 hour, 44 minutes.

Photo: Nadja Michael performing the "Dance of the Seven Veils" in San Francisco Opera's "Salome." Credit: Terrence McCarthy/San Francisco opera

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It was a powerful performance that the San Francisco Opera brought on stage with Salome. Nicola Luisotti took up the challenge to give life to one of the most shocking Biblical stories as imagined by Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss. And, if not consistent in all its elements, this Salome was an intense spectacle with many memorable singing moments supported by a vivid orchestral rendition.

As the audience took their seats, the curtains were already open. Spectators had time to familiarize themselves with the minimalist mise en scene by Bruno Schwengl before the clarinet started its first uncanny scale of Strauss' piece. Herod's guards were patrolling the space on stage while, in the pit, a peculiar, prolonged tuning took place: the instrumentalists were creating a disharmonious soundtrack that matched the eerie atmosphere on stage.

I noted that the audience was given the chance to familiarize itself with the space in which the action unfolds. Yet, this is not the most appropriate term for a work saturated with uncanny motives. In a recent conversation reported in the programme notes, Luisotti commented on some of the most striking qualities of Salome: not only are many of the characters voyeurs, but this opera more than others 'makes us voyeurs, which in secret we might like, but to admit is uncomfortable. […] It's a private opera; everything happens in one room'.

Voyeurism and gaze were certainly themes explored in this production. The set was a sombre box-like space recalling a darkroom. This photographic parallel was amplified by the door of the prison from which Jochanaan appears: an oversized camera lens. This reading is consistent with the lingering on images of gaze present in Oscar Wilde's play, the source from which this opera draws most of his textual material.

Director Seán Curran made good use of these elements: having moved from choreography to stage direction, he conferred to this production a coherence made of gazes wittingly choreographed. At times the minimalist, bare staging seemed not to serve the many layers of the opera. Yet, the staging managed to assume consistent connotations precisely because of the way the characters inhabited it. In particular, in the first scene the narrative, tension was conveyed through proficient and intense singing by Garrett Sorenson (Narraboth), Elizabeth DeShong (the Page) and by the interactions of body and gaze between the characters.

What really made the theatrical space come alive was the presence of Nadja Michael in the title role. The audience, together with the characters inhabiting the drama, first saw Michael's Salome in a flowing, virginal white dress, which clashed with the provocative way she swung around the guards, giving life to bodily and vocal patterns. She portrayed a whimsical and manic teenager. Unfortunately, her high tessitura is still a bit strained. This aspect of her singing should improve as she continues to transition from mezzo to soprano.

On the other hand, her physicality helped her in the construction of a fierce character. Even when not singing, she functioned as a catalyst for narrative tension – for instance, when she was sitting immersed in her thoughts, by manically touching her hair. Her making love to Jochanaan's head at the end of the drama was a masterpiece of morbid intensity.

Shape patterns – oval shapes in particular – were a strong motif in this production. Both the main entrance at the left of the stage and Jochanaan's prison were round-shaped; and Salome could penetrate the prophet's prison through a round opening. Moreover, the moon, whose image permeates Wilde's text, was a big circle of light projected on the stage, and to which Salome seemed to be attracted. Like a moth, Michael's Salome delivered her lines swaying around the circumference of this aseptic and omnipresent moon.

Powerful moments certainly included those featuring baritone Greer Grimsley. He aptly exploited all the colours of his role. His Jochanaan was an imposing presence on stage, and his timbre and vocal precision conveyed nobility and moral steadiness, together with a sense of endured suffering, which befits the portrayal of this character.

Kim Begley's Herod wasn't equally convincing. Although elegant in his phrasing, he was often surmounted by the orchestra. His Herod was a red-blooded pathetic man, and his ineptitude was manifested well in his relationship with his step-daughter, who seemed almost to intimidate him.

On the other hand, I felt he could have exploited more the interaction with Salome: in this regard, his portrayal came across as somewhat weak. This was not the case for Herodias, Salome's mother: through her precise and violent singing, Irina Mishura portrayed a powerful and scornful character.

This was the first time Luisotti conducted this opera, but I found his reading of the score a generally convincing one. From the pit, the conductor and his musicians created a harmonious oscillation between vigorous outbursts of sound and of pianissimo lines.

There were a moments, though, in which I wished Luisotti would push more to the extreme the depth and colours of Strauss' score. One of these moments, perhaps, was the Dance of the Seven Veils. As Salome dares to fulfil the lustful desires of her step-father to get what she desires, Luisotti could have dared to venture into subtler shades of the musical fabric. Incisiveness was the missing ingredient in some moments. Yet, as I noted above, it is evident that Luisotti engaged with Strauss' score from a passionate and knowledgeable perspective.

As my friend noticed after the performance, we are lucky to take our seats at the opera house knowing pre-emptively of Salome's necro-nymphomaniac whims and of the way Strauss gave musical shape to them. His work has not lost its shocking qualities, but it is each company's responsibility to bring the intensity of the score alive. This San Francisco Opera Salome had the potential to become a truly powerful interpretation, but some elements are not totally convincing. Nonetheless, thanks to some thrilling vocal renditions, and to Luisotti's fiery reading of the score, this one is a Salome worth catching.

Director Seán Curran made good use of these elements: having moved from choreography to stage direction, he conferred to this production a coherence made of gazes wittingly choreographed. At times the minimalist, bare staging seemed not to serve the many layers of the opera. Yet, the staging managed to assume consistent connotations precisely because of the way the characters inhabited it. In particular, in the first scene the narrative, tension was conveyed through proficient and intense singing by Garrett Sorenson (Narraboth), Elizabeth DeShong (the Page) and by the interactions of body and gaze between the characters.

What really made the theatrical space come alive was the presence of Nadja Michael in the title role. The audience, together with the characters inhabiting the drama, first saw Michael's Salome in a flowing, virginal white dress, which clashed with the provocative way she swung around the guards, giving life to bodily and vocal patterns. She portrayed a whimsical and manic teenager. Unfortunately, her high tessitura is still a bit strained. This aspect of her singing should im

Kim Begley's Herod wasn't equally convincing. Although elegant in his phrasing, he was often surmounted by the orchestra. His Herod was a red-blooded pathetic man, and his ineptitude was manifested well in his relationship with his step-daughter, who seemed almost to intimidate him.

As my friend noticed after the performance, we are lucky to take our seats at the opera house knowing pre-emptively of Salome's necro-nymphomaniac whims and of the way Strauss gave musical shape to them. His work has not lost its shocking qualities, but it is each company's responsibility to bring the intensity of the score alive. This San Francisco Opera Salome had the potential to become a truly powerful interpretation, but some elements are not totally convincing. Nonetheless, thanks to some thrilling vocal renditions, and to Luisotti's fiery reading of the score, this one is a Salome worth catching.

By Marina Romani

Photos credits: Cory Weaver

Thursday, June 18, 2020

WSJ: Relationships Where More Means Less

· EVERYDAY MATH

When one figure goes up as another goes down, math can help us look at problems from a new perspective.

Eugenia Cheng

June 18, 2020 11:55 am ET

As the world begins to emerge from lockdown, some people are lamenting the “quarantine 15,” extra pounds they gained by stress-eating or baking to pass the time. Although I am typically very prone to comfort eating and baking, I found a way to avoid this using some math.

Math often involves equations showing a relationship between two quantities, enabling us to understand one by means of the other. One familiar type of relationship is when two quantities go up or down in proportion to each other. For instance, since steak is sold by the pound, the more your steak weighs the more you will pay for it (barring special offers). Likewise, if a certain proportion of the population is infected by a virus, then a state with a higher population is expected to have more cases than a state with a lower population.

With proportional relationships, the ratio between the two numbers is constant. No matter how large or small they get, if you divide one by the other the result is the same. But there is another, less obvious type of relationship, called inverse proportional or reciprocal, in which one number goes up while the other comes down. In this case, it’s not the ratio that stays the same but the product: multiplying them produces a constant result.

For instance, if you drive faster you will get to your destination faster, because when speed goes up the duration of a journey goes down. The constant product is the distance, which remains the same regardless of how fast you drive. The word “faster” obscures the fact that one quantity (speed) is going up while the other quantity (journey time) is going down. We can use that relationship to our advantage if we’re in a hurry.

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In other situations, inverse proportional relationships work against us. Stepping on a Lego brick is much more painful that stepping on a real brick, even though you weigh the same in both cases, because with a Lego brick the weight is distributed over a much smaller area, making the pressure larger.

This type of relationship is how I convinced myself not to overeat during lockdown. Trying to eat less didn’t sound enticing to me, but with reciprocals I could convert “less” into “more.” Instead of reducing the amount of food I ate, I focused on increasing the time my supplies would last. Here the quantity that is constant is the amount of food I bought. By eating less each day, I could make my supplies last for more days.

Of course, I could have just bought more food. By increasing my total supplies, I could increase the amount I ate each day without reducing the number of days. Our world of excess encourages us to buy more of everything all the time, but during lockdown I was trying not to do that. Of course, those without easy access to resources don’t have the option.

Inverse relationships are a version of a zero-sum game. In such a game the sum of both players’ scores is fixed, whereas here the product is fixed. But the idea is the same: to make one amount go up, you have to make the other go down. Zero-sum games often have a negative connotation, since they make it impossible for both sides to cooperate. But in this case I used the concept to my advantage. I avoided gaining weight, and I avoided extra trips to the grocery store. Math can seem fixed and rigid, but we can use it to change our point of view in helpful ways.

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/relationships-where-more-means-less-11592495703
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/relationships-where-more-means-less-11592495703

Sunday, June 14, 2020

Barber: Vanessa Glydnebourne

Vanessa review – Barber's opera finds its time with intelligent, gripping staging

4 / 5 stars 4 out of 5 stars.

Glyndebourne, LewesKeith Warner’s new production features a compelling performance by Emma Bell at its centre, with the London Philharmonic under Jakub Hrůša also very impressive

Tim Ashley

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Proud and sensual … Virginie Verrez as Erika in Vanessa. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

‘Somehow the opera itself has grown immeasurably with time,” director Keith Warner writes in a programme note for his new Glyndebourne staging of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa, a work much neglected after its New York premiere in 1958, but which in recent years has come into its own. Its first critics, hankering after the creation of an American operatic style in the wake of the McCarthy era, deemed Barber’s post-Romantic idiom, and his choice of a subject he considered universal rather than national, to be overly dependent on European models. The slow process of re-evaluation, however, has focused on the work’s emotional directness and its often remarkable dramatic cogency.

Setting a libretto by Barber’s partner, Gian Carlo Menotti, Vanessa examines the conflicts and disparities between romantic idealism and emotional reality in the lives of three women immured in a remote mansion in an unspecified “northern country”. After waiting 20 years for the return of her former lover Anatol, Vanessa finds herself confronted by his son of the same name, to whom she becomes obsessively drawn, oblivious to the fact that he is a shameless opportunist. He, meanwhile, seduces Vanessa’s niece Erika, whose growing desire for him is tempered by her awareness of his inability to love, and who determines not to bear his child when she discovers she is pregnant. Watching and judging is Vanessa’s mother, the Baroness, a formidable arbiter of moral truth, who refuses to speak to anyone she considers to be living a lie.

Edgaras Montvidas as Anatol and Emma Bell as Vanessa in Vanessa by Samuel Barber at Glyndebourne. Directed by Keith Warner. — Elation and anguish … Emma Bell as Vanessa and Edgaras Montvidas as Anatol. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Barber and Menotti set their opera in the fin-de-siècle world of 1905. Warner, however, updates it to the time of composition and explores its secrets, lies and evasions by drawing on the imagery of 40s and 50s thrillers and film noir. A hall of mirrors, reminiscent of Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai, reflects back on the characters the unpalatable truths they are unwilling to face, while the gender polarities of Hitchcock’s Vertigo are reversed as Emma Bell’s Vanessa tries to make over Edgaras Montvidas’s Anatol in the image of his father. Questionably, however, Warner suggests backstories that Barber and Menotti leave unspoken. Flashbacks reveal that Rosalind Plowright’s Baroness was once involved with the local Doctor (Donnie Ray Albert). There are hints that Virginie Verrez’s Erika may not be Vanessa’s niece at all, but her illegitimate daughter by the elder Anatol. Warner’s interventions muddy the narrative in places, but nevertheless this is intelligent music theatre that proves consistently gripping.

Musically, it’s hugely impressive, too. Bell gives one of her finest performances to date, beautifully acted, her voice soaring with elation and anguish, even as Vanessa becomes increasingly deluded as to Anatol’s true nature. Montvidas is all seductive elegance, but his charm can turn to cynicism in a flash when his guard is down, and we fully understand why Verrez’s proud, sensual Erika finds him both so attractive and so suspicious. Plowright strikingly suggests a woman whose view of the present is haunted by the sadness of her own memories, while Albert convinces as a man who can mend men’s bodies, but singularly fails to understand their souls. Jakub Hrůša, conducting with tremendous passion, really opens the emotional floodgates, sweeping us away in the big set pieces, while the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s playing is at once sumptuous and superbly detailed.

At Glyndebourne, Lewes, until 26 August.

Culture > Classical > Reviews

Vanessa, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, review: Worth the wait for this winningly performed production

Vulnerability and self-obsession: Erika (Virginie Verrez) and Vanessa (Emma Bell) in Vanessa, Glyndebourne Festival ( Tristram Kenton )

Barber's 1958 opera once seemed outdated, but it has recently enjoyed a number of major revivals including this first full-scale professional staging in the UK

George Hall

Monday 6 August 2018 10:00

Vulnerability and self-obsession: Erika (Virginie Verrez) and Vanessa (Emma Bell) in Vanessa, Glyndebourne Festival ( Tristram Kenton )

Back in January 1958 Samuel Barber’s opera Vanessa was well received at its New York premiere, though following a poor critical reception in Salzburg that same summer its international career faltered badly.

The problem was one of timing. At a point when serialism was the shibboleth for a new generation of composers, Barber’s adherence to post-Romantic lyricism, with its echoes of Richard Strauss rather than Schoenberg, must have seemed hopelessly and almost perversely outdated.

But times have changed. In today’s more pluralist classical world, Barber’s first full-length opera is being looked at again and has recently enjoyed a number of major revivals. Wexford presented it successfully in 2016, and now Glyndebourne follows up with what is the first full-scale professional staging of the piece in the UK – 60 years after the work’s launch.

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It has been worth the wait. Barber’s score is technically impeccable. Himself a singer of some distinction, he writes for the voice with confident skill, while his orchestration is a thing of consistent beauty and imagination, its virtues marvellously displayed at Glyndebourne by the London Philharmonic under conductor Jakub Hrusa.

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Doubts will remain about the libretto, by Barber’s long-term partner Gian Carlo Menotti. In his original scenario, set in some unspecified Northern country around 1905, Vanessa keenly awaits the arrival of her former lover Anatol, a man she last saw 20 years before. But when he turns up it is not the Anatol she knew – who is dead – but his son, who quickly engages her affections as well as those of her niece, Erika. The surprise ending sees Vanessa and Anatol set off for a new life in Paris while the distraught Erika settles down for her own period of waiting.

Menotti’s would-be poetic text is not always fortunately phrased, and Keith Warner’s production arguably hints at answers to nagging questions about the true relationship between the three central characters that are better left ambiguous.

Other than that, Warner and his designer Ashley Martin-Davis do a fine job in suggesting a hothouse emotional temperature in a cold Northern clime, and the neediness of the two women whom the shallow Anatol finds he can wrap round his manipulative fingers.

All three roles are winningly performed. Emma Bell’s tensile soprano charts the central character’s vulnerability and self-obsession. Though French mezzo Virginie Verrez could do with clearer diction, she takes us right inside the inexperienced Erika’s mindset. Edgaras Montvidas’s clean-cut tenor conveys the confident charm that brings Anatol easy conquests.

Standing out from the surround are Rosalind Plowright as the dignified, taciturn Old Baroness who knows far more than she lets on, and Donnie Ray Albert as the loyal family Doctor. Glyndebourne may have turned its attention to Barber’s opera belatedly, but they have done him proud.

Until 26 August (glyndebourne.com)

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Glyndebourne | Festival | Opera | Samuel Barber

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Book:

martin-dm / Getty / Paul Spella / The Atlantic

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell William Morrow

“What kind of monster,” a Facebook commenter asks on the first page of My Dark Vanessa, “could do that to a child?” It’s an instantly provocative question, which Kate Elizabeth Russell’s first novel—one of the splashier literary debuts of the year—immediately begins to complicate: The gulf between the person telling the story and the reader receiving it may feel as unconquerable as the Mariana Trench. Vanessa, who is 15 when she first meets the English teacher Jacob Strane and 32 when Strane is implicated in a string of abuse allegations, is a fiendishly difficult, almost willfully blinkered narrator. Her account of what happened between her and Strane flips disconcertingly between the rote patter of a cult victim and flashes of acute insight.

“I was the first student who put the thought in his head,” is how she characterizes the “teacher-student romance” between them, as glassy and automated as a Manson family member. It’s easy to see that she’s parroting Strane’s words. “There was something about me that made it worth the risk. I had an allure that drew him in.”
I, me, I. Vanessa’s solipsism can be overwhelming, more so because Russell allows the reader to see what Vanessa can’t: This story is about damage, not love. Strane is a pedophile, and Vanessa is his victim. I can’t, despite Vanessa’s insistence, bring myself to describe what happens in the novel between Strane and Vanessa the way she does, as a “relationship,” or a “romance,” or “destiny.” But Vanessa refuses to categorize it as abuse. “In someone else’s mouth the word turns ugly and absolute,” she argues. “It swallows up everything that happened.” My Dark Vanessa is a minefield in which language itself has been weaponized. Vanessa is both a smothering presence and a troubling void, a narrator who often feels disassociated from her own story.

Read: ‘Trust Exercise’ is an elaborate trick of a novel

I’ve been thrown by the book since I read an advance copy a few months ago, before it was swept up in the drama surrounding Jeanine Cummins’s border-set immigration novel, American Dirt, and the prickly issue of whether publishers favor trauma narratives by white writers over writers of color. (My Dark Vanessa, like American Dirt, was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, and then quickly dropped, with Winfrey seeming to tire of picking books that inflamed debate.) On the face of things, Russell’s book is about an adult woman coming to terms with events that have shaped both the contours of her life and the structure of her mind. Set in part in 2017, as the first wave of #MeToo accusations against abusive men broke out, the story shows Vanessa reckoning not only with Strane but also with herself—in particular, with the ways she has defended and justified his treatment of her over the past 17 years. My Dark Vanessa is about a victim so psychologically shaped by her abuser that she needs to see herself as his accomplice, fully complicit in the things he did. It’s the only source of power she has left.

To spend substantial time—roughly 350 pages—in the mind of a person defending the assault of an underage girl isn’t particularly pleasant. The more salient question, though, is whether it’s illuminating—whether Vanessa’s narrative offers something distinct about the mental aftermath of teenage trauma that makes its graphic descriptions of abuse worthwhile.

The answer may depend on the reader’s tolerance for a character so intent on defending her own damage. Part of what makes My Dark Vanessa difficult to read is the novel’s own mutation even before it was published. Russell gave a number of high-profile interviews talking about the book’s origins, defending it as a work of fiction while heavily implying that it also draws on real experiences. (One of the many cultural veins the novel has exposed is whether authors should be forced to testify about genuine experiences of past trauma in order to prove their bona fides as arbiters of pain.) In an interview with Vulture, Russell said that for many of the years she worked on it (while a graduate student) she considered her book a twisted love story. One of her favorite novels as a teenager was Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which she similarly interpreted at the time as a chronicle of forbidden love, one that allowed young girls more power and more romantic possibility than propriety (not to mention the law) gave them. Only when Russell had the breakthrough of understanding Strane’s treatment of Vanessa as abuse, she explained, did she figure out what her book could be.

Russell’s evolving conception of My Dark Vanessa may explain why Vanessa’s story veers so wildly between obsession and disgust, between her steadfast defenses of Strane and her flashes of insight. They first meet at a Maine boarding school, where Vanessa is a freshman and Strane is an English teacher with a practiced air of pomposity and a whispered-about reputation. Russell scatters enough bread crumbs early on that the reader can see what kind of man Strane is straightaway: His eye alights on one of the prettiest girls in class, Jenny, before he notices Vanessa and starts feeling out her vulnerabilities, manipulating her loneliness into a sense of uniqueness instead. “I like to be by myself, too,” he tells her. “My first impulse is to say no, I don’t like being by myself at all, but maybe he’s right,” Vanessa thinks. “Maybe I’m actually a loner by choice.” Even in their earliest interactions, he’s rewiring the way she thinks, the way she understands herself.

To the reader, Strane is a textbook predator, his behavior so predictable it’s almost banal. First, he lets Vanessa know that he sees her as a person, not a student. He compliments her style (“It seems strange for a middle-aged man to notice girl clothes,” she observes) and puts his hand over hers while she’s struggling with a computer program. Ritualistically, he escalates. He compares her hair to maple leaves. He gives her books of poetry to read, tells her that a particularly charged poem by Sylvia Plath reminds him of her. He gives her Lolita. “I start to realize,” Vanessa thinks, “the point isn’t really whether I like the books; it’s more about him giving me different lenses to see myself through.” He asks her whether she meant to “sound sexy” in a poem she wrote. “I think we’re very similar, Nessa,” he tells her, appropriating a family nickname he learned at a parent-teacher conference. “I can tell from the way you write that you’re a dark romantic like me. You like dark things.”

Read: Three novels that capture the long-term effects of sexual assault and harassment

These interactions are electric for Vanessa, not because she’s attracted to Strane—the physical response he inspires in her is disgust—but because it upends the way she sees herself. Before Strane, she was an unexceptional teenager. Basking in the light of his overtures, she becomes significant, “someone somebody else is in love with, and not just some dumb boy my own age but a man who has already lived an entire life.” She has, she suddenly realizes, “power over him.” Strane’s single-minded focus on Vanessa indulges her craving for attention, and that’s what she finds so intoxicating—enough to submit to the advances of a burly, jowly man whose glasses dig painfully into her face when they kiss, and whose “lips are dry, like laundry stiff from the sun.”
Vanessa’s story is almost identical to one the writer Katie Roiphe recalls in her new nonfiction collection, The Power Notebooks. In a short essay, Roiphe describes a sexual “relationship” (the meaningful quotation marks are Roiphe’s own) she had with a 30-something rabbi when she was 15, Vanessa’s age. She compares herself to the novelist Jean Rhys, who was similarly preyed on at 14 by an older man who left Rhys “dreadfully attracted, dreadfully repelled,” but who mostly “talked about me, me, me … It was intoxicating, irresistible.” Roiphe wonders if she was drawn in by the same desire for attention, the same vulnerability in the hands of someone willing to focus so intently on a teenage girl.

Like Vanessa, in her 20s Roiphe felt compelled to defend her abuser, arguing in a magazine article that the dynamic between her younger self and the rabbi wasn’t unequal: “I had the power of youth, of being the forbidden object of desire, the injured party, and it was a power I quickly learned to use. If he was exploiting me in the traditional ways in which older men exploit young girls, I was exploiting him in the less well publicized ways in which young girls exploit older men.” Now, though, Roiphe writes, she sees how “the toughness I constructed for myself in response to him, for him, the jaded gamine I evoked or brought into existence to meet him, who was preternaturally in control, prematurely poised and powerful, was a costly fiction.” The question lingers: Without that self-construction, who might she have otherwise been? I found myself asking the same of Vanessa: Who is she, really? How can she be such an elusive part of her own story?

Teenage Vanessa is right about one thing. She is unexceptional, in the sense that she’s a conventional 15-year-old enthralled by Fiona Apple, by melancholy, by sex, by the possibility of making someone fall in love with her. She speaks like a teenager. (She tells Strane she thought “that we might, I don’t know, kiss or something,” and when they do, her immediate reaction is to observe “how weird it is that he has a tongue.”) She believes that Strane sees her as a flame-haired soul mate radiating heat and darkness in equal measure. But to the reader, it’s painfully obvious (truly, it caused me pain) that Strane wants Vanessa to be a child. When she sneaks out of boarding school to spend the night at his house for the first time, he stocks the kitchen with ice cream, potato chips, Cherry Coke. She’s stolen a black silk negligee from her mother’s underwear drawer to wear for their first night together. He presents her instead with a gift: a pair of girl’s short pajamas in white cotton with a strawberry print.

After reading My Dark Vanessa, I reread Lolita. I wanted to see what about it might have fascinated Russell so that she spent the best part of her academic career until now crafting a love story between an underage girl and an older man—Lolita from Lolita’s point of view, if you will. What I hadn’t remembered is the extent to which Nabokov lets the 12-year-old Lolita indict Humbert Humbert, the book’s self-confessed pedophile narrator. How repulsed she is by him, how she tenses up when he touches her, how watchful and weary she becomes. How she sobs at night. How obviously she manifests signs of prolonged abuse, how blank she becomes in Humbert’s presence. “I recall certain moments,” Humbert thinks, “let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her … I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness.” Postcoital Humbert is swoony and delirious; Lolita is lifeless, her lashes matted with tears, “her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever.” When Humbert’s lust again becomes obvious, Lolita recoils. “Oh, no,” she says, with “a sigh to heaven.”

Read: How ‘Lolita’ seduces us all

Nabokov does the reader other favors, too. He uses language so floral, so ornate, that the brutality of an adult raping a child is kept at a distance. Russell isn’t so generous. Vanessa’s description of the first time Strane violates her is written like an assault: Her younger self is clearly repulsed by the naked Strane, who forces himself on her, even as she’s “crying, really crying.” Afterward, she feels “slimy” and “raw,” while he hacks and spits into the sink. The scene is awful to endure. Vanessa seems to realize that she’s been violated, without knowing what to do with that fact. Adult Vanessa similarly recounts, matter-of-factly, how she tried to have sex with Strane in her late 20s, re-creating the first time, even wearing the same pajamas. But “it didn’t work. He kept going soft; I was too old.” She can see the evidence that he’s a pedophile but refuses to look at it, because it doesn’t fit into her narrative.

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Why Everyone’s Angry About My Dark Vanessa Now

On the heels of the American Dirt controversy comes a new literary dustup.

By RACHELLE HAMPTON

JAN 31, 20207:28 PM

Left: the cover of My Dark Vanessa. Right: Kate Elizabeth Russell. — Photo illustration by Slate. Images by HarperCollins and Elena Seibert.

Another day, another literary scandal involving a seven-figure book deal. Even as details are still emerging in the maelstrom around Jeanine Cummins’ migrant novel American Dirt, there’s already a new Literary Twitter drama brewing, this one concerning Kate Elizabeth Russell’s much-anticipated debut My Dark Vanessa.

My Dark Vanessa, which revolves around the relationship between a teenage girl and her teacher, has drawn praise from the likes of Stephen King, Gillian Flynn, and Kristen Roupenian, author of “Cat Person.” But the book is now embroiled in a controversy similar to the one around American Dirt. Wendy C. Ortiz wrote an essay accusing Russell of borrowing from the real-life experiences of a Latina author—in this case, those in Ortiz’s memoir Excavation—for her own work of fiction. The parallels between the two books are being used as evidence of the entrenched biases and double standards of the publishing industry. Others, though, say that Ortiz’s accusations of plagiarism are hasty and misguided. Here’s what’s going on.

The Book

My Dark Vanessa alternates between the past and present of titular character Vanessa Wye. Vanessa’s present is like ours: In the midst of the national reckoning around sexual assault and abuse brought on by the #MeToo movement, she is re-evaluating a relationship she had when she was 15 with her 42-year-old English teacher Jacob Strane. In 2017, Strane is accused of sexual abuse by another former student, who reaches out to Vanessa. As the publisher summarizes it: “Now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager—and who professed to worship only her—may be far different from what she has always believed?”

My Dark Vanessa was included on both the New York Times’ and the Guardian’s most anticipated books of 2020, with the latter likening it to “an inversion of Lolita for the #MeToo generation.” In interviews, Russell has said that she’s been working on the book since she was 16 and that the project began as a memoir, with the character of Vanessa based on Russell herself. She says the character of Strane, however, was always intended as a composite of older men that Russell was involved with as teenager. “I knew what was at stake for them, didn’t want to betray them—but now I see it as an empowering decision for me both as a woman and a writer,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “Fiction gave me the freedom to center my own emotional experience rather than focus on the details of what exactly an older, powerful man did or didn’t do to me.”

The Other Book

On Wednesday, Ortiz published an essay in Roxane Gay’s Medium publication Gay Magazine about the trials that she faced in securing a literary agent and selling Excavation, which primarily deals with “her relationship with a charming and deeply flawed private school teacher fifteen years her senior.” She begins the essay by explicitly comparing the situation to American Dirt, then writes that “a white woman has written a book that fictionalizes a story many people have survived and the book is receiving tremendous backing and promotion. The book this time, though, is titled My Dark Vanessa. The book I wrote, Excavation, is a memoir with eerie story similarities, and was published by a small press in 2014.”

The bulk of Ortiz’s essay deals with her encounters with white literary gatekeepers who assure her that her writing is “powerful” and “striking,” that her memoir is “powerful and complex” and that “her story should absolutely be heard,” but then also tell her that there’s no room in the market for her memoir, which is at once too original and too similar to other memoirs to make it worth buying. Ortiz eventually published Excavation with a small press, went on a self-planned book tour, and, a year later, put her book up for auction to be reprinted with a big publisher, only to be met “with radio silence.” When she learned of My Dark Vanessa from an online summary, “it sounded so much like Excavation I thought I was going to pass out.”

Ortiz admits that in her essay that she has not read Russell’s book, nor does she intend to, writing on Twitter that she is “uninterested in reading a book that sounds like a fictional take on a reality she lived.” Soon after Ortiz mentioned on Twitter that she was “‘looking forward’ to the book that sounds like [hers] coming out in March,” she says Russell reached out to her.

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Apparently it had come to her attention that people were comparing the books and were upset. She confirmed that she had read Excavation in 2015, and offered a number of other influences in the writing of her novel. I dealt with this email the way I deal with things I don’t need in my life: I put it in a folder and decided I didn’t need to look at it further. Before I did that, I forwarded it to two other trusted people, to make sure my rage was proportionate. The consensus was that there were suddenly an awful lot of justifications, a little too late. The questions I have about it go unanswered.

The Controversy

Ortiz’s account of her experiences with the publishing industry, which is 76 percent white and difficult for writers of color to break into, has struck a chord, especially on the heels of American Dirt.

How could any of this ever have been understood—by Vanessa or by Russell—to be a love story? For all the emotional damage Humbert does to Lolita, she flees him at the first opportunity. But Vanessa keeps returning to Strane—after she discovers how meticulously he’s planted seeds to label her a dangerous fantasist if his behavior ever gets out, after she is thrown out of school, even after she learns of all the other girls who’ve accused him of preying on them, too. “To be groomed is to be loved and handled like a precious, delicate thing,” she thinks, in one of Russell’s sharpest indications of how warped Vanessa’s thinking has become. In therapy, she clings darkly to the idea that her history with Strane makes her exceptional. “I’m her favorite client,” she thinks of her therapist, “because there’s always another layer to peel back, something else to unearth.”

What makes other fictional narratives of teenage abuse more bearable—Kate Walbert’s His Favorites, for example, or Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise—is that the person telling the story has enough distance and perception to be able to see what they’re really portraying. Vanessa is infinitely more challenging. Only in the final moments of the book does she seem to begin to understand what the reader has seen all along. Roiphe’s essay, by contrast, contains, in eight short pages, more acuity about the ways abuse can twist people into defending it. That’s not to say that characters need to be “perfect” victims—Vanessa’s stubborn contrarianism, her inconsistency, the distance between the lies she tells other people and the lies she tells herself, are the most interesting things about her. She is an immensely difficult person to spend time with. Is she a valuable one, in the end? I still can’t decide.

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