Portis hadn’t published a novel in nearly twenty years, but he turned up finely turned out, only to bolt for home before the ceremony began. By the time the organizers tracked him down he had changed out of his evening wear into khaki pants and a beige windbreaker. He was coaxed back to the gala but didn’t want to change again, so it was in this garb that he took the stage and accepted a golden statue of a rooster from then-editor Marc Smirnoff.
It’s a perfectly Portisean moment, in which an almost pathologically unassuming figure is coerced by circumstance into wagering a personal reserve of dignity against the overweening silliness of the world. The masterful touch—the one Portis would have invented if it hadn’t been invented for him—is of course the golden rooster statue, which was based on the magazine’s colophon but could not help alluding to True Grit’s Rooster Cogburn as well as Joann, “The College Educated Chicken,” from his debut novel, Norwood (1966). As far as I can tell, this was the last public appearance he ever made.
Every professional writer, that is, every person who makes publishable composition his trade, whether he be paid for it or not, experiences at times a supreme disgust with his profession and himself. Now many of these writers would no more make a confession of such weakness than they would admit that they were not just as good as any of their contemporary writers, if readers would only judge the merits of writing honestly. But if there is any professional writer who asserts on all occasions, especially in the occasional moments of candor that even authors may have, that he is not oftentimes bored to death by his trade, and furious at himself for being an author, then that professional writer is only an amateur, and if not that, a prevaricator.
This is something Voevodsky has learned through personal experience. In 1999 he discovered an error in a paper he had written seven years earlier. Voevodsky eventually found a way to salvage the result, but in an article last summer in the IAS newsletter, he wrote that the experience scared him. He began to worry that unless he formalized his work on the computer, he wouldn’t have complete confidence that it was correct.
But taking that step required him to rethink the very basics of mathematics. The accepted foundation of mathematics is set theory. Like any foundational system, set theory provides a collection of basic concepts and rules, which can be used to construct the rest of mathematics. Set theory has sufficed as a foundation for more than a century, but it can’t readily be translated into a form that computers can use to check proofs. So with his decision to start formalizing mathematics on the computer, Voevodsky set in motion a process of discovery that ultimately led to something far more ambitious: a recasting of the underpinnings of mathematics.
In our days of Insta-everything, where cool is watered down by likes and dislikes and anyone can become an influencer, this novel reminds us that cool used to be hard to attain — and that L.A. cool is different from New York cool, which is different from Cannes cool. “The Sunset Crowd” is cool sans hangover, which makes it a perfect addition to your summer luggage.
In the midst of France’s année terrible, there’s a panther loose in Paris. It’s “black as a hole and [moves] like liquid”, and those who see it take it as a bad harbinger. Who can blame them for suspecting the supernatural, when their city’s been turned upside down? Although there’s a more mundane explanation – the panther has escaped from the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes – it’s emblematic of an extraordinary and terrible year. Stef Penney’s fourth novel opens in May 1870, just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. It chronicles the siege of Paris – four months of shellfire and starvation – and even then is only halfway done. After the French defeat in January 1871, Paris is far from peaceful: revolution follows, and the radical Paris Commune takes control of the city until its violent defeat in May 1871. To cram all these events into one novel is ambitious, but the result is electrifying.
“Since the identity of the United States as a nation remains unusually fluid and elusive, we Americans have had to look back repeatedly to the Revolution and the Founding (as we call it) in order to know who we are.” The eminent historian Gordon S. Wood wrote those words in “The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States” (2011). Now, with the country locked in an endless, vicious battle over American values — and as we celebrate its 247th birthday — it’s a suitable time to return to the founding documents and the events that led to their creation. British writer Peter Moore’s new book, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream,” examines the prehistory of the Declaration of Independence and the transatlantic currents that bore it to the shore of legend on July 4, 1776. Is there anything we can apply to our present tribulations?