Writers who contemplate going onstage tend to fall into two camps: those who know better and those who should but don’t. Of the second kind, The New Yorker has, over its hundred years, produced quite a few. Robert Benchley, one of the magazine’s founding voices (if on permanent loan from the Algonquin circle), was perhaps more famous in his day as a performer than as a writer. His sketch “The Treasurer’s Report” became a classic. He was eventually hired to narrate the musical-comedy film “Road to Utopia”—no small compliment, or challenge, given that it meant adding laughs to a prime Bob Hope–Bing Crosby comedy. Alexander Woollcott, another early contributor who left his title, if not his campy imprint, on Shouts & Murmurs, went on to play himself in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” The character, Sheridan Whiteside, was based on Woollcott and intended to mock him—until he took the part himself, turning satire into homage by his living presence as a pre-mocked subject, like jeans sold pre-distressed. More recently, Calvin Trillin performed two funny and affecting solo shows drawn from his own work—“Words, No Music” and “About Alice.” Lawrence Wright has done a couple, too, including the more sombre “The Human Scale.” And, of course, there’s been a steady trickle of gifted performers who’ve leapt into our pages, and then leapt back out again, as slightly reformed characters, or at least more literary-minded comedians.
To come to the point—and it’s not a point that will survive an interminable buildup—I joined the company of these writers long ago, and am now returning to it. As it happens, I spent a good chunk of my childhood onstage, where I was, for a time, the Shirley Temple of the Philadelphia avant-garde theatre—a boast few could make, or would want to. At nine, I was cast as Galileo’s apprentice in a mid-sixties production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo,” one of the first shows directed by a newly minted impresario, André Gregory—already as sleek as a borzoi, with the same mesmerizing patter that would later delight the world in “My Dinner with André.”
Both the Bible and the Qur’an recount how this clash of worldviews led to the first murder, that of the shepherd Abel by his farmer brother Cain, but the clash is much older than the Abrahamic scriptures. In the Black Sea region it started more than six thousand years ago, when farmers and herders found themselves cheek by jowl at two steppe boundaries: one in eastern Europe, the other in the North Caucasus. That encounter marked the beginning of a dance of death that, for millennia to come, would bind the two in mutual hostility and dependence. Each grew and attained new heights of sophistication thanks to the other, but any malaise that affected one affected the other too, and climate change periodically rolled the dice. It was against this backdrop that the Indo-European languages were born.
Twenty years ago I proposed to a publisher a book about parties in literature and history. I have always liked parties, largely because of their unscripted nature and air of imminent danger. Giving or going to one is a high-risk activity, if done properly. Trimalchio’s dinner party in The Satyricon concludes with him staging a dress rehearsal of his funeral; Edgar Allan Poe gives us the party as massacre in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’. Kitty, in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, compares her party nerves to ‘a young man’s feelings before a battle’, while Lucia in E F Benson’s Lucia’s Progress looks forward to the warfare.
The denouement, when it finally comes, is so gloriously absurd, you can’t help but salute Oyeyemi’s knack for artful nonsense. She is a gleefully unapologetic trickster; whether you adore this novel or chuck it across the room may come down to how much mischief for the sake of mischief you can handle. My bet is you’ll finish it, as I did, feeling bemused but also perversely entertained, and grateful for the ride.