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The Lesson review – amusing but contrived literary thriller about family tragedy and vengeful ambition

A charismatic young tutor comes to help a tragedy-stuck family in a bookish drama that’s fun and smart, but not entirely convincing

H ere is a brittle and contrived but rather elegant Brit thriller about literary paranoia from debut feature screenwriter Alex MacKeith and director Alice Troughton, herself a cinema first-timer having had much acclaim working on TV. The upscale and sophisticated mise-en-scène is rather French; Julie Delpy has a role here and looks quite at home.

Richard E Grant plays JM Sinclair, a bestselling, sharp-tongued author who gives roguish interviews repeating the old maxim that good artists borrow but great ones steal. He is married to art collector Hélène (Delpy) and they live in a handsome country estate with extensive grounds and a lake. But Sinclair, usually so prolific, has retreated to a haunted creative silence following the tragic death of his elder son; the parents are now concerned with moody and mercurial younger boy Bertie (Stephen McMillan) who needs to be coached to get a place at Oxford to read English.

And so they engage a live-in tutor to give lessons: this is Liam (Daryl McCormack), whose charm engages his employers. Liam finds himself having dinner with the family wearing borrowed clothes belonging to the dead son. But more painfully still, Liam admires Sinclair because he is a would-be author himself, and tremulously shows him his first novel in manuscript – with calamitous results.

I enjoyed the “lesson” scenes here, especially when Liam has to provide a reading list. (My reading list for this film would be: John Colapinto’s About the Author , Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot, Rebecca F Kuang’s Yellowface and James Hadley Chase’s Eve.) As for McCormack, he has the same screen presence he showed playing opposite Emma Thompson in the comedy Good Luck to You, Leo Grande – a not dissimilar role, in fact. Yet here he has to be angry, vengeful and infatuated, and the role certainly tests his emotional range pretty severely. Well, it’s hard not to be upstaged when matched with Richard E Grant in full flight. An amusing essay in conceit and revenge.

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Early on in this dreary would-be psychological thriller, the literary mandarin J.M. Sinclair, played by Richard Grant, shares with an interviewer his observations on the writing life. “Now, average writers attempt originality. They fail. Universally. Good writers have the sense to borrow from their betters. But great ... great writers ... steal.” He then breaks into a cocky grin and laughs wheezily, like Mutley on “Wacky Races.” I’m sure not on purpose; I trust Mr. Grant has been fortunate enough to have never been exposed to that cartoon.

The adage that Sinclair paraphrases may have, um, originated with T.S. Eliot or with Igor Stravinsky, who applied it, of course, to composers. And it’s a not entirely untrue and not entirely un-useful aperçu. Still, if you’ve been writing for a long time, even in the relatively unheralded trenches of criticism, you’re likely sick of hearing it. God knows I am. In any event, Sinclair’s observation, aside from adding dimension to his character (not a particularly interesting dimension, given how tired is his pet observation), also serves as, speaking of phrases we all ought to be thoroughly tired of, a kind of Chekhov’s Act-One-Gun for the plot.

“The Lesson,” directed by Alice Troughton from a script by Alex MacKeith , aspires to be high-toned but only gets to the peak of a cliché slag heap. The ostensible protagonist is Daryl McCormack ’s Liam, first seen being interviewed himself, speaking of his first novel, about a ruined patriarch trying to reassert power over his fraying realm. In a flashback, the unpublished Liam is summoned by “The Agency” (not the C.I.A.) to audition for a tutoring gig. Bertie, the son of literary lion Sinclair and his French wife Hélène ( Julie Delpy ), needs a leg up to get into Oxford. Young and pale and poor of attitude, Bertie ( Stephen McMillan ) resists Liam’s friendly suggestions about learning critical thinking and insults the guy at family dinners. Nevertheless, Liam gets the gig, moves into the family’s palatial manor (this is a world in which literary mandarin status still pays big), and starts putting Post-It notes on his mirror; observations on the family that he hopes will feed a literary work of his own.

The Sinclairs are one of Tolstoy’s unhappy families; an older son, Felix, committed suicide by drowning himself in the manor lake a few years back. In another excerpt from a public interview, J.M. gets into a snit when asked about his son’s death. Among other things, the tragedy seems to have blocked J.M.

Hélène takes to Liam to the extent that she wants to hire him directly, cutting out “The Agency.” In this movie, no one has ever seen any other movies, so Liam thinks this is an excellent idea. And he also very gladly signs an NDA. We also learn that the window of Liam’s room—which had once belonged to Felix (and the house does appear to have a lot of rooms, so why Liam’s been boarded in such a grief-weighted space doesn’t make much sense but go on)—looks directly into Hélène and J.M.’s bedroom, and one night Liam watches while J.M. performs cunnilingus on his wife. “Don’t do that, dude,” I said to the screen as this happened. “This is a border from which you cannot step back.” Oops, then Hélène sees him watching and smiles. “You’re in it now, pal,” I said to the screen. But honestly, I wasn’t that concerned.

Because, come on: this is one of those movies that goes on for an hour and forty minutes because someone doesn’t have the common sense to get the hell out of Dodge twenty minutes in. When J.M. asks to read Liam’s novel-in-progress and offers his own work for Liam’s delectation, the subsequent comparing notes session goes poorly, and Liam contrives to get some of his pride back, helped by an explosive (or so the movie hopes) discovery.

When all the dominoes fall, it’s so neat, so pat; there’s no credibility, and with that gone, any opportunity for emotional resonance goes pffffft as well. Some might expect this picture to be redeemed by juicy performances, but that’s not the case; while none of the performers phone it in, the script gives them only the most commonplace ideas and states to convey. “The Lesson” is a wash. 

Now playing in theaters. 

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

The Lesson (2023)

Rated R for language and some sexual content.

102 minutes

Richard E. Grant as J.M. Sinclair

Julie Delpy as Hélène Sinclair

Daryl McCormack as Liam Sommers

Stephen McMillan as Bertie Sinclair

Crispin Letts as Ellis

• Alice Troughton
• Alex MacKeith

Cinematographer

• Anna Patarakina
• Paulo Pandolpho
• Isobel Waller-Bridge

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Movie Review: ‘The Lesson’ provides a spicy literary thriller

This image released by Bleecker Street shows Daryl McCormack in a scene from “The Lesson.” (Anna Patarakina/Bleecker Street via AP)

This image released by Bleecker Street shows Julie Delpy, left, and Daryl McCormack in a scene from “The Lesson.” (Anna Patarakina/Bleecker Street via AP)

This image released by Bleecker Street shows Richard E. Grant in a scene from “The Lesson.” (Anna Patarakina/Bleecker Street via AP)

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The egos are as vast and thorny as the gardens on the lush estate of a prominent author in “ The Lesson ,” an entertaining and erudite chamber piece about a master, a tutor and a family after loss.

This is a story that, in different hands, could have easily turned maudlin or melodramatic, but director Alice Troughton, writer Alex MacKeith and composer Isobel Waller-Bridge opted instead for wry lightness within the construct of a slow-burn thriller. It’s as though “The Lesson,” and everyone involved, is winking at the audience through the serious material that lingers, intentionally, on the fine line between pretentious and provocative.

Daryl McCormack , of “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” and “Bad Sisters,” plays Liam Sommers, an aspiring writer who has accepted a job tutoring the son of world-famous author J.M. Sinclair (Richard E. Grant), who also happens to be his literary idol. But the film begins with Liam on a fancy stage, being interviewed about his novel about a fading patriarch and a grief-stricken family that the moderator calls one of the most striking debuts of the year. The movie is a memory prompted by that very standard interview question: What was your inspiration?

Anyone in the business of asking artists questions about inspiration knows, on a certain level, that at best you’re only getting a very brief version of one person’s highly sanitized truth. At worst it’s just a plausible sounding fabrication, safely constructed in the rearview mirror. J.M. Sinclair, in the YouTube interviews that Liam watches on repeat, coyly speaks about how all great writers steal but he’s not one, you imagine, who would publicly own any thievery. He is as precious about the singularity of his works and his talent as, in his words, the average writers who attempt originality and “fail universally” and the good writers who have the “sense to borrow.” But it all helps to plant the seed that you’re about to watch a literary heist unfold, though perhaps not the one you might expect.

The Sinclair family is the picture of upper-class posturing, with a household staff and a feigned formality fitting of someone who is always in control of the narrative, even at the dinner table in the company of only his son, Bertie (Stephen McMillan), and wife, Hélène (Julie Delpy). When he queues up Rachmaninoff as their dining music and Bertie protests, he challenges his son to give him three good reasons why — a snobbish test that only shuts down the conversation. It’s also quite the introduction to an author whom Liam has worshipped. Never meet your idols, etc, etc.

Liam is ostensibly there to help Bertie, a quiet and tortured Chalamet-type, prepare for entrance exams to study English literature at Oxford. But he has his own motives too — he’s writing a thesis about Sinclair and at work on his own book. Why would a family that insists on a nondisclosure agreement and utmost discretion hire someone with such a glaring conflict of interest? Well, that’s just one of the many mysteries for the audience to navigate in this maze of secrets, shame and scandals, including the somewhat recent suicide of the eldest Sinclair boy who was, it’s suggested, a more promising writer than Bertie.

McCormack, Grant and Delpy are a deliriously captivating group to watch. Grant, so adept at comedy, is prickly and terrifying as this intellectual tyrant who is unafraid to crush anyone in his path with casual cruelty, as when he asks Liam for help because he’s “not a real writer.” And McCormack once again excels at playing a shrewd, underestimated outsider. Liam has a few Tom Ripley talents up his sleeve that he uses to his advantage at key moments.

As Liam says of Sinclair’s newest book, the third act in the film feels like a bit of a jarring departure from the fun escalating tension of the first two acts. But “The Lesson” is worth a watch as a tightly crafted film made by and for adults unafraid of some rhododendron metaphors and casual Tchaikovsky talk.

“The Lesson,” a Bleecker Street release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “language and some sexual content.” Running time 104 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

MPA Definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr .

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by Ian McEwan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2022

A richly observed story that spans decades to recount lives of sometimes-noisy desperation.

A tale of aspiration, disappointment, and familial dysfunction spread across a vast historic panorama.

Embracing the years from the Blitz to Brexit, McEwan’s latest finds Roland Baines, an unaccomplished fellow who scrapes out a living as a lounge pianist and sometime journalist, worrying about his infant son, Lawrence: “Shocked, numbed, scar tissue forming within hours in the lower regions of the unconscious, if such a place or process existed?” The boy has good reason to be damaged, for his mother, Alissa, has abandoned them. She will go on to great things, writing bestselling novels and, decades on, a memoir that will falsely accuse Roland of very bad behavior. Alissa is working out a trauma born of other sources, while Roland floats along, remembering traumas of his own, including piano lessons with plenty of illicit extras at his boarding school. McEwan weaves in the traumas of world history as well: As the story opens, the failed nuclear generator at Chernobyl is emitting radioactive toxins that threaten the world. Other formative moments include the Suez Canal crisis, Covid, and 9/11, which causes Roland more than his usual angst: “Only a minuscule faction, credulous and cruel, believed that the New York hijackers reclined in paradise and should be followed. But here, in a population of 60 million, there must be some.” McEwan is fond of having his characters guess wrongly about what’s to come: A detective scoffs at forensics based on genetics (“Fashionable rubbish”), while Roland nurses a “theory that the Chernobyl disaster would mark the beginning of the end for nuclear weapons.” Well along his path, though, Roland comes to realize a point learned in childhood but forgotten: “Nothing is ever as you imagine it.” True, but McEwan’s imagination delivers plenty of family secrets and reflects on “so many lessons unlearned” in a world that’s clearly wobbling off its axis.

Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-53520-2

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Percival Everett ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2024

One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.

This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.

Pub Date: March 19, 2024

ISBN: 9780385550369

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Percival Everett

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‘The Lesson’: Sharp literary drama curdles into melodramatic mush

Great performances by richard e. grant, julie delpy and daryl mccormack initially elevate this british thriller about the writing life.

What makes an ending? That question looms large in “The Lesson,” in some ways intentionally, in other ways not.

Impeccably acted — by Richard E. Grant, Julie Delpy and Daryl McCormack in the main roles — the initially combustible story fizzles out in melodrama. This literary thriller revolves around a pair of writers: Grant’s prickly J.M. Sinclair, considered the most revered author in England but facing a bit of a block as he puts the finishing touches to his latest work, and McCormack’s Liam Sommers, a novice writer making a living as a tutor while he struggles to finish his first novel, in longhand. When Sinclair’s sexy yet neglected wife, Hélène (Delpy), hires Liam, who wrote his thesis on Sinclair, to prepare their sullen teenage son Bertie (Stephen McMillan) for his upcoming Oxford entrance exams, it looks like sparks will fly.

And so they do. The arrangement Liam has just walked into involves Grant’s stern paterfamilias coping with, as it turns out, not just a surly adolescent and a chilly wife, but a family rendered dysfunctional by profound loss.

That’s not a spoiler. The film opens with Liam giving an interview about his debut novel, which is described in just that way — as the story of a “brooding patriarch presiding over a grief-stricken family” — as the interviewer asks Liam where he got the idea for it. “The Lesson” is his answer, told in flashback.

Good writers borrow; great writers steal, as Sinclair says over and over in the film, capably directed by Alice Troughton, a director of TV series making her feature debut. (Apparently, first-time screenwriter Alex MacKeith took that maxim to heart. The line comes from T.S. Eliot.) And accusations of literary theft figure prominently here, after Sinclair and Liam trade manuscripts one day, each asking the other to read his work. For the great author, it’s a request for proofreading; for Liam, it’s a chance to get advice from his brilliant artistic hero.

Liam is no slouch in the brains department. But when he speaks his mind too freely, daring to critique the ending of Sinclair’s novel, it opens up a fissure in their once-frosty relationship, which had started to thaw into a kind of warm mentorship. Strong feelings are stirred, and secrets percolate upward in this tense and warily unhealed household, like bubbles through the water of the lake that lies at the bottom of the garden, in which Liam has been forbidden to swim.

So far, so good. Delicious, even. The first two acts of the “The Lesson” are a delicate dish of ambition, pride, resentment, feelings of failure and other spicy emotions. The cast is flawless, down to Crispin Letts as the Sinclairs’ butler: tightly wound and tight-lipped, with the ability to keep secrets of his own, as you will learn.

But just as Sinclair seems to have missed the mark with the ending to his book, at least in the eye of Liam, so too does “The Lesson” — initially so full of suspense, cagey maneuvering and surprise — take a turn for the obvious, devolving into a tale of a taboo love, sexual jealousy, betrayal and violence.

Echoing Liam’s review of Sinclair’s work in progress, I’d call the first two acts of the film cleverly constructed, fresh and fascinating, yet marred by a climax and conclusion that are unworthy of what came before. If there’s a lesson here, in a marvelous movie that curdles into easy mush, it’s that endings — or at least the great ones — are hard.

R. Area theaters. Contains strong language, some sexuality, brief nudity and smoking. 103 minutes.

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‘The Lesson’: Review

By Fionnuala Halligan 2023-06-13T15:20:00+01:00

Richard E. Grant relishes his role as an domineering novelist in Alice Troughton’s twisty debut

Source: Bleecker Street

‘The Lesson’

Dir. Alice Troughton. UK/Germany, 2023. 103mins

A thriller-ish drama about two writers – master and servant, literally – with a troubled teenage son thrown into the mix views like airport fiction come to life. With Richard E. Grant as the best-selling author and Daryl McCormack as his biggest fan, this is a slickly-packaged and appealing primetime TV-friendly drama which bows at Tribeca before a release in the US through Bleecker Street on July 7, undoubtedly as a prelude to landing on a prestige TV or streamer service.

A watchable, polished, undemanding and vaguely familiar package

Episodic director Alice Troughton ( Baghdad Central ) makes her feature debut with this lower-budgeted twisty drama, and producers were lucky to land McCormack in the lead as his star is in the ascendant. Initially coming across as an update of  Ordinary People –  with Julie Delpy in the Mary Tyler Moore role – this has pulpier aspirations, as the doomed lake at the front of the central mansion turns into a swamp. Rounding out the quartet is talented young Scottish actor Stephen McMillan ( Boiling Point ), whose character is left to fend for himself as the adults become increasingly entangled in the weeds.

Eminently watchable Irish actor McCormack plays aspiring writer and Oxford literature graduate Liam, who has a photographic memory and a sideline in tutoring. The film is framed in flashback, meaning his fate is never in jeopardy. Early shots of him disrobing for a swim seem rather gratuitous, although they do establish a watery theme before he decamps to a grand house in the British countryside to tutor his literary hero J.M. Sinclair’s (Grant) troubled son Bertie (McMillan), who also aspires to a degree in literature at Oxford. There has been a tragedy in the family – the suicide of an older, adored sibling – and Sinclair’s frosty French art collector wife Helene (Delpy) is trying to help her son in the face of this trauma and his father’s domineering disapproval.

There are attempts to bring class differences to the mix – Liam’s unfamiliarity with classical music, for example – but it’s hard to pitch this correctly in such a multi-national household, unless you deliberately read Liam being Black and Irish as a visual/aural code which hopefully isn’t the case. It’s almost a relief to read in the credits that the house itself is located in Germany because the film just doesn’t seem rooted in any culture, whether that be academia, literary, or Oxford/UK. It works better as the same sort of nowhere-land in which last year’s Amazon hit  All The Old Knives  was set.

Whatever the case, this family are crashing, unlikable snobs, and that’s the message which Troughton is keen to emphasise as she edges Alex MacKeith’s screenplay out of dark comedy into thriller terrain. Liam, himself a naked opportunist, is desperate to ingratiate himself with his idol, but soon discovers Sinclair a deeply unpleasant domestic tyrant (a character trait which Grant tackles with suitable relish). So now, how far will Liam go? Why does Sinclair keep a server running in his dead son’s locked bedroom? Will Liam’s photographic memory come in handy apart from being able to quote chunks of Sinclair’s text back at its author? And why does the film keep repeating Sinclair’s mantra about how every writer needs to steal?

A score by Isobel Waller-Bridge can occasionally be a little too emphatic in its quirkiness, but is mostly used as a cheeky motif to enliven proceedings. The cast approaches the task with enthusiasm, particularly Grant. The actor works better with repressed fury than abandon and is excellent at slyly comic turns, but having to follow the script into increasingly lurid terrain is a shame for the controlling character he has created. A watchable, polished, undemanding and vaguely familiar package, the main surprise in The Lesson is that that this is the debut screenplay from MacKeith and not a literary adaptation itself.

Production companies: Poison Chef, Egoli Tossell, Jeva Films

International sales: Film Constellation

Producers: Camille Gatin, Cassandra Sigsgaard, Judy Tossell, Fabien Westerhoff

Screenplay: Alex MacKeith

Cinematographer: Anna Patarakina

Production design: Seth Turner

Editing: Paolo Pandolpho

Score: Isobel Waller-Bridge

Main cast: Richard E. Grant, Julie Delpy, Daryl McCormack, Stephen McMillan, Crispin Letts

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2023, Mystery & thriller, 1h 43m

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Critics Consensus

Even if it isn't always quite as clever as it seems to think it is, sharp performances from an outrageously talented cast make The Lesson worth learning. Read critic reviews

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The lesson videos, the lesson   photos.

Liam (Daryl McCormack), an aspiring and ambitious young writer, eagerly accepts a tutoring position at the family estate of his idol, renowned author J.M. Sinclair (Academy Award nominee Richard E. Grant). But soon, Liam realizes that he is ensnared in a web of family secrets, resentment, and retribution. Sinclair, his wife Hélène (Academy Award nominee Julie Delpy), and their son Bertie (Stephen McMillan) all guard a dark past, one that threatens Liam's future as well as their own. As the lines between master and protégé blur, class, ambition, and betrayal become a dangerous combination in this taut noir thriller.

Genre: Mystery & thriller

Original Language: English

Director: Alice Troughton

Producer: Camille Gatin , Cassandra Sigsgaard , Judy Tossell , Fabien Westerhoff

Writer: Alex MacKeith

Release Date (Theaters): Jul 7, 2023  limited

Box Office (Gross USA): $284.7K

Runtime: 1h 43m

Distributor: Bleecker Street

Production Co: Bleecker Street Media, Egoli Tossell Film, Jeva Films, Poison Chef, Constellation Productions

Cast & Crew

Richard E. Grant

JM Sinclair

Julie Delpy

Hélène Sinclair

Daryl McCormack

Liam Sommers

Crispin Letts

Stephen McMillan

Bertie Sinclair

Alice Troughton

Alex MacKeith

Screenwriter

Camille Gatin

Cassandra Sigsgaard

Judy Tossell

Fabien Westerhoff

Andrew Karpen

Executive Producer

Kent Sanderson

Anna Patarakina

Cinematographer

Paulo Pandolpho

Film Editing

Isobel Waller-Bridge

Original Music

Seth Turner

Production Design

Henning Jördens

Art Director

Verena Schlünsen

Set Decoration

Sabine Böbbis

Costume Design

Dixie Chassay

Martin Heberden

Jens Meurer

Film Editor

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Book Reviews

'lessons' finds some familiarity with author ian mcewan's own life.

Heller McAlpin

How do you take the measure of a life?

In Ian McEwan's expansive new novel, a man assesses his life's trajectory from childhood to old age, focusing especially on what he considers his wrong turns and disappointments. Set against the backdrop of 70 years of major global events, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Covid pandemic, Lessons displays both breadth and depth. It ranks among McEwan's best work, including Atonement.

Roland Blaine, the novel's effete protagonist, feels he never lived up to his potential — careerwise or otherwise — beginning with his dismal academic performance. We eventually learn why. Intent on self-improvement, Roland strives to make up for his aborted formal education with an ambitious self-directed reading course, but he still rues his inability to cobble together more than a subsistence living with watered-down versions of his talents — playing piano in a cocktail lounge instead of a concert hall, teaching tennis instead of competing in it, writing greeting cards instead of great poems.

In the novel's opening pages, McEwan deftly introduces Roland and the two life-changing experiences inflicted on him two decades apart: sexual predation at boarding school, and marital abandonment as a new father. Additional issues come into focus later, including the art/life tradeoff and questions about whether genius can co-exist with happiness — or ever justify bad behavior. Some of the novel's answers may surprise you.

When we meet Roland in 1986, his wife, in a sort of Doris Lessing move, has just left him and their 7-month-old son without warning because she felt she was living the wrong life and feared repeating her mother's mistake of sacrificing her literary aspirations to a constricted, domestic existence.

Newly deserted, with no idea where Alissa has disappeared to, Roland must fend off police investigations into his possible culpability. The sleep-deprived, newly single parent recalls an earlier experience of extreme disorientation: one of his first piano lessons at the progressive English state boarding school to which his parents sent him from their home in Tripoli at age 11, in 1959. Shy and homesick, he didn't know what to make of his pretty young teacher when, after he hit a wrong note on a Bach prelude, she pinched his bare inner thigh hard enough to leave a bruise. That pinch turns out to be the first of Miss Cornell's increasingly inappropriate physical and emotional transgressions, from which it takes Roland much of his adulthood to recover, in part because of his guilt at his enjoyment of the sex.

Despite his personal trials, Roland knows enough about political persecution and global privation to count his blessings. During the Margaret Thatcher years, he muses in a passage that showcases McEwan's perspicacity: "His lot lolled on history's aproned lap, nestling, in a little fold of time, eating all the cream. Roland had had the historical luck and all the chances. But here he was, broke in a time when the kindly state had become a shrew."

Because Lessons is such an interior narrative that spans so many decades, it sometimes feels like it channels Roland's journals, which ploddingly summarize his days. But his story — like life itself — is periodically punctuated by more riveting confrontations, including reckonings with the two most influential women in his life.

One of the more striking aspects of Lessons is its many salient parallels with McEwan's life — which is unusual in his work. McEwan and Roland were both born in 1948 to mothers who had a wartime extramarital affairs while their first husbands were at the front. Both his mother, Rose Moore, and her fictional counterpart, Rosalind Morley, gave up a son conceived from this liaison before their first husbands were killed in combat — a secret kept for nearly 60 years in both novel and real life, where it was giddily covered by the British press in 2007. McEwan's father, like Roland's, was a career army officer whose posts included East Asia, Germany, and North Africa, including Libya. The author and his protagonist also share strong Labour Party leanings, as well as "[religious] disbelief, which was so complete that even atheism bored him."

In a rare autobiographical detail in his 1987 novel, The Child in Time, McEwan wrote about the jolt of being sent 2,000 miles from his home in Libya to Woolverstone Hall School in Suffolk — an experience he recaps in The Lesson through Roland's eyes. Although Berners Hall, the stand-in for Woolverstone, is relatively benign as British boarding schools go, it is hardly cozy.

Yet should you insist on reading Lessons as a thinly veiled autobiography, McEwan has a lesson for you — which he has Alissa deliver when Roland objects to what he sees as an evil version of himself in one of her novels. Alissa, one of Europe's most acclaimed writers, shouts at him, "Have I really got to give you a lesson in how to read a book? I borrow. I invent. I raid my own life. I take from all over the place, I change it, bend it to what I need." Her books, Alissa adds, encompass "Everything that ever happened to me and everything that didn't. Everything I know, everyone I ever met — all mine to mash up with whatever I invent."

It's an apt description not only of this multivalent novel, but of the art of literary fiction.

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Reviews of Lessons by Ian McEwan

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

by Ian McEwan

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' Opinion:

• Literary Fiction
• UK (Britain) & Ireland
• Eastern Europe
• 20th Century (multiple decades)
• Generational Sagas
• Coming of Age
• Dealing with Loss
• Strong Women

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About this Book

• Reading Guide

Book Summary

From the best-selling author of Atonement and Saturday comes the epic and intimate story of one man's life across generations and historical upheavals. From the Suez Crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current pandemic, Roland Baines sometimes rides with the tide of history, but more often struggles against it.

When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Two thousand miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life. Haunted by lost opportunities, Roland seeks solace through every possible means—music, literature, friends, sex, politics, and, finally, love cut tragically short, then love ultimately redeemed. His journey raises important questions for us all. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without causing damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past? Epic, mesmerizing, and deeply humane, Lessons is a chronicle for our times—a powerful meditation on history and humanity through the prism of one man's lifetime.

This was insomniac memory, not a dream. It was the piano lesson again—an orange-tiled floor, one high window, a new upright in a bare room close to the sickbay. He was eleven years old, attempting what others might know as Bach's first prelude from Book One of The Well-tempered Clavier, simplified version, but he knew nothing of that. He didn't wonder whether it was famous or obscure. It had no when or where. He could not conceive that someone had once troubled to write it. The music was simply here, a school thing, or dark, like a pine forest in winter, exclusive to him, his private labyrinth of cold sorrow. It would never let him leave. The teacher sat close by him on the long stool. Round-faced, erect, perfumed, strict. Her beauty lay concealed behind her manner. She never scowled or smiled. Some boys said she was mad, but he doubted that. He made a mistake in the same place, the one he always made, and she leaned closer to show him. Her arm was firm and warm against his ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• How did your reading experience differ between passages and scenes related to major historical events and those that were more intimate and specific to Roland and the other characters?
• Roland reflects: "The past, the modern past, was a weight, a burden of piled rubble, forgotten grief. But the weight on him was at one remove. It barely weighed at all. The accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell—a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife—was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he ...
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Media Reviews

Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

Lessons shines at disrupting hoary old concepts like good guys and bad guys, clear motivations and closure by tweaking well-trodden themes. Perhaps inevitably, the plot's artful setup, with all its neat foreshadowing and synchronicities guaranteeing a juicy outcome, its trotting out of historical upheavals through yet another fictional character's lens, can feel a tad by-the-numbers. Sometimes you can almost glimpse the novelist consulting his outline and research to make sure no poetic connection goes unconnected. But for the book's spectacular chemical reactions to occur, some basic elements have to be methodically poured into the mix. While Lessons puts plot, characters and ideas first, its prose style is routinely insightful and enticing: "Long drives usually settled him into sustained reflection… His little car, nimbler and more spacious than he expected, was a thought-bubble pushing north through a country he no longer quite knew or understood.".. continued

Full Review (916 words) This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today .

(Reviewed by Jacob Lenz-Avila ).

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Locus Online

The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field

Katharine Coldiron Reviews The Lesson by Cadwell Turnbull

Although I could be wrong, I think The Lesson , Cadwell Turnbull’s debut novel, is an allegory for white interference in Black cultures, whether in Africa, America, or the Caribbean. I’m cautious of assigning this idea from inside my white skin, because I could be making a deeply insulting assumption. But if I am wrong, I’m listening to anyone who wants to explain what I’ve misunderstood – and anyway, it wouldn’t lessen my admiration for this remarkable book.

The Lesson is set in the Virgin Islands, mostly in the very near future, though there’s a long passage that flashes us back to the Maroon rebellions in 18th-century Jamaica (Google that if you don’t know about it; fascinating bit of history). It’s about an alien ship that lands in St. Thomas, and five years of rippling consequences following the landing. Mera, an “ambassador” from the alien Ynaa, is one of a large cast of third-person narrators. Some voices pervade the novel (Derrick, an idealistic young man who works for Mera), while others only speak once (Jammie, a marijuana grower with an alien girlfriend). The book is crowded with characters: Patrice, a local girl made good who fears the Ynaa; Jackson, her father; Shawn, a foolish, violent teenager; Harriet, Derrick’s grandmother; Lee, his sister; and so on. Every character has at least a few good moments, but the book starts to feel like a literary scrapyard toward its end, full of pieces of stories rather than a smooth narrative.

The story of the book is less an agile plot than it is a series of shifts in the lives of these characters. Key events occur, but how the characters absorb and react to these events makes the plot feel a little sparse. No matter. Turnbull’s writing is affecting and intelligent, dropping wisdom like cherry bombs: “The universe didn’t care about strength. It didn’t care about anything. Indifference looked like malice to creatures with something to lose.” Each character has a story, and each story has a winding path that leads him or her to a final, often brutal conclusion. The Lesson isn’t symmetrical or geometric, but messy, driven by decisions and relationships. That makes it much more human.

The trouble with allegories is how circumscribed by purpose they often feel. Nothing that doesn’t fit the allegory can go in the book. The Lesson does not have that problem; its events occur organically, and the book’s nature comes clear only gradually. The Ynaa, although they don’t mean any specific harm to the human race, unquestioningly react to any degree of aggression with extreme violence. It takes time for the reader to understand that Turnbull is writing about white people – that when the Ynaa tear arms off in response to being accidentally shoved, they are taking care of the uppity humans. Because Mera seeks to help so earnestly, and because she divides her loyalty (“unable to speak out against the Ynaa and unable to speak fully on behalf of the humans”), it takes time to understand Turnbull’s point about the uneasiness of middle ground between conflicting racial agendas. Because the aliens, who land in a ship shaped like a conch shell, seem to have a connection to island life, it takes time to appreciate Turnbull’s restraint, his purpose in limiting the story to an island colonized and exploited many times over. His intentions in linking the Maroon story to Mera’s long occupation of Earth become clear once the turnabout of violence begins to make sense. It all fits well without taxing the reader, and without squeezing the narrative in places it should spread out.

In a simpler book, the Ynaa, because they are Othered, would stand in for black people, and would suffer persecution and casualties to form the allegory. But The Lesson works harder than that. Toward the end of the book, Shawn, grieving his brother, decides to murder one of the Ynaa. He observes her walking down the street: “He recognized the expression on her face… Tranquility. Not a care in the world. The Ynaa was certain that nothing could touch her. How wonderful it must be to float through the world with all that certainty, knowing that you could do anything and it wouldn’t come back to you. How wonderful it must be to feel safe.” These words take on heavy significance in our current world, not just in the speculative one Turnbull has invented. Plus, ultimately, the Ynaa’s mission translates to white greed for immortality, which may be the one consistent legacy white people have spread across the world.

In craft, The Lesson is hardly a perfect book. It has false starts (the opening makes it seem like a YA book), it juggles its many characters with less than ideal grace (Patrice, characterized inconsistently, has a convenient, low-stakes pregnancy), and its vague gestures to how the world beyond St. Thomas deals with the Ynaa’s existence are not enough to fully contexualize the event. But it’s a daring and thoughtful book, which is far better than a beautifully crafted snoozer. Moreover, it’s a book that presents racial issues and questions in a genuinely new way, which makes it a book that, I hope, will stand the test of time.

Katharine Coldiron is the author of Ceremonials (Kernpunkt Press), an SPD fiction bestseller. Her work as a book critic has appeared in T he Washington Post , T he Believer , T he Guardian , and many other places. She lives in California and at  kcoldiron.com .

This review and more like it in the June 2019 issue of Locus .

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H.G. Wells was using alien invasions as metaphors a long, long time ago.

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A Quintillion Words | Book Reviewer | Copywriter

The lesson – book review.

Overall Rating : ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“Someone’s got to make him pay…”

Last year, I picked Lisa Bradley’s debut, Paper Dolls , as my favourite read of the year, so hearing about The Lesson had me so incredibly excited. It did not disappoint! After reading this book, I think I might love it even more than Lisa’s debut (which I didn’t think was possible!) Another addictive and truly thrilling novel, one that refused to leave my brain for weeks! I still can’t stop thinking about the entire plot and just how much I love this author. I’m so happy to be sharing my review on the blog tour – make sure you check out the reviews from all these other brilliant book bloggers!

Evie has just started her second year at University. She is young, beautiful and popular. She should be having the time of her life, except she has something to hide – a one-night-stand with her English Professor, Simon.

Not wanting any of his other students to be used in the same way, Evie reports their relationship to University HR. But hours later, Village Vixen, the student gossip blogger, is baying for blood. She’s found out about the accusation and is firmly on Simon’s side.

But how could Village Vixen possibly have known? Evie can’t help but feel like she’s being watched. As paranoia and fear set in, the one thing Evie knows for sure is someone has to teach Simon a lesson…

The beginning

Evie has a confession. She’s had a one-night-stand with her English tutor, Simon, and she needs to make sure she does the right thing by coming clean. She can’t live with herself unless she prevents it from happening again and again with other unsuspecting victims. The author stunned me yet again by just how easy it was to sink into her words, and reading the first chapter brought back all those great memories of how much I loved the author’s previous book. Evie is a fabulous character, as is her friend, Bronte. The pair were such memorable characters to follow and always had each other’s back. Aside from this main storyline, the author also introduces other characters, one of which is doing all he can to raise awareness of mental health issues after a friend, Josh, died by suicide the previous year. (Lisa, you don’t know how important it is to me that you’ve included this after I lost my boss/friend to suicide last month. Just reading this has helped me to process the pain and these new, strange feelings. Thank you so much. ❤️ )

The story alternates perspective from student, Evie, to lecturer, Jenny, and then to Evie’s English tutor, Simon. Jenny is such a wonderful character, but someone with such weight on her shoulders. Josh was one of her students and it’s clear his death still affects her a year later. I loved learning more about this character and I found her absolutely fascinating. I was just as intrigued when learning about Simon. I found myself warming to this character in a way I never thought I would – learning about his home life and what he and his family have to go through each day tugged at my heart. However, does this really excuse what happened? What even did happen? I was really looking forward to finding out more about the bigger picture to help me organise the facts and draw those all important conclusions. As with any thriller, nothing is ever as it seems on the surface! The book’s introduction was faultless (as expected) and it sets us up for a fantastic experience. I couldn’t wait to get stuck into the details and get to know these characters even more!

“She jumped back, not even understanding for a second what she was seeing. Just a scrawl and colours. Bad colours. Something red and purple and slimy, something belonging on the insides rather than the outsides, dangling from her door handle.”

Evie has a lot to process, but her worries only escalate as she reads a post from student blogger, Village Vixen, almost tailored exactly to her situation with Simon. How could anyone know what happened? Is she being watched? Stalked ? Should she be worried? If that wasn’t enough for her (and me!) to process, it gets even worse… I didn’t expect things to get so dark so quickly, but my god, I loved how unexpected and disturbing things became! I soon became concerned for Evie’s safety and made a mental note to keep an eye on every single character. Someone was involved and I needed to know who and why! Hearing the start of Simon’s version of events was really interesting, and the more we hear about those finer details, the more intrigued I became. There still wasn’t enough to pin the blame on any one person, but the journey we were taking was so thorough, exciting and so compelling to read. Jenny also seems to be a target as she too finds a gruesome discovery, which still managed to turn my stomach. The author already had me thinking of suspects, characters who might have had it in them to cause suffering to these two characters.

As we learn more about Jenny, it blew my mind just how much there was to this character and how deeply developed she was (just like all the other main characters, to be honest!) I was so desperate to learn her story and really get into the layers and layers of thoughts and feelings she has. There were so many other connections to other characters and events that we only get the bare bones of at this point, but I simply couldn’t stop reading and I needed to find out everything I could about all three of the main characters. Josh becomes even more significant which I was really glad about, and I found myself thinking about certain events in my life and all the whys and the hows you end up mulling over as you lay in bed each night. Surprisingly, it made my own thoughts a bit easier to sift through, if only for a short while. Every single element of the story so far worked in perfect harmony and I already knew this book would become one of my new favourites!

The more we delve deeper into this web of secrets from pretty much every character, the more I was sucked into their lives. I felt like mapping out every fact we’d learnt and I even began to feel differently about those characters I’d really warmed to at the start! This is just one of the many ways the author grabs you and forces you to become so tangled up in what’s going on that you can guarantee you’ll forget about reality for a while. Everything is so involving and perfect to get your teeth into. Make sure you don’t get disturbed while reading because you’re going to need all your concentration in order to not miss any crucial detail! The changes we see in these characters had been written well – take Evie for example. She and Bronte were great friends, but now Evie longs for time alone without someone who clings on wherever she goes. Each of these changes, no matter how small or insignificant they may seem, was turning these characters into completely different people, and I loved how easily the author managed to sway my opinions on others.

I really felt for Evie as she is almost certainly being watched, but I was also questioning how truthful she was being. At the same time, she seemed quite genuine! Jenny continues to have a strange, cryptic aura around her, but I couldn’t ignore all the work she was doing for men’s mental health and for doing all she could after Josh’s death. However, a part of me wondered if she was doing all this because of the guilt she felt, and there was definitely something readers weren’t being told about her just yet. I loved the build up to all of this! Reading more of Jenny’s thoughts was so captivating, not only because I was so intrigued about her story, but simply because of the words used. The author has beautifully and clearly written about some delicate issues, but also twisted things to create her dark and mysterious storyline. I continued to love every minute and every word, taking each chapter and each character’s version of events and attempting to untangle what on earth was going on. I loved the challenge and enjoyed the delivery of everything I read.

“Too long have we ignored the rise of suicide in males. Too long have we grieved without purpose, too long have we wept silent tears. It is time to take care of each other, to not look the other way, to not cross the street when you see somebody in pain.”

Jenny can sense herself becoming too involved in Evie’s life, something that is all too familiar and makes her think of Josh, the person she couldn’t save. I loved the way the author always adds more layers to the story, but keeps things perfectly organised and makes you read faster and faster to try and get to the bottom of what was going on. I was so eager to visit each chapter and the cliffhangers after each one were so brilliantly written and really held my attention throughout. I was even so surprised with how emotional I felt in certain scenes, and even more surprised that many of these feelings occurred when we were visiting Simon’s chapters. There was one particular character that we’d heard so much about but never met, and at this stage, this character became very significant to more than one of the main characters. Could he be the person causing trouble and grief? Or was it someone we’d grown to know over the course of the book, someone unexpected?

Everything I read was so thought-provoking, and at the same time, the ending was impossible to predict. The mental battles these characters have to go through and the intense emotions felt as a result are passed onto the reader in such an extraordinary way, and I seemed to be continually impressed with how much I felt everything so deeply. These characters are so incredibly realistic, and the author has thrown in such a great mix of twists that really make this story unique, simply one of a kind. So many scenes stuck with me until the end, and just when you think the plot couldn’t get deeper, it does with such intensity. It’s unforgettable and I couldn’t wait to find out how the author rounded things off! I could sense something big coming, and even though we started to get some shocking truths with some unexpected characters by this point, I just knew there would be more excellence to come.

The author’s words were seriously impressive all the way through the book, but the closer we got to the ending, the more beautiful and descriptive they seemed to me. It might have been because of how much the emotions shine through each sentence, or maybe the fact that I felt so close to these characters now. I loved how we finally connect some dots, and some discoveries were so shocking it felt as though my jaw unhinged! No matter how closely I kept an eye on certain characters, the author still managed to shock me, and the unexpected change of events forced me to change my opinions on them once again. The way this is delivered was extraordinary, and I loved how thrilling and captivating each page became. Who could be trusted?! What else was going to go down and shock us even more? I knew there would be more to discover, and it seemed one particular character had been an incredibly good liar all along… no spoilers!

The pace and the urgency made my heart pound as the final few chapters arrived, and I became concerned for different characters for a range of reasons. Simon could lose everything; his family, his job, his sanity . Jenny is also quickly losing her mind as paranoia and panic sets in, and Evie might lose everyone around her if she isn’t careful. Things were certainly reaching boiling point for these characters and someone had to crack soon… I loved how consistent the tension felt all the way through these ending chapters, and just like the author’s previous book, we’re left hanging onto her every word as things play out in such a gripping way. I flew through the final chapters and had a few late nights simply because those intense cliff hangers just wouldn’t let me sleep! Incredible.

“ ‘Just listen,’ I told him. ‘Maybe you’ll find the answers. We often do. In such unexpected places.’ “

One of my absolute favourite scenes had to be the hearing, a chapter where Simon is put under the spotlight and grilled about the allegations against him. This scene felt so real and the detail was so thorough it almost felt as though I was watching it play out on TV! If you love a good interrogation and intense dialogue and conversation, I guarantee you’ll love this. The shocks just keep coming and the way the whole meeting played out had to be one of the best scenes I’ve read this year. I don’t think anyone could predict the direction of the book here, and just the surprise of it all was so perfect to me! At this point, I had a solid choice of which character I was backing all the way, and I wanted to start the book again now I had this new frame of mind to see if there were any subtle hints I missed before. I loved it, and I wasn’t entirely sure if this could be topped!

I must admit, found some parts of the ending of the book difficult to stomach, purely because of recent personal experiences, and I did have a little cry, but I didn’t let this little blip ruin the book for me. It was only a chapter or so anyway! It’s so powerful, and I loved how everything came together. Twist after twist after twist is revealed, and that final chapter, that final sentence ? The best twist of all! The author well and truly caught me off guard and I couldn’t bloody believe what I’d read! One of the best finales I’ve ever read in a thriller, there is no doubt in my mind. I was so engrossed in the words that everything else left my mind as those final pages went by, and I genuinely became so sad that I’d reached the end. Can I start it again now?!

Overall thoughts

I could write about this book forever and a day and still have amazing things to say about it! It’s such a rare treat when an author does everything right, and this book is such a prime example of that. I honestly believe this is one of the best books I’ve read, and I rarely say that! Lisa is an incredible author who knows exactly the kind of book I want to read and delivers every single time, and we’re only onto book two!

I spent days daydreaming at work, nights laying in bed thinking about these characters, their motives, their secrets, their lies… The whole experience knocked me off balance, and very few authors manage to give me such an unexplainable feeling of awe when I finish a book – Lisa managed it with her debut and this feeling was twice as strong with her follow up. The Lesson has quickly become one of my favourite books of all time, and it’ll stick with me forever. I think I’m tearing up!

A huge thanks to the author, Lisa Bradley, and Quercus Books for my copy of this phenomenal book – one of my new favourites! You can purchase your own copy of The Lesson over on Amazon now, available on Kindle or in paperback. Make sure you’re following lovely Lisa over on Twitter and Instagram for more updates.

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She Moved From the Chem Lab to the Kitchen, but Not by Choice

In Bonnie Garmus’s debut novel, “Lessons in Chemistry,” a woman who has been banished to the home front turns it into a staging ground for a revolution.

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By Elisabeth Egan

Welcome to Group Text, a monthly column for readers and book clubs about the novels, memoirs and story collections that make you want to talk, ask questions and dwell in another world for a little bit longer.

Meet Elizabeth Zott: scientist by training, cooking show host by default. One meal at a time, she galvanizes her audience to question the lives they’ve been served.

Like the lunches Zott packs for her daughter, “Lessons in Chemistry” is irresistible, satisfying and full of fuel. It reminds you that change takes time and always requires heat.

Here are a few words I loathe in conjunction with fiction written by women: Sassy. Feisty. Madcap. These supposedly complimentary adjectives have a way of canceling out the very qualities they’re meant to describe: Opinionated. Funny. Intelligent. This last one is not to be confused with its patronizing cousin, Clever. Don’t even get me started on Gutsy, Spunky and Frisky — the unfortunate spawn of Relatable.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY, by Bonnie Garmus (Doubleday, 386 pp., $29) , a debut novel about a scientist in the 1960s who is opinionated, funny and intelligent, full stop. Unfortunately, Elizabeth Zott has been unceremoniously and brutally sidelined by male colleagues who make Don Draper look like a SNAG (Sensitive New Age Guy).

How, exactly, she was cheated out of a doctorate and lost the love of her life — Calvin Evans, a kindred scientist, expert rower and the father of her daughter, Madeline — are central elements in the story, but feminism is the catalyst that makes it fizz like hydrochloric acid on limestone.

Elizabeth Zott does not have “moxie”; she has courage. She is not a “girl boss” or a “lady chemist”; she’s a groundbreaker and an expert in abiogenesis (“the theory that life rose from simplistic, non-life forms,” in case you didn’t know). Not long after Zott converts her kitchen into a lab equipped with beakers, pipettes and a centrifuge, she gets hoodwinked into hosting a staid television cooking show called “Supper at Six.” But she isn’t going to smile and read the cue cards. Zott ad-libs her way into a role that suits her, treating the creation of a stew or a casserole as a grand experiment to be undertaken with utmost seriousness. Think molecular gastronomy in an era when canned soup reigned supreme. Baked into each episode is a healthy serving of empowerment, with none of the frill we have come to associate with that term.

In addition to her serious look at the frustrations of a generation of women, Garmus adds plenty of lighthearted fun. There’s a mystery involving Calvin’s family and a look at the politics and dysfunction of the local television station. There’s Zott’s love affair with rowing and her unconventional approach to parenthood and her deep connection to her dog, Six-Thirty.

Still, beyond the entertaining subplots and witty dialogue is the hard truth that, in 1961, a smart, ambitious woman had limited options. We see how a scientist relegated to the kitchen found a way to pursue a watered-down version of her own dream. We see how two women working in the same lab had no choice but to turn on each other. We meet Zott’s friend and neighbor, Harriet, who is trapped in a miserable marriage to a man who complains that she smells.

“Lessons in Chemistry” may be described with one or all of my verboten words, and it might end up shelved in that maddeningly named section “Women’s Fiction,” which needs to go the way of the girdle. To file Elizabeth Zott among the pink razors of the book world is to miss the sharpness of Garmus’s message. “Lessons in Chemistry” will make you wonder about all the real-life women born ahead of their time — women who were sidelined, ignored and worse because they weren’t as resourceful, determined and lucky as Elizabeth Zott. She’s a reminder of how far we’ve come, but also how far we still have to go.

Discussion Questions

What do science and rowing have in common? Why do you think Garmus decided to dedicate so many pages to the sport?

Aside from her presumption that her daughter is gifted, how is Zott’s approach to parenthood 50 years ahead of its time?

Suggested Reading

“ Where’d You Go, Bernadette ,” by Maria Semple. You can’t get to know Elizabeth Zott without waxing nostalgic about Bernadette Fox, the original tortured, inscrutable, cynical yet vulnerable protagonist who couldn’t care less what you think. If you haven’t read this book by now, we definitely aren’t friends. Sorry, the movie doesn’t count; equating the two is like forfeiting a trip to Italy because you’ve eaten a can of SpaghettiOs.

“ Lab Girl ,” by Hope Jahren. Interested in reading a more hopeful — and true — account of a woman in science? Start with this memoir from a professor of geobiology who’s now at the University of Oslo. Our critic called it “a gifted teacher’s road map to the secret lives of plants — a book that, at its best, does for botany what Oliver Sacks’s essays did for neurology, what Stephen Jay Gould’s writings did for paleontology.” (Jahren also gets props for showing “the often absurd hoops that research scientists must jump through to obtain even minimal financing for their work.”)

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Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

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Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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The Lesson Hardcover – Unabridged, June 18, 2019

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An alien ship rests over Water Island. For five years the people of the US Virgin Islands have lived with the Ynaa, a race of superadvanced aliens on a research mission they will not fully disclose. They are benevolent in many ways but meet any act of aggression with disproportional wrath. This has led to a strained relationship between the Ynaa and the local Virgin Islanders and a peace that cannot last.

A year after the death of a young boy at the hands of an Ynaa, three families find themselves at the center of the inevitable conflict, witnesses and victims to events that will touch everyone and teach a terrible lesson.

• Print length 286 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Blackstone Pub
• Publication date June 18, 2019
• Dimensions 5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
• ISBN-10 1538584646
• ISBN-13 978-1538584644
• See all details

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From the Publisher

Praise for The Lesson

Editorial Reviews

The Lesson is a welcomed addition to the new wave of Virgin Islands literature. The plot is smooth and exciting, the polemics are subtle but smart, and the characters are heartfelt.

The Lesson is a story that should not be missed by readers who embraced such books as Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven or even Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End ...It's a tribute to Turnbull's storytelling that everything unfolds through scenes that ratchet up a slow-burn tension that climaxes in something truly gripping and shocking... The Lesson is definitely one of those books that wants to provoke a deeply individual response from each of its readers, rather than spelling out a conclusive, pedantic lesson for us all. Perhaps that's a good storytelling lesson more writers ought to heed.

[A] rich debut novel about family, love, and loyalty in turbulent times...Turnbull uses a beautifully drawn cast of black characters to convey the complexity of ordinary hardship in extraordinary times. This is an ideal story for fans of Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven and other literary science fiction novels.

A compelling and layered narrative that explores colonialism and our messy human flaws through a diverse and painfully real cast of characters. The Lesson is smart, full of dry wit and creeping dread--a unique and artful debut.

A culture clash between humans and aliens is brought to life in the narration of Janina Edwards and Ron Butler...Both excel in their smooth Caribbean accents, bringing to life an intergenerational cast of characters with distinct personalities.

A parable of cultural conflict, conflicting moralities, colonialism, and the costs of being a decent person in the midst of desperate times...This is one of those books in which the setting becomes almost a character in itself. The Virgin Islands and their people are drawn in vibrant detail...Turnbull has been compared to Octavia Butler, and in his case I think the observation is a valid one. The Lesson isn't just a serious, important book--it's also a fun and rewarding one.

A strong debut from Cadwell Turnbull, The Lesson does what all the best science fiction does: it uses the supernatural to reveal something true about our world.

A thought-provoking work that blends empathy with high concepts. It's a fine place for a thoughtful career to begin.

An excellent read. It explores the history of the Caribbean Islands in the context of European colonization, along with current events in which communities of color are confronted with overwhelming forces that deal out harsh punishments. It's a thought-provoking and interesting story, one that I'm still thinking about.

Beyond its examination of violence and colonialism...there is also, and I was not expecting that, a look at toxic masculinity, paternalism, and patriarchy. It didn't escape me that there is a beautiful (and harrowing) juxtaposing between language itself and these ideas (when the Ynaa refer to men who are they talking about?) that leads to an explosive ending...Its multiple threads fall into place beautifully.

Bring[s] to mind the urgent and vibrant writing of Octavia Butler...From beginning to end, The Lesson is thrilling, moving and thought-provoking. This may be Turnbull's debut, but it reads like the work of a seasoned writer. It's also proof that science fiction is more than entertaining--it's a vital genre that lays bare the perils of the age and the boundlessness of the human spirit.

Cadwell Turnbull paints a stunningly intricate portrait of humanity, capturing hopes and dreams, flaws and failings with remarkable depth and texture. The Lesson is a blast to read and a meaningful exploration of the bearing of colonialism and the perils of human ambition.

Cadwell Turnbull's The Lesson brings an alien invasion to St. Thomas with a breadth that encompasses the past, present, and future. As his well-drawn characters wrestle with interspecies challenges, Turnbull imparts lessons that both embrace and transcend culture and race to drive at the heart of what it means to be human.

Emotional prose and distinctive characters highlight an incredible story that will touch readers' hearts and minds. A compelling tale of invasive occupation and emotional uprising, Turnbull's debut is complex and enthralling. It's a must for all libraries, and the writer, who crafts speculative stories with black characters on par with Octavia Butler, is definitely one to watch.

For all the story's thoughtfulness and literary depth, The Lesson is given a sharp edge through Turnbull's refusal to flinch from portraying the true consequences and costs of invasion, violence and resistance...In his first novel, he displays a sure hand with plot and characters, creating a complex world that is firmly anchored in, and made more compelling by, its roots in real history. The Lesson should appeal to fans of the socially aware and thoughtfully constructed science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler.

I came for the aliens and a war of the worlds. I stayed for the deadpan St. Thomas humor; the complicated, charming, sexy island folk; and Turnbull's delicious prose. He may not only be a new voice in sci-fi, but also a major new name in Caribbean American literature.

If Frantz Fanon had written War of the Worlds , he might have produced something like Cadwell Turnbull's The Lesson... Turnbull shows with heartbreaking clarity that even when fundamentally different individuals are able to find an essential humanity in each other, the nature of colonialism destroys both the colonizer and the colonized.

In The Lesson Cadwell Turnbull, by setting his story in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, makes something completely new of the old theme of humans' first contact with superior aliens. Putting these 'colonizing aliens' in a place shaped by colonialism opens new perspectives on issues of race and culture and sex and exploitation. But the true wonder of this novel is its beautifully realized portrayal of Charlotte Amalie and its deeply human and complex characters, young and old, all of them transformed by the arrival of the ambiguously motivated Ynaa. It's a story of mystery, romance, tragedy, and redemption. Like Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin before him, Turnbull uses the tools of science fiction to illuminate the human heart. The Lesson stands at the beginning of what I expect to be a long and illustrious career.

Mr. Turnbull, who has been compared to Emily St. John and Octavia Butler, is considered one of science fiction's most exciting young talents.

Narrators Janina Edwards and Ron Butler do a fantastic job setting us in the islands, and their accents draw extra attention to the colonial elements of alien invasion that mirror our own history.

Rather than collapse his premise into a straightforward colonial allegory, Turnbull uses the Ynaa occupation to explore what social violence means to the communities that embrace or suffer through it, and whether we as individuals have anything to say about it. Some of the early critical comparisons of The Lesson to Octavia Butler can feel just a little gauche--black authors somehow always seem to be compared only to each other--but Turnbull's fearless commitment to his novel's ambivalence more than earns it.

Remarkable...Turnbull's writing is affecting and intelligent, dropping wisdom like cherry bombs...A daring and thoughtful book...that presents racial issues and questions in a genuinely new way, which makes it a book that, I hope, will stand the test of time.

Sometimes the aliens don't land in New York or London. In fact, the alien Ynaa ship that catalyzes the emotional landscape and drives the action of this debut novel lands in the harbor of Water Island, one of the US Virgin Islands...A persuasively--almost musically--worded meditation on colonialism and whether it's really possible to return home again.

Turnbull artfully incorporates the history of slavery and colonialism on the US Virgin Islands into the story, imagining that history's legacy on a future in which it's hard to differentiate between the cruel nature of man and alien. The Lesson is an impressive first book that takes a classic science fiction archetype and makes it feel new.

Turnbull was raised in the Caribbean in a family that lived there for generations. This slow but gradual addition to the field of diverse writers whose fiction is influenced by their cultural background has not only led to a more authentic depiction of places other than mainland America and the United Kingdom, it's also revitalized the genre's creaky old tropes, such as the alien invasion/first contact narrative... The Lesson is everything I adore about a debut, a bold new voice that applies a fresh coat of paint to an old idea and does so with a sense of daring, compassion, and intelligence.

Turnbull's bold and provocative debut pits aliens against slavers, aliens against the descendants of slaves. On the island of St. Thomas, a family collides with intergalactic meddlers, stranding two lovers with souls in distant worlds. A forbidding panoply of colonial mischief.

Turnbull's novel combines a solid, modest gravitas, a homey quotidian ambiance, a sophistication of character development, and some genuine SFnal strangeness into a unique and savory gumbo...A native of the region before taking up residence in the USA, Turnbull has the setting and citizens of St. Thomas in his bones and blood, and he conveys their reality to us gracefully, colorfully and with a minimum of hand-holding...Turnbull illustrates life on the island and the patterns of culture that contribute to the climactic miniapocalypse with sensitivity and flair...Ultimately, this deft, low-key, exacting, surprising, yet predestined story assumes the contours of the classic account of two cultures at cross-purposes, misunderstanding each other through a welter of good and bad intentions, tragedy resulting.

While reading this book, I couldn't help but think back on the state of race relations in the United States...The book is a study in power and how two opposing sides warily regard one another, and what happens when things get out of control. Given the events of the summer of 2020, this is a theme that's undoubtedly here to stay as authors use science fiction to explore this deadly power dynamic and white supremacy that's part of American life.

About the Author

Cadwell Turnbull is the author of The Lesson . His short fiction has appeared in The Verge , Lightspeed , Nightmare , Asimov's Science Fiction , and several anthologies, including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 and The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 . His first novel, The Lesson , was the winner of the 2020 Neukom Institute Literary Award in the debut category. The novel was also short-listed for the VCU Cabell Award and long-listed for the Massachusetts Book Award. Turnbull lives in Raleigh and teaches at North Carolina State University.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Blackstone Pub; Unabridged edition (June 18, 2019)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 286 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1538584646
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1538584644
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
• #252 in Black & African American Science Fiction (Books)
• #5,012 in Alien Invasion Science Fiction
• #62,225 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Cadwell turnbull.

Hi, I’m Cadwell Turnbull, award-winning author of the science fiction novel The Lesson and No Gods, No Monsters and We Are the Crisis.

My short fiction can be found in the pages of Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Nightmare to name a few. My Nightmare story “Loneliness is in Your Blood” was selected for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018. My Asimov’s novelette “Other Worlds and This One” was also selected as a notable story for the anthology. My short story “Jump” was selected for the Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019.

My debut novel The Lesson is set in my native U.S. Virgin Islands after an alien colonization. The Lesson was the recipient of the 2020 Neukom Institute Literary Award in the debut category. No Gods, No Monsters was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and a winner of a Lambda Award.

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April 13, 2024

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Review of ‘Lessons in Chemistry’

If anyone wants another show that will rip their heart out and put it on a plate, Apple TV’s production of “Lessons in Chemistry” is just the show for you. 

Based on the book by Bonnie Garmus, the story follows chemist Elizabeth Zott as she navigates being a working woman and mother in the 1960s. The show tackles sexism in the workplace and the role of women in a society in which gender roles were extremely defined. Zott begins to inform the women around her of the endless possibilities women can have regardless of what the men around them think.

Garmus got the idea for the book from her own experience in a male dominated workplace and a particular idea being stolen by a male co-worker. 

The show begins with Zott working as a lab technician at Hastings Research Institute where the women at the institute either work as secretaries or lab technicians. We learn that Zott was on her way to earn her Ph.D. in Chemistry, but after being sexually assaulted by her advisor, she was expelled from the program and is extremely cautious about being alone with men behind closed doors due to the trauma of her experience. 

Zott has a particular love for cooking, often trying a variety of different variables and trials to create delicious and healthy recipes. She is asked to unwillingly participate in the institute’s pageant as the rest of the women at the institute are dismayed by the way Zott holds herself. However, Zott attracts young successful chemist Calvin Evans. The two begin working with each other on the science of DNA and eventually become romantically involved. 

Zott has made it very clear at this point that she does not want to get married because she wants her work to be her own and recognized for it, not for her husband to be the one who would receive the credit. 

After a traumatic loss, Zott falls into a deep period of grief and is particularly hit hard with denial. Amongst her denial, she finds that she is pregnant. Due to the nature of workplaces in the 60s, she is fired from her job and begins to raise her child, Mad (named for the mental state in which she was feeling when Mad was born). Zott raises Mad alone, with support from her attorney neighbor Harriet Sloane, who is fighting for the end of the construction of the highway through their backyards. She earns money by quietly doing the math work of Hasting employees.

Zott learns that one of the scientists at Hastings plagiarized her work and claimed all the credit for her research on amino acids. 

Several years later, Mad, who , like her mother, is incredibly bright , befriends a lonely girl in elementary school. Mad begins giving the girl her lunch. Zott finds out and approaches the girl’s father at his work, a television station, and he offers her a cooking television show. She accepts the job and is quickly popular among housewives for her empowering words and blunt persona. 

Meanwhile, Mad’s character arc extends as she begins a search for who her father was and unlocks the secrets of who the recluse Calvin Evans was. 

Award-winning actress Brie Larson portrays Zott and brings the bluntness and brilliance of the troubled woman into her character quite well. She manages to capture Zott ’ s phase of grief with fervor and creates a sense of anxiety and uneasiness with the audience as we navigate her loss with her. 

Lewis Pullman portrays Evans rather well. He manages to capture the awkward and “too intelligent” for his own good man. Kevin Sussman, known as his character Stuart in “The Big Bang Theory,” has a nice change from the comic book loving geek to a stressed out television executive, Walter Pine, who is also a single parent. 

Aja Naomi King plays Sloane with strength and dedication radiating as the woman who has no time for nonsense but all the time in the world to support those she loves. Rainn Wilson guest stars as a big time TV executive (and plays a dick personality rather well) alongside Marc Evan Jackson as Dr. Leland Mason, who , in my opinion , does not act and plays the same character in everything he does. 

The show manages to encompass the 60s and gender roles a little too well, as well as racism during the Civil Rights movement. It also tackles the religion v. science argument , as many characters either struggle with their faith or are willing to accept differing beliefs all together. 

The heartwarming show is no stranger to the ability to tug on heartstrings, of course , after the rather energetic and happy opening song of “Wham Bam Rebop Doo.” 

Beautiful lake scenes and the ability to make Los Angeles look better than it actually is make the show picturesque and cinematically pretty. The show leads the audience through a variety of stories that intertwine creating the story of Zott. Since the show does kind of mess with the audience’s trust issues early on, it keeps the audience guessing and on their toes. However, it maintains their presence as it makes up for its actions by the end. 

You can find the limited series of “Lessons in Chemistry” on Apple TV+.

Published in Culture and Reviews

More posts from Emme Aylesworth

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April 18, 2024

Current Issue

Voice Lessons

April 11, 2024

Fred W. McDarrah/MUUS Collection/Getty Images

A contact sheet of Fred W. McDarrah’s photographs of Village Voice writers and staffers at a union meeting, New York City, July 8, 1982

In December 2016 I was sitting in The Village Voice ’s fluorescently lit office in New York City’s Financial District, waiting to interview for a job. There was a strange flutter in the air; big news had just arrived. My phone had buzzed on the elevator ride up with a push alert bearing a New York Times article: “The Village Voice Names a New Top Editor, Again.” 

The last decade had not been kind to the Voice . The paper had been hollowed out by its previous owner, the New Times newspaper chain. As the journalist Tricia Romano remembered, during the “years that New Times ran the paper, it was death by a thousand cuts, as they slowly fired everyone.” Among those forced out were staffers who had worked there for decades, including Robert Christgau, J. Hoberman, Nat Hentoff, and Lynn Yaeger. In 2015 the paper’s ownership changed hands again, this time to a billionaire named Peter Barbey. Observers treated the acquisition with cautious optimism. “It is one of America’s great newspaper brands in terms of potential by the pound,” Barbey said. In the year that followed, he replaced the Voice ’s editor three times.

That day in December I was shuttled from the waiting room into a windowless back office. I remember the whispers and the tense atmosphere: the journalists here were used to upheaval. After this latest announcement, they were clearly imagining more bad headlines to come.

I had begun my career in the media a year earlier, at the music website Pitchfork. I thought I’d be in graduate school by then, but meeting deadlines and getting free tickets to concerts was more exciting; the idea of writing for the public was a happy accident. It would have been gratifying to work at the local paper I had read growing up: free copies of the Voice , piled up in those red boxes, kept me company as a teen in the far reaches of Queens. My interview did not go well: everyone (me, the editors I talked to, all the people nervously shuffling around the office) seemed worried about the institution’s health. When I left the office, I didn’t expect to hear from them; I went back to my desk at Pitchfork later that afternoon and wondered if I had dodged a bullet. Maybe things would be safer at Condé Nast.

Eight months later, in the summer of 2017, another bad headline did follow. “After 62 Years and Many Battles, Village Voice Will End Print Publication,” the Times announced. Barbey hadn’t just run the paper into the ground; he had killed it.

It was a year filled with similar news. In digital media, the “pivot to video,” a social media–fueled shift in strategy from written content to short videos made on the cheap, had wiped out dozens of jobs from Vice to MTV News. The previous year Dan Fierman, of ESPN’s Grantland, having been hired as publisher to revamp MTV’s editorial arm, had gone on a hiring spree of name-brand writers. When layoffs were announced, the company explained that it was “shifting resources into short-form video content more in line with young people’s media consumption habits.”

As for print media, this latest blow to The Village Voice seemed sadly inevitable. Years of declining ad revenue—funneled, now, into Craigslist and Google and Facebook—had shuttered or diminished many papers around the country, especially local alt-weeklies, the format the Voice helped invent. Fewer than two years after I interviewed at the Voice , its editorial operations were shut down and most of its staff was laid off.

At the end of 2020 Brian Calle, a media executive from Los Angeles, bought the paper and announced plans to revive its website and restart its print edition as a quarterly. The news was met with alarm. In 2017, after Calle acquired LA Weekly , a sister publication of the Voice , he proceeded to ruthlessly gut it, showing most of the newsroom the door. There was no staff left for him to fire at the Voice (in fact he hired a former editor at the paper named Bob Baker), but its ramshackle website and hard-to-find print edition give the impression of a ghost ship. Pitchfork, too, has become a husk of what it was: earlier this year, Condé Nast executives decided to merge the site into GQ , firing more than half of the full-time editorial staff in the process.

To work in American media in the twenty-first century is to live as if the end is near. Your job, your publication, and your lifestyle are always on the verge of crumbling. It’s easy to wax nostalgic about a time when journalism was a more esteemed profession, or at least a more stable and better compensated one. But dread was the prevailing mood even when publications were thicker with ads and paid classifieds. In 1978 Kevin Michael McAuliffe wrote a history of The Village Voice called The Great American Newspaper . By then, he declared, the publication was already in decline: the paper’s pluck and lively spirit were destined to wither away as it faced its first crisis of succession, brought on by a series of new owners—first the patrician society man Carter Burden, then Clay Felker, editor of crosstown rival New York , and finally, worst of all, Rupert Murdoch.

“It would survive somehow,” McAuliffe wrote. “But the magic and the glory that had been there would never return.” The Voice , from this point of view, might be seen as the canary in the coal mine, a preview of what was to come for the industry: bitter divides between management and labor that necessitated the creation of a union; the inability to overcome the economic headwinds brought on by the ruthless logic of the Internet; the mad, misbegotten hope that some new, more benevolent owner might save the place. But the paper’s story can’t be reduced to a death foretold. There’s much to learn from the life of the Voice .

Romano is the author of a new book about the paper, The Freaks Came Out to Write . It’s a door-stopping, decades-spanning oral history stitched together from more than two hundred interviews she conducted as well as materials drawn from the oral history archive at Columbia University and other secondary sources: podcasts, books written by staffers, the like. Romano is well suited to chronicle the paper’s rise and fall. A former nightlife columnist and reporter at the Voice in the 2000s, she was also a witness to its twenty-first-century decline.

The book’s short, episodic chapters detail important events in the paper’s history—from its founding in 1955, with the help of Norman Mailer, to its reporting on Stonewall and the AIDS crisis—and survey the forms of writing it pioneered, including personal essays and cultural criticism about emerging genres like graffiti and rap. The Freaks Came Out to Write presents the Voice as a colorful and often fractious institution, with much screaming, performing, and brawling, both in its pages and in the hallways of its office. More than once the jazz critic Stanley Crouch came close to physical altercations with coworkers over disagreements both editorial and musical.

In 1962 Dan Wolf, who cofounded the paper and served as its first editor, described the Voice ’s mission as an attempt to open a newspaper’s pages not only to trained journalists but also to people who had something to say:

The Village Voice was originally conceived as a living, breathing attempt to demolish the notion that one needs to be a professional to accomplish something in a field as purportedly technical as journalism. It was a philosophical position. We wanted to jam the gears of creeping automatism.

Staffers told McAuliffe that as an editor Wolf did not handle “copy” so much as “people.” What this meant, Louis Menand wrote in a 2008 essay on the Voice for the New Yorker , is that the paper “had to be prepared to publish what writers wanted to write. So, on the one hand, the Voice was under-edited; but, on the other hand, it got material that no other publication did, because no other publication would have attracted it or known what to do with it.” Among the writers whom Wolfe and his coeditors—notably Jerry Talmer, who went on to found the Obies—recruited in the paper’s first decade and a half were Vivian Gornick, who was hired to cover culture and second-wave feminism; Jonas Mekas, avant-garde film’s great evangelist; and Mary Perot Nichols, a Village housewife-turned-muckraker who showed up at the Voice ’s offices complaining that they had overlooked Robert Moses’s proposal to ram an expressway through the middle of their neighborhood.

“A lot of the people [we] hired,” the longtime Voice editor Richard Goldstein told Romano, “were effectively amateurs as writers but had amazingly interesting sensibilities and were totally attuned to the subjects they wrote about.” The staff writer Lucian K. Truscott IV underscores the point:

You could read a Village Voice story, and not only were you learning what was going on in the world, whatever the person was writing about; you were also reading about the person that wrote it, so you were getting a sense of who this person is, and where he or she is coming from. When Susan Brownmiller, Claudia Dreifus, and Vivian Gornick and those women were writing about their lives as women in the early days of feminism, that was what feminism was. It was who they were, and why they were like that, and they were willing to tell you, out loud, in print, who they were, and why they felt the way they felt.

The result, he concludes, was a sense of intimacy “between Village Voice writers and Village Voice readers.” By the end of the 1960s, McAuliffe discovered, those readers were on average not denizens of New York’s underground but rather affluent thirtysomething professionals. Menand summarized his findings:

Almost ninety per cent of Voice readers had gone to college; forty per cent had done postgraduate work. Most had charge accounts at major department stores, such as Bloomingdale’s. Most owned stock. Twenty per cent were New Yorker readers. The Voice was the medium through which a mainstream middle-class readership stayed in touch with its inner bohemian.

One wonders why this demographic remained committed to the paper. Perhaps they valued the its variegated and idiosyncratic contents: Jill Johnston’s all-lowercase lesbian separatist personal essays, Jules Feiffer’s dyspeptic cartoons of modern life’s indignities ( dating , crumbling infrastructure , the problem of Dick Nixon ). Or it could be that they were drawn to the back of the book—the cultural reporting and criticism that, for many readers in New York and elsewhere, defined what was tasteful and cool.

The Voice was designed to evolve with the city it called home. It began as an idealistic, almost anti-ideological beatnik paper focused on the Village and its coffeehouse-frequenting inhabitants. By the end of the 1950s it had developed a reputation for picking fights with local power brokers. “Its first crusade,” Richard Goldstein told Romano, “was overthrowing the boss of Greenwich Village, Carmine DeSapio, and replacing him with a young Reform upstart named Ed Koch.” In the paper’s early years Nichols was “pounding away at Moses,” as Fancher puts it, “week after week.” The Voice receptionist Diane Fisher recalled that “Mary may be the only layman in the whole world who read the capital budget from the first item to the last.” Later, when Robert Caro was struggling to write The Power Broker , Nichols helped him secure carbon copies of Moses’s papers hidden in a Parks Department garage.

In the following decades the paper became a hub for exposés on the city’s most corrupt and powerful. It ran dogged early reports on Donald Trump’s real estate grifts, the symbiotic relationship between New York City’s cops and criminals, and backroom deals and gladhanding at city hall. The standard-bearers for this reporting were Jack Newfield—inventor of the Voice ’s famous annual front-of-the-book “10 Worst Landlords” list—and Wayne Barrett, who tussled with Koch and Trump. In other respects the Voice could be nakedly partisan. Its relationship with Koch was at first particularly cozy. The paper was integral to his rise: it threw its weight behind him and his group, the Village Independent Democrats; tipped him off to the excesses of his rivals; and even hired him briefly as its lawyer. Then, when he became mayor in the late 1970s and cultivated a robust patronage system , the Voice turned on him: “Newfield decided he was like the Antichrist,” as someone put it to Romano.

Edmund Vincent Gillon/Museum of the City of New York/Getty Images

The Village Voice offices next to Cedar Tavern, New York City, circa 1975

Meanwhile, by the end of the 1960s the paper had also evolved into an important organ for the city’s social movements. One of Gornick’s first reports on women’s liberation arrived in November 1969. “The fact is that women have no special capacities for love,” she wrote,

and when a culture reaches a level where its women have nothing to do but “love” (as occurred in the Victorian upper classes and as is occurring now in the American middle classes), they prove to be very bad at it.… The woman who must love for a living, the woman who has no self, no objective external reality to take her own measure by, no work to discipline her, no goal to provide the illusion of progress, no internal resources, no separate mental existence, is constitutionally incapable of the emotional distance that is one of the real requirements of love. She cannot separate herself from her husband and children because all the passionate and multiple needs of her being are centered on them. That’s why women “Take everything personally.” It’s all they’ve got to take.

A decade later, Ellen Willis was reflecting on motherhood and its place in the left: “The institution of the family, and the people who enforce its rules and uphold its values, define the lives of both married and single people, just as capitalism defines the lives of workers and dropouts alike.” Abortion was among the paper’s concerns from early on. Throughout the 1960s, writers like Susan Brownmiller and Marlene Nadle offered sympathetic portraits of abortion providers and defended a woman’s right to determine her own reproductive health. But the paper’s desire to remain somewhat neutral—its refusal to, as one contributor put it to Romano, “become ‘the voice’ of any faction”—also allowed an anti-feminist, anti-abortion stance to develop in its pages. Nat Hentoff, originally a jazz critic, became one of the leading liberal voices for the pro-life movement.

The paper’s coverage of LGBTQ affairs got off to a bad start, too: one of its first stories on the riot at Stonewall called the protesters “the forces of faggotry.” But the editors were open to criticism and agreed when protestors from the Gay Liberation Front demanded they no longer use the slur. By the start of the 1980s the paper’s coverage of gay life in New York stood out, from its annual queer issue—edited by Goldstein—to its dedicated coverage of the AIDS crisis.

McAuliffe implied that the Voice might become more mainstream and conventional as it entered the 1980s. Instead its staff came to include writers and editors who could cover race, class, and popular culture with authority: Greg Tate, Thulani Davis, Nelson George, Hilton Als, Joe Wood. Tate’s 1989 essay “Jean-Michel Basquiat, Flyboy in the Buttermilk” remains among the most influential pieces of criticism the Voice ever published: not just an assessment of the painter a year after his death but a broader consideration of the price Black artists paid to be included in the avant-garde and the need for critics and artists of color to sketch out an aesthetic space outside what their white peers could imagine. About his own newspaper’s art coverage, he implied that much work remained to be done: “It is easier for a rich white man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a Black abstract and/or Conceptual artist to get a one-woman show in lower Manhattan, or a feature in the pages of Artforum , Art in America , or The Village Voice .”

Throughout his history of the Voice , McAuliffe argues that it was uniquely a writer’s paper as opposed to an editor’s paper, a place where talent could be nurtured and cultivated. He was wrong about what would eventually kill it—going mainstream was a small problem compared to the ones the paper had to confront when the industry’s economic model changed. But he was right about the writing. Each generation that passed through the Voice created its own idiom, its own way of seeing the city.

The Voice owed its financial success to good timing, canny marketing, and sheer luck. The luck came in the form of two newspaper strikes, in 1962 and 1965, which allowed the paper to expand in the brief absence of competition: Menand reports that, after the 1962 strike, “circulation jumped from seventeen thousand to forty thousand.” (Another byproduct of the 1962 strike was the creation of The New York Review .) After 1965, he continues, they “consolidated that gain, and the Voice became a Manhattan weekly,” swelling with apartment listings, classifieds, and ads.

Those profits weren’t exactly shared with the staff. As the paper’s profile grew and its business stabilized, Wolf and Fancher became wealthy men, but they still relied on freelancers who were either poorly paid or worked for free. They published stuff other papers wouldn’t, but they didn’t pay the same rates as other papers, either. Only when Rupert Murdoch bought the Voice in 1977, three years after Fancher and Wolf were pushed out amid the paper’s brief merger with New York , did freelancers and staffers unionize, finally securing living wages. (A pioneering aspect of the Voice contract was that it gave even freelance contributors vacation days and other benefits.)

What killed the Voice , according to Romano and all the paper’s other eulogists, was the Internet. It is relatively easy to draw a straight line from the invention of Craigslist to the beginning of the Voice ’s decline. Leonard Stern, the paper’s owner from the 1980s until the early 2000s, told Romano that he heard about the listings site from his son, who used it to hire an au pair. In that moment, he said, he knew the Voice was never going to be profitable again.

In the mid-1990s Stern made the paper free, abandoning the subscription business for a model that relied on sheer scale. (In part, the paper’s management worried about the growth of rival publications, like the free alt-weekly New York Press .) Many writers at the time bemoaned the move. Laurie Stone, a critic and columnist, told Romano it “undermined the idea that this was something of value to pay for.” Not charging a dime for the paper, she suggests, was part of a larger trend of devaluing the labor of writers altogether. Critics of the press have long warned about the corrupting influence of the fourth estate’s profit motive: A. J. Liebling once proclaimed that “the function of the press in society is to inform, but its role is to make money”—two forces that will always be at odds. But from our present vantage point it’s hard to disagree with Stone:

You don’t pay writers now because the culture has determined that intellectual contributions, aesthetic contributions are something that someone can do on the side, like a hobby. And see what happens to a culture who treats its artists and its intellectuals that way? Not good.

Changes in the city’s demographics also influenced the paper’s long-term prospects. In the view of Michael Tomasky, who wrote for the Voice in the 1990s, “the community of people who supported the Voice ” had died by 1995, before it went free, because gentrification and real estate speculation had killed the soul of New York. “The whole idea of these rent-controlled flops that people could live in for cheap in the Village—that was all really disappearing by 1990,” he told Romano. It became difficult for the writers and artists who filled the paper’s pages, because “you started to need to be rich to live in the Village.”

Today writing as a profession can no longer promise even a hint of stability. Last year more than three thousand workers lost their jobs across broadcast, print, and digital news media. This past January alone, 538 more layoffs followed. The Internet must take part of the blame: if Facebook, Google, and Twitter hadn’t gobbled up ad revenue, the media business might not be on such unstable ground. But the industry was also forced into decline by broader economic pressures, as the American labor market grew increasingly subject to the demands of shortsighted investors and venture capitalists.

One of Menand’s insights about the Voice is that its “own success made it irresistible to buyers who imagined that they could do better with a business plan than its founders had done from desperation and instinct.” There is a kernel of optimism in his acknowledgment that sensibility is a crucial ingredient in a publication’s success—a fact that many buyers, especially the meddlesome ones, fail to understand. The Voice won loyal readers by cultivating a community-minded, risk-taking identity, opening its pages to engaged citizens, and letting its writers run wild. Its legacy can perhaps best be seen in the current wave of worker-owned publications—like the New York City–focused news outlet Hell Gate and the irreverent sports and culture site Defector—staffed by people jilted by corporate media. Outlets like these are betting on an idea for which the Voice long stood: that the making of a publication need not be optimized.

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