![]() Instead, they embark on a whirlwind tour of American place names mixed with friendly questions, Howards End-like exhortations to connect, and reminders that "we're only tourists in this life" - plus a two-page detour into Dadaism, complete with the poet Hugo Ball's claim that Dada existed "to remind the world that there are people of independent minds - beyond war and nationalism - who live for different ideals." American Utopia speaks to Byrne's own ideals: empathy, curiosity, and meaningful engagement with the country around us. Byrne and Kalman are not here to address the specificities of interdependence, though. But before the pandemic began, Americans were already relying on each other for often-lifesaving support the legions of medical-bill-related campaigns proliferating on GoFundMe bear sad testimony to that fact. "y life is in your hands," Byrne writes - which may seem prescient, given that, thanks to COVID-19, each of our lives quite literally rests in others' hopefully sanitized hands. Byrne and Kalman may not offer a narrative arc, but they have an argument of sorts to make. Some pages offer only a few words, or a notable place name - Truth or Consequences, New Mexico makes an appearance, as do Bullfrog, Utah and Goofy Ridge, Illinois-or, in one case, the chorus of the Talking Heads hit "Road to Nowhere." The resulting effect is much more like reading a book-length poem than reading a play, though few poems or poetry collections come filled with charming illustrations of trees, dancers, and party-hatted dogs.ĭavid Byrne and Maira Kalman/Bloomsbury PublishingĪmerican Utopia is, fundamentally, appealing in both senses of the word. American Utopia contains little of the play's language in fact, it contains little language, full stop. Dialogue accompanied only by stage directions always strikes me as tragically bony, bereft of both the energy that renders live theater compelling and of the detail that lifts other prose from the page. In the spirit of honest criticism, I should note that I have a bias here: I hate reading plays. ![]() Not having seen the musical, I can only guess - but I can testify, with great pleasure, that the book stands on its own as a soothing and uplifting, if somewhat nebulous, experience of art, as well as an argument for the reincarnation of hope in the American project. It can only have been a stroke of luck that, together, Kalman and Byrne hit on a form perfect for our attention-frayed, stay-at-home age: a version of a play that, rather than offering the full script with no visuals, offers the staged American Utopia's spirit or, at least, what I imagine its spirit must have been. American Utopia, David Byrne amd Maira Kalman
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