Review: Jill Lepore’s reasons to panic (or not)
(iStock)“Panic is not evidence of danger,” Jill Lepore calmly notes in her newest work, The Deadline, “it’s evidence of panic.” But Jill Lepore has reason to panic.
Lepore, a staff writer at the New Yorker and a professor at Harvard, has penned the 46 essays that comprise The Deadline during an unprecedented decade. Every day, Americans are lost in the relentless onslaught of headlines spurting out of the ever-changing political opinions of our country’s leaders. There is seemingly no reprieve. It appears that now is as good a time as any to panic.
To say that Lepore’s work provides a reprieve would be inaccurate; but neither does she sow the seeds of panic. Instead, she uses her deep historical knowledge to ground the reader in truthful analysis, synthesizing complex ideas into their most digestible form. She allows readers to build their understanding of how our country has worked and will continue to work, reminding us that “history isn’t a pledge, it’s an argument.”
The Deadline traverses the worlds of historical narrative, political theory, literary analysis and cultural exposé.
That argument takes form in Lepore’s exploration of America’s obsession with its own history, evolving cultural mores and the forces that have fostered and subsequently undermined the United States’s elusive greatness. At 640 pages, it is a slimmer anthology than Lepore’s previous work and perhaps her magnum opus, These Truths: A History of The United States, which was a hefty 960 pages.
The Deadline, which includes two previously unpublished essays, traverses the worlds of historical narrative, political theory, literary analysis and cultural exposé. Within its 10 chapters, each containing three or four essays first published in The New Yorker, Lepore demonstrates her intellectual chops. She constructs and reconstructs historical narratives, from the lives of the legendary—Fredrick Douglass, Ruth Bader Ginsburg—to the stories of the unsung: Lisa Franklin, Ben Franklin’s little sister; and Robert Ettinger, the father of cryogenics, who thought that “death is for chumps.”
While she is a scholar of the past, Lepore’s deft analysis is rooted in the present. Lepore splits and merges the storied narrative of American police brutality with the history of the Second Amendment in “The Long Blue Line.” She conducts a close exegesis of the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights in “The Rule of History.” Her explanatory journalism and cultural commentary on the too-narrow scope of the #MeToo movement in “The Return of the Pervert” is shrewd and poignant. She is accidentally a prognosticator in her delightful yet troubling 2018 essay “Valley of the Dolls” that foretold the social commentary of the 2023 movie “Barbie”—which, by the way, Lepore hated. What she lamented in “Valley of the Dolls” still grips the sorrowful present: “Empowerment feminism is a cynical sham.”
It must be an exhausting, panic-inducing task to peruse the annals of history with an eye trained on the present.
Her writing is crisp, the kind of no-nonsense commentary that recalls the facts as they are (Robert L. Ripley of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” fame grew up “fabulously wealthy”), and then personalizes the analysis (Mr. Ripley “had a girlfriend called Okie and a dog called Dokie” and “looked remarkably like a vampire” and “only dealt in oddities”). She layers the facts in a poetic narrative, a lyrical style with a pragmatic agenda.
In “No, We Cannot,” Lepore responds to President Obama’s 2008 promise that Yes, we can!, using utopias and dystopias as her framework. She paints a holistic picture of the American political scene despite working from a dirtied canvas. She looks to the future of politics through the lens of a sordid past, saying “A story about ruin can be beautiful.... But a politics of ruin is doomed.”
And yet, Lepore finds room in The Deadline to diverge from her well-trodden path. In the titular essay, Lepore offers an elegy for her departed friend, Jane, who died on the day Lepore’s first son was born. The news rendered Lepore paralyzed by grief as she lay in her hospital room preparing for labor. She describes her cesarean section in dissociative terms, stating, “The doctors had to unzip my baby from me.” From notes on motherhood to the challenges of “never showing your colleagues your soft belly” as a woman in academia, Lepore’s personal essay—penned by the quintessential academic essayist—reveals her psyche.
It must be an exhausting, panic-inducing task to peruse the annals of history with an eye trained on the present. The primordial roots of American history have nestled themselves deep within the mind of Jill Lepore. And despite her robust understanding of the American past and the significant challenges posed by the present political, cultural and ecological climates, she does not panic. At least, not yet.
This article also appeared in print, under the headline “Don’t Panic,” in the February 2024, issue.
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