I Dream with Open Eyes

May 9, 2022
A man flees Trumpistan in this overwrought meditation on politics and belonging. Prochnik (Heinrich Heine) recounts the buildup to his family’s 2018 move from Brooklyn to London, an event prompted by disenchantment with his soulless PR copywriting job and by the presidency of Donald Trump, “the Frankenstein figurehead of apocalyptic capitalism.” His exploration of the nature of America takes in his father’s background as a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Vienna and his mother’s heritage of Yankee do-gooding; extended disquisitions on Sigmund Freud’s theory of the death instinct that allegedly powers MAGA xenophobia; and still more abstruse expositions on Renaissance painter Titian’s Diana and Actaeon as a study in the structural power of whiteness. Prochnik’s musings betray too much focus on Trump as the cause of everything evil. Several chapters revisit the trauma that the author and his liberal circle suffered on election night in 2016, which he compares to the sinking of the Titanic, the 9/11 attacks, Kristallnacht, and other Nazi outrages; the nightmare culminates in the “satanic Camelot” on display during Trump’s victory speech, followed on the bleak morning after by an eerie encounter with an little girl chanting “We’re all going to die.” Prochnik’s unfocused erudition illuminates little beyond Trump’s ability to stoke hysteria in his detractors while robbing them of perspective. Photos.

August 1, 2022
A chronicle of a family's fraught decision to leave America. In 2016, shock and dismay over Donald Trump's election incited for Prochnik several years of intense deliberation about whether to leave the U.S. with his wife and son. Although Trump "was indubitably the match to the fuse" and the "symbol that signified an actual, irreclaimable loss," his discontent had begun earlier and had deep roots, which he explores in an erudite examination of heritage, home, the meaning of his life's work, and his place in the world. Living in upscale Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the author became disillusioned both with the fraying social fabric and "the self-involvement" and "entitlement" that he saw around him. Furthermore, his job was unsatisfying. For nearly 20 years, he had worked at a public relations agency, promoting "lies and deceit. I allowed myself to become the voice of people I despised, or who had money enough not to have to speak for themselves. I sold the aspect of myself I cared for most deeply." He had long felt torn between two strands of his intellectual inheritance: one, the "idealistic faith in human nature" held by psychologist and neurologist James Jackson Putnam, the author's great-grandfather; the other, "the tidal tug of Freud's dark, worldly view which despaired of humanity en masse and its respective experiments in civilization." His mother's family had come over on the Mayflower, linking him "to the country's founding fantasy: the creation of a holy nation in the wilderness." His father's prosperous Viennese Jewish family "had barely escaped the Nazis." From Titian to the surrealists, Stefan Zweig to Walter Benjamin, H.D. to Elizabeth Bishop, Prochnik draws on art, philosophy, literature, and heavily on Freud as he contemplates his "longing to move to a different moment in history" and to change his life--and his son's--"instead of just being forced to submit to the ways the world was changing so alarmingly around us." A dark, brooding, and highly literate meditation.

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September 15, 2022
Writers and spouses Prochnik and Rebecca Mead felt impelled to leave their cherished home in Brooklyn after the disastrous 2016 presidential election. Their move to London inspired Mead to write Home/Land: A Memoir of Departure and Return (2022). Now Prochnik, the author of books about Stefan Zwieg and Gershom Scholem, provides a wholly different chronicle, a many-faceted intellectual and moral inquiry rooted in his exceptional erudition, philosophical cast of mind, and family history. His mother's ancestors crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower; his father was eight when his Viennese Jewish family fled the Nazis. Prochnik's maternal great-grandfather, a "distinguished psychologist and neurologist," knew Freud, whose work Prochnik revisits, while examining the alarming parallels between the current rise in fascism and the brewing fascist horrors of a century ago. Prochnik also considers our digital enthrallment and the worsening toxicity of Trumpland's relentless lies, while lamenting his own work at a corporate PR firm. As he delves into ""apocalyptic capitalism," "explorations of the unconscious," Titian, the Surrealists, and Spider-Man, Prochnik traces the nexus between self and civilization with exacting and electrifying rigor, insight, and emotion.

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