London Falling Author Patrick Radden Keefe at the Schnitz
Image: Courtesy Doubleday
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An upper-middle-class 19-year-old goes missing in London. His body is pulled from the River Thames a few days later. Then CCTV footage turns up of him jumping from the luxury apartment of a notorious gangster, “Indian Dave.” Soon, the teen’s secret life posing as the son of a Russian oligarch comes to the surface. Yet Scotland Yard draws a blank: Zac Brettler’s death is ruled neither a suicide nor a murder. His parents, a financier and a journalist, entirely unaware of their son’s double life, get no answers. It’s a human story about the forces and allure of extraordinary wealth. But it’s also the story of London’s dependence on oligarch money and in turn its corrupt and ill-equipt police force. It’s the kind of story the New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe likes to tell.
Keefe is one of the biggest names in journalism today, and he follows a long line of New Yorker writers whose blockbuster articles become books and then films. His 2018 book, Say Nothing, was a vision of the Troubles in Ireland told through a mother’s abduction by the IRA. The FX adaptation, which streamed on Hulu in the US, won a Peabody. Empire of Pain, published in 2021, was a detailed account of the opioid crisis told through the Sackler family, the makers of OxyContin. Now Keefe is out with London Falling, his book about Zac Brettler, which he will read from at the Schnitz Thursday (7:30pm, tickets are part of a subscription series).
A24 has already announced it’s adapting the book into a limited series. (The studio is also at work adapting The Snakehead, Keefe’s 2009 book.) London Falling is instantly at the top of the New York Times bestsellers list. And it’s launched a pretty funny newscycle around its author. “Can a Journalist Be a Celebrity Anymore?” is the headline of a Times profile that thrice mentions Keefe once appeared in a J.Crew ad.
More things to do this week
SPECIAL EVENTS Ceramic Showcase
10AM FRI–SUN, APR 24–26 | OREGON CONVENTION CENTER, FREE
If you’re into clay, deciding what to call yourself is pretty loaded. You have studio potter, ceramicist, and the truncated “ceramist,” preferred by the folks at Merriam-Webster. But you can also be a clay artist, simply a sculptor, or a hobby handbuilder or wheelthrower. More than 200 of the above—and hopefully more with cooler names—make a mess in the convention center annually at the Ceramic Showcase, a three-day clay fest with galleries, a million selling booths, and staged demos put on by the Oregon Potters Association.
DANCE Drawing on the Walls
VARIOUS TIMES FRI–SUN, APR 24–26 | PCC PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, $20+
Chamber music ensembles also tend to have cool names. Take WindSync, the wind quintet—flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and French horn—collaborating with the high-spirited and wildly creative contemporary dance company BodyVox on this spring show. Drawing on the Walls is the 10th performance BodyVox has produced with Chamber Music Northwest, the folks behind pretty much every small-scale classical music performance in the region. Expect an artful, elegant, and boisterous show.
VISUAL ARTS Umico Niwa
THRU JULY 3 | ILY2, FREE
Mischievous pranks quickly turn profound in Umico Niwa’s hands. The artist, who was born in Japan and works between there and the US, offers a transgender perspective on the riddle of artistic creation versus procreation in her latest show (read our full review). It’s animated by “a constant low-grade baby fever.” A series of diaristic drawings and writings make something like abstracted comics panels in long frames. But rotting tomatoes, discarded flower stems, and flung, dripped, and sprayed paint extend the installation onto the floor and curtains and into the gallery’s lighting and HVAC. The show’s title is a microcosm of the worlds Niwa builds, monumental questions disarmed by a laugh: the disappearance of my testicles, and other such mysteries regarding motherhood.
Elsewhere...
- The Criterion Closet is coming to Portland. (PAM CUT)
- Oregon Book Award winners. (Literary Arts)
