The center, the Flatiron Building, Rodin's "Thinker" and an anonymous smokestack are among the familiar icons he revisits in this show, along with a few other subjects.
That story begins in the first gallery, labeled "The 1871 Purchase," which revisits, in highly edited form, the museum's inaugural exhibition.
Describing the predicament of the Gir lions of India, saltwater crocs in Australia, Carpathian bears and the Amur tigers of Siberia, he revisits in each instance the central questions that these exercises in biological conservation entail.
Against this background of domestic harmony – halfway through the interview, Franzen gets a call from the garage, informing him that Chetkovich's long-awaited VW Golf has arrived, and he is buoyantly excited for her – the novelist revisits, in his fiction, terrible relationships of the past.
They were too weird, too pitiful, too specific to his own family and his disastrous adolescence (a period Franzen revisits in his essay Then Joy Breaks Through, in which, memorably, he goes to church camp and on the way does everything he can to avoid being consigned to the car of Social Death).
(Chinen) OLU DARA QUINTET (Tomorrow and Sunday) Before he was known as the father of the rapper Nas, Mr. Dara was a trumpeter, guitarist and singer who infused New York avant-gardism with Mississippi twang, territory he revisits in a group featuring the guitarist Kwatei Jones-Quartey.
