Last Week’s New Yorker Review: April 8, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of April 8
"I am worried that my children are not warriors and are lost in it."
Must-Read:
"Opportunity Cost" - Peter Hessler does target practice with the Chinese immigrants he taught. An entry in Hessler's ongoing series in which he follows the lives of his students from the '90s and more recent eras – a series which has something of the multifaceted beauty of the Up films; as we follow these people's lives over decades, we understand more about them as individuals, the society they come from, and the interrelation between the two. Of course, Chinese society is more of a black box than English society to the average reader of this magazine – and Hessler's patience and lack of judgement gives us a glimpse without claiming to be more than it is. Mostly, this piece is just patient character portraits, told almost novelistically – the gorgeous illustration by Jun Cen establishes something of the tone; little scenes in little boxes add up to a picture which is carefully composed but not serving a single bold thesis. Hessler's strong enough in that mode; when he presses the COVID stuff too hard, the storytelling goes limp because Hessler's position is too clear. But the rather disturbing central story of Vincent, the gun nut with Blue Lives Matter sticker camouflage on his truck and a yen for Mormonism, is much stranger and richer than any one conclusion could hope to contain.
Could Hessler go further in unpacking the ideologies that drive Chinese students in America toward certain pockets of our culture and away from others? Perhaps – but this might also mislead, since even the usual narratives about Americans' attraction toward some of the same things ("They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them") tend to spark a flame of offense – ("His remarks are elitist and out of touch," sez Clinton.) But I do wonder how unique the resignation Hessler finds really is to the Chinese; I reckon it's cropping up more and more in locals to the states, too. It's natural to slip towards nihilism in an increasingly apocalyptic world – why bother worrying about collapse when you can relax into "'educated acquiescence'" and more near-at-hand concerns? This fascist mindset has little to do with Chinese society in particular; it's a virus that spreads everywhere – one that can't be solved with quarantines.
Window-Shop:
"Feast Mode" - Lauren Collins fills up on crêpes flambées at Les Grands Buffets. If you don't find Collins on French society's strangeness to be absolument délicieux – I mean, who even are you? This is just fun. The attempt at historical background is a bit standard – the differing role of excess in different cultures is a smart hook, but Collins could press it further, beyond just France and America. How do other cultures think about too-much-ness? Unlike a buffet plate, though, you've come for one thing only: Collins' descriptions of the bizarre atmosphere at the ultra-French panoply, the "stuffed quails and leeks vinaigrette and babas au rhum stretching neatly into the distance." I have choice anxiety and I don't love food overspill or fine-motor tasks, so I find buffets a bit nightmarish (I'd rather do pushups than try to shave my own Serrano ham off the leg); Collins makes a case for their wonder while making it clear it's also a personal thing: If she wants to eat while doing "a scavenger hunt," she can be my guest. I'll enjoy it vicariously through her descriptions of "the crystal-curtained lobster tower... topped by an upright specimen thrusting its claws to the sky, as though it had just slayed a halftime show," or of trou normand, "which is said to counteract the sensation of a full stomach" and which is now my own personal unsnackable.
"The Amazon Patrol" - Jon Lee Anderson burns down with a mission – to fight the miners depleting the Amazon and endangering indigenous tribes. A very well-told tale, visceral and bleakly epic – and still too long by about a third. Anderson establishes a gripping mood in which the G.E.F. fight a doomed battle, waging their "zero-sum" war. But things are slack in the middle; Anderson just can't sustain the tension for the exceptional length of the piece, so between the racing-pulse action scene at the beginning and the grim assessments toward the end, there are long scenes devoted to Lula's political strategy, a jungle scout's entire life and career, and Roberto Cabral's devotion to animal rights. These scenes are compelling on their own rights, they just prompt a bit of impatience as a reader waits for the helicopter to take off again. This is still well worth reading because it combines the directness of war reporting with the broader scope of environmental reporting, showing how the two are related – and revealing that much environmental reporting is reporting on a kind of war – a war of setting fire to mining shacks, knowing more will pop up; a war of attrition between a tiny group of righteous pyromaniacs and pretty much the entire decentralized crime world (represented by the one impoverished and exploited cook that couldn't quite run away.) There's a tragedy of operatic scope at the heart of this piece, but Anderson keeps a stiff upper lip – you can't wallow when your house is aflame.
"Crazy-Making" - Leslie Jamison is cooking with gaslight. Compelling, if not quite as revelatory as Jamison's very similar piece on imposter syndrome. Perhaps that's because she's juggling two theses which are seemingly hard to reconcile: First, that "gaslighting" is often used imprecisely and thus diluted, and second, that a spectrum of gaslighting behavior is much more common than is usually understood. To be clear, Jamison is right on both points, but she doesn't clearly articulate a framework under which they're both true: "One doesn't have to dilute the definition of gaslighting to recognize that it happens on many scales," she concludes, straining to unite the points without quite showing why one doesn't have to dilute that definition, or even exactly what the undiluted definition is. If it's narrowly about accusations of insanity, as in the initial definition, then even the central anecdote about Adaya, whose parents kept a hearing-disability diagnosis from her, might not technically qualify; if it's any dynamic involving the imposition of a false reality, I'm not sure how much narrower that definition truly is than the widely-understood one. It's as if Jamison knew her imposter syndrome piece revolved around proposing a somewhat narrower and more specific definition of the term, and decided that the same thing must be brought up here – even though her arguments for widening our view of gaslighting are actually more persuasive.
This is especially true of the idea that the parent-child relationship usually includes a degree of gaslighting. The section on Ben Kafka and his view of this dynamic as central is deeply fascinating, especially the idea that "a child receives her version of reality from her parents [and] may feel that she has to consent to it as a way to insure that she continues to be loved and cared for." In a way, the normative model of child-rearing is one in which the parent imposes their stringent, structured view of reality onto the child's anarchic one; many people spend a great deal of their lives unlearning the lesson that the world is inherently rigid and rule-bound, a lesson which is useful to parents (since rules promote efficiency, making time for labor) but often goes against the child's gut feeling – and a child who insists on their freedom and wildness is labelled difficult, hyperactive, and, yes, crazy. (This insistence, when it exists, does often stem from neurodivergence, since neurotypical children are conformists. But neurodivergence is not mental illness.)
A paragraph on Pragya Agarwal, who considers gaslighting sociologically, is also fascinating, but similarly reveals the limits of Jamison's approach. It's tempting to conclude that interpersonal gaslighting is fundamentally different from gaslighting where there's a formalized power differential – as in hospitals or the workplace. But this brings up the fact that the gender dynamic in relationships is formalized because the legal and economic systems across the world are, to different degrees, gender-biased. I wish Jamison really explored the social use of the term "gaslighting" – is it useful to the "oppressed" Agarwal speaks of, or does it risk framing their oppression as the result of simple sourceless malice? Is "gaslighting" taken this broadly not, on some level, a description of alienation? An inability to conceive of oneself as in charge of your own actions, or as at home in your self; a situation where the responsibility for your mind is displaced. Perhaps what's needed for the oppressed or gaslighted subject to reconnect with their humanity are not merely therapeutic resources but political ones. Gaslighting is all about power, ultimately; by sticking mainly to the power dynamics between individuals Jamison never gets into some of the deepest implications of her own argument.
"The Old Pinball" - Helen Shaw gets tilted at The Who's Tommy. Shaw's not having any fun with this trifle, not embracing its silliness – which is her right; I'm sure the show doesn't earn that trust. But it makes the review feel like an extended eyeroll, which isn't itself much fun. In theory, at least... but in practice, I'd watch Shaw roll her eyes all day; her kveching is articulate and sharpened to a point. And the last few lines are a remarkably nuanced reading of the original album ("What force will help us recognize the real?") that turn a bad review into a kind of Zen koan of rejection. Om at this bomb!
"Voyage of the Damned" - Elizabeth Kolbert asks: Who let him Cook? An extremely dark comedy, as Captain Cook blunders about horrifically, burning and pillaging. Kolbert eventually arrives at the point: He was just "an instrument in a much, much larger scheme" called empire, and if he was a rather blunt instrument interpersonally, so much the better! (His strength, navigation, is undisputed, even if his voyages rarely achieved their stated goals.) Why, exactly, we're hearing his story... neither Kolbert nor the author of the biography under review really give a good reason. Apparently the "risks" of the charged political moment around monumental colonialists drew the author, Hampton Sides, to the subject, but the academic habit of listing a bunch of "charged issues" raised by a subject ("'Eurocentrism, patriarchy, entitlement, toxic masculinity,' and 'cultural appropriation'" – and don't forget he did a racism, he did an imperialism...) in lieu of actually establishing that subject's import is frustrating. Otherwise, this review mostly maps out Sides' book instead of critiquing it – but it's still a grimly entertaining read, and the sticky myth that Europeans were "more civilized" is nicely undercut by tales of their mucking about uncivilly.
Skip Without Guilt:
"Hope" - Amanda Petrusich waits for a holiday with Vampire Weekend. The last two Vampire Weekend albums were pretty major for me, so I'm excited for their new release, all the moreso because Petrusich digs it so much. I appreciate her focus on Koenig's writing, which is too often dismissed as "intellectual" and thus, I guess, not worth mining for meaning – but her analysis of Koenig's lyricism isn't the most convincing (sure, "vague religiosity" is one theme, but I'm not sure it's especially central – "the unstoppable trudge of time" is closer, but that's present in most art). It's hard to judge her takes on the new tracks without listening along (the album drops Friday) – though the description of one track as a "big, hazy tune" makes me think more of IPAs than music. She keeps coming back to their past work, which is okay – but we only get to hear in depth about three of the new songs, which is sort of disappointing. I'm most interested in the list of "semi-arcane references" she spotted – though I wanted an attempt at deciphering the meanings of those references. Can she connect Water Tunnel No. 3 to vague religiosity? (Actually, Koenig would probably connect them – though as much for the iambic rhyme as anything else.)
"A Life More Ordinary" - James Wood knows it's father time in Amitava Kumar's new novel. It's an odd choice to spend so much of a very positive review harping on the perceived issues with the rest of the author's oeuvre. Especially because Wood's gripe, that those works have too many references and don't let "stories and details speak for themselves," is kind of true of this review; Wood keeps bringing up other, similar works he can compare the Kumar to, to the point of crowding out discussion of the book at hand. I love the close analysis of the scene where a sister's translation leads to an emotional moment; I could do without Wood's reminiscence on another, similar moment – which doesn't deepen his reading but merely repeats it – as well as with his hectoring note that it avoids "commentary," which the episode "would have been spoiled by." Strangely, at the end of this review I find myself wondering what Kumar's new novel is like – I know something of its plot, but not much about how it reads.
"The Devouring Neon" - Andrew O'Hagan music manages expectations. Rinse and repeat my critique of O'Hagan's previous effort, also on celebrity; his attempts at humor are unanimously flat and his superabundance of voice hides how little he has to say. The idea of a regular, thoughtful, somewhat funny column on the workings of celebrity is a good one – but couldn't they get, say, B.D. McClay for the gig? (That way O'Hagan's constant tryhard references to Taylor Swift would at least be leavened by true expertise.) This piece isn't as dire as O'Hagan's previous effort because some of the stories are genuinely interesting, like Brian Epstein's "worshipful attitude" toward the Beatles: "He slipped into the crowd and screamed like one of the girls, saying it was what he'd wanted to do from the minute he saw them." You just have to wade through a lot of circuitous unfunniness to get those nuggets, and they aren't nearly worth it.
Letters:
Mark says: "I feel like you should've given some love to what I consider the platonic (in more than one sense) ideal of a Talk of the Town story." That's André Wheeler's piece on Busy Philipps' divorce sale. It's definitely charming, I think it was just hurt by my not really knowing who Busy Philipps is. Sorry, Gen X-ers.
Mark continues: "I'd like to see you break out all the Talk stories separately. Just a thought!" I definitely considered this – the Tilly Minute, the newsletter I'm shamelessly ripping off, always covered the Talks. I certainly read that section each week. However, I just feel that criticizing these short and playful (and perhaps less thoroughly considered) pieces takes me too far away from the intended spirit of this newsletter. Only highlighting the strongest ones helps me lean away from any nasty vibes. "Catty, not cruel" – that's the motto. Also, frankly, I rarely have anything that additive to say about these pieces. But if there are particular Talks you want me to cover, you can always venmo me $20 (@SamECircle) and I'll put them in the Sunday Edition – and I'll happily do three or four Talks for the price of one full article.
Thanks for bearing with me, I know I'm a day late (whether I'm a dollar short I'll leave you to judge) and to be honest, from now till the end of the semester, when I graduate from my MFA, you can expect similar delays – though nothing drastic. Your readership means the world.
Nothing rhymes with a link that's orange.