Last Week’s New Yorker, week of December 1

“‘Every single detainee receives due process. Get a grip.’”

This is the year’s last Centenary Issue, and its theme is “Our Far-Flung Correspondents” which in practice means a lot of pieces about awful things happening around the world. Well, one last burst of bad news, and then it’s Year-End List Season, everyone’s favorite time of year.

Must-Reads:

“Disappeared” (Annals of Immigration) - Sarah Stillman says Trump’s taking any deport in a storm. There is a general ambient awareness amongst the populace, I think, that Trump has been deporting people to foreign countries. I’m not as sure whether the most disturbing and unprecedented details have been the ones most widely distributed; the beatings administered by ICE, in particular, are disturbing even outside their context, indicating at the very least an Abu Ghraib-esque unofficial-official endorsement of abuses – on top of, you know, the offical unspoken endorsement of ethnic cleansing. The brazen international lawlessness of the Ghana scheme, meanwhile – apparently an attempt to dump prisoners, have them shuttled across a foreign border by middlemen, and then wipe our hands of them – may not beggar belief in its cruelty but does in its sheer ramshackle ridiculousness. Stillman is always worth reading; the relative brevity of this piece is especially to its benefit, as one doesn’t really need to aim for pathos or even deep characterization when the material is this outrageous. Notice just how many paragraphs here end with a quote that states an obvious truth in a punchy manner. From the first two sections: “In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution.” ““I’ve started to have a phobia that ICE will come and break down my door.” “It’s them saying, ‘I have the power to destroy you.’” “We are wondering if we will ever see him alive again”. “I hope we can stop this train.” Things continue in that vein, accumulating force, forming a monument that, God willing, proves impossible to ignore.

“This Side of Paradise” (Books) - Claudia Roth Pierpont makes the Comedy central. An excellent Dante primer, if you’re in need, with enough tidbits to sate an expert. Roth Pierpont is an unshowy but excellent prose stylist, and this whips along past lots of material – all the Dantean trivia basics, quick reviews of two new outré translations, and a fair bit of contextualizing. It would be easy enough to claim Dante for every era, a “constant contemporary”; Roth Pierpont doesn’t contradict that argument, but points out how often it’s been made, and tries to claim Dante for his own era, too, showing just how much the life of the man and the world of the 1300s determined what he was able to produce. The most interesting fact here was that Dante’s son was writing supplemental commentaries on the work “when the ink on Paradise was barely dry” – the lineage of Dante reclamation is also, quite literally, the lineage of Dante.

Window-Shop:

Danticat on Kincaid (Takes) - A stellar close reading of a short text, unearthing the tenderness in a piece that can look at first like a mother’s uncontested monologue of cruelty and judgement. Really, the mother “is offering a template for survival… a trousseau of words” – and, read closely, one can see the daughter’s perspective slipping in, even if her two quotes at first seem scant. The enigmatic ending, concerning bread, also gets a lucid justification: It’s “a kind of nourishment that someone else still controls”.

“To Die, To Weep” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang says he’s not crying, it’s the quintessence of dusty in here. First line is a little clunky, though I’m one to talk. Otherwise this continues Chang’s very hot streak, not letting Hamnet get away with its ham, but also admitting its tearjerking is successful. The film is rapidly becoming an Oscar villain for the ages; I greatly enjoyed the novel, and I’ll see the film with just a bit of apprehension, since apparently it’s stripped the novel of most of its strangest features. Chang finds his hook – “the entwining of art and life has become a tiresome conceit,” overly reliant on the supposed “therapeutic aim” of creativity. That’s compelling enough to warrant a longer, Kael-ic digression. Zhao’s directorial style is repeatedly tagged as Malickian, but Chang is clever enough to point out that it’s mostly Malick’s golden-hour aesthetic, not his narrative subversions, that inspire Zhao. I wish Chang had room to wax analytical: the rigid review form hems him in slightly. It’s not pentameter, exactly, but it’s not nothing.

🗣️ “Feet Just Go” (O.G. Dept) - David Kamp catches breaks with Kurtis Blow. Thank god Kurtis Blow seems charming. He’s high on the list of people I’d really like to think of as charming.

“Dangerous Neighbors” (A Reporter at Large) - Jon Lee Anderson says be kind, Rwanda. An incomprehensibly grim portrait of a conflict so intractable it’s hard to comprehend even what a first step toward resolving it might be. Rwanda, helped by outside forces, drains the DRC of resources and encourages violence and privation; the DRC fights back brutally, often aiming at innocents. Anderson, as ever, is phenomenal at not only gaining access to key actors but at getting them to say the unspoken part: The DRC’s Félix Tshisekedi is an open autocrat, and the Rwandan politicans’ comparatively media-trained style doesn’t keep the implications of their rhetoric from shining through. He struggles a bit more keeping the narrative from descending into a web of proper nouns; the need to reread to keep everything straight, combined with the hopelessness of the story, makes this a fairly grueling experience, which could probably be anticipated.

“Getting the Goods” (Books) - Gideon Lewis-Kraus knows Das Kapital, folks! A very funny and surprisingly pointed analysis of Sven Beckert’s new book/doorstop which is in one sense hugely ambitious (it’s about as long as the Bible) and in another sense sort of unambitious (unable to sum up anything so vast as capitalism, and staking his whole project on the difficulty of pinning it down, but still needing a working definition, he lands on a “manifestation of appetite” that is so vague it may well be synonymous with the word ‘growth’.) Lewis-Kraus bristles at Beckert’s desire to have it both ways, which casts capitalism as a “relentlessly dynamic” but “political” and not technological “project”: “His pinhole view of both markets and states leaves little room for the more complicated, sometimes antagonistic interplay between them.” More trickily, he shows how Beckert uses a conceptual framework drawn directly from antisemites, relying on an ‘acquisitive instinct’ as a stand-in for original sin. I don’t think Lewis-Kraus is totally off-base, but trace back any bit of language or rhetoric in this world and you’ll likely find a hateful person somewhere along the line. Joseph Heller’s famous quote isn’t wrong, but paranoia is like tinnitus: You can’t get rid of it, and it makes you hear dog whistles. Lewis-Kraus is more interested in poking holes in Beckert’s giant trial balloon than in launching his own; that’s fair, since he doesn’t have a thousand spare pages. And it’s inevitable that a review of a book this long would sometimes seem to be focusing too much on minutiae, as in the paragraph spent dissecting one iffy detail about German clock-makers. It’s as though Beckert is proclaiming the world’s complication and Lewis-Kraus is arguing that in fact it’s far more complicated than all that; he’s right, but explanation generally requires some simplification, and nothing here is simple. I need an explanatory review for my explanatory review!

“The Lounge Wars” (Brave New World Dept.) - Zach Helfand is deplane as day. Basically a novelty article; not really gonzo enough to be gonzo, but without much new information beyond Helfand’s mildly odd experiences of both actual luxury and mid simulacrum of luxury. I guess the surprise is meant to be just how remunerative these lounges are for airplane corporations, which now derive much and maybe most of their profit from them. Helfand is a witty enough writer to keep things crisp, though the scenes with Lounge Guys, who appear to be something like Costco Guys without the working-class charm, grow wearying quickly. The four-paragraph sidetrack into the life of Herbert Goldberger, who fought to deprivatize lounges, on the other hand, is something like a postmodern miniature of white male grievance at its most successful: Accomplishing justice for the medium guy, everywhere it doesn’t matter. The air is rarified wherever we say it is, dammit!

🗣️ “A Sargent Story” (Paris Postcard) - Lauren Collins joins the group château. Collins writes this like flash fiction, emphasizing narrative detail; an effective choice.

“The Big Ice is Sick” (Letter from Greenland) - Ben Taub is frozen out. Stillman and Lee Anderson’s articles are about massive events that affect many people; Taub’s article is about the effect of massive events on a tiny number of people, whose way of life, already sort of dying due to colonialism, is being even more definitively killed by climate change; their lives are ruined in a way that is, comparatively, more escapable than that of people purloined to Central America or embedded in the war-torn Congo, but still not, probably, as escapable as it might seem; regardless, the loss of a way of life is a tragedy in itself, and the loss of life atop that – to suicide, violence, drugs – is especially hard to bear. That said, the sense that Taub was drawn to this spot because of its remote harshness makes me a little uneasy; surely, if you go looking for the most barren places, you’ll find barren lives. It’s very difficult to seek out that barrenness without romanticizing it, in other words, and Taub falls into this trap a bit, such that there is a clunking shift from the sad nobility of a hunter to the dreary alcoholism of his daughter, who’s seen all her nearest friends and lovers die, most by suicide, at twenty-five, and who describes her father’s abuse. Taub can’t help but write beautifully about these tragedies and pains, but should he seek out tragedies and pains in order to write beautifully about them? That’s a harder question. Still, the sorrow and sadness here is sharp. No need to shout “mush!”.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Going Viral” (On Television) - Inkoo Kang knows the Pluribus is coming, and everybody’s jumping. The first seasons of both Breaking and Better are pretty damn “light” and “strange”, so I wonder if Kang’s expertise in Gilligan is actually clouding her reaction to this new project, which has too much “otherworldliness” to resonate with her. But I appreciate the specificity of the X-Files episode pull, and at least her thesis is internally coherent: we should feel “lucky to have” such original work, but that doesn’t mean it necessarily coheres.

“Past Wives” (The Theatre) - Helen Shaw is in a wife-time movie. This misbegotten, outdated, meaningless Hanks thingy at the Shed has given all the critics a chance to aim their arrows at a soft target; that’s never been Shaw’s gift – she waits till halfway through to call it a “clunker”, whereas Jackson McHenry declares it “not really a play” in his first line. The brief Oedipus review is much more interesting, highly attentive to Robert Icke’s shifts in tone, though it’d be nice to hear more about what makes Anne Reid’s take on Merope “stunning”, for example. I guess she ran out of time – that’s going around.

“Written in Stone” (The Ancient World) - Alex Ross gets big time-stoned. Ross is a very good writer – obviously! – and in a different issue, I might have liked this more. Here, amidst all these human pains, it felt removed, lifeless… stony. The great discovery is that land formerly assumed to be solely sacred was actually also domestic, suggesting… well… something interesting! If anyone knew what it meant, Ross certainly doesn’t deign to guess; he enjoys the bliss of not knowing, which is probably a great way to walk around ruins, but falters a bit as journalism. Most of the piece is spent on premodern and modern histories of Orkney; each paragraph is lovely, but there’s so much looping in time that any sense of forward movement gets lost – maybe by design. Ross tries to undermine the romanticizing of the place, pointing out its deliberate unsustainability, but this is really just another kind of romanticizing, since actual knowledge is mostly just not there. Ross lets a lot of archaeologists say they “‘have to try to imagine’” what these lives were like, but strangely he never lets them, let alone himself, have a go at imagining them. There is beauty in this silence, but there isn’t much story.

Levy on Hahn (Takes) - So quote-dense it’s basically just a summary, excepting the one scant paragraph of biography. Badly needs another level.

Letters:

Serena has an excellent and detailed critique of my negative review of the short story The Golden Boy by Daniyal Mueenuddin. “I thought it was an interesting and somewhat entertaining period piece (even if parts were too fantastical/Hollywood — I actually found some of it hilarious even if it wasn’t the author’s intention). We don’t always read short stories for great meaning or gripping plots. Sometimes, a reader just wants to be transported to a different time and place for a bit. The author’s prose is quite good and I don’t really care about whether he went to a fancy, private school and did not grow up on the streets of post-partition Pakistan like his main character. If only lived experience counts, there is so much we wouldn’t even consider. I also don’t care if he is an unpleasant person IRL. With authors and movie stars, we really should have more of a ‘put the fries in the bag’ approach, especially when a story is not especially deep.”

I agree the story was transportative, and its details were finely rendered. I was just too bugged by its narrative. To clarify one point, my issue was not at all that Mueenuddin was not writing from lived experience, a point of critique that gets under my skin as well. A rich writer can absolutely write with care and precision about the experiences of poor people. But when they are cruel or jaded in their perspective of others, as I think Mueenuddin is, I do think it’s fair to wonder whether that’s because their perspective blinded them a bit. It’s interesting that you call the story ‘not especially deep’, though. Maybe more than anything that was my issue. If an author is going to demand so much of my time and attention, I’d like one of the following: depth, compassion, humor, surprise, narrative propulsion; at the very least something that doesn’t leave me with a pit in my stomach.

What did you think of that story, or of this week’s issue? Next week is much slimmer and I’ve read most of it already, so I can’t imagine the newsletter will be too delayed. But those are famous last words, as are these.

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