Last Week’s New Yorker Review: January 1 & 8, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of January 1 & 8
"One of the attendees had come out to do his morning Tai Chi and unknowingly ended up at the event."
Happy new year! We're finally settled in to Buttondown, so it's time for the first Last Week's New Yorker pledge drive! If we can achieve 25 new paid subscribers by the end of February, I will add reviews of the weekly Fiction pieces to the weekly review for everyone to enjoy. (I'll likely review the fiction a week behind everything else to keep my workflow manageable.) If we can achieve 50 new paid subscribers by the end of February, I will also start reviewing the online-only "Weekend Essay" for all to enjoy. If you'd like to contribute but don't want to commit to a recurring payment, shoot me a note and we'll work something out & I'll add you to the count. Since I announced the move, I've added 8 paid subscribers (and lost a few, oh well) so that's the current count. I'll add an update at the top every week. If you like the newsletter, now's the best time ever to chip in a few bucks. If you can't manage the price, consider forwarding the email to a few folks you think might enjoy it!
Here's a link to read this on the web.
Must-Reads:
"Genghis the Good" - Manvir Singh scores goals for Mongols. If this had been merely a thoughtful recap of the history of the steppe, I would've been entertained and enlightened. Singh's narration is clear and condensed but not austere; I liked details about "composite bows and... saddles with leather toe-loop stirrups." I knew next-to-nothing about the subject going in, and by the midpoint of the piece I felt I'd gained a basic understanding. But Singh's thesis barely emerges (though rereading reveals seeds he's planted) until he moves on to an analysis of the "global history" field in general. Both halves of the piece strengthen each other; the argument about the field gains specificity and force from the specific case of Mongols, and the Mongol history is all the more interesting to consider as a theoretical example of the paradox Singh points to: a civilization that historians only consider compelling insofar as it affects "the rise and fall of sedentary, often European polities." Singh sees the need for "a more sophisticated grasp of what sophistication looks like," not merely because this would be better scholarship in the abstract, but because these civilizations contain "something that dwells within networks: an ever-responsive capacity for large-scale collective action." That's a lesson too powerful, and too slippery, for the West to ever claim.
"Winter Sun" - Adam Gopnik sees Pissaro's colors all over. A tour de force of Gopnik's style, running ramshackle through the entire Expressionist gang and scattering theses like tubes of paint. The delicious density of Gopnik's project here makes this hard to excerpt; take this: "Painted side by side, the telegraphic abbreviations of Pissaro and Cézanne become difficult to tell apart. Pissarro taught him how to sublimate erotic anxiety into sensual apprehension – the endless bosoms that the sexually overwrought Cézanne scribbled became sublimated into apples. Cézanne's example then taught the Cubists how to do it, and the Cubists then taught us. It was one of the basic advances of modern vision." We've jumped from one specific lesson to the entire modern world – yet Gopnik's infinite intellectual confidence can't help but charm when wielded with such ferocity and panache. What makes this a particularly fine example (beyond its disinclination to wade into anything too topical, not Gopnik's strong suit) is the fine way in which every thread recurs – the idea quoted above, for example, pops up at the end: "We know [Pissaro] through his seemingly observational works. People disclose their personalities through the pursuit of pleasure more tellingly than they do through the pursuit of novelty..." There's no need to nudge; the attentive reader can follow these ideas. And the less-attentive reader can still find joy in the psychedelic swirl of an untrammeled mind writing exactly what he sees.
Window-Shop:
"Unsafe Passage" - Mosab Abu Toha is detained in Israel. A gutting first-person narration of Toha and his family fleeing Gaza, with particular attention paid to the inhumane conditions in the IDF camps, where Toha is held and framed as Hamas after a random selection. It's rare to see this sort of diary of events in the magazine, but with journalists under such direct threat in Gaza, reliance on witness testimony is necessary. There are some awkward formal choices here; the story takes no liberties with chronology, precisely because it's testimony and not reportage, which renders the last two sections repetitious and not climactic.
There's an odd effect in which the minor tragedy of a kick to the face triggers our empathy because we feel its pain, but the major tragedies of death and the genocidal destruction of a homeland we can only relate to as concepts, even when they've touched us directly. Their force is unimaginable because it's not individual. Toha's piece is most vivid when focusing on the details, on his subjectivity, but the wider picture is nauseating on a different, collective level, one his narration can only gesture toward. We quibble over words like 'genocide' because we can't grapple with the totality of what they represent. Writing like Toha's puts things in terms we can understand, but perhaps it loses some force in the process. For that we need action.
"Divided House" - Helen Shaw house-sits at Appropriate. Shaw leans heavily on a point about Peak TV casting "kitsch" that I found neither totally clear nor especially compelling. Before and after that interlude, this is reliably excellent; the way Shaw is "knocked sideways" by both the successes and failures of the show is clear; she projects her rattled feelings onto the review, no easy task. ("...whenever Paulson left the stage, I found myself parking a bit of my attention by whichever door she'd just walked through.") Don't go in that door!
"Over the Limit" - Anthony Lane thrills to two revved-up new films. The second review is strong; Lane really sells you on the film's hammy "platter of fine charcuterie" and gives just enough characterization without totally spoiling the plot; it helps that he has a point of view on Ozon. The longer Ferrari review is merely fine; it would be nice to hear about the parts of the movie not concerning its main character, but again, it helps that Lane considers Mann in general, how his films show that "heroism, riven with risk, is available only to those who take action." Vroom!
Skip Without Guilt:
"The Cats of L.A." - Jonathan Franzen finds there's more than one way to save a cat. Franzen is an enjoyable crank, so relentlessly focused on the particular pocket of nature he favors that he's willing to ignore everything else. This should be annoying and offensive, and in places it certainly is. (As much as I agree with Franzen that No Kill is misguided, the metaphor he draws between it and the anti-abortion movement is profoundly misguided, and the subsequent cheap jab at open borders is worse.) Franzen's nature ("rigid and depressive") is rather feline, ironically; he hisses from the shadows and spurns affection. Franzen is deeply skeptical of any meaningful individual intervention (same!) but he also doesn't believe in any sort of collective action (oh no!). That leads him to conclusions that are more like rants against what he sees as inevitable, slow-moving disaster ("We are a cancer on the planet!"); and if you brace for Franzen's eco-nihilism¹ going in, it's possible to have a lot of fun with this piece, which is a vividly composed acid bomb. I can't quite recommend it, its implied politics are too wrongheaded; still, I enjoyed it a great deal.
"The Ventriloquist" - Patrick Radden Keefe writes wrongs with Scott Frank, punch-up artist turned schlock auteur. Keefe clearly likes Frank, and it would be awkward to turn in a negative profile of a kind-seeming guy who's open about his hang-ups and is just doing his job. But there are a few moments here where Frank's true nature becomes clear: One is the Emmy-speech snafu, which Keefe can't integrate into his rosy portrait (it was "a puzzling lapse," he says – sure.) The other is his invocation of a Hammett parable about a man who flees his life and moves across the country only to re-create his own life, which Frank takes to be about "how 'a single moment' can cause a person to reassess who they are and who they want to be." That misinterpretation is a perfect metaphor for Frank's work (and Hollywood film in general) – obsessed with reinvention but ultimately returning to the same story.
Keefe himself can be a bit heavy-handed in shaping the narrative; he has to tell us that "it was after the editing master class with Soderbergh that Frank came into his own as a director," for example. Much of the too-long story is made up of industry insiders praising Frank; it would be nice to get a more skeptical, outside eye, whether it's Keefe's or that of someone he brings in. In the punch-up artist segment, it's amazing to find out that Frank is responsible for the worst parts of two of Hollywood's best recent efforts, the horrible daughter plot in Gravity and the corny father plot in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The Queen's Gambit was mundane hackwork, only made interesting by a dynamite central performance. (Marianne Heller was good too.) A really great profile would allow for a reader to come down on the side of Frank as shallow hack or as dynamic bricoleur. Keefe doesn't get there; my cocked eye was rarely rewarded.
"Tipping Points" - Zach Helfand tries to adjust the tip. Lazy in a way some may find charming but I find mostly enervating. I'm genuinely surprised the anecdote about 'tip' being an acronym made it past fact checking; the OED disagrees and the tidbit has been debunked in the usual places. That's about par for the course here; the interviews are with everyone you'd expect (Larry David, Danny Meyer,) and everyone hits their marks, with exactly one genuine surprise – a callback revelation in the penultimate section. But the story never feels urgent, or even necessary, because it's never sure if it wants to be a silly etiquette story (it's filed under "Annals of Etiquette") or a serious labor-rights story, and by splitting the difference it satisfies neither aim. The former story fails because Helfand is hazy and inexact, relying on clichés and hearsay; the latter fails because Helfand doesn't have a perspective on the labor issue, he's discussing it merely because it's relevant, and he can't lose the smirk he's assumed through the rest of the piece. Also, I find the Christoph Niemann illustration deeply disturbing.
"Open Season" - Jennifer Wilson is too cool for polycule. Unconscionably erases vast swathes of the history of non-monogamy in favor of a cherry-picked American "fiscally conservative"² version it can then put down. I don't think Wilson's thesis, that the sort of open relationships presented in T.V. shows about and for bourgeois hetero people tend to co-opt the utopian possibilities of open relationships, is wrong at all. It's just that she never even touches upon those utopian possibilities, or really any possibilities beyond the most rigidly conventional open relationships imaginable. The only mention of anything queer is a sidenote mentioning that one book under review doesn't include the free love movement adopted "by socialists, beatniks, and queer liberationists." But the idea that the subsequent "post-nineteen-sixties polyamory movement" can be so easily divorced from those aspects feeds into the very issue Wilson eventually derides, that of a co-opted movement with no liberation at its heart, one that leaves "abundance culture" for the bedroom only. Surely part of the solution is spotlighting the histories of those who paired personal and political transformation, yet Wilson dares not.
Beyond my political issues with the piece, it's also saggy despite its brevity, with a first section that mentions every T.V. show you've already seen, and a final section which rolls its eyes at length toward a memoir that sounds blinkered but probably not worth the ink. I'd like a second opinion... and then a third.
Letters:
Nothing in the mailbag this week (apart from a few very kind notes of support.) It makes sense that there'd be fewer comments here without a public-facing comments page (something I've heard through the grapevine is likely coming to Buttondown soon, at which point I'll certainly implement it) but I'd still encourage everyone to write in! Your thoughts are valuable, and interesting to me.
Postscripts:
A few of you may be interested in this video I made for a class recently. It's a 20-minute-long Daily Show style field guide to the magazines of New York City. Snarky, and hopefully somewhat useful!
I forgot to review this week's cover in the Cartoon & Poem Supplement. It's a bit depressing, but certainly relatable, and the color story is beautiful. The wastebasket in the lower left corner is especially lovely.
Next week will be the recap of the year, including: My favorite pieces of the second half of the year, and a comparison of the magazine's 20 most-read pieces to my takes.
¹ Arguably, ecofascism, but I'm not going to litigate that here...
² Shouldn't we have abandoned this particular euphemism by now? It barely means anything, and serves mostly to remind me of the tweet.