Last Week's New Yorker Review: December 30 & January 6
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of December 30 & January 6
“‘You’d always have to be quiet, because he was working on it at the table. I think it was called “Ways of Seeing.”’”
Must-Read:
“You Won’t Get Free of It” - Rachel Aviv writes a wrong. First things first – yes, this is the longest thing the magazine has published since I’ve been writing this newsletter, just barely beating out PRK’s Gagosian profile. Aviv could absolutely have gotten a short book out of this material – flesh out the other daughters a bit more, include more expert testimony – but this piece in this venue does serve, inevitably, as a kind of mea culpa on the magazine’s part; Munro was published fifty-five times, after all, and her work was practically synonymous with its best fiction. Aviv even pulls Deborah Treisman aside to avow, in a slightly HR-ish manner, that she didn’t know the full story. But Aviv provides much more than a rehash of the original Toronto Star article with a few additional perspectives. (To refresh your memory: Munro’s daughter was sexually abused by her stepfather; Munro, upon learning of the abuse, ultimately stayed with the man.) For one, her close reading of Munro’s work with the newfound knowledge of these acts is a feat; every quote is relevant and resonant. But Andrea’s voice is centered, and it’s always her story being told, even when Munro’s work is the lens through which it’s viewed. (If Aviv is unfair to anyone, it’s us readers, who “seemed to blithely accept that [Munro’s] stories, with their grisly leitmotifs, were the product of a saintly lady who was making it all up, out of empathy.” Surely this suspension of emotional disbelief is foundational to the practice of reading postmodern fiction.) This piece is a bit discourse-resistant, or at least flattened by the usual stock readings. Sure, it shows that so many people knew and did nothing, but beyond the present-day horrifically incurious Canadian press (and one awful academic), the elisions seem to have more to do with the flow of information than malice – Munro had powerful friends who heard her side of the story, her children did not. Yes, Munro’s cruelty and lack of self-respect are shocking, but it’s a credit to Aviv’s nuanced humanism that the shock is never the point; this is not a piece about cancelling or not cancelling Munroe, thank goodness. What is it a piece about? Cognitive distortions; family systems; what is said and unsaid. How gender roles can enable abuse; how close looking can substitute for true awareness. (“There’s a sense in which her remarkable capacity to describe a woman’s experience is born less from affinity than from observation.”) Even – how art can be positively shaped by lack, void. (The piece has much in common, in this, with Aviv’s profile of Joyce Carol Oates, though there the central art-shaping mystery remains mysterious, and by all appearances un-horrific.) Aviv has written into being a vast open space, all clarity, as if to argue against Munro’s tight, jagged montages, full of false breakthroughs. Things don’t have to be repressed: We have pages and pages to bring it all to light.
Window-Shop:
“Working Man” - Rachel Syme splits the Adam Scott. Scott is a charming guy, an excellent podcast presence (U Talkin’ U2 To Me? and its spinoffs can’t live up to their predecessor Analyze Phish, which includes my left-field pick for the greatest chat podcast episode – but they’re still very good fun.) and therefore a very good interview. His story is as mundane as his persona; he slogged for a very long time (a “protracted fallow period”) before hitting it medium, then slightly bigger. But Syme gets his relaxed, goofily straight presence to come across in text (“See, my memory of this place is that I once played a bad guy here in an Aaron Spelling pilot called ‘Crosstown Traffic,’ about hot undercover cops”). Why Syme feels the need to spoil the ending of season one of Severance right at the end of the profile, I have no clue – it hardly comes up again! And generally that next-to-last section, about the show’s delay between seasons, seemingly due to Ben Stiller’s perfectionism (Stiller comes across quite poorly, although of course nobody’s willing to criticize him on the record1) feels largely unrelated to Scott, who’s really just trying to do his job. Hey, is this an episode of Just Trying To Do His Job?
“Momma Mia” - Helen Shaw says goodbye to blueberry pie and hello to Gypsy. Other reviews can bother with every little detail; Shaw’s more interested in contextualizing Gypsy as a work of theater about the theater, and she does so diligently. The new production isn’t a failure – no show this strong with a central performance this honed can be – but it doesn’t take full advantage of its advantages. Shaw makes the compelling point, though, that Audra’s operatic soprano is itself a connection to older forms, and to “the way that low art often hides high art underneath its glitz.” Shaw knows it’s not enough to review the show, you gotta get a gimmi– uh, rather, a thesis.
“Art of Stone” - Justin Chang has a long Brutalist of ex-lovers. (Look, I did an Olivia Rodrigo riff for the Brady Corbet profile, I’m trying to continue the pop music theme.) A very long movie lets a critic pick and choose, in theory; Chang mostly tries to stuff everything in. The main character can’t be “reduced to his addiction, his war trauma, his love for his wife, his devotion to Judaism, or his uncertainty—as other Jews flock to Israel—about where that devotion begins and ends”, and I suppose the film can’t be reduced to any one thing, either. Chang basically gives away the ending, which I’ll continue to be frustrated by; at this point, he must be doing it on purpose. Other than that, this is predictably snappy and readable. It’s light on its feet – the opposite of some big concrete building.
“Talk Sense” - Manvir Singh speaks facts. As it turns out, the move to discredit extreme Whorfianism (e.g, “if your language lacks certain emotion words, you will never feel them”) may have gone too far in the other direction; now studies have found some evidence that language – what words you call different shades of blue – can affect outcome – how ably you classify shades of blue. Singh rushes past the counter-counterpoint (these studies may be showing “‘eensy-weensy’” effects) to consider the implications – that our senses may be shaped by how specifically we communicate about them. The extended framing device, about Indian caste politics, is interesting but doesn’t feel entirely related to Singh’s main point, which concerns how language shapes experience, not politics (though, yes, it’s a blurry line between the two.) This is compelling enough, but brief and minor. The topic is so broad one could go in any direction; Singh, perhaps afraid of getting lost in the weeds, has gone in no direction in particular.
“Lumps of Coal, Cont’d” (Talk of the Town) - Adam Iscoe possesses total recall. I love a good list-based Talk.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Nature Studies” - Jennifer Homans touches the green green set decoration of home. Strangely unpersuasive – I trust Homans that the dance, Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful, is moving in its non-narrative memoiristic, near-confessional style… but mostly there are just a lot of descriptions of people running around a big stage (“Abraham ran into the green wilderness… He kept running, circling the large stage several times with an easy gait… The theme of running recurred… His pace slowed until he was walking in place”) which is easy enough to imagine – it’s that vast, cold Armory stage, which no amount of projected greenery can warm. Running to represent time passing – it’s a cliché, no? There is one really great point here, about the way in which “dancers trained in ballet spend years aiming for the sky, and their bodies do not easily fold to the ground, whereas many modern dancers practice falling until it is second nature; the earth is their habitat. Abraham’s dancers can sink down through the knees into the floor and in the next breath push up into lightness and flight, without making a show of it.” Gia Kourlas at the Times didn’t like the dance; her descriptions are very similar to Homans’, they just don’t have words like “truly extraordinary” attached. I find her critique more convincing: Even as Homans describes it, the show sounds “stilted”. I won’t know – tickets sold out immediately – so maybe I’m just coping. Maybe it’s beautiful, maybe the title protests too much.
“The Spotify Syndrome” - Hua Hsu has got algorithm, he’s got music, but he could ask for a whole lot more. Ironically, this is nothing I haven’t heard before. Spotify is awful for music, as Damon Krukowski, to name just one, has been saying for years; the C.E.O. is making bank bleeding music dry. Hsu waits till the end to name the obvious solution, regulation, but at least he names it. Mostly he wants to connect Spotify to various broad cultural shifts that… people have been discussing for a very long time now. (Is Spotify an “allegory for life this year” or is it just, you know, an example of a shitty thing?) Hsu also doesn’t even touch some of the truly egregious things Daniel Ek is doing with his moolah. As the artist behind one of the year’s best albums, which is not on the platform, put it: “THE CEO OF SPOTIFY IS A THIEF AND A WAR PIG.”
“International Affairs” - Inkoo Kang spies, with her little eyes, something shallow. Kang has almost nothing good to say about Black Doves, but there’s no bite to her critique, which is rushed and limp. The broader question of whether a spy show can care about more than escapism is a really interesting one – if only the piece were structured around that question; instead, it’s just tossed off at the end, then resolved in such a pat way it beggars belief: “In the end, the drama unfolding on the news is the one that sticks.” Gee, you don’t say.
“What Good Is Morality?” - Nikhil Krishnan will face values. I was drifting off, then got to the end and realized that Krishnan was calling “morally homogenous” liberals the “in-group” who only hate conservatives because they’re the “out group” and not because they explicitly want to harm or kill the people in the so-called in-group… and had to backtrack and try to find the start of this turn toward ridiculousness (and the unbelievably grim ending, which suggests that instead of fighting for revolution we should, I guess, all just embrace despair and shrug till the end of the world). Whether this is a fault of Sauer’s dumb argument or Krishnan’s explanation, I’m not sure – I haven’t read Sauer’s book, but reading some other reviews makes me think Krishnan may just have reduced a rather cogent (but not hugely original) argument about elite capture of the left’s ideas to the point of incoherence.
Letters:
All that’s in the mailbox are some people confused by my delay (since last week’s dropped when this week’s ought to have.) Sorry about that! It’s a process.
up with people
down with walnuts
Shortly before its release, there were a number of semi-anonymous tweets, all now deleted, alleging that Severance was an incredibly mismanaged and toxic environment behind the scenes. I can’t speak to that; I will say, though, that twenty million dollars an episode is nutso for a show like that, absolutely off-the-charts wacky. For reference, that’s double the cost of an average Game of Thrones episode. ↩