Last Week's New Yorker Review: February 10
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of February 10
“an ‘oversized Valkyrie’ who ‘drank like a drainpipe’”
Must-Reads:
“Femme Vitale” - Alex Ross picks Alma Mahler-Werfel up on his antenna. Another banger from Ross. I’ll start with my quibble – I think Tom Lehrer’s song is pretty celebratory, not “slut-shaming” and only partially “sniggering”, and Ross’ somewhat disingenuous claim that Mahler-Werfel merely “allowed herself the same freedom as the men with whom she consorted” ignores the central thing, which was not that she slept around but that so many of her lovers were artistic geniuses: Imagine if Manet had also been with Cassatt and Bracquemond – it would be outré! (Given that Ross begins by listing Alma’s husbands, he has to kind of know this.) Still, it’s worth dissecting and complicating Mahler-Werfel, whose modest handful of songs do, indeed, show sparks of genius. (Ross focuses in minute detail on the very beginning of that one – literally the first sixteen seconds – though he could go on.) It’s a good idea to unpack Mahler’s horrific letter banning his wife from art before revealing their partial reconciliation and her close shepherding of his legacy; those moments each need their own weight. (Mahler-Werfel’s romantic life was largely defined by her ability to identify and tolerate art monsters; it’s hard to say how much of that was her taste and how much was just recurrence.) Ross is fantastic on the intricate question of Mahler-Werfel’s reactionary politics and antisemitism; it’s true that Werfel’s explanation is “tortuous” but it’s also hilarious: What could prove one’s kinship with Jews more than absolutely hating Jews? And at the end, while Ross might not like Lehrer’s take, Marina Mahler hits much the same final note. She: “She didn’t talk about the past, even though it was all around her… The love of life was still there.” He, stretching to rhyme with her first name: “The body that reached her embal-ma / was one that had known how to live.” L’chaim.
“Leaning Tower” - Eric Lach asks whose misalign is it anyway? Eighty percent highly entertaining schadenfreude, twenty percent horrific workplace tragedy. Therefore I can’t rightfully describe the story as a whole as “delightful”, because idiocy is only funny until people get hurt… but the aspects of the story that involve an easily preventable boondoggle are delightful nonetheless. (If you wish to skip the grim bit, just ignore the third section; it’s neatly contained. I had the bizarre realization that a construction worker’s falling death at the school where I went to undergrad happened just four days after the similar accident in this piece. The timeline also matches an Edwidge Danticat short story from the magazine; I wonder if she was inspired by this incident.) The brief history of tilting buildings Lach gives has a few good dry punchlines, from “No one knows why this is” to “Big Pants”. And there’s just enough detail about foundations and infill that one can say “Those morons!” with confidence. Any good New York story is a story of clashing cultures; here the clash is mostly between Italian and Hasidic email etiquette – the first absurdly poetic and the second more “apoplectic.” And the best detail is the attempt to fix the problem by trying “to straighten the thing out in midair”, which compounds things and results in “‘a banana’” shape – a fairly perfect metaphor for liberal capitalism, no? One weird thing – the framing narrative centers around a family who declined to be interviewed; were there really no outraged buyers willing to go on the record? Well, I suppose pending legal action will have that effect. Differential settlements? They’ll show you differential settlements!
Window-Shop:
“True Blood” - Nicola Twilley is artificially sanguine. Snappy prose, and a few outré scenes that will stick with me – bags of blood “suspended from a steel rail like macabre baubles”, scientists “injecting wine, ale, opium, antimony” into the bloodstream of dogs. The history lesson on transfusion takes up most of the piece; each time you think it’s over, Twilley finds another reason to jump back in time. The piece almost feels like a literature review with a journalistic anecdote grafted on to the beginning and end. There are worse things; Twilley is more interested in the novelty of science than the practical realities of healthcare, and that’s fine (that’s what Atul Gawande is for.) Besides, not every piece needs to introduce their central figures by telling us where they grew up and what their relationship with their mother was like. We don’t need the guts here, there’s more than enough blood.
“Untested” - Jessica Winter is forensic and tired. The book under review clearly overstates its central claim that the inventor of the rape kit was “secret” – but saving this as the final beat hurts this article, which is most interesting as a piece about SAKI and how its obvious conclusions were deliberately ignored by a machine that runs on cruelty. It ought to be obvious that “party rape” and “stranger rape” are usually committed by the same people, but of course this wouldn’t be obvious to a justice system that views only the latter as perversion and discounts the former as mere bad judgement. (“Systemic indifference,” Winter calls it – as Christine Blasey Ford said, “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter.”) Winter could focus in more detail on that research and its (lack of) effects; trying to widen the scope without extending the piece muddles things a bit. And prison abolitionists may be bothered by Winter’s acceptance of that status quo, even as she writes against other cruel norms. This is still really powerful, and Winter’s outrage is potent; the last line is hard to shake.
“Invisible Ink” (Talk of the Town) - Zach Helfand judges a cover by its book. Cute! Wish it ran sooner, though; the exhibit’s already closed.
“Half the Battle” - Dexter Filkins is a low standard-bearer. Arguably caught off-guard by the Trump administration’s position that the best way to build an army is to discourage der untermensch from joining. He opens with that recap, but the piece is mostly a sort of “innovations in recruitment” survey. Filkins pretty much exclusively interviews young soldiers giving two thumbs up; sometimes this is downright egregious, as when, at the very end, a few paragraphs on Trump’s ban on Trans people are supplemented by an interview with a rictus-grinning Christian Alabaman cis woman. Most of the Taiwan stuff just restates a recent Ian Buruma article; some of the weight-loss stuff feels stuck in Supersize Me-land. There’s nothing revelatory here; still, as a snapshot of an institution already struggling, right before things absolutely go to shit, this basically works.
Skip Without Guilt:
“In His Cups” - Jackson Arn blurs boundaries with Giorgio Morandi. I find Morandi pretty straight-faced, and Arn’s giggling is unconvincing; whatever comedy he sees, I just don’t. And that is really his central point – this is practically a comedy review of still-life jars. “Ravishing confusion” is much closer, but I want a bit more on form. Thank goodness, at least, that Arn is reviewing something in a gallery. But this brief review itself dissolves around the edges. It doesn’t jar!
“Play It Again” - Helen Shaw sees Hugh Jackman in the box seats. I don’t really consider a Hugh Jackman variety revue to be theater in any meaningful sense, and I do feel that the column space could be better spent on a variety of cultural happenings which won’t fill the city’s largest theater regardless of whether they’re covered. Shaw has nothing that revelatory to say about Jackman as a performer or a presence. The Beckett review is hurt by the shoehorned Jackman lead-in and -out, but it’s serviceable.
“Some Fresh Hell” - Elisa Gonzalez is un-Dante’d by Shane McCrae. I’d absolutely love to see poetry reviews return to the magazine; there’ve been virtually none since Dan Chiasson departed, which is a crying shame. Unfortunately, Gonzalez’s prose is flat, and she has nothing to say about McCrae’s project – she mostly recounts his premises, relies on (unconvincing) quotes, and concludes that the “overlaid” literal and figurative meanings gesture toward something “metaphysical”. That describes most of this century’s poetry, and the lens doesn’t reveal anything surprising about McCrae’s take on the underworld. A close reading of Dante would be interesting, but Gonzalez mostly supplies a far-away reading of Dante (“...writers have often turned to Dante during their own crises”, she writes, college-essay-istically). The idea of poetry as a “pain scale”, pointing vaguely toward something it can’t comprehend, is a decent one – though Gonzalez finds such a literal quote to illustrate it (“I can’t write down all/The pain I saw”) it undercuts the concept’s gravitas. This piece isn’t hellish – but it’s a bit purgatorial.
Letters:
An empty bag! Next week is the extraordinarily overstuffed Anniversary Issue. I’m gonna try to cover everything including some online-only pieces that are listed in the index. I have this week off of work, and I plan to spend the time productively – and for “productively” read “reading aloud”, now and forever.