Last Week's New Yorker Review: February 13 & 20, 2023
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of February 13 & 20
Must-Read:
"Not Fooling Anyone" - Leslie Jamison disambiguates 'Impostor Syndrome.' The rare piece that functions perfectly both as a somewhat clickbaity headline ("Impostor syndrome DESTROYED!! These third-wave feminists from [local city] have found something your boss will HATE!") and as a resonant and truthful piece itself, one that unpacks its arguments and beliefs with care, tenacity, and fine detail. The pathologization of experience under capitalism ends up alienating us from the truth and beauty of our existence, and causes us to view ourselves as shelves in need of compartmentalization and straightening. The piece's thesis could really be expanded even more broadly; it applies to the way most behavior patterns are treated, and the way medical diagnosis inevitably flattens our view of life and convinces us that both distress and joy, two ways of acting and moving which are contrary to the extraction of our labor as quickly and easily as possible, are deviant behavior. To its credit, the piece gestures at a lot of this while also providing thoughtful biographies of the original coiners of what they more accurately term "the impostor phenomenon," as well as the duo that critiqued the idea in a contemporary article. The structure of the piece, which operates not in a straight line but as an inward-turning loop, in which the same idea is dissected and critiqued in more and more depth, ought to be a model for all popular coverage of psychology. And the language, especially toward the end, approaches poetry, and demands extensive quotation: Impostership is "not diluted but defined by its ubiquity. It names the gap that persists between the internal experiences of selfhood — multiple, contradictory, incoherent, striated with shame and desire — and the imperative to present a more coherent , composted, continuous self to the world."
Window-Shop:
“Time Frame” - Vinson Cunningham measures the meanings and styles of a new production of Beckett’s “Endgame.” Cunningham excels at raves, where he can nerd out on analysis of “the performance styles of the leads” and “the correspondence between Beckett and the Bard.” This show is so weird there’s a lot of setup here, but when Cunningham gets to the meat of the matter, there’s no one better; Beckett is perfectly encapsulated by his vivid image of a soliloquy that “had been wrenched out of context and sucked dry of narrative potential, doomed to loop through its own syntax until, eventually, it died.”
“Desperately Normal” - James Wood dissects two meticulously uncharitable novels by Gwendoline Riley. Wood is phenomenal at the kind of prose-sampling I often wrestle with in this newsletter, finding the perfect phrase to demonstrate his point: “With a few words, [Riley] can paint a dreary English January (‘Each day brought just a few hours of dampened light’).” Wood’s style, obsessed with the resonances of these surface details, is perfectly tailored to an assessment of Riley’s work, in which the surfacey lives of her character’s petit-bourgeois English parents come in for detailed, obsessively harsh analysis. Wood could perhaps go a step further in analyzing the political meanings of Riley’s “experiment in unillusioned dissection”; after all, there are many possible critiques of England’s “lovingly coddled provincialisms and mortal narrowness,” and it’s interesting that Riley focuses mainly on the aesthetic ones.
"The Mail" - This week's mailbag has some really detailed rebuttals of the sustainability of the 3D-house-printing company from Rachel Monroe's piece a few weeks back. That aspect was under-addressed in the piece, so I'm glad to see it get coverage.
“The Marrying Kind” - Joan Acocella loves Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. Has a professor of Medieval studies been put in charge of the magazine? Between Cep on monks, Ross on nuns, and now Acocella on women, there’s been an obvious editorial imperative to refurbish the era’s reputation in the public eye. (Or, you know, a coincidence; but that’s no fun.) Acocella is the queen of summarization, unmatched in her ability to convey plot, tone, and meaning with speed and wit. The final section here, pegged to the news hook of Chaucer’s innocence of supposed rape charges, runs out of steam and can safely be skipped. The rest is just as Acocella describes the Wife’s prologue: “irreverent, triumphant, ribald, fun.”
"Defiance" - David Remnick profiles Salman Rushdie, focusing especially on his stabbing last August. Its recounting of Rushdie's career is compelling, if focused mainly on the newsiest moments (there's hardly any mention of the specifics of the fifteen novels between 'Satanic Verses' and now, except the near-autobiography, which is mined for details.) That's too bad, because the thin slice of literary analysis we get is delectable. Meanwhile, the stabbing itself is recounted in extreme, moment-by-moment detail, and while it's certainly gripping, I wonder if it ends up reinforcing the sense that, as Martin Amis puts it, Rushdie's "vanished into the front page."
“At Large” - Anthony Lane sees two reverent dramas. A fine pair of reviews, with lovely prose, the right ratio of gags, and even a bit of formal analysis. But Lane clearly has much more to say about “Godland,” which gets the briefest of capsules, than “Knock at the Cabin.” A swap is in order.
“Why New Jersey?” - Zach Helfand presents a portfolio of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s previously unseen work from an intentionally inexplicable sojourn to the Garden State. Helfand’s blurb tells an interesting story, and the photographs are well-composed though deliberately mundane. Unfortunately, in the print edition, the binding swallows key details in each of the three double-spreads, so online viewing is basically a necessity; awkward for a photo profile that ought to look great in print.
Skip Without Guilt:
“No City Limits” - Lawrence Wright remembers the Old Austin, Texas, while searching for the heart of the New Austin, Texas. Essentially a series of section-long digressions on a theme, which boils down to the tragedy of the commons, what Louis Black describes as a “really wonderful place that everybody came to, which then wrecked the core idea.” Wright is a talented enough writer that the piece is fun to read throughout, but it almost entirely lacks an organizing principle. Ultimately, too many of the sections fell flat for me to recommend it, but it might be more fairly assessed as Fourteen Short Stories About Austin, in which case here are my highs and lows:
Highs:
1. The introductory section, a nostalgic personal essay in brief with charming details.
2. (Beginning “‘Don’t California”) - Connects California to Texas without hyperbolizing — hard to do.
Lows:
3. (Beginning “Other Austinites”) - Annoyingly credulous coverage of Thielean Joe Lonsdale, who started the stupid Bari Weiss college.
2. (Beginning “Speaking of ghosts”) - Totally unnecessary and somewhat tasteless coverage of the American Atheists; feels morbid and oddly braggy.
1. (Beginning “Everywhere in town”) - Simplistic and hugely problematic coverage of homelessness, which, among other flaws, finds no time to interview any homeless people and plenty of time to present viewpoints dehumanizing them.
“Nostalgia Cycles” - Carrie Battan recaps the journey and widespread influence of Paramore, and briefly touches on their new album. Battan clearly loves and appreciates Paramore; unfortunately, this means she mostly keeps her knives sheathed regarding their new album, which she obviously dislikes. Instead they’re given the treatment of a legacy act, mostly notable for past successes’ influence on a new generation, which is actually a more disrespectful read than a nasty review would be: Hayley Williams is only thirty-four, and Paramore’s new music is far from commercially irrelevant. But Battan correctly assesses that the two singles released from the most recent project are dire.
“The Merry Widow” - Rebecca Mead compiles the long royal life of Anne Glenconner, lady in waiting turned memoirist and Crown defender. Glenconner has a few stories to tell regarding the cruelty and darkness of her own privileged life, but she neither links the cruelty to the privilege nor addresses the cruelties inherent to privilege, and Mead doesn’t push her. So what’s here for us common people? For all Glenconner criticizes the Royal media, she’s become a part of it now, as has Mead. They ought to own that.
Letters
Zoë Beery (an excellent writer and a champion of the rave - no, not the rave review, silly) provides a thoughtful letter:
“...Even after 25 years of reading the magazine I still learn a new word nearly every issue, somehow. I can't tell if this phenomenon is charming or insipid. Are we celebrating the breadth and specificity of the English language? Or just showing off in an onerously pretentious way?
Anyway this week's word is 'agon' - conflict, esp. the dramatic conflict between the chief characters in a literary drama. Ex. ‘And there is no coöperation in the Trump world, because everything is an agon.’ The perfect word here, sure—Trump presented his conflict with the mainstream press, as with all his enemies, as an epic moral war akin to the Greek battles from which this word is derived. But is it really necessary to say this, instead of ‘epic battle’ or ‘moral crusade’ or something that doesn't send most people to the dictionary?”
I agree the magazine loves its ten-dollar words, but usually they’re well-chosen; I can’t think of a single word that could replace ‘agon,’ and while “moral crusade” is fitting enough, it lacks spark. Ultimately, it all comes down to your taste in prose styling, but the combination of concision and specificity that a great little-known word provides is, for me, worth the trip to the dictionary and the accusations of, *clears throat* philotimia.
What do you think?