Last Week's New Yorker Review: February 3
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of February 3
“A bunch of pieces in disparate styles are thrown together, leaving the audience to pick and choose favorites.”
Must-Read:
“Banging the Drum” - Alex Ross has a case of the Monday Evening Concerts. Ross continues his extended winning streak with this haunting tribute to a burning Los Angeles. It certainly helps that (in distinct contrast to the top piece in Window-Shop) one can find a record of the art under review; I listened to the gloriously eerie Czernowin piece while I read both Ross’ article and the Jon Lee Anderson piece elsewhere in the issue; the soundtrack elevated both subjects. The history of the concerts, which tends toward a concise batch of past highlights, is appreciated; the Czernowin review could be longer, but it’s beautiful, and as with the Knausgård, it helps that Ross isn’t afraid to use the first-person: “I felt as though I were on unfamiliar, unstable terrain, yet each sonic flicker seemed to land exactly where it had to… But the score is really about fostering a space of contemplation… I began listening in the right way when, toward the end, a recording of a downpour made me think of the thousands of L.A. homes that might have been saved had it rained over Christmas. I remained in the grip of that fantasy, bordering on prayer, until a ritualistic pinging of crotales brought the music to a close.” Ross brought me to the verge of tears – no small feat for a one-page classical music review. That’s why he is who he is.
Window-Shop:
“Private Eye” - Karl Ove Knausgård is living in the material world, and Celia Paul is a material portraitist. Hurt immeasurably by not including reproductions; online, there are two, but “Ghost of a Girl with an Egg” is neither, nor could I find it on Google – and it’s perhaps the image I was most keen to see. (This wouldn’t be an issue, presumably, in the monograph this essay was written for.) Knausgård is in such direct conversation with Paul’s work that the more directly exegetical segments of the article are like hearing one side of a telephone call. The rest of the piece is only cursorily biographical; Knausgård, as befits his general project, is more interested in philosophical musings on the nature of self than on the usual bullet points – when he does go there, he mostly just quotes from Paul’s autobiography, as though afraid that trying to capture her image would be to step on the toes of a fellow self-portraitist. It’s a reasonable approach, and there are many lovely passages here, even if at times it seems as though Knausgård is struggling to re-invent art criticism from first principles, quoting Deleuze and saying things like “I dare to affirm” – and the strain of this pre-obviated accomplishment mostly keeps him from his usual sly humor. It’s still Knausgård, at the end of the day; he can, and does, write. (And the translation, by Ingvild Burkey, is never less than seamless.) If I wasn’t entirely convinced either by Paul’s work or by his analysis of it, that’s probably just because I’m looking at a reproduction of a reproduction – I can’t see what isn’t really there.
“The Witness” - Jon Lee Anderson goes back to the Syria of the crime. Quite successful as a grim real-life fable of trauma and torture and the way they lure us back inexorably – and it hardly tries to be the other, more obvious thing it might be; a political analysis of the fall of Assad and what it means for the broader region. Anderson is very good at writing that sort of piece; here he aims for something more Avivian, with moving but sometimes frustrating results. Anderson creates ambience exceptionally well, but a reader who’s generally familiar with the way authoritarian regimes use torture and suppression will find no surprises here (even al-Hamada’s supposedly unthinkable return is an exceedingly literal manifestation of the central idea of Freudian psychology); though the narrative is always gutting, it’s also something we’ve known about, in Syria, for ages – to report on it just as Assad finally falls is to imply surprise at something completely unsurprising. It’s sort of astonishing to consider Syria now and devote but one paltry paragraph to Ahmed al-Sharaa, who’s just taking over. Anderson’s writing is vivid and gutting. But it’s telling that he relies on Ben Taub’s reporting from 2016 – nothing here is new.
“Line of Fire” - M.R. O’Connor is burned out in Los Angeles. This is essentially redundant with O’Connor’s excellent piece on firefighting in a changed world from a few years ago. It makes sense to send her out to this exceptionally deadly scene, but she doesn’t find much to say about it, and instead devotes most of the piece to capsule biographies of firefighters. Those could be from any fire; a news-pegged piece ought to be more closely tied to that news. O’Connor is a Brooklynite with no particular ties to the West Coast, and while that’s fitting, I guess, for this magazine, it holds this piece back – the Eaton Fire’s significance is that it struck a suburban setting, and it feels almost like O’Connor resents that this fire has gotten so much more press than larger, more rural blazes. But that isn’t some kind of conspiracy – cities are just, you know, where people live. Is it that those people didn’t know that fires posed a threat – or is it just that we have to compartmentalize in order to live?
Skip Without Guilt:
“Language Lessons” - Helen Shaw finds English minor. I can’t fully grasp Shaw’s critique of the show – that Toosi doesn’t have enough “comfort with elision and, ironically, with the unspoken” – and it’s all given as a negative example (she does things better in a different play) which means Shaw doesn’t feel the need to provide any specific evidence. I also find it pretty needless to review this show again; Shaw doesn’t find anything to mention that Alexandra Schwartz didn’t say three years ago, and her treatment is a bit cursory. I like that she weaves in a few shows from Under the Radar; these connections are elegant – but I wonder why the piece couldn’t be structured around them, and use English as the side example?
“Armchair Quarterback” - Vinson Cunningham counts out Touchdown Tom. Extremely roast-light – if Brady is, apparently, quite bad at his new job, please give more examples, ideally with funny jabs alongside them! Cunningham doesn’t find much new to say about Brady the persona, and this piece is, generally, so lightweight it floats like an underinflated ball. Why not delve into his break with Giselle, beyond mentioning that his roast had some jokes about their split? (It’s pretty funny that the guy who had done nothing but win his whole career gave up everything to try to win a little bit more, and then – for the first time ever, pretty much – failed to win.) Why not even touch on Brady’s politics, or (seeming) lack thereof? As many a team has discovered, you’ll never beat Tom playing defensively.
“Some Personal News” - Anna Wiener says it’s about work ethics in tech-bro entrepreneurialism. Weirdly behind the curve – sure, circa 2019 Silicon Valley was heavily pushing a sort of founder-fetishizing every-man-for-himself ideology, but that was before all the– I mean… you know! Aren’t we in the “quiet quitting” era? (In combination with the “tech leaders propping up and/or ruling in place of our fascist president” era?) It’s fair that a deeply researched book from an academic press takes a little while to come to fruition (in this case, eight years) but in that case it’s the job of the reviewer to contextualize its lessons in our present moment, and Wiener isn’t able to do so. That means this very short piece, despite Wiener’s usual peppy prose and clever eye, leads pretty much nowhere.
“Capybara, Mon Cœur” - Gary Shteyngart loves capys – no cap. There is definitely a trends piece to be written on the rise of the oddball animal. When asked the ceremonial question, kids these days are less likely to yell “Tiger! Rawr!” than “Potoo! Poooooob, poob poob poob too.” (They may also quote what’s inexplicably become the only meme adored by three consecutive generations.) This is not that piece, though. One may also expect, knowing Shteyngart’s usual style, that this would be a sort of personal essay via capybara – and it is, for about three paragraphs. No, mostly this is a fairly limp travelogue, in which Shteyngart goes in search of capybaras – and finds them, plus lots of merch, without much difficulty. What he never really finds is a story to tell about them. It’s not unenjoyable to tail Shteyngart; he pulls off his self-aware shlemiel act pretty well, even when he’s just meandering. But perhaps the story imitates the Capy a little too closely: it meanders around, looking cute and a little dopey, before eventually falling asleep.
“Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” - Arthur Krystal has enough apocalypse narratives to fill a handbasket. Needlessly full of nervous energy to start, rushing past the entire history of apocalypse narrative as if trying to drop enough proper nouns to distract from the lack of thesis (and, for that matter, the lack of compelling anecdote – most everything lands with a thud.) I certainly prefer that, though, to the piece’s second half, which rushes through messianic Christianity, climate change, and the A.I. apocalypse in a style so glib and full of false equivalencies one wonders if Krystal is aiming to run for office. Avoid like the plague, or the Terminator, or whatever the hell you think will do us in for good.
Letters:
Zoë Beery enjoyed Michael Schulman’s piece on Charlotte Zwerin: “I loved how at the end of his piece, Schulman tries a formal twist to end on a bit of vérité of his own. It's obvious what he's doing, but that doesn't make it any less refreshing, or any less sweet of a tribute to his subject—giving Zwerin her flowers at last, literally and figuratively.” 🌸