Last Week's New Yorker Review: July 10 & 17, 2023
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of July 10 & 17
Must-Read:
“Toy Story” - Alex Barasch chokes on Barbie’s pooper-scooper. A delightfully dry disassembly of Mattel’s hopes to create an intellectual-property universe, this piece was itself launched into the public-conversation-verse and thereby given a whole host of associations that make it very difficult to read for what it is. Sounds a bit like Barbie itself, which has been fought over so much it’ll be a wonder if it comes to theaters with its plastic head on its shoulders.
Barasch struggles with the past — his history of the “Barbie conversation” is perfunctory, with flat prose. ("Feminists argued that these qualities reinforced gendered stereotypes and unforgiving beauty standards... Other people came to see Barbie as a tool for empowerment.") And if he’s going to attempt a takedown of the entire “I.P.-based filmmaking” practice, the “plasticky corrosion of storytelling,” he needs to venture further back than Marvel. Gerwig’s agent asks if “Hal Ashby and Sydney Pollack would be making movies with Mattel if they were alive today,” but what about Robert Altman’s Popeye? It’s a famous flop, one manufactured by Paramount executives jealous of Annie, but it’s still a genuine Robert Altman film, with quirks. Or go back further: Before the mid-‘70s, Hollywood almost exclusively made star “vehicles,” and if I.P. seems like a shallow platform for deep meaning, imagine building a film around the manufactured personality of its lead. I’m not defending the practice of I.P. strip-mining, but I think both its novelty and its insidiousness are vastly overstated. Talented filmmakers who are given funds and creative freedom — as Gerwig was! — will sometimes make Nashville, and at worst will make Popeye. They won’t make Jeanne Dielman — genuine experimentation, work that even Theodor Adorno might approve of, probably requires government (or at least non-corporate) funding of art, something America is notoriously hostile towards. Short of that, this deal has always been with the Devil.
Speak of the Devil: Barasch’s main focus is not really this history, that’s a thin setup to get to the meat of the matter, idiotic executives saying and doing stupid shit on the record. This piece is mostly a satirical charcuterie board of those moments, well-selected by Barasch. My favorite comes from the head of Mattel, scrolling through the He-Man wiki: “It’s hundreds of pages… and here’s a movie, and here’s a movie, and here’s a TV show… It’s endless!” It certainly is.
Window-Shop:
“Mudang Chile” (Talk of the Town) - Julian Lucas wanders SoHo with ADG7, a “folk-pop band” inspired by “ritual songs from present-day North Korea.” The genuine exuberance of the bandmates pops off the page. (At the Washington Square Diner: “I think I saw this type of restaurant in soap operas.” After an airline loses their costumes: “Oh, this is the beginning of our journey!”) That marks a refreshing change from the many jaded strummers to feature in band-profile Talk of the Towns. Lucas is a great tour guide, picking out some great minor details (one member was enlisted “while she was in the bathroom of a Domino’s Pizza in Seoul,”) and finds an excellent and unexpected button. Plus, ADG7’s music positively slaps.
[Coming Together] “A Lesson for the Sub” - Sam Lipsyte gets a substitute education. The key to a strong flash-prose piece, in the Fiction-issue style, is that its details are allowed to remain enigmatic. Smooth them into the narrative and the brevity comes to seem a liability — you can only tell a very simple story so quickly. Lipsyte keeps the weird stuff, the “O.J. trial” and the “strawberry sorbet,” and everything mostly coheres, which is better, here, than totally cohering.
“Killing Dickens” - Zadie Smith, despite herself, writes a historical novel. This is a bit silly, a bit aimless, a bit self-indulgent; it’s also very short, and if you aren’t charmed by Zadie Smith at her bloggiest, I’m not sure what to tell you.
“À La Cartes” (Talk of the Town) - Zach Helfand will have what menu collector Henry Voigt’s having. Voigt is a very recognizable “type,” in ways that aren’t as charming as he might hope. But the menu ephemera at hand is still very fun.
[Coming Together] “A Family Wedding” - Jamil Jan Kochai gets him to the mosque on time. Kochai has no idea what to do with this format, and you can feel him hustling to wrap up from the halfway point. (“Ultimately, every crisis was resolved.”) But read as a companion to his fiction, this reveals the sources of some key dualities. (“…I had never got used to the way friends held hands in Afghanistan.”) I appreciate, too, the moments of factuality (“The Taliban were reconquering the countryside”) as these flash-prose pieces often hone too tightly to individual interiority.
[Coming Together] “Night of the Happy Bodies” - Mary Gaitskill gets down tonight. Gaitskill is a great prose stylists, and the vivid joy of the dance, here, nearly makes up for the blunt and awkward crash-landing of an ending. It’s meant to scan as philosophical, but reads, instead, as weirdly sarcastic.
Skip Without Guilt:
[These first three are all barely skips. Consider them Skip With A Soupçon of Guilt, maybe, or Window-Shop from Across the Street.]
“Tell No Tales” - Parul Sehgal isn’t lulled by stories. If you wish to experience semantic satiation for the word “story,” look no further. Otherwise, while this is a deeply compelling piece, it’s rather disorderly, as though Sehgal took her own lesson about the beauty of scatteredness a bit too literally. “It's not just the unruliness of life that's ill-served by story,” one paragraph begins, after which about two-thirds of the remaining essay concerns the unruliness of life. Sehgal also never defines story or narrative satisfactorily; that definition could easily fill a piece of its own, but maybe that piece should have come first. (Maybe this is meant to be that piece? Sehgal refers to the migration of the word story, but if its current location is everywhere, its starting point is never pinned down.) I think Sehgal falls into these traps because she’s more interested in collecting a fascinating, formally diverse body of texts that each concern, in some way, her broad theme. Unfortunately, there’s so little to frame these references that they often press directly up against each other, and tend to reduce each other’s meanings instead of multiplying them. (Apparently, their “questions and unease echo and rhyme,” but you wouldn’t have guessed that without Sehgal telling you.) Sehgal’s philosophy is sometimes fascinating, but it’s very diffuse; I ended up taking away many of the same ideas I had going in, now filtered through Sehgal’s language. Compare this to a recent post by B.D. McClay that also concerns storytelling and a vicious, viral Times review; note that there, the intricacies of a single line are delved into at exhaustive length. Sehgal quotes from the same line… then moves to the next paragraph.
“Becoming Tennessee” - Casey Cep appreciates a collection of short-fiction juvenilia by Mr. Williams. Frankly, these stories sound almost unreadable, and Cep’s ending makes an obvious point about their appeal in a needlessly bombastic manner. There’s still some fun to be had in Cep’s handling of the “excessively and unconvincingly heterosexual” “trail of false starts,” in which “Williams gathered all the kindling he needed but forgot to bring a match.” The biographical sections could be trimmed, and those critiques lengthened.
“Galaxy Brain” - Julian Lucas keeps the "generous, transgressive, and polymathically brilliant" Samuel R. Delany talking. Delany has earned a less by-the-book profile than this one. Not just because his work has been restlessly experimental, swerving off each straightway, but also because his readiness to delve into the ephemera of his life combined with his reluctance to give any reading of his work ought to have more deeply informed this piece. Instead, it mostly serves as an opening and closing anecdote, while the rest of the piece cuts from a chronological retelling that ends up dragging (which will happen when so much life has been lived) to a present-day account that works well in the first and last sections, less so in the middle. When Lucas starts tying Delany’s life to his work (“As his novels grew increasingly ambitious, Delany's life, too, assumed solidity,”) one can imagine the man growing peeved — especially since those connections are so forced.
That beginning is fun, though, especially Delany’s first appearance as “a small man behind a luggage trolly taking my picture.” Lucas nicely conveys Delany’s loquacious sincerity. Better still is the ending section, a great anecdote which would have served nicely as a framing device. That might have forced Lucas into confronting the exuberant sexualness of Delany’s writing instead of shying away from it until the last moment; in the penultimate paragraph, when he suddenly proclaims the importance of Delany’s late pornographic writing, you wonder who the opposition is supposed to be — Lucas’ past self? Lucas also fixates on real-estate, perhaps aptly given Delany’s work on city character and gentrification, but it’s still very awkward when he hashes out an internal struggle regarding Delaney’s living situation, his daughter, and her husband; the cold gossip is certainly memorable, but in no way necessary. Apart from the ending, the piece is content to be an enhanced encyclopedia entry on Delaney. That isn’t the worst thing, it just isn’t very Samuel Delany.
[Coming Together] “The Ice-Cream Truck” - Souvankham Thammavongsa gets the scoop. Everything is right on cue — the “frantic” joy, the loss, the “sunshine,” the subtle remove. But, asked to stand in for both class struggle and personal loss, the actual ice cream just feels like a placeholder. Any memory will do.
“Last Gasps” - Anthony Lane peters out with Indiana Jones. Lane seems disinclined to really lay into the new Jones flick, structuring his review so that the few moments he likes take up most of the space. That’s a shame, but I still liked the stuff on Jones and looting, which isn’t original but benefits from Lane’s antic tone. (“The Ark may wind up in a crate, but, by God, at least it’s an American crate; what safer haven, for the holy of holies, than the Xanadu of the West?”) As for the second review… this film appears to be a depressive Sundance-indie take on Pauly Shore’s 1996 masterpiece Bio-Dome. I’m at a loss for words.
“Lives of the Artists” - Alex Ross spends the day in San Francisco. It’s hard to make a review of an already-closed opera seem relevant, so Ross doesn’t try to, giving a pro forma account of the San Fran scene, then trotting along through three reviews. He claims to have liked or loved everything he saw, yet he mostly sounds jet-lagged. (The compliment he pays the staging, that the “tableaux… seem ready for museum display themselves,” is apparently not meant to read as backhanded.) It’s an odd misfire from Ross: Maybe he left his heart in New York.
[Coming Together] “Roberta at the Morrison” - Rebecca Curtis gets well late with Ms. Flack. If there’s one thing that feels distinctly un-New York, it’s mooning over celebrities that are just going about their day. Chatting with Roberta is one thing, writing it up is another.
Letters:
Regular correspondant Michael “enjoyed reading about [Peter] Hessler's life in Egypt and China over the years in the magazine.” He wishes other Far-Flung Correspondents would get their own regular columns, though “the economics of the modern magazine industry makes that impossible.” I wish I were a better scholar of this magazine’s past, but my understanding is that for much of its existence, that kind of Letter-From piece was a very common feature. There are still lots of pieces that fill the brief — indeed, almost every issue has a “Letter From” somewhere — but they’re usually one-offs, and often not as invested in their place as the subhed would seem to indicate.
LSA looked into Michael’s question from last week about whether Robert Gottlieb could reasonably have finished War & Peace in fourteen hours, and found this from his memoir: “The way I read was odd too; I more or less devoured books—skimming them rather than bringing them into focus line by line. (One particular attack of showing off, when I was 15 or 16, involved ‘reading’ War and Peace in a single marathon 14-hour session.) This kind of browsing was a habit I had to break when I became an editor.” The scare-quotes indicate this was a bit of dry humor that Remnick took quite literally.