June 27, 2023

Last Week's New Yorker Review: July 3, 2023

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of July 3

Must-Read:

“You Good?” - Nikhil Khrishnan rereads Aristotle’s Ethics, and illuminates what it does and doesn’t say. Genuinely enlightening in its thoughtful yet concise explanation of Aristotle’s ideas, in a way that various Philosophy 101 classes mostly aren’t. It makes sense, once you’ve read it, that the seeming gap at the core of Aristotle’s writing is not primarily evidence of obscurity or foreignness, but rather a manifestation of his core idea that the eudaemonic life can’t be broken down into “formulas” or rules to follow, but requires “good judgement,” which itself rests on “experience, the company of wise friends, and the good luck of having been well brought up.” That’s the thrust of Krishnan’s argument, but his unspooling can’t be summarized so easily; it hides under the cloak of a review of a new translation before bursting forth, three sections in, with a kind of miniature bildungsroman, a personal history of Krishnan’s scale of Mt. Aristotle, which manages, miraculously, to give the reader a sense of the height to which he’s climbed, without pretending to have brought us along with him. And its bravura ending features a one-swoop takedown of effective altruists, misogynistic influencers, and D.E.I. committees.1 Given how rigidly simplistic the perverse corporate co-option of therapeutic self-care tactics is, it’s oddly heartening to receive a reminder that experience demands exertion.

Window-Shop:

“Measure for Measure” - Ava Kofman explants the Penuma, a device which enlarges penises, with a couple nagging side-effects. It’s to Kofman’s credit that she’s not self-conscious about the size of her story; after all, it’s perfectly normal that a piece like this might take one particular surgeon as its subject and still comfortably fill an hour of vigorous activity. She shouldn’t be worried that the subject doesn’t expand to include the risks of other cosmetic surgeries — trying to go that broad might result in painful prolongation. Writers whose stories last more than four hours should call their local Knopf agent immediately. I’ll stop — but it’s hard difficult not to joke, even as Kofman rightfully points out that distress which “almost sounds like a joke” still warrants mending. Actually, the choicest dark humor here is far from phallic; it mostly concerns the fly-by-night “chicanery” of “silver-haired urologist” James Elist, not to mention almost every other Penistown Player at hand. (In hand?) A few highlights: Elist’s oldest son who “left a job at McKinsey to become the C.E.O” — a regular Peen Buttigieg. The “high-volume implanter” who memorably describes his colleagues as “a tiny smear of people, and they are fucking cutthroat.” (That’s not all they’ll cut.) And, of course, the climactic scene in Elist’s office, with “a gilt statue of a jaguar” and “a mirror with an image of Jesus etched at its center.” But that’s just the, uh, tip of the iceberg — most of the piece concerns the insecure patients taken in by Elist’s promises and/or unsolicited Demerol injections; the vivid and grotesque descriptions of their… “member detriments”… should cause anyone to moan and clutch themselves. (How’s that for body equality?)

“Divine Comedy” - Mary Beard selects some choice anecdotes from the history of Roman emperors. Beard has a keen eye for oddness, though her sensibility skews British. (Her retranslation of vae as “Blimey” hardly functions for us Americans — how about “Gadzooks”?) At first, I felt the strange stories were under-contextualized, but eventually Beard takes a breath to explain how “the aspects of the worship of emperors that make it most difficult for us to take it seriously… fit much more comfortably into traditional Roman assumptions of what gods were and how their power worked in the world,” namely that “Rome’s military and political success depended on the gods being properly worshipped.” Those assumptions ought to be unpacked earlier, but this may be a fault of excerption — this piece is drawn from Beard’s new Emperor of Rome.2 In general, the piece’s greatest strength lies in the precise clarity of didactic moments like that, or the outline of the difference between divus and deus; those bits are the fluted columns on which the weird palace is propped up. As in any house of oddities, what stays with you is a rather macabre picture, full of egregious vanity and sudden death. Perhaps those things were pervasive amongst Rome’s rulers, or perhaps those have always been the celebrity stories we can’t forget.

Also: Props to illustrator Daniele Castellano, whose fantastically awkward take on Titus mounting an eagle is my favorite spot art in some time.

“Aesthete of Steel” - Alex Ross chronicles the life and work of “cosmopolitan fascist” Ernst Jünger. Sharply written and frequently incisive. Ross doesn’t mine Jünger for lessons or even conclusions, he’s content to provide a beat-by-beat chronological trek with the “empirically acute but emotionally distant” writer, whose life is ultimately a series of capitulations that his work can’t hope to make up for. Your patience for literary histories of deeply compromised characters will determine your satisfaction. Unlike, say, Heidegger, though, Jünger’s prose has an accessibly sadistic luridness, like the passage so “notorious” in German it has its own ten-reichsmark word: die Burgunderszene.

“Witch Hunt” - Helen Shaw slowly turns against The Doctor. Shaw’s eye is as sharp as ever, but unfortunately this bullseye is already full of arrows: When a play is as obviously “reactionary” and wrongheaded as this one, so dismissive and “unserious” regarding matters of identity, so “self-congratulatory” in its “scolding, color-blind centrism,” every critic who sees it will end up lodging a version of the same complaint. So the only thing that feels fresh here is Shaw’s stunning appreciation of Stevenson’s voice, its “supercompressed quality, as suspenseful as a steel spring,” which “can make an argument take on heat and power, thrust and excitement,” even when, as here, “the wheels fall off that argument.”

Skip Without Guilt:

“A Double Education” - Peter Hessler helps his kids study the Chinese primary-education system. Hessler’s pieces often feel like new installments on an ongoing saga; in this case, much of the schooling material feels both outdated by Covid and ultimately not a subject Hessler can wring much interest from — especially since his university students at Fuling Teachers College mostly go on to work at exactly this kind of school, so we’ve gotten his perspective already, just without the personal stakes. Better, though very separate from the main storyline, is the dual narrative of two of the kids’ great-grandfathers, each writing diaries in separate foreign countries (the Chinese man in the U.S. and the American in Rome.) I wanted more of those primary texts, which may not build to enough of a climax to form a piece of their own, but which are intimate, revealing, and contextualized well by Hessler.

“Man Child” - Alexandra Schwartz reads an “anxious, ominous, tense” memoir of raising a boy in a misogynistic world. There’s a recurring problem born from the necessary structure of reviewing books in periodical form — by the time a critic discovers a gem, it’s often too late for a review to be timely, and when they make up for it by reviewing the author’s subsequent work, they often find it misses the spark that made the previous book glimmer. So it is here, where Heidi Julavits has apparently “lost her broader comic point of view.” Unfortunately, Schwartz can only quote from the book she’s reviewing, so all we have to go by is the anxious and preoccupied present subject, full of shaky metaphor and “hard, hammered sentences” that prove “excruciating.” The trouble is, Schwartz can’t have any fun with the takedown; she’s too busy mourning what could have been, the vanished rave of a more worthy follow-up slipping through her fingers. Just as with Julavits, her longing takes her out of the present moment.

“Cold Case” - Inkoo Kang travels to Happy Valley. Maybe I’m the problem: I just think one operating principle of this magazine is that reviews speak to the broader significance of the piece of media under the microscope. But Kang spends this entire review recapping three seasons of plot and giving thumbs up and down to various elements, and the only brief gesture toward the meaning of the show, rather than its success or failure, is her précis of the showrunner’s “two animating ideas.” I want to hear some of Kang’s ideas.

“A Trillion Little Pieces” - Elizabeth Kolbert chokes on microplastics. Disappointingly individualistic, especially coming from Kolbert, who's been immersed in environmental reporting for long enough she should be better able to point to the harm of corporate and corporate-sponsored pollution, and to reject wording that points the finger back at the consumer. Instead we get one scant paragraph about the immense power of "the plastics industry... a subsidiary of the fossil-fuel industry" before a conclusion which asks what aspects of "contemporary life" might need to face "elimination" in order to "make a significant dent in plastic waste." (Maybe first we could try "eliminating" the "contemporary life" of Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil?) The idea that the "public" might simply stop purchasing single-use plastics of their own accord when they realize that plastics-recycling barely works and probably leads to "microplastics in human placentas" is easily countered by the fact that "recycling is a scam!" has been circulating in the poorly-understood-normie-conversation-topic bloodstream for at least a few years. It hasn't broken down the system any more than those nurdles have broken down in your baby's stomach. In any case, Kolbert’s flair is really for foreboding investigative scenesetting (the cave full of dead bats in The Sixth Extinction is an indelible classic) and here, stranded with a couple of books, she seems lost.

Letters:

Not much in the mailbag this week, though regular correspondent Michael wants a fact check on the exceptional claim in Robert Gottlieb’s obituary that “when he was in high school, he read ‘War and Peace’ in ‘a single marathon fourteen-hour session.’” He notes that “the audiobook clocks in at 61 hours.” Do you think Gottlieb managed it, or did he just skip forward to volume II part V? (Shoutout to any Great Comet-heads out there.)