Last Week’s New Yorker Review: July 8 & 15, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of July 8 & 15

"un petit verre pour cinq pounds!"

Must-Reads:

“Casting a Line” - Kathryn Schulz runs through the brief oeuvre of Norman Maclean. A deeply heartfelt appreciation of a writer whose fingerprints are all over Schulz’s style in ways I’d never noticed before: Simple language arranged rhythmically but without pretense; a plain-faced, thrusting narrative style. Schulz’s homage leans hard into its own Maclean impression – early on, she calls a quote “fly fisherman’s prose, spinning in glittering circles overhead before landing exactly where it must” – an autological line if ever I’ve heard one. Schulz is very good on Maclean’s life and even better on his work, and while the piece moves decisively from the former to the latter at the halfway mark, Schulz finds plenty of places to tie one to the other, without any strain. There’s a self-contained beauty to this piece that’s the truest tribute to Maclean: When the story’s been told, there’s nothing to add.

“The Blue and the White” - Rebecca Mead embarks on a Nobel pursuit with London publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. Service journalism for lit nerds (what’s going on with those blue British books?) and a classic of perhaps the magazine’s most quintessential genre: Portraits of interesting people succeeding at difficult things. Mead makes the risky choice not to quote Testard, the central character, until the very bottom of the second page; that works well, though – he bursts onto the scene proclaiming that it’s fine if his books don’t sell, and he continues with that “I look at you like ‘this shit gravy’” energy throughout. He scoffs at lit-award eligibility (“‘I know I’m not the only person who checks in about the rules’”) and invents the “‘low-ball preëmpt’” (“‘“If Werner Herzog has a sense of humor, he will say yes to this”’”) – it’s both funny and galvanizing: Why shouldn’t we put up a fight for high culture? Some may be less charmed by a wunderkind throwing lavish parties – a publisher is essentially a self-elected gatekeeper, a role which Testard won’t apologize for. But glamor doesn’t have to be a vice, and if plain blue books become a status symbol, there’s still a better chance they’ll be read. And what’s more British than to be read white-and-blue?

Window-Shop:

“Puss in Heels” - Helen Shaw’s night is a blur. It’s easy enough to credit a reimagining as successful; it’s harder to name exactly what the original show had that was worth preserving, and precisely how the new take presents it. Shaw’s explication of the reimagining’s “shift from commercialized kitsch to camp sincerity” is so compelling it has done the unthinkable: Made me kind of excited to see Cats. The “mysterious literary synchrony” she spotlights, that there’s “an emphasis on the power of names known only to those who understand you, and on a thriving community’s reverence for its elders”, has me snapping at the insight. The callback to the opening anecdote is expertly done, too, and it’s charming that Shaw had an appreciation for the original work coming in – if she were too good for it (which is no high bar) her praise for the new queer effort might feel tokenizing. The capsule review of a closed show is mostly just a chance for a little history lesson, but Bassichis is a true original and deserves the coverage.

“How the West Was Long” - Richard Brody looks over the Horizon. Love that title. This is just smart, snappy stuff; Brody is right that all westerns are political and his analysis of the incoherent nature of Costner’s film’s politics is astute, even if it’s low-hanging fruit. It’s not only the politics that don’t cohere; the film itself is so unfinished Brody has to rely on the “closing montage” teasing the next installment to make sense of its plot – and he doesn’t quite get there. Whether it’s worth crediting Costner’s “chutzpah” in theatrically releasing a film with a “dramatic format… borrowed from television”, or whether that’s just a leading indicator of a broader shift (read: decline) is for history to tell. One quibble: If you’re making the point that “the greatest directors of Westerns were not specialists”, it’s mandatory that you include Howard Hawks.

“Teardrops On My Guitar” - Kelefa Sanneh can sierreño the future. The connection between regional Mexican music and Emo had never occurred to me, and is genuinely revelatory – it makes me hear the whole style differently. This is worth reading just for that nugget, but there’s also a nice consideration of one of the style’s rising stars. It’s the usual trap with this magazine’s music coverage – Cornejo is picked because he’s the most representative of the style, not the best representative – but his music is still good, and Sanneh has enough smart musical analysis (“an unexpectedly languorous electric-guitar solo… evokes… Arctic Monkeys”) that you barely notice the review is pegged to an album that doesn’t drop until the 18th – and which Sanneh seemingly isn’t allowed to name any new songs from!

“School of Loft” (Talk of the Town) - Nick Paumgarten makes calls for free with sax man Alan Braufman. Dig it!

[Love & Heartbreak] “Lost Stories” - Donald Antrim holds onto his mother until he can’t. Best read in conjunction with Sehgal’s article below, which examines similar themes of memoir-writing and memory. This is spare, tender stuff from Antrim, elegant in construction, with a gutting final two lines.

“Twice-Told Tales” - Parul Sehgal does her memoir-tiplication tables. I usually like Sehgal’s perfumed style, but it’s laid on a bit thick here – I had trouble breathing. There’s a whiff of writing to an assignment and hoping style will mask a lack of substantive connection between the two books under review. The Ciment review (the second section) is fantastic on its own, though; by unraveling the ways in which the past memoir and the present memoir are written against one another, Sehgal points toward the “shame” that animates both. (I could see some readers bristling at Sehgal’s approach, which is not especially kind toward Ciment-the-character, which is maybe to also say Ciment-the-writer. But Sehgal is not a therapist, and by writing a memoir Ciment opens herself to a close reading, however painful.) Her read of the Louis book is also incisive – in calling him unhappy, is Sehgal suggesting his transformation is incomplete? But the questions it hits on are narrower in scope – the sections should have been flipped. The last paragraph is its own little prose poem, an ollie Sehgal lands with ease.

[Love & Heartbreak] “Up the Stairs” - Shuang Xuetao holds onto the handrail. A productively odd character portrait which is built around how little we ever know of the lives of others, even those close to us. (Which may be especially true in northeast China.) “Not one person in my family wanted to know anything more about her” – that’s the heart, everything else is… not misdirection, exactly, but not leading where the first line indicates it might.

“Down and Dirty” (Talk of the Town) - Mark Yarm dodges bears with Black ecologist Rae Wynn-Grant. The anecdote about taking her toddler on a “jaguar-tracking study” with the married man she was having an affair with… suggests a more complex character than the rest of the piece, which mostly focuses on diversity in the field, could possibly bear out. Still a good time.

Skip Without Guilt:

[Love & Heartbreak] “Weeping at the Lake Palace” - Akhil Sharma holds out for a connection. There is interesting material to be mined from this anecdote, which touches on race, class, foreignness, self-loathing. But Sharma’s approach is so reserved it occludes any depth of feeling lying underneath these strange actions. That weight is just not available to the reader.

[Love & Heartbreak] “Bound Together” - Edwidge Danticat holds herself tight. I suppose birth and death are related to love and heartbreak, but by that metric, isn’t everything? Danticat chooses lovely images, but shades too often toward platitudes (“What we wear in both joy and grief can amplify our emotions, serving as an extension of our feelings”) which robs the piece of its immediacy.

[Love & Heartbreak] “Diorama of Love” - Addie Citchens holds many hands. A bit too slam-poetic in its use of refrain and its didactic desire to tell us what Citches has learned about love. Let the stories speak for themselves – they will!

“The Last Rave” - Emily Witt breaks down and up. Publishing this in the Fiction Issue, sandwiched by stories, suggests that we read it as autofiction, but it lacks any sort of elevated or philosophical position on its own narration – it’s just a sequence of events, recounted patiently but without a lot of style. More than anything, it reminded me of an xoJane article – My Leftist Boyfriend Had a Manic Episode and Decided I Was a Cop. This story doesn’t benefit from this venue, which demands a level of sophistication that Witt fails to achieve; when she tries, she gets the furthest from understanding her own story. (“It was as if I had algorithmically generated a terrifying millennial edgelord from my own personal data points” is the story’s worst line, suggesting that Andrew “borrowed” the language of wokeness [which is the opposite of an ‘edgelord’ vocabulary] from her, as if she owned that language.) The biggest issue here, really, is just that Witt’s story is nothing more than gloomy gossip, really – presented in such a beat-by-beat style, it’s hard to find much deeper meaning. It’s certainly not Witt’s job as a person to have some deep reserve of empathy for her shitty ex-boyfriend, but her insistence on not embodying that boyfriend’s perspective is notable, and it hampers her story a bit. The one moment we hear from Andrew is in a parenthetical, presumably lawyer-mandated, that he “denies shoving” Witt – it’s the story’s most interesting moment, because it suggests the world of accusations and accountability in which we live – the performatively woke world Andrew inhabits, the one Witt wants to leave. Everywhere else, that world is taken for granted.

Witt also seems remarkably aggrieved at the idea that her shitty ex will continue to have a life – she says he “had erased me from my own life”, but it’s not her life he’s erased, it’s their life together. The real loss is that she isn’t responsible for him anymore; she’s lost him in the crowd for good. But the most important “red flag” predates his manic episode – it’s that the responsibility was never reciprocated; he was never responsible for her. As in any codependent relationship, one partner is needy, the other is self-sacrificing. Both play their part. That’s a tale as old as time.

“Wheel of Fortune” - Jennifer Wilson knows it must be funny in a rich man’s world. I was engaged by the opening, though it’s only responding to one of the book’s threads, and seemingly not the central one. Then came the plot synopsis… and as it continued on and on, and the end of this very short review got closer and closer, I started wondering… when will the review start? Reader, it does not start. This article is entirely a description of Brodesser-Akner’s new book; if there is a single word that directly describes Wilson’s reaction to that book, please, point it out to me. That kind of omission is a bit annoying in reviews of histories; when it comes to fiction, it’s straight up unacceptable.

“Antihero” - Inkoo Kang makes fash work of The Boys. Kang takes this unbelievably dumb and shallow TV show as some sort of bold political statement, while roasting an imaginary viewer who is too stupid to understand that depiction is not endorsement even when it’s an over-the-top caricature of a fascist demagogue. Spare me!!

Letters:

Nada! I do especially want to know what people thought of that Emily Witt piece. Is it as oblivious as I felt like it was, or is it actually aware of the dynamics I see, and is using its occluded portrayal of them to achieve some literary effect that I’m missing?

Hit it!

Gimme.