Last Week’s New Yorker, week of June 29

“Oprah selected it for her book club; at her compound in Montecito, Whitehead was so nervous that her staff insisted on blow-drying the damp patches of his dress shirt before they were introduced.”

Must-Read:

“Urban Legend” (Profiles) - Julian Lucas takes the “A” train with Colson Whitehead. The magazine’s best straightforward profile in many moons. It helps that Whitehead is such a natural wordsmith one actually sort of believes his claim to being a “slacker”: A guy this casually insightful and charming doesn’t even have to try to write like he does. He does have to feel, though, and Lucas makes the astonishing seem uncomplicated: Although both Whitehead’s history and the story of Lucas’ various meetings with him seem to be told chronologically, they intersect with and lead into one another so elegantly, they make the story of Whitehead’s tragedies and triumphs seem almost fated. He’s a “humble” ironist who summons the magic in the world around him, and Lucas’ wide lens catches him in the act. I was surprised, rereading, to see that Lucas is actually relatively light on quotes from Whitehead, relying, instead, on quotes from those around him; his family, friends, and partners are impressed by Whitehead, who remains preternaturally un-self-impressed, and thus a better scholar of the world than of himself. (Even his memoir sounds heavy on the sense-memory.) Whether he’s sleeping in a dominatrix’s basement to save on rent or getting spit on by Richard Ford at a party, Whitehead is “fatalistic” and able to transform shapes and styles – no wonder the question of who he really is proves so generative for Lucas. As if this weren’t enough, the piece takes from Whitehead’s Nickel Boys not only its twin form – the past and the present – but also its deeper meditation on brotherhood and kinship, as Whitehead’s dead brother is ever-present but emerges in the penultimate section as a keeper of their “tandem youth”, the stranded double who couldn’t make it here. And the new books chronicle “a man whose relentless striving brings him only closer to the past”, “an unusually perfect double” and “a safe for the secrets of a city”. He’ll keep the lights on.

Window-Shop:

“Wild Things” (Books) - Elizabeth Kolbert checks mates. If you loved Isabella Rossellini’s genius Green Porno shorts on animal mating behavior, you’ll also enjoy this, even though there are no puppets and a few of the anecdotes will be familiar from Rossellini. Kolbert has three books on similar subjects to mine for only the most outré sexual practices in the animal kingdom; I won’t spoil any of that, but it’s fun, even if none of the books get ‘reviewed’ as such. The final section pivots toward humanity, and makes the good point that exhorting nature as unprejudiced, and looking toward it to affirm our sexual practices in either direction (whether ‘it’s not natural’ or ‘birds do it, bees do it’) means ignoring the true nature of nature, which is uninterested in our morality entirely, instinctively driven and often brutal. Heads up!

🗣️ “Knicksomania” (Dept. of Hoopla) - Dan Greene is testing, testing, one-two-three-four-five. Decent observational fun gets a high placement in a weak-ish edition.

“Prickly Pairs” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang has a couple issues. Not Chang’s highest-energy review, but he successfully conveys what sounds like the film’s awkward combination of a script that shrinks away and a style that pushes forward, an effort that thus lands awkwardly despite an able cast. The last paragraph explicitly spoils the twist, even warning us… but a close reader’d have a hard time not guessing at it from what precedes that ending. Watch the film or don’t watch the film; you’ll regret it either way.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Around a Dark Corner” (Personal History) - Amanda Petrusich goes on a bear hunt. Grief: You can’t get over it, you can’t uncover it, you’ve got to go through it. A gutting opening section, recounting Petrusich’s husband’s death and some of its aftermath, is a brief piece worth reading unto itself, though some of the writing Petrusich has produced on other subjects has, oddly, more fully expressed her devastation – that many of those details get rehashed here made this feel almost like a behind-the-scenes; because Petrusich let her experiences inflect her writing already, though, it spoils the effect a bit. After that first section, the piece becomes bizarrely similar to the recent Sloane Crosley article on misophonia, moving through the same beats in the same order: Background into a new center for research into the condition (grief/misophonia, respectively); the question of whether the condition ought to become a specific medical diagnosis, so as to make it easier to bill insurance for, or if this will have downsides; a new treatment (EMDR/special headphones, respectively) that the writer clearly believes in, but allows a skeptic to speak on (EMDR might be “mostly theater”, and a way of making exposure therapy require a pricy license; technology makes a “promise” that it can’t fulfill). Petrusich wraps up by describing her gradual recovery in what are basically the standard terms. (She describes the most basic tool of therapy, that of validating hard feelings, as both “bizarre, even sort of grating”, and also “a remarkable kindness” – of course, it is neither remarkable nor strange in the least.) Petrusich is heartfelt, but because the piece is so sure to have no formal spikiness, it loses its emotional edge as well.

“Hot Pursuit” (U.S. Journal) - Paige Williams repositions reposessions. Williams continues to have trouble finding the line between realistically depicting blue-collar Americans and rendering aesthetic judgement on them. The usual magazine approach would be to write a history of repossession and use Matthew Pitman’s life as a framing device; Williams tries reversing this structure, incorporating that history only where it dovetails with her portrait of Pitman – an interesting idea, but one that only intermittently works, because she never finds anything that deep to say about Pitman, a keen-eyed, aggressive man who struggles with loss and addiction. We’re meant to thrill at the descriptions of his repossessions while also shuddering at their being posted in public – but, of course, Williams is raising the profile of those debtors further without even the justification that it’s in service of breaking any particular story. In a very long piece, the one section of background is, somehow, the most compelling thing here; that’s a big problem for what’s essentially a profile. Aw, nuts.

“Young Americans” (Annals of Religion) - Eliza Griswold sticks her neck out for teenage Christian nationalists. Not nearly hard enough on these Trumpenjugend, and not plugged-in enough to understand how instantly Kirk was mocked, long before Erica Kirk’s obvious insincerity made him truly embarrassing to mention. Griswold is good on the nuttiness of Palm Beach, increasingly a gathering place for wealthy wannabe-Trump-hangers-on, and thus for their children, who are variously brainwashed and bloodthirsty. But there’s too much rehashing of Kirk’s views (do any of us need the refresher, really?), too much credence given to the idea that Kirk’s death was galvanizing (it’s very noteworthy that Griswold can only find an adult, a “retired banker”, to parrot this point on behalf of youngsters), and too much attention to aesthetics as indicative of deeper change (“gone were the outmoded trappings of evangelical subculture”, replaced by, for example, “a Stanley tumbler bedazzled with the American flag”). The thing about a Turning Point is that it can keep you anchored in place.

“Better, Richer, Happier” (Reflections) - Hua Hsu plays point on the Dream team. I expected a linguistic dissection of the phrase and its various meanings; I received an offputtingly shruggy yet blindly hopepilled disquisition on how there are lots of thoughts on how to bring back the Dream. It’s frankly odd to write this essay and never mention Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose essay reframing the Dream as a fantasy of white suburbia is arguably the defining text of the 2010s. Instead, Hsu does remarkably little to undermine the Dream of prosperity, almost presupposing it’s worth reaching for; he’s only mildly put off by the corniness of a “museum of American exceptionalism”; a more economically-engaged essay might have had more room to comment on the junk-bond king behind the place. That essay might also have been able to articulate the vast differences between socialism and the Abundance agenda, which certainly can’t be reduced to the latter’s “less regulatory progressivism”, which we probably shouldn’t be calling progressivism. There’s a nugget of something interesting here – finding reasons beyond the pursuit of prosperity to carry on the fight for justice is hugely important – but Hsu ends with a shrug; to Dream’s perchance to sleep.

“Growing Pains” (Pop Music) - Amanda Petrusich tries to esse quam videri satis tristis propter puellam tam amantem. I’m a big Rodrigo fan (I’d pegged her as a future star during HSMTMTS) and I enjoyed her latest a great deal, as did Petrusich. I’d love to read a review of that album; the paragraph-and-a-half we get here hardly scratches the surface. Petrusich would rather recap the deeply silly discourse-controversy around a dress that Rodrigo wore; to reify such topics by dignifying them with a response is to endorse them as worth paying attention to. Petrusich absurdly declares that pop has a hard time expressing “nuance or rebellion” and generally seems to have a hard time forgiving Rodrigo for being a 23-year-old. Her age is not the only thing defining her music, and Paul McCartney was 23 when the Beatles made Rubber Soul. I have had enough, so act your age.

“Longing for Ithaca” (A Critic at Large) - David Denby is all at Odyssey. Reviewing a movie that has not yet been released is a fundamentally dumb idea; maybe a weirder writer could put some spin on it, but Denby runs us through the past bad adaptations of Homer’s story with little style, gives us some high-school history of the story (and I should know, brother; I taught that shit), and wraps things up so half-heartedly one can almost sense his dawning realization that this was a bad idea for an essay topic. He doesn’t even comment on the trailer – which, as much as I believe in Nolan to not make anything truly dire, looks so bad and so cheap. The movie’s coming out on July 17, at which point any guessing at what this movie might be will be instantly rendered obsolete. Ship out!

Letters:

Nothin’ to quote, just some groaning at my puns, as per ever.

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