Last Week’s New Yorker, week of June 8

“‘Why waste money on tape when you can make your own? Muslin can be melted with one part oil, six parts wax and ten points resin to produce adhesive tape.’”

This is the Fiction issue. (But the fiction was reviewed previously. We do things a little different around here…)

Must-Reads:

“Paperboy” (Personal History) - Peter Hessler wraps sheets. I’m a huge Hessler fan, whose coverage of China and the Middle East blends lyricism and insight, and often approaches the personal, but I absolutely still would not have guessed that he had this in him. On its surface this is a meditation on Gen X suburban American childhood, with its hidden perils and moderate physical toil; yes, this is, somewhat literally, a back-in-my-day-we-walked-through-the-snow tale. Hessler juxtaposes a series of everyday anecdotes with a running thread about a pedophile neighbor who violated him in an unsettling but comparatively minor way. And yes, the overarching theme is how the things that happen to us as children impact the adults we become. This summary, though, totally fails to capture the quality that makes the piece so melodic and, yes, deeply moving. (I did tear up at this piece and the Franzen fiction piece, and I am thus not beating the sympathetic-to-the-interests-and-stories-of-old-white-guys allegations.) What is that quality? It’s hard to capture; Hessler’s prose is not at all showy, even compared to other acclaimed spare personal historians of a certain demographic from the magazine. Maybe it has something to do with Hessler’s ways of describing or not describing pain: Whatever he felt from breaking his tibia, we don’t hear, but a few paragraphs later, when the man’s wife gives Hessler a look of “cold fury,” we hear of his “guilt and shame”¹ and that it “remains one of my most awful memories from childhood.” There is a sense, then, of the gap in time, the one that removes the pain of a tibia fracture but keeps the wound of the hated child. That’s only one guess. It could also be the richness of detail which this unhurried piece manages despite a sparing touch with emotional description – and the ways this matches the story’s themes of repression. This piece demands to be read with a certain openness – if you decide going in that you don’t care about Hessler’s childhood, he’s not going to try to persuade you. If you grant it that interest, it’ll leave you crumpled. Superb; destined for the year-end list.

🗣️ “Hanging Out” (Dept. of Energy) - Charles Bethea gets high five. Dusty Baker is in the running for the coolest person alive. Time spent listening to him is never wasted.

Window-Shop:

🗣️ “But Soft” (Dept. of Matrimony) - Michael Schulman knows the law’s on their side if they say aye. Staging a wedding at the end of R&J is a sweet, and productively bizarre, theatrical idea; Schulman’s focus, though, is rightfully on Wasil and Hollister, the betrothéd, a very charming transmasc duo with a genuine connection to the material. The sun shines through.

“The Tally” (Family Values) - Anne Enright talks turkey. Unsurprisingly, in this special section of short essays, the two writers with experience in narrative nonfiction fare better than the three who’re almost exclusively fictionists. Enright’s story of family morals is true to the way we try to rebel against received values but reify them in the process. Enigmatic and untidy on its face, the family story begs for Enright to find some resolution; she never can, but that desire drives her. That might be the human condition; it’s certainly the storyteller’s condition.

“Love Omen” (Family Values) - Miriam Toews counter-steers. Short, declarative sentences create a spell that is only broken at the very end, with an ending sentence that spirals upward with commas. Toews presents a selection of moments, each touched on only briefly, then reveals that they’re linked by this belief in magic – the magic of transience, of youth, of a belief in freedom that may be part delusion but still holds true.

“Power Move” (The Sporting Scene) - Sam Knight breaks the Infantino formula. I can’t remember two magazine features as near-identical in tone and focus as this and the New York feature by Andrew Rice released less than a day later. Theoretically, reading them against one another would be an interesting exercise, but they’re so similar: both withering in their treatment of the abjectly anti-political Infantino. Their main difference is just that Knight, in the usual style of this magazine, jumps backward to give a history of FIFA, while Rice, in the usual style of his magazine, stays focused on the tangibles throughout. But both articles are about power, and how the consolidation of power warps everything about an institution, not merely its goals but its processes and its rhetoric. (Knight comments on Infantino’s nuttiest speech but doesn’t quote it directly, which removes the quality of absurdist megalomania that turned it into a meme: “Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker.”) Knight nails the casual quality of modern corporate evil, the “simultaneously banal and hard to read” denigration of “democracy, human rights, the rule of law” which Infantino exemplifies. Knight gestures toward disasters waiting to happen at the World Cup, but his focus is not on tomorrow’s earthquake but today’s tremor. Shake on it.

“Carte Blanche” (Books) - Katy Waldman minds maps. I’ve mentioned many times the trouble with the review of the book after the hit book, which inevitably becomes a list of things the first book did well that the new book does less well. Maggie O’Farrell’s followup to Hamnet seems to have dodged many of those issues, but Waldman still spends a bit too much of her review on the prior book, just to the opposite effect: Whereas Hamnet “overreaches in its claims about the power of art to resurrect the past”, in Land, “the facts ground the fiction, the fiction enlivens the facts”. It’s not an uninteresting lens (or, as the new book might have it, theodolite), just one that a hundred reviews of the old book and another hundred reviews of its abhorrent film adaptation have peered through already. Waldman, as ever, is superb at condensation, and at picking quotes that serve her point while standing for the whole. Like any good cartographer, she works from the outside in.

🗣️ “An Auditory Person” (The Pictures) - Jane Bua names that tuner. Always funny when an actor, confronted with an expert, accidentally reveals how inaccurate their project is. I play piano, but tuning may as well be an arcane magic, and this is a nice peek beneath the lid.

“Polyglotism” (Family Values) - Joseph O’Neill is on the trip of his tongue. Builds to a wonderful litany of the various found-home phrases of an unmoored life. That’s enough to make this worth reading, though it’s perhaps something less than a narrative.

“Forever Young” (Books) - Becca Rothfeld gets a novel feeling. The first four sections are a fairly interesting and rather straightforward review of a work of exuberant literary criticism from 1960; Rothfeld doesn’t try to make it relevant to the now in any particular way, which is a bit disconcerting in a new assessment of an old book but, given that one of her strongest criticisms of Fielder is that he eventually tilted toward “desperately modern” trend-chasing, fitting enough. And then one arrives at the final section, in which Rothfeld does try on her own Fielder hat, and she’s just alright, too heavily reliant on the familiar frames of reference – our tastes are adolescent because we watch media about toys (aren’t teenagers sort of famous for putting away their childish things, though?), there’s no “consequential” sex in literature anymore because this would mean embracing true maturity (Miranda July, Deeshaw Philyaw, and Ayad Akhtar, to pick some random examples, would like a word; also, I believe that Ben Lerner is the most important American writer of our age and I still think we should learn to shut up about him a bit) and nobody writes about “the clash between opposing forms of life” because social formations were too stable until recently, or something. I get lost in the last few paragraphs, which feel scattershot – but crammed into the last few paragraphs, this doesn’t feel like Rothfeld’s chutzpah coming through; really, it’s a bit of a shrug.

“The Antagonist” (Family Values) - Han Ong is mother superior. Bitter and unresolved, and uninterested in any sort of vanity. Indeed, the face Ong shows is so ugly and embittered that a reader wonders if these few paragraphs are more an exercise in unveiling the shadow self than they are an accurate picture of the integrated Ong. That’s one way to heal, perhaps. But it makes for an uncomfortable read.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Star-Crossed” (Books) - Rachel Syme does a sun sign salutation. An absolutely fascinating tale of a woman driven mad by the popular success of her own woo-woo ideas is told briefly in the first two sections, then told again, at slightly greater length but with almost nothing of interest added, in the second and third sections. Why in the world is the piece structured this way? I think Syme read Gooberz and decided to justify her pains by inflicting suffering upon her readers. It’s immediately clear to the reader that Goodman is a bit of a nut, and thus the biggest question is why it took her biographer so long to come to terms with that. Syme doesn’t hazard an answer, and her closing paragraph is predictable (you’ve secretly been reading a trends piece!) and unconvincing (just because people contain multitudes, doesn’t mean a biography shouldn’t have a clear, evidence-driven perspective.) There are some faults in these stars.

“Table Manners” (Family Values) - André Alexis gathers round. Alexis is one of the great living fiction writers, and I wouldn’t think his style would be completely impossible to translate into nonfiction… but here he’s made no effort, writing this as flatly and generically as an answer to a job interview question about the importance of family, as though afraid to let any of his style peek through. Weird!

“Lady Chatterley’s Meme” (Books) - Louis Menand sets the obscene. It’s remarkably self-defeating to write an article about the relative historical unimportance and lack of literary merit of your subject, especially because I don’t think anyone was really trying to make the case for Chatterley as a landmark of literature. (Except Philip Larkin, who may have been trolling.) His thesis is quite obvious; the story of the book is more important than the story in the book. Menand’s writing is lightly funny, as usual, but this is even more disposable than Chatterley itself.

“Hits and Misses” (The Current Cinema) - Richard Brody guitars and featherweights. Almost entirely disengaged plot synopsis; little to no commentary on the formal aspects of this fairly dire-sounding film. The last three lines are a rather clever defense of the songwriter/singer divide that the film argues against, drawing a metaphor to the writer/director divide. Even Brodyheads can just scroll down to that.

Letters:

John writes: “Jonathan Franzen's story left me cold--but your assessment suggests that, one of these days, I ought to give it another look. Besides, the opinions of anyone who loves Han Ong's [short story] ‘Ming’ as much as I do are not to be dismissed.”

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