Last Week's New Yorker Review: May 5
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of May 5
“‘She never really was a Zionist,’ one woman remarks of her mother. ‘She only went for the weather.’”
Must-Read:
“Westward Oy!” (Books) - Kathryn Schulz knows the Stars of David at night are big and bright, deep on the coast of Texas. Schulz is the magazine’s only book critic that regularly chooses a gushing tone – most aim for something more persnickety and self-consciously critical, but Schulz doesn’t feel the need to contain her enthusiasm (or maybe she only pitches writeups of works she’s already read and loved.) She’s usually very convincing, but this is an especially remarkable-sounding book, a nonfiction history assembled entirely of primary sources that moves almost like a stage play. Indeed, Schulz is so taken by this form that the article doesn’t turn toward the usual project of regurgitating the most interesting bits of the book under review until nearly halfway through! That material is a multi-pronged battle which is both hugely geopolitically and theologically important and very poorly understood, the fight over where and how to establish a Jewish homeland. Schulz can’t untangle the bigger picture; it’s, well, a Canaanian knot. Even Cockerell’s book, to Schulz’s dismay, eventually tilts personal, not deeply addressing the outcomes of the fight she chronicles. Instead, in three Jews who each wanted a homeland and each did not want an annexed Palestine, instead preferring the carefully chosen but still fanciful-seeming location of Galveston, Texas, Cockerell finds a past perspective that sheds light on the present. Schulz could afford a bit more detail about that present, but she mostly keeps things literary. Still, you can feel her excitement at what Cockerell has managed – a conversation, stripped of didacticism, with no right answers. Schulz suggests various formal precursors, but misses perhaps the most important: The structure is positively Talmudic.
Window-Shop:
“Compost Cops” (Talk of the Town) - Diego Lasarte talks trash. Seriously delightful and surprisingly deep – compost policy enforcement scrambles some of our preconceived politics, and you’ll have to render your own judgements as to whether Crespo is a pig, or whether he’s just rolling around like a public servant in slop. You’ll laugh either way.
“Settlers” (Talk of the Town) - Michael Schulman shouts Fire Island in a flaming building. So astonishingly despicable in ways that compound upon themselves that it becomes totally hilarious. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of daddies?
Khullar on Sacks (Takes) - Basically a capsule biography of Sacks and his method, through the lens of one piece. Khullar’s fondness is evident.
“Is It Happening Here?” (The Political Scene) - Andrew Marantz asks if you see what he autocracies. Basically an article about Hungary, comparing and contrasting its slide into autocracy with what’s going on in America now. Notably, Hungary maintains a facade of rich culture; one has to dig a few inches to find fascist emptiness. (Often literal – the college campuses are being rented out.) Because the piece is a comparative analysis, it transcends the infodump the title threatens. What could become a tallying-up of potentially authoritarian things Trump has done (a piece which Jill Lepore already wrote in this issue anyway) is instead a more nuanced look at what the hollowing-out of a country might look like after-the-fact. Marantz does an excellent job modulating tone; he’s forthright, never alarmist, just properly alarmed. This is a very simple piece, and if it’s galvanizing it’s not galvanizing in an especially new way – were you aware you shouldn’t obey in advance? Still, Marantz’s argument is spot on: We’ve got plenty of fight left in us, but we need to have some good people in the ring.
“Deep Down” (The Theatre) - Helen Shaw is one foot under. Shaw gives snappy rundowns of all three shows, but as usual, I’m frustrated that the earnest, glossy, and mediocre production in which “the creators’ storytelling control is slack to the point that I genuinely could not tell you how many people die” – same! – gets most of the space, and only blurbs are left for two of the most exciting, though smaller-budget, shows of the season. It’s not even really clear how much Shaw liked those shows; she doesn’t criticize either one, but does the lack of overt gushing say something? Perhaps. I’m sure Shaw wants to cover as many shows as possible; it’s a shame there isn’t more space for that in the magazine, and it’s too bad her early practice of posting additional reviews online has stopped. She’s stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Mr. Nice Guy” (Annals of Law) - Charles Bethea follows the slime trail with Brian Steel. There’s certainly enough material in the bizarre, twisty Young Thug case to merit an article (Bethea already wrote a pretty good Talk of the Town about one aspect), but focusing the proceedings around Steel feels perverse – he’s a totally average lawyer, and perhaps the one aspect of the saga that was not out-of-the-ordinary. Bethea rushes past outré details about attorneys marrying defendants and wildly misunderstanding rap lyrics to make more time for Steel’s bland diet and habit of friendly phone-call check-ins with everyone he knows. He’s clearly a true believer in the system. Which is probably how he justifies representing some truly awful people, like Sean Combs. The article uses the Combs case as a subhed hook, but Steel can’t discuss it for legal reasons so Bethea mostly declines to; it doesn’t even come up until the last four paragraphs. There’s an attempt in that section to cock an eye at Steel, but because the rest of the article basically venerates him, it doesn’t work. He’s a regular everyday guy; he’s also not the story.
“Up the River” (Books) - Lauren Michele Jackson wonders which Mark to market. Awkwardly split between criticizing the extremely lengthy biography of Mark Twain under review and picking out its most interesting bits. If there is “little that’s substantively new” about Chernow’s treatment of Twain, well, it falls to Jackson to say something new. She doesn’t manage it, at least when dealing with the bulk of Twain’s biography, which she delivers as though trying to get past it to something more interesting. But when that something arrives, she doesn’t find much of a perspective on it. She says Huck Finn is “usefully unsettled” because it imagines “freedom through entanglement”, and thus it’s still worth reconsidering. That feels rather like the introductory lesson of a Huck Finn class, pointing ahead to things on the syllabus, but not quite getting into the meat of the material – actual literary analysis. That’s not strictly necessary in a review of a biography, but it might keep Jackson’s interest in a way Chernow’s biographical information obviously does not. (Jackson says Twain’s story is well-known, then rehashes it.) Jackson has a strong point to make about the Chernow book, which flinches away from the unease of Twain as though responding to a Your Fave is Problematic tumblr post. But she sticks too closely to the magazine’s usual format, so things feel bifurcated for no convincing reason. Never the Twain should have met.
“The Road to ‘Sinners’” (Profiles) - Jelani Cobb hopes Coogler-heads prevail. I was interested to see how Cobb’s newsy prose style would adapt itself to a profile. The answer? Not at all, apparently, as this bone-dry, brief, and emotionless recap of Coogler’s career evinces. You won’t get even a sliver of a sense of Coogler as a person from this piece, which feels like a padded-out interview, and not an especially interesting one. Coogler is clearly an important person, and his obvious talent (Creed, in particular, is a startlingly well-made film; the two-thirds of Black Panther which bear any of Coogler’s fingerprints and not those of the Marvel house team are excellent, too) have combined with his genuine belief in “low” culture to make him the man of the moment. (Those who try for the same thing without the same passion are doomed to failure.) Now he’s made a film which, while it only half-worked for me, is exciting and strange, and worth applauding. But you won’t find much here that goes beyond the IMdB trivia page. The one thing Cobb ought to have brought to the table is a deep look at the racial politics of Coogler’s films; Cobb is excellent at unpacking race relations in a sophisticated but unadorned manner. Weirdly, there is none of that here, and Cobb mostly declines to say anything at all about Sinners, as though this piece were designed to drop before the film came out, but then got pushed back. (The weirdly generic title is further evidence of this conspiracy.) There’s meat left on the bone – or, I guess, blood left in the neck.
“Achy Breaky” (Pop Music) - Kelefa Sanneh asks, is this an emo band? One of the purest examples I can recall of this magazine’s general problem with pop music coverage: Every piece must be a “trends” piece, which leads to nonexistent and insipid trends being identified, and truly heinous music highlighted because it vaguely fits the trend the piece is about. Is Sanneh being sincere when he claims that the perfectly generic country singer Megan Moroney is making emo music because she 1. Sings songs about heartbreak and 2. Has a guitar strap that says “Emo Cowgirl” on it? This makes about as much sense as proclaiming that Bon Jovi makes bounce music. Sanneh’s real interest may have more to do with his weird fetish for promoting cancelled artists; Moroney dated (or perhaps just kiss-and-telled with) Morgan Wallen, of drunken racism fame, after the famous drunken racism. Sanneh ties in some closer-to-actual examples of emo-country, which rank among the most profoundly empty pieces of music I’ve listened to. (My issue is not that it’s country-pop, to be clear. I like plenty of country-pop.) He points out the unscuffed white cowboy boots that many are wearing at Moroney’s concert, but he doesn’t consider various other types of unscuffed whiteness that might be operative.
“In Case of Emergency” (American Chronicles) - Jill Lepore bops Decameron and ninety-nine more. I generally like Lepore, but this piece is both unamusing and condescending. As a longtime A.J. Jacobs fan, I love a gonzo self-experiment, so my issue is not with the idea of reading a short book every day, even if it is comically low-stakes, especially when Lepore quickly abandons the initial chronological pretense. But what the piece actually turns into is the same joke structure over and over and over: An explanation of some thing that happened in the news in Trump’s first hundred years, followed by a quote from one of the books that supposedly has something to do with it. Maybe there just wasn’t enough source material to draw quotes from, but Lepore is straining extremely hard to find these moments; there are forty-something in the piece and I found exactly two convincing. (Which is not even to say amusing.) Most fall into a couple categories: They have a shallow linguistic connection to the news – environmental cuts equals a line about “blue hills” – or they are so literal they illuminate nothing – Trump is like Caligula because they’re both fickle rulers. The piece fails at this level, but it’s aggravating at a deeper level, too. The whole point of the piece is that Lepore is finding escape from the news through these books, but by connecting them back to the news over and over, she deprives the reader of that escape, instead reducing art to a series of didactic and depressing quips, as though the purpose of literature is to accidentally be Twitter. Lepore also tells on herself politically, parroting the current bullshit line about how the reason Trump won is because the left asked too much of us, enforcing “speech codes” and cancelling alleged sexual abusers without enough “due process.” These are, frankly, the manufactured bugaboos of a tiny and mostly idiotic group of wealthy centrists; regular people abandoned the Democrats, where they did, because their political project was arbitrary and pointed toward no future. At least destruction has a plot.
Letters:
Susan saw “Here There Are Blueberries”, which I panned in the weekend edition, “at Berkeley Rep. Hopelessly naive - who the hell is surprised that the Nazis were partying away while commiting atrocities? Haven't we all known about this for a very long time? I will say that I thought the form was weird but with promise - a staged documentary.” I totally agree, and I was pretty unamused by its winning Best Play at the Lortel awards.
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