Last Week's New Yorker Review: October 16, 2023
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of October 16
Must-Read:
“Long Exposure” - Julian Lucas focuses on Teju Cole’s new novel about looking. Lucas’ summary of Cole’s work as addressing “the limits of vision” is clever and cogent, and he manages to give a real sense of Cole’s prose style without relying on huge blocks of text. Cole’s new book sounds compelling, though so much about the connective tissue of the novel that any review, in which pieces are, by necessity, isolated, will fail to capture the shape of its sprawl. Mostly, Lucas focuses on themes over theses, in line with a book that aspires “to illustrate the world’s interconnectedness without recourse to the fictional conventions of plot and psychological portaiture.” Yet I wanted a few more of Lucas’ ideas, not just his elegant restatements of Cole’s.
Window-Shop:
“Passages” - Emily Witt moves to Virginia with a family uprooted by transphobic legislation. The brief political contextualization here is accurate but feels pro forma; Witt is mostly interested in painting a portrait of Willow and her mother as people. Mostly, though, they just seem extremely normal. That’s probably sort of the point — trans people are normal — but do we really need details like “Chapman suddenly remembered that she had forgotten to buy padlocks for the storage pods”? This sort of fine-toothed recounting feels more suited to a book-length study featuring multiple characters whose differences would be highlighted by contrast. On its own, the portrait doesn’t take on the needed weight. But for those who want to read about trans issues, this is still sensitive and careful work, far better than most of what’s in, say, the Times. For that it should be commended.
“About Time” (Talk of the Town) - Samantha Henig rakes the New York Earth Room. Tending to durational art is always fascinating, and if Henig doesn’t get any truly unusual details, she does capture the zen of maintenance.
“Thin Ice” - Anthony Lane cracks the case of Anatomy of a Fall. Lane’s quibble about the realism of the movie’s “legal bells and whistles” is annoying, it seems obvious that these are creative liberties to be analyzed as artistic choices, not simply flubs. Otherwise, this is pretty strong; Lane’s prose is at its best (“With her flustered froideur, she needs no cross-examination to make her bristle,”) and it helps that he mostly takes the movie seriously. Not sure about the ending, which may be a sly spoiler or just a non-sequitur.
“The Shadow Armada” - Ian Urbina plays the squid game, monitoring China’s fleet of forced-labor fishing vessels. A grueling read — it feels like every paragraph recounts some catastrophe or abuse aboard the boats and then follows it up with “(The company that owns the ship did not respond to requests for comment.)” That grows wearying, and I would have appreciated a bit more geopolitical contextualization, if only just to break the horrors up. Urbina also places blame with individuals in a way that rankles me — “Nothing is likely to change as long as American consumers are willing to look the other way.” But the piece has just explained that it’s incredibly difficult to determine the provenance of seafood, since so few records are kept so companies can “hide their ties to ships with criminal histories.” What is a consumer supposed to do, besides, I guess, sharing Urbina’s article?
Skip Without Guilt:
“Melting Pot” - Vinson Cunningham microbraids at Jaja’s African Hair Braiding. I’m not sure the three long block-quotes Cunningham picks are especially evocative; perhaps onstage they sing. And he can’t seem to decide whether or not the show would work as TV — he goes back and forth in a way that suggests the thought sparked other thoughts; still, it could be tidied up.
“Cryptoball” - Gideon Lewis-Kraus does not go finite into that good night. This may be an attempt at the last word on Michael Lewis' new book; I've been up to my eyeballs in the “unholy amount” of SBF reporting and Going Infinite coverage specifically, so it was always going to be an uphill battle to articulate any new perspective on the book or the figure. Does Lewis-Kraus manage it? Well, the first two anecdotes he delves into happen to be the same two Matt Levine recently highlighted, though he glosses them a bit differently. (Lewis-Kraus' quick mention of "a day of slantwise games" at Jane Street gets unpacked at length by Levine.) Mostly, the novelty comes from Lewis-Kraus’ slightly strained attempts to draw a parallel between Lewis’ project and SBF’s: The writer is “taking a highly contrarian position on the margin, and he hasn't done all that much to hedge the trade.” The review’s positivity is also a surprise, after roasts in the Times and elsewhere; Lewis-Kraus’ appreciation of Lewis’ “stupefyingly pleasurable” prose is sweet. Underneath the plaudits lies a bit of the breezy skepticism, common in this magazine, in which barbs are all the spikier for being unemphasized. (“The final chapters of the book are dedicated to an evaluation of Bankman-Fried's story that stops just short of credulity.”) Still, I wanted a wider view of Lewis’ project, one that would analyze it not just as a risky bet on a kooky acquaintance but as a troubled late example of the iconoclast biography. What could be built where this big thing is burning down?
“Transformer” - Michelle Orange disassembles Madonna. Orange is put in a tough spot: The book under review has no “original takes, fresh intel, or freewheeling analysis” for her to analyze, so she can only recount the same worn biography of Madonna and squeeze a few of her own opinions in at the margins. But those opinions aren’t the freshest, either: “The Internet and social-media culture,” believe it or not, “could be said to have out-Madonna-ed Madonna.” Orange is better discussing Madonna’s music, at its best “a lipsticked invitation for listeners to take mischief and pleasure as seriously as she did,” than she is spinning media-studies theses about her totemic importance. Mostly, though, she just seems baffled by the idea of a Madonna biography by a writer who “set out with no particular knowledge of or attachment to Madonna,” who could possibly approach her with “admiring dispassion.” Orange has skin in the game; as with Madonna, it’s a shame for her to cover up.
“Under the Carpetbag” - John McPhee shoots hoops with his old friend Bill Bradley. McPhee has the blanchest of the many cartes belonging to the magazine’s old guard that have stuck around. This is essentially a shaggy-dog story with no punchline, but told in the charming, meandering style of an earlier era of the magazine. Your tolerance for, say, quoting from a student’s essay from McPhee’s “Princeton writing class” because her father was a gold-medalist backstroker will determine how much enjoyment you can get out of a prose style I’d call “midcentury-modern” — “Actually, I was five feet seven at my zenith and have lately condensed,” or “Coming through the door, you faced a curvilinear wall with an Italian bicycle hanging on it like a work of art, which it was.” As much as I like that tumbler-of-scotch quality, these are such meandering observations that I wanted a sharper edge. Maybe, heaven forfend… a bit more editing?
“Close to Home” - Inkoo Kang finishes Reservation Dogs. I don’t really get the point of publishing a mixed-to-negative review of a show that’s about to end — at least, a review in which the criticism isn’t cultural but formal. Sure, it might have been nice if the show’s focus was sometimes wider; it would also make it a different show. As for Kang’s prose, I continue to stumble over phrases like “montage-level deep.”
“Trial by Combat” - Susan B. Glasser assesses all scenarios regarding national-security adviser Jake Sullivan. The magazine has had plenty of direct, boots-on-the-ground Ukraine war reporting. It’s also had lots of historical-contextualization reporting. What it’s mostly lacked, and what Glasser is happy to provide, is heaps and heaps of detached political reporting on the machinations in Biden’s state department. I can enjoy this sort of thing, but frankly I have an easier time enjoying it when it’s about, like, healthcare website rollouts, and not about picking which kinds of deadly weaponry we send abroad, and when. The omnipresent distastefulness of realpolitik is one thing, but when you’re using a metaphor in which Richard Nixon says “send everything that flies” to the Yom Kippur War, then summing up an Obama official’s argument that “the problem today is that Biden has been more Kissinger than Nixon,” you’ve lost perspective. What is bleakly compelling are the frequent mentions of Israel, as above, and also in the frequent reference to the “Israel model” in which the U.S. supplied military aid and weapons “in order to give Israel a ‘qualitative military edge’ in the region,” but made “no explicit pledge… to fight on Israel’s behalf if it is attacked.” It goes without saying that the Israel-Hamas War puts these lines in a different light. Even for a workaholic like Sullivan, there is much to be done.
Letters:
Gabe says last “issue was a banger!” On Gideon Lewis-Kraus’ piece on lying social scientists, he says, “I'm a sucker for a good debunking, especially of sort-of pop-psychology ‘thought leaders.’ It says some pretty bad things about the field, the way structural incentives are set up for splashy findings, and I'm not sure how you get around that. Sort of a depressing counterpoint that I keep seeing ads for the TV show based on Ariely [The Irrational] when I watch sports.”
Michael’s favorite was Paige Williams’ journey at the Neshoba County Fair. “Great example of an interesting but, to me at least, under the radar topic. I too spent the first half of the piece wondering when the inevitable zoom out would happen.” And re: Jackson Arn’s review of Ed Ruscha — “It does seem a little farfetched that Ruscha's big problem is that there isn't a monoculture for him to respond to anymore. But still happy to have strong arguments about art or ‘arts’ more broadly in the magazine.”
Susan “really appreciated” David Kirkpatrick’s piece on a right-wing legal group — “but hey, I’m a lawyer.”