Last Week’s New Yorker, week of October 5

“‘HAPPY JACK’ SHAEFFER
1844 — JUNE 28, 1906
BLOWN TO ATOMS IN A MINE”

Must-Read:

“Danger Drive” (Letter from Colorado) - Peter Hessler drives a Rocky Mountain highway. A hugely ambitious, bizarrely and profoundly moving piece, this is also still, at its core, a piece of infrastructure writing. Yes, it’s a metaphor: The dangerous road that nobody will fix because that’s not how we do it in America. But Hessler is attuned to every pebble; he winds us around this story so that when we’re back at the start, the landscape looks new. Yet every detail of this vista can be seen from the beginning: In the very first section, going paragraph by paragraph, there’s the natural danger, the metal-mining history, the tourist accidents and suicides, and the silver Honda – its fall, its debris, the elaborate rescue, and the voice inside. Seven chapters, all accounted for, and each stop along the way comes with its own points of interest.

The history is self-evidently fascinating – Otto Mears’ story is ready for the jaded American art-movie treatment, already equal parts Killers of the Flower Moon, There Will Be Blood, and First Cow. (“As the Army escorted the Utes out, Mears charged them tolls for using his roads.”) The rescue-mission section is noticeably similar to Paige Williams’ recent journal from the Smokies, which made me think at the time about Americans’ “partial, private solutions to public problems”; Hessler revels in the jargon of ingenuity, but we move on quickly. (Good thing; descriptions of monofilament line give me Hemingway-scented agita.) The suicides-and-miracles section looks for the line between respect and eerie detail; like an unfortunate driver, a few moments misjudge the distance. Hessler gradually builds to a point about personal responsibility and its limits, but his prose is so lively and the scene changes so rapid you don’t notice – until he produces a dialectical reading of the accident that also sums up the piece. Which matters more: What we contain, or where we look? Don’t think too hard about it; this is tricky terrain. Keep your hands on ten and two. Stay tight.

Window-Shop:

“Threat Level” (Books) - Beverly Gage goes nowhere fash with FDR. A standard historical book review, but no less gripping for it. Why did FDR fail “to act or even to fully comprehend what was happening until it was almost too late”? Gage answers the second part first, and somewhat dismissively; if Hitchcock’s book accuses the president of “confusion and undue caution”, Gage wants to make sure we know that between the antisemitism and the anticommunism of the “foreign-policy establishment”, F.D.R. can hardly be blamed. It’s odd how little agency this portrait grants the man. As for the first part, Gage warns against “false certainty” and wants us to consider that “hesitation, pragmatism, and self-interest” can also be politically salutary. She sounds almost like a member of Roosevelt’s cabinet, urging him to focus on winning issues like the New Deal. Despite my skepticism of her spin, Gage does excellent work conveying the thrust of Hitchcock’s argument without just quoting it; the martini arrives neither dry nor wet.

“The Grid and the Curve” (A Critic at Large) - Daniel Immerwahr drains the circle and circles the square. The first half has a well-worn but still relevant thesis: The blithe destruction of Native American earthworks and the senseless but at least conceptually egalitarian gridding of land were, in practice, precursors to our founding genocide. Much of this is classroom-level (did you know about the Dust Bowl?) and while it’s meant as a joke when Immerwahr says “the grid treats the Earth as if it’s flat, which, famously, it is not”, in the midst of various other common facts the joke doesn’t land. Gridless suburbs aren’t much better, of course; Immerwahr ends with the usual YIMBY pitch, which is, again, sensible but common. Still, if you’d like to get fired up about the politics of place, this is a good enough place to start.

“Extreme Home Makeover” (The Theatre) - Emily Nussbaum unconsciously uncouples. The Ionesco sounds thrilling; I can hardly wait. (Though the director’s newsletter that Nussbaum namedrops – and please, can we not call it a Substack? – definitely reads like A.I. slop.) The “pretty but unnervingly smooth” Cherry Orchard, which I already caught, she gets basically right. That both shows are reconfigured revivals doesn’t need, or get, much extemporizing. I like that Nussbaum alternates between even portions and one-short-one-long reviews, depending on the shows at hand. Here, if the Chekhov didn’t fire on all cylinders, it was a big enough truck (those loads of fake dirt!) to warrant more than a blurb.

“Ice Ages” (Personal History) - Nick Paumgarten is a chip off the shot block. Paumgarten is pretty clearly trying to write his Barbarian Days, a manly memoir-through-sport, complete with nearly identical cover design. His voice is more neurotic than Finnegan’s, and an uncharitable reader may dismiss this as a tortured reification of the same aggressive masculinity it wants to rise above. Maybe it’s not that deep? I found Paumgarten’s childhood anecdotes mostly convincing; his best stories, though, are those least in need of unpacking (“On the ice,” their Slavic coach “wore red sweatpants and old skates, and used a stick with a straight blade, no curve at all”) – whereas the more directly philosophical material feels imposed backward from the present. The present-day story, in which Paumgarten’s passion for assistant-coaching his son’s team eventually takes on baggage, can’t decide if it wants to take a small story seriously or wink at its own low stakes. (This may be less of an issue across a book, where the stakes come with the territory.) It’s easy enough to sum this piece up: It’s only a game. Why you have to be mad?

Skip Without Guilt:

“The Sting” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang will have the catch of the day. Feels short on space and substance – after the historical setup and the plot synopsis, there’s little time for formal analysis, and trying to avoid spoilers at the expense of coherence (“one shot in particular” doesn’t really get described) while giving away the ending to a film not even under review (I was gonna watch Predators, man!) is annoying. If Chang is irked by the film’s morals, he ought to get the space to make his case. Cutting for time is so network era.

“Borderlands” (Profiles) - Anthony Lane rides the Pawlikowski slopes. Very annoying intro – opening with someone’s attractiveness isn’t that much less gross when it’s an older man. From there, the usual zany Lane-y style is not as out-of-place in a profile as one might worry, but neither does it really enhance our view of this sly, still filmmaker. We are told but do not really see that Pawlikowski is “wry and convivial”; the descriptions of his early documentary work are quite nice (one film “finds lyrical scraps at the damp and tattered edges of society”¹) but not very personal. Perhaps he is too much a profiler to be profiled: As Lane notes, “it is characters who have muscled their way to the forefront of his imagination”, yet his character is hard for Lane to pin down. Lane also says one “can’t help raising” questions of how the personal touches the filmmaker’s work, yet Lane seems reluctant to raise it himself: We’re told “Pawlikowski paused his filmmaking career to raise the children on his own”, yet those children are absent here, as is any home life. It’s not that I need these things, just that Lane gestures toward their importance, then doesn’t provide – even suggesting, in the final line, that each film becomes his home. But Pawlikowski only refers to them as “‘a roof over my head for three years.’” One wonders if Lane’s left enough headroom.

“Character Work” (Pop Music) - Amanda Petrusich would watch one thousand Mileys. I assumed that this would be yet another instance of that cliché, the disappointed take on the followup to an artist’s best project; but even that was giving Petrusich too much credit. The entire first half of the article (and much of the second half, too) refers exclusively to Miley the celebrity and her very biggest spotlight moments of almost twenty years ago. Do we really need to hear again that ‘Party in the USA’ is a good pop song, or that her V.M.A. performance was “a bonanza of what we might now call millennial cringe”? (What is actually millennial cringe is using that term in such a stilted, winking manner.) “Something Beautiful” was a solid, arty, ambitious pop album, and the easy story to be told about her newest, “Bass Persuades”, is simple: It’s a less-convincing set of less-solid songs. Because Cyrus has never been able to write lyrics, the production is everything; she’s trying to reference house music here, I think, but she hasn’t enlisted any house music producers, so it all just sounds like dated radio pop instead. (Why a project this warmed-over and easy to pinpoint even warrants coverage in the magazine is another matter.) Petrusich covers some of this, but everything comes back to “questions of persona” – which even Petrusich seems bored by. I do like the Madonna reference in the last line, which suggests a dialectic of pop-star sincerity that might be a more interesting place to start. Madonna’s superb new record was a much bigger and more interesting moment this year, showing that even after forty-three years of variously successful reinvention, a pop star with a point of view can entrance us – why aren’t we talking about that?

“Should I Stay or Should I Go?” (Annals of Law) - Eyal Press laws out of all devices. We’re really getting this article now? Not when Trump was elected, not a few years in when there was no denying his ideology (well, we got it then too), not at the end of his first term (well, we got it then too), not even at the beginning of his second term, but now? We are so unbelievably far past the point when government lawyers quitting or getting fired makes any real difference. It’s been a decade of institutional destruction at this point. Evan Osnos covered, in 2018, loyalty as a principal qualification, the exodus of the conscientious, and the erosion of professional independence; he even devotes a few paragraphs to administration lawyers in particular. Adam Entous covered Fiona Hill six years ago, who entered the administration, found herself marginalized, accomplished little, and left with only a magazine profile to show for it. So what does Press, the third fiftysomething otter with a side part to tread this ground, have to add? A rather thin Albert Hirschman framing device, and a number of baroque solos from the world’s smallest violins. (You had to take a job at a private law firm? Kim, there’s people that are dying.)

Letters:

No letters, just your periodic reminder that paid subscribers receive the Cartoon & Poem Supplement, which, like the rest of this newsletter, is just what it sounds like.

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