October 2, 2024

Last Week's New Yorker Review: September 30, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of September 30

"(Best Portuguese Language Christian Album, for example)"

I know this newsletter is by far the latest it’s ever been, but I have reason to believe that I actually have enough school-day free time (plus transit time I can use to read) that once I get in the flow, I should be able to keep my regular publication schedule. Appreciate your patience during the adjustment period.

Must-Read:

“Rhythm Collector” - Daniel Alarcón stretches the elastic band of Latin music. A personal appreciation of a “genre” so broad it can hardly be captured, and a review of a group that tries to capture it anyway. Alarcón makes a home in the songs he covers and lets us inside; he’s a warm host and this is a cozy space. The length is just right (the expansion from the usual music reviews, while slight, makes a huge difference in how far the piece is able to take its ideas) and Alarcón’s prose brings the needed poetry when describing sound (“the bass lines that spread over the tracks like dark ink seeping across a canvas”) but is otherwise simple, which is perfect: Two or three instruments, that’s all you need for intimacy. 

Window-Shop:

“Coming Alive” - Oliver Sacks licks envelopes. Assorted correspondence from Sacks’ early Parkinsons research, with letters to his parents, a hated boss, Robin Williams, et cetera. The first few letters to his parents are really excellent – they’re a portrait of a mind at hard work, communicating Sacks’ character and his intense focus but still making time for the needs of family. (“Before I forget, thank you, Ma, for the motorcycle leathers which arrived a few days ago.”) The letter to “a former lover”, John, is airier but no less precise, and the contrast between Sacks’ selves is compelling – it’s so hard for writers to capture when we feel we’re being watched. The interiority of correspondence is still occluded, but it’s differently occluded. The middle bounces around a bit – it’s sketchier, there’s less dramatic focus, but it’s still eminently enjoyable to feel the steam rising from Sacks’ intelligence. Only the ending falters – the film adaptation just isn’t Sacks’ work; he’s less engaged, and more starstruck.

“Immaterial Girl” - Jia Tolentino eulogizes the transcendent star Sophie. The first section is a well-written but straightforward career recap, with nothing new for anyone generally familiar with the artist. The actual album review is a bit cramped at just three short paragraphs, but they’re tremendous, providing context, vivid description (one song is “a spiderweb of hard filaments, a million strands in every direction, each of them vibrating to the beat”) and a legitimately moving ending. This may be a one-off, but if Tolentino is on the pop music beat now, we’re in good hands.

“Close Quarters” - Helen Shaw chants big house, little house, back house, flop. The Roommate, a barren star vehicle, isn’t an especially interesting failure; Family is mostly notable for its site-specific staging. Shaw makes a lot with that thin gruel, building, respectively, to a sharp point about the “sly artificiality” powering star vehicles, and a goofy meditation on the author as viewer. Still too much repetition as to the incoherence of the former show, and not enough space to do much more than dismiss the latter. But Shaw is Shaw.

“Tattoo Caucus” (Talk of the Town) - Charles Bethea knows from tribal lines. Perfectly unambitious – just a grab-bag of fun anecdotes about inked pols. It works!

“The Escape Artist” - D.T. Max says Mafia? They’ll hardly know her… whereabouts. No sense of propulsion; despite the high stakes, the story meanders from one case study to another without urgency. The priest Ciotti’s job doesn’t have anything to do with secret identities or spycraft, he’s just a charismatic middleman with a moderate thirst for publicity. He’s likable, and his stories are compelling, but his interiority isn’t deepened beyond “doer of good”. (There may just not be much beneath his forceful helpfulness.) Max keeps close by his side, and the story has consequent shortcomings – following the work of an activist without criticism risks feeling like advocacy for their cause, which ought to be avoided no matter how worthy that cause is. It’s also perhaps a bit strange to track a man’s work so closely in a story mostly about the female victims of abuse – not to say Ciotti isn’t a figure worthy of inspection, just that there’s no sense of his working within a system full of actors – everything feels like his idea and his execution, which can’t possibly be the case. Max knows how to write, of course, and despite the sagginess of the broader structure, each of the case studies individually is visceral and tense. But perhaps its viewpoint could’ve been less Catholic and more catholic.

“Briefly Noted” - Both nonfiction books sound gripping, both fiction books sound wonderfully bizarre.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Uncommitted” - Andrew Marantz knows pushing the Democrats left can be hit-or-Michigan. I appreciate that Marantz manages, without directly inserting his opinion, to make it pretty clear how he feels about pro-Palestinian protest by means of the historical analogy he patiently draws: “Even if the antiwar movement did contribute to Nixon’s victory, it may have hastened other developments in American life, such as ending the draft, that were arguably as important.” Even Marantz can’t make sense of the calculus behind the Dems’ refusal to platform a Palestinian American at the Convention, which is really just an optics stand-in for Biden’s continued abetting of Israel’s genocidal actions (an approach which seems to be working out great for all involved). The opening and closing sections here suggest a focused and fascinating deep dive, but the piece itself is very scattered and overlong. The political chatter of Michigan Muslim organizers in a hookah lounge is moderately interesting but hardly related to matters of strategy; they’re just discussing how they, personally, are going to vote, which is essentially irrelevant. It also contributes to the idea that the only voters whose minds will be changed by the Palestine issue are literally activist Muslims, an incredibly cynical view (although not one I think Marantz is intentionally trying to push). Significantly worse is the long digression into RFK supporters, which seems to have been copy-pasted from some other document – its relevance to anything else here is neither articulated nor understandable (RFK isn’t even pro-ceasefire), and the section isn’t nearly fun enough to work in spite of that. Whether that spoils the piece will depend if you’re contractually obligated not to skip sections – if one were to leave it out (it begins “A lot of Michigan voters…”), this probably jumps to a mid-window-shop. Hint hint.

“Merely Players” - Giles Harvey finds Our Evenings odd. There is something frustrating about a consideration of a writer I’ve only vaguely heard of but who Harvey considers to have “the finest body of work by a living writer of English prose”, in which pretty much everything we hear is couched in criticism or backhanded compliment. First we get a lengthy delve into Hollinghurst’s highly questionable treatment of race, followed by a new book which seemingly attempts to atone for these sins but in the process introduces new problems. Because I don’t know Hollinghurst, I’d like to be shown his brilliance instead of merely being told about it. The review of the new book is, word for word, well-written, but it left me without much of a sense of what Harvey’s experience of reading the book was like – it’s more of a formal analysis, which is fine, just a bit dry. James Wood, for example, excels at doing both things at once. Harvey leaves us halfway there.

“Family Style” - Inkoo Kang says the family that walks runways together, stays together. Surely a mixed review of a fashion soap opera should provide plenty of opportunities for wit, but Kang doesn’t really find them; this is very straightforward. The usual – no frills.

“Sensory Overload” - Rebecca Mead munches down eyeballs, oh oh oh oh. The connection of annoying didacticism to “art” by a chef that doesn’t even have a background in art is incredibly obnoxious, and Mead takes the bait. This sort of thing infests every artistic field, because big swathes of the public like their food prechewed, but literal food has been granted some immunity until now, because sophisticated flavors still have a comparatively low barrier to access – and often what’s considered “sophisticated” is actually just foreign. From what Mead says (although it’s very clear she’s not a food critic) it sounds like there’s little sophistication of flavor at Munk’s spot, just small bites with hacky and overbearing themes. I have no problem with political messaging in food, but there’s no need for grandiose metaphors – food is literally political; there are all sorts of ways to make your restaurant reflect values (sustainably grown food, a unionized workforce, a fully accessible design) without actually serving the lesson up on a plate complete with a video of the intended vibes. Even the famous eyeball is just a giant tacky plate with a little circular dish on top. The emperor isn’t just nude, he’s swinging his dick around. 

“Move to Trash” - Louis Menand has a weak constitution. A dreary lecture you already received in tenth grade civics class. One paragraph literally begins “As everyone knows”. More importantly, Jill Lepore literally wrote the exact same piece two years ago, but with significantly more detail, wit, and style. There’s even a parenthetical reference to a related project here, so it’s not like Menand can claim to have skipped that piece. Menand’s lobotomized rendition only shows bits of life when he’s criticizing the books he’s reviewing; even then, he quibbles over misleading data points instead of really considering the issues with the broader picture. (His glancing late reference to the horrible move toward a right-wing constitution rewrite is bizarre – doesn’t he have anything to say about that?) This is pointless and dull – I hold that truth to be self-evident.

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Letters:

Susan highlighted “what just has to be one of the best names for a bicycle shop ever” in Anna Weiner’s piece on Rivendell: “Allez LA”.

What did you think of this week’s issue?

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what if the Joker

was blue and orange?

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