Last Week's New Yorker Review: September 25, 2023
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of September 25
Must-Read:
“Makeover” - Molly Fischer reads the Glossier dossier. Makes a canny and surprising choice to focus on the topic of one book — Glossy, on the “passing Zeitgeist” of Glossier — while essentially reviewing another by proxy — Taylor Lorenz’s Extremely Online, on “the business of internet fame.” Fischer manages to find a quote from the latter to go with almost every scene she pulls from the former, and the withering ending convincingly cringes at Lorenz’s conclusions. That commentary laces a peppy business article, chronicling a brand’s journey through some of the hoops of internet fame. There are a lot of moving parts, and it’s to Fischer’s credit that the result seems breezy, never labored.
Window-Shop:
“The Suitor” - Rachel Syme in-grey-tiates herself to Thom Browne, reinventor of the suit. (With photographs by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari.) I can take or leave the photos, which lean into Browne’s editorial goofiness and thereby end up looking too much like ads for his clothing. Syme’s piece is good fun, especially when she focuses on the connections between Browne and various of-the-moment stories in fashion: She finds links to the rise of menswear, the increase in gender-nonconforming clothes, and the decline of America as a “hub of global fashion.” As a nonexpert, I appreciate these tidbits, and Syme keeps them from feeling forced. Her sense of humor shines, too — Browne’s signature look reminds her of “some mischievous scamp out of a Roald Dahl book who is always conspiring to put a dead hamster in the headmistress’s bed” — so you trust her belief in the success of Browne’s sartorial comedy, as when he’s “daring an overcooked gag… to detract from the sombre mood of the proceedings.” The piece’s arc is a familiar one from past Fashion and Design issues — a show is prepped and put on, then the designer relaxes at home — and perhaps the fit is slightly loose for Browne, though then again, maybe Syme’s just taking her time down the runway. It’s fun regardless.
“The Mother Trap” - Merve Emre dismantles Mom Rage. Quite vicious, dismantling a shallow popular-nonfiction book with the sort of withering tone usually reserved for the truly malign. Even the press comes under fire for not using “better editorial discretion with a first-time author.” Whether the book is pernicious or merely sloppy, perhaps more key is whether sloppiness can be pernicious. Emre clearly feels it can be, and she makes the case quite strongly, though the book often seems to be just an easy target, picked almost at random, for an entire realm of sloppy “feminist nonfiction” which lacks the dialectic consciousness found in an earlier era’s formative works, which are regurgitated without being deeply understood. A fair critique, though it’s also part and parcel with the entire field of pop nonfiction, where good ideas go to be flattened. If you want to see Emre wield her daggers, and don’t mind the somewhat soft target, this is a treat.
“Bodies At Rest” - Helen Shaw starves at Annie Baker’s new play Infinite Life, “a knife without a handle.” Shaw is mostly interested in how the new show slots into Baker’s oeuvre and what it reveals about her process, which doesn’t leave much time for specific formal analysis. The plus side of that is how little the review demands the context of the actual show — it works perfectly well on its own, almost as a prose-poem.
“True West” - Rachel Monroe reads a new biography of Larry McMurtry, ambivalent Texan novelist. Never makes any kind of case for McMurtry’s relevance to the present moment; in fact, it does the opposite, basically, proclaiming him a “figure from another era,” “lashing himself to a dying industry,” books, as his family had done with cattle. That’s probably the right call; it lends the piece a forlorn air, with the twang of pedal steel. More quotes from McMurtry’s writing would have been nice, though Monroe’s more concerned with him as a figure than as a writer. Most interesting when it directly addresses the romance of the late western, the thing McMurtry tried to subvert, but ended up reinforcing. It’s hard to write a tale of a dying world and not have it come out an elegy.
“Concealed Carry” - Hua Hsu leaves his handbag at home. I have no idea how many of the various pocket-related anecdotes come directly from the history of pockets under review, but I suspect it’s most of them, which brings this close to the line separating review from summary — there’s no more than a praising phrase or two regarding the actual book. There’s not really a thesis here, either, beyond “Pockets are interesting!” The pocket anecdotes selected are a mixed, er, bag; the lengthy third section, on womens’ rights to pockets, is pro forma, but there’s livelier stuff toward the end.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Designing the Apocalypse” - Sam Knight feeds mealworms with “critical” architect Pavels Hedström. Implicitly poses an interesting question: Architecture is harming the world, so is it possible to make work that breaks established systems while still producing something that is recognizable as architecture? It’s a political question, really — essentially a rephrasing of the battle between reform and revolution. Ultimately, the trouble is “how to make a living,” the question Hedström asks of MOMA’s design curator. The piece ought to focus more closely on this question, as it’s a bit scattered, trying to address four topics: Along with addressing architecture’s difficulties responding meaningfully to climate change, Knight also explores who Hedström is as a person, who he is as a designer, and the historical precedents for his work. Knight leans heavily on Scandi-accented quotes (“I really remember when I started to dig under the tires… that this is how I would like it to be when I work as an architect”), and anecdotes straight from the “weird genius” playbook (a school project was “doing something that’s completely out of line, but it works.”) Still, Hedström never fully coheres as a character. Most troubling, though, is the piece’s overall implication that he is the future of architecture and design, since it’s clear his pieces are mostly museum-bait — wanting them to be practical is not the same as making them practical — and that there’s no obvious, reformist path forward. Knight needs to state that more forthrightly, and allow his piece to consider more deeply what the alternatives might be.
“Outside Man” - Vinson Cunningham profiles Jeremy O. Harris, playwright enfant terrible. Bewilderingly light on gossip, and nicer to Harris than he’d be to himself. Cunningham’s affection for Harris is sweet, and he’s convincing as to Harris’ charms and talents, but surely a source of such drama, so much literal and figurative shit-flinging, deserves a bit more edge in his depiction. Harris’ stance toward power is a complex one; as Cunningham says, he “could start a food fight in the theatre world’s living room and still be invited to sit at its dinner table”; elsewhere, he says himself he’s “interested in… if not class ascension, then class association”— he’s talking about voices, but the quote applies to his whole personage. Harris’ great strength as a public figure, then, is his ability to stir things up; the question is whether things can ever meaningfully change as a result of that stirring. That’s not just my question, it’s Harris’ great dramatic question, too; Cunningham gestures toward it, but he’s indeterminate. I want to know what he thinks!
“They Came by Night” - Anthony Lane sees two freaky far-flung flicks. The first review, even for Lane, spends shockingly little time on opinion; it’s clear he’d rather be watching Eva. At least he formulates a critique of El Conde, and even grounds it in the director’s past work, though I’m not sure his notes make sense — surely many masterpieces are all “predator,” no “prey.” Most of Buñuel (who Lane loves!), for one.
“Best Foot Forward” - Ziwe gets arch about her wikifeet rating. There’s a certain style of comedic personal essay that I find grating, in which every point is stated flatly and obviously, as if it’s a middle-school five-paragraph essay covered by a veneer of irony. Anyway, this is that, jumping from present-day self-Googling to a few childhood anecdotes (“One time in the fifth grade…”) concerning sexist or racist microaggressions… mostly. A few just feel thrown in to fill space (the grandparent-image story?) It all brought to mind Doreen St. Félix’s brilliant, critical review of Ziwe’s show; here, though, the jabs don’t even land.
“Bloomsbury Chic” - Rebecca Mead breaks fantastic and gay with the Edwardian-era group that “happily discarded” the era’s habits, plus its clothes. A tiresome, repetitive treatment of a fairly interesting subject. Yes, it’s compelling to hear that the group “combined observance of convention with its subversion,” and that their habits of thought and dress have been influential to modern designers… but in absence of another structure, the piece repeats that same point over and over again, with little to no development. Its sections feel ordered arbitrarily. The prose, too, is plodding and dry; one cries out for Mead to take a lesson from the group and add a few splashes of color. On the group’s “sometimes transparent, sometimes occluded queerness,” the treatment is rather basic, too, never going further than this quote from Bring No Clothes, the book Mead draws most of the piece from: “The queer members of the Bloomsbury group had to navigate prohibitive societal norms… It can make us realize that, even today, we all live by such codes, as much as we believe that we are free.” No duh.
Letters:
Gabe, discussing last week’s Fall Books issue, says: “I really want to read everything. …Cool to have a James Ellroy review too, I used to really like his stuff but I think I’ve outgrown it (and/or he became a bit of a prisoner of his own style, and as much as he knows his protagonists are evil, he also likes them and sympathizes with their views a wee bit too much).”
Not only did last week’s issue have few skips, last week’s and this week’s issues were both on the significantly long side… which is why this edition is coming to you late on Thursday. Relatedly…