Last Week's New Yorker Review: đł The Weekend Special (July 1)
Pieces are given up to three Munros (for fiction), Sontags (for essays), or Herseys (for your picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Munro, Sontag, or Hersey indicates a generally positive review.
đł Fiction
âVincentâs Partyâ by Tessa Hadley. No Munros. woolly, worry, working-class. Hadley is usually quite good at balancing all the British period detail that she summons so brilliantly with sharp-edged plots. Perhaps the issue here is that this story is the first third of a novella, though Hadley says itâs expressly meant to work on its own. Regardless, the thin plot here is smothered by period detail, much of which is annoyingly thematically literal. (âIt was a big thing among the art students to want to mingle across the boundaries of class that their parents were so intent upon policing: their mothers putting doilies on cake plates,â et cetera â I have to cut off that quote because Hadley goes on for so long.) Eventually, all the laborious scene-setting delivers us to⌠a very uncomfortable conversation between two incredibly obnoxious drunk boys and the central characters, which we get to hear every word of. The mood is cultivated well enough, itâs just an unpleasant place to spend time, and Hadley doesnât summon a payoff that makes it worthwhile. The sudden revelation of a loss at the end is deliberately abrupt; still, it has to ring true as human behavior and dialogue â it didnât, for me. Hadleyâs prose is always wonderful; sheâs a master of the adverb. This effort fell apart in my hands, though, like some kind of stale British tea cake.
đł Weekend Essay
âHayek, the Accidental Freudianâ by Corey Robin. One Sontag. conviction, contortion, consciousness. Thereâs no reason why this couldnât have appeared in the magazine; itâs even pegged to a new-ish biography of Hayek. I suppose the weekend essay is deliberately grab-bag-ish, but I do prefer when its contents are recognizably different from the print essays. The titleâs peg to Freud isnât totally inaccurate, although Robinâs essay is more wide-ranging; the piece cuts somewhat randomly between incidents in Hayekâs life and his central ideas â itâs engaging enough, but I canât say I walked away with a considerably clearer conception of Hayek. The introductory section is probably to blame â it sets the piece up as being about Hayek and authoritarianism, but that subject is mostly abandoned. The most interesting section by far, a must-read on its own, is the last, where Robin explores how Hayek pursued a divorce from his wife, with âconsiderable subterfugeâ â much of which was rather Hayekian. If Robin seems a bit pleased with himself for drawing those links, theyâre nonetheless still compelling. I get the sense (based on no evidence, to be clear) that Robin had to rush through some of his ideas about Hayek to fit a certain size â which ought not to be the case with these essays, which, after all, arenât bound to the page. Let there be sprawl!
đł Random Pick
âAll Dressed Up and No Place to Goâ by Whitney Balliett. (April 25, 1970). One Hersey. big, brassy, obsolete. Glad to read my first piece by the magazineâs longtime Jazz critic, a position that hasnât been filled in a while â though Richard Brody steps up online now and again. No wonder, since in 1970 Balliett was already mourning its near-obsolescence, at least as a profession â the title here refers to the âdressed upâ high-school and college students he sees perform in Mobile, âa huge army of potential professionalsâ, trained for a field that hardly exists. Jazz teachers are part of a âclosed-circuit, self-perpetuating systemâ where the only career is teaching jazz. Sadly, in this respect jazz was a leading indicator for the entire field of the arts, where making a living has grown virtually impossible. (For more on this, check out my documentary on the adjunct systemâs brokenness, especially for MFA students.) The âhigh-school and college stage-band movementâ, still novel in the early â70s, clings on in only somewhat diminished form; sadly, it doesnât seem to have created many jazz careers, just a lot of overqualified music educators.
Balliettâs writing is very heavy on referenced names â if you arenât already a serious jazz appreciator, itâs hard to know what to do with descriptions like âthe drummer is tough and sounds like the old Don Lamond.â Oddly, Balliettâs more embellished descriptions have nothing to do with music and more to do with his Southern surroundings: âLive oaks, mossy and thick-trunked, clasp hands across the streets,â the houses have âgrown fat in an easy climateâ. The piece is written in present-tense (âI receive a telephone call not long agoâ, it begins, somewhat strangely), a choice Iâve noticed in many â60s-â70s pieces in the magazine â when that practice began or ended, Iâm not sure. And Balliett focuses closely on the racial mix of each Jazz group, which rings awkward to modern ears but is more honest than ignoring race, especially when discussing a Black art form. I enjoyed this piece largely for its historicity; if Balliett was a great describer of sound, he doesnât showcase that here. The interviewsâ glimpse into a past way of thinking about art as industry â which isnât so different from the present way â are what set my heart a-thumping.
âYour Pickâ is a piece chosen by a randomly selected paying subscriber. (Except when itâs a âRandom Pickâ, in which case itâs chosen by random number generation.) Have a piece you want to be "Your Pick"? If you're a paying subscriber, you can also skip the vicissitudes of fate and force your way to the front of the line! Venmo $20 per request to @SamECircle, then write me an email or a note on Venmo letting me know you've done so and what your requested piece is. No limit on the number of requests, BTW. If you want to give me a more open-ended prompt ("1987 reported feature by a woman") that's great as well â and pieces from other venues are okay too, if you ask nicely.
The Sunday Song: