The Weekend Special (June 24)

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.

🍳 Fiction

“The Buggy” by Roddy Doyle. No Munros. push, pull, purpose. A very concise story in which a drifting older man regains a bit of self-confidence after rescuing what we Americans’d call a stroller, a story he then embellishes to his son. It’s pretty easy to reverse-engineer the story’s construction: The writer sees something odd at the beach and thinks about what type of person this vision might be especially meaningful to. Because of this, there’s a predetermined quality to the central character; it doesn’t help that this sort of adrift middle-ager, newly empty-nesting, has made an appearance in Doyle’s last two stories in the magazine, to considerably more interesting effect. Elegance isn’t everything; there are no extraneous bits in this story, each move serving its purpose, but because of that there aren’t enough places for life to seep in.

🍳 Weekend Essay

“It’s Mourning in America” by Cody Delistraty. No Sontags. after, bereavement, closure. A very short essay on the American approaches to grief. There’s an air of the debate club to Delistraty’s prose; indeed, he worked as a speechwriter. I don’t doubt Delistraty is sincere in looking toward past approaches in grappling with the loss of his mother, but the very thing that’s interesting about this – the meta approach of grief research as a method of grieving – goes totally unremarked upon. Where, too, are all the quotes? Bringing up Walter Benjamin and allowing him only two words of his own is a shame. It’s as though Delistraty wasn’t especially interested in his own research, and decided we could do with a flash-card summary. That approach doesn’t give us room to explore, or even space to breathe. Delistraty’s upcoming book on the theme will presumably go into more depth, but for such a psychologically weighty topic, this skim of the surface is surprisingly, and unfortunately, lifeless.

🍳 Your Pick

The picking reader asks that I choose a piece from 2020 “that moved or inspired you, or that fried your brain with its originality or depth.”

Naturally, thinking about the COVID year, I turn toward the magazine’s coverage of the pandemic, and for me its early peak was this innovative multi-authored piece.

“April 15, 2020” by various authors. (May 4, 2020.) Three Herseys. novel, notice, now. This roving portrait of the city and its COVID response, as told through the stories of its many inhabitants on a single day in April, presents a lyrical, profound, and restrained view of the pandemic; it’s one of the few “how we live now” stories not to flatten its narrative beyond all usefulness. It’s also essentially just a giant batch of Talk of the Towns (without as many jokes) which never try to inform each other too literally, or grow into too preordained of an emotional arc. The excellent photography, in a variety of styles, adds to the sensory potpourri. Because there is no overarching point or even mood, one is able to reflect on one’s own mood, and view of the world. I’d love to see more experiments like this in the magazine, not just when emergency strikes. Reading it again, I wasn’t as struck by time’s passage as I thought I might be – I still remember all this stuff, but it neither feels like yesterday nor like a very long time ago. It feels like… about four years. Maybe that, more than anything, is the sign of change.

“Your Pick” is a piece chosen by a randomly selected paying subscriber. 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 – and pieces from other venues are okay too, if you ask nicely.

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