Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🍳 The Weekend Special (Apr 1)
Welcome to the Weekend Special.
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
"Allah Have Mercy" by Mohammed Masethu Ali. No Munros. punishment, talisman, bread. I love that we're getting a story diving into the specifics of a minority culture – Hausa Muslims in Ghana. And Ali has a keen eye for the complicated intersecting dynamics governing power in such a culture; the precise differences between how mothers act towards children, how "official disciplinarian" Uncles act toward their nephews... it all rings true. Unfortunately, the story doesn't trust us to understand these dynamics intuitively; it underlines them again and again ("I realized that Grandmother's suggestion was the closest anyone had come to admitting that I had been hurt by the beating") in ways that don't make sense in this speaker's voice – all this would be natural to him, I didn't buy his somewhat distanced and alienated perspective, which is far more likely coming from a long-emigrated adult like the writer. The narrative thread is also choppy; I'm sure this is deliberate, but I'm not sure to what end. Why introduce Hafiz's "jinns" so late, and after there's been a confusingly similar dream-incident with the speaker? Why go into such precise detail about the negotiations with the angry bread vendor, which never come up again? There's a feeling that Ali is afraid of confusing us, but this fear ends up robbing the story of much of its power. The subject matter is worthy, and I like a story that presents a somewhat imperiled child without quite falling victim to the same manipulative child-in-peril narrative (the fearful journey, the tearful rescue) that crops up so often. But Ali hasn't found anything compelling to replace it; we're left with lumpy fufu.
🍳 Weekend Essay
"Piecing for Cover" by Ayelet Waldman. No Sontags. patchwork, stitching, crisis. I'm glad Waldman gets so much pleasure out of quilting, but this is essentially a long, overblown description of why her hobby is cool. Quilting is cool on its merits, it doesn't need all this justification; yes, it "cures trauma" – simply because it passes time and time heals. All the science-scented stuff about brain patterns apply to any hobby, and instead of, say, a poetic reminiscence about the importance of quilting, Waldman insists on going for something far more pop-psychology-inflected. There's a funny, maybe telling typo midway through, when Waldman says that "a number of experts in neuroscientists" endorse hands-on work. This could have gone deeply into the meaning of women's work, taken its references to the Palestinian conflict a bit more seriously and talked about the privilege of aesthetic labor, or even just included more pictures of the quilts – they're gorgeous. But the piece is pat.
🍳 Your Pick
"Jordan's Moment" by David Halberstam (December 21, 1998). One Hersey. bulls, balls, back-and-forth. After a brief contextualization, this is essentially an extended recap of the Bulls V Jazz championship battle – granted some additional after-the-fact pathos, since it describes Jordan's final playoff games. There's no real attempt to grant the series some supra-sport relevance; it mainly centers around Jordan being really great – his personality, his strategy, his raw skill. There's not much surprise here, especially for those who've seen the same series chronicled in far more granular detail in The Last Dance; this hits many of the same beats, without the extra access that time allows for. And basketball doesn't always ring on the page – its players do, but not the sport itself, not like baseball or tennis (which is better read about than watched.) This is still entertaining, though; it's just an all-time-classic sports story, and I especially liked the peek into the NBC Sports head's mindset, his desire for a lucrative seventh game. Still, I think my favorite thing here is that awesome, vibrant illustration of a tongue-out Jordan, by David Mazzucchelli, whose Asterios Polyp I adored when I read it (quite a long time ago). Seems like he retired to just teach after that; in at least that respect, he's the Jordan of comics.
Have a piece you want to be "Your Pick"? If you're a paying subscriber, you can get a review of any piece in the magazine's history: Venmo $20 per request to @SamECircle, then write me an email 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.