Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🍳 The Weekend Special (May 13)
Howdy.
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
“We’re Not So Different, You and I” by Simon Rich. No Munros. toxic, comic, forty. A glorified Shouts and Murmurs, and one that makes me feel justified in my decision not to regularly review Shouts and Murmurs. What more can you say, really, besides “Not Funny!”? In this case, the warmed-over “supervillain has a normal life where he struggles with friendship” premise smacks of Robot Chicken without even its minor puerile pleasures. Rich’s hyper-committed execution might improve things somewhat – his Thanksgiving Shouts was a prime example of how taking your premise as far as it can possibly go will work wonders even when that premise is thin – if he could find a gag that didn’t 1. proceed very obviously from the idea that a supervillain doesn’t have friends (he’s socially awkward in over the top and cruel ways, the superhero is patronizing toward him) or 2. rely on a wordbank of easily identifiable references and supposedly funny phrases (Rick and Morty, The Bachelor, Buffalo Wild Wings, ass cancer). Everything is oversold, too: My favorite moment is when the henchman Scuzz, upon learning he’s “always going to be, like, this rhinoceros,” reacts like this: “‘Man,’ Scuzz said. ‘Fuck.’” But this is followed by Death Skull awkwardly attempting a pun and, when it bombs, Scuzz repeating “‘I can’t believe I’m going to die like this,’” and then there’s even more awkward banter. I prefer my jokes tossed-off; here, they’re all laborious. This magazine’s current era has much to recommend it, but something has been lost of the often wildly esoteric humor of its earlier incarnations. Good spot art (by Tim Lahan), though.
🍳 Weekend Essay
“Swimming with My Daughters” by Mary Grimm. Two Sontags. pregnant, prone, protected. This sort of personal essay at its very best – though it made me realize I may have some insurmountable issues with the style. Grimm’s voice is so gorgeously patient and measured; it never strains for poetry, beauty, or intimacy, but finds it anyway, hiding in tiny moments. (The paragraph which begins “I lay there between the two of them, sweating a little in the July heat,” is amazing – the moment feels like it could unravel an epic swathe of Proustian reminiscing if Grimm let it, but by keeping things measured she enriches the surrounding piece.) The portrait is really about Grimm’s view of her daughters – and on that level it succeeds completely, filling in the tale of a young mother’s perspective, changing over time, in a way that neither lingers over struggle nor occludes it, and never makes too obvious what the piece’s “project” is – so that it has time to sneak up on you. Still: I was surprised, in the end, how little I felt I knew about either daughter, or about Grimm. We hear about their personalities – but it’s all really about Grimm’s perceptions of their personalities; the “I” keeps pushing in. (“When Val and Sue fought, though, I couldn’t be rational.”) Maybe the real tool that fiction gives us is the ability to depart from that I; to rove a bit. Even tight-first-person autofiction does this – the gap between the speaker and the writer is enough to create that air. I haven’t refined this thesis – I’m just grasping toward why a piece that I can find no formal flaw in still left me feeling that some of its possibilities remained ungrasped. Bright readers, perhaps you’ll have a better idea.
Randomly generated Picks start next week! I’ll spin a month’s up right after I publish this.
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 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.
I agree about the essay. I would say that there are a few things obstructing it from feeling successful and complete. One is the tendency to use speculative language— “it may have been the first Christmas,” etc. All essays like this are necessarily speculative (reliant on memory, a single POV), and drawing attention to it should serve a thematic purpose, and here, it doesn’t. The second is the tendency to avoid direct self reflection. She looks at her feelings and behaviors obliquely, rather than truly attempting to analyze and understand her impulses, her daughters’. The third is a lack of one, uniting conflict or question. I suppose she would say it’s the question of why she insists that her daughter join them in the water, but this question doesn’t feel all that important (the daughter resists, then relents, and that’s it) or representative of the greater family dynamic and she doesn’t ever really answer the question or come close to doing so, and she doesn’t complicate the question, either, so it just sits, unanswered and unimportant. These three issues are related and work to make the essay feel too vague, too like a list of loosely connected semi-memories. An essay should feel like insight into a mind as it works something out on the page, or tries to, anyway. This feels more like overheating a conversation she’s having with herself.