Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🥐 The Weekend Special (July 7)
The Weekend Special
Pieces are given up to three Knapps (for fiction), Downeys (for essays), or Fords (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Knapp, Downey, or Ford indicates a generally positive review.
🥐 Fiction (One)
“The Silence” by Zadie Smith. One Knapp. power, postcard, postpartum. A fairly ordinary menopausal-freakout narrative, elevated by Smith’s usual English clarified-milk punch. I found Smith’s Takes more compelling than the story itself; that her inspiration was so much about labor representation deepens the story’s picture of stasis and silence as forces beckoning this woman in. They’re magical, ego-dissolving; do they preclude community and organization? Smith gives hints in both directions; it’s hard not to think of her very public wrestling with her left-Liberal politics, and the way those politics valorise a certain silent understanding – the empathy of the gaze without the touch. But this is all pretty subliminal; mostly the story is interested in a sort of unobtrusive psychological probing – there is a surprising amount of remove despite regular moments of free indirect discourse (“How lovely, this castle”), as though the story were being retold by Sharon’s therapist to her advisor. One of my all-time favorites from the magazine, Mary Gaitskill’s “Acceptance Journey”, is a similar sort of narrative; the protagonist is just one year older, there. But Gaitskill’s prose suggests the infinity of life, whereas Smith, here, has refined things down to the point of parable. She’s good at it, but does it serve this story, which is inspired by a writer who Smith loves for her everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach, “with an emphasis on the kitchen sink”? Smith’s story is smooth, but it doesn’t sink in.
🥐 Fiction (Two)
“Jubilee” by Jhumpa Lahiri. Three Knapps. mother, move, mourning. Between this and the Hilton Als personal history, the line between autofiction and autobiography is certainly shaky in this edition – Als’ piece has about as many poetic flourishes, and this story closely matches the outline of Lahiri’s early life. It’s also Lahiri’s first time writing directly in the English language in a decade, after a series of stories written in Italian then translated. One senses the energetic charge behind this change; Lahiri’s language arcs and cracks. The story is not a Mavis Gallant riff, and only reflects her inspiration loosely; this allows it to achieve a richness of its own. Lahiri takes from Gallant permission more than structure; permission to probe a personal psychology and allow a story to coalesce around it. (The Gallant story is also quite literally referenced in the first paragraph.) Lahiri achieves a depth of feeling that is quite astonishing, looking through a “lace curtain” fifty years thick but allowing her past self a certain grace; there is deep sadness and a bit of dramatic irony, but there is never a sense that the speaker holds anything over her past self beyond the accumulated weight of time and, perhaps, wisdom. Lahiri’s treatment of the speaker’s mother, and of the speaker’s changing understanding of her mother’s story over time, could easily sharpen into judgement – of the mother or of the self – but instead there is a patient and profoundly ethical insistence on allowing for the partiality of knowledge. The story is a great advertisement for litany; while the talismanic significance of only a few objects is deeply discussed, there is a sense that every object noted must hold similar stories, through which we glimpse the spiraling depth of a full life. Masterful stuff; struck with “dappled light”.
🥐 Fiction (Three)
“The Comedian” by Ottessa Moshfegh. No Knapps. worry, world, worksheets. Moshfegh at her sharpest and most misanthropic, to little effect. Moshfegh’s appreciation of Harold Brodkey gives us some sense of where she went wrong. She clearly wants us to understand her speaker, like Brodkey’s, as a frustrated budding artist, whose bitter, bloody, bullying view of his world is partial. But she confirms this view at every turn, because the world of her stories is a comical one – a Bukowski-inspired universe of folks with dirty habits and weird secrets, but one that feels dishonest because, unlike Bukowski, Moshfegh didn’t really come by it honestly. (To be clear, Moshfegh’s alienation is obviously genuine; her interest in depravity, though, is more aesthetic than sympathetic. She doesn’t see dead bodies on the street, she Googles them.) The standup is also similar to Adam Driver’s character’s comedy in Annette, in that it’s vaguely mean-spirited but bears no resemblance to a joke at any point. But there it’s at the beginning of the first act before things spiral into total lunacy; here the scene is meant to hold weight – it’s titular! – and instead it collapses. Is this a joke?
🥐 Weekend Essay
“What I Learned from My Mother and the U.S. Postal Service” by Casey Cep. One Downey. bags, bathrooms, backgrounds. The title is mostly a framing device for a moving, if slightly saccharine, book review. If you like hearing about all the snow, rain, heat, gloom of night, et cetera, there is plenty of that here, and it’s doubled-up on: As soon as Cep’s done recounting her mom’s travails, she moves on to those recounted in Stephen Grant’s memoir. Eventually she endorses Grant’s political case for the institution, which is plenty stirring without the extended Thornton Wilderish tribute to “the angels” with a “glass of ice water” and such. The sap undercuts her case, really – even if every postal worker were a lazy jerk, it would still be worth funding the system. I mean, can you imagine if we privatized the DMV?
🥐 Random Pick
“Richard Rovere” by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. (Sep 17, 1984). One Ford. middle, memoir, metropolis. Moynihan, now of benchless Train Hall fame, was a centrist pol and intellectual who pushed causes from the admirable to the dispiriting. On the verge of a clearly foreseeable electoral disaster, he spends his time waxing poetic about the anticommunist liberal who covered Washington for the magazine for three decades. The piece is better if you read it in Moynihan’s distinctive “supporting role in His Girl Friday” voice; the circumlocution stops being enervating. Of course, Moynihan gets more than half of what he says dead wrong; he puts a lot of stock in the idea that Washington will inexorably eclipse NYC, but that this is a problem because there are “too few filters of sensibility” in that town. A certain powerful yet insensible New Yorker has proven that your place of origin is largely a horse of a different color. (Sorrel man bad.) Moynihan also asserts that between opinion polling and the T.V. age, all that matters in politics anymore is “lots of money, a good pollster, and the best commercials.” It’s a slyly cynical position, but one that the next election, and the next few decades, would largely bear out… though it would then be totally overturned by the mix of grassroots and astroturf efforts that largely defined the politics of the 2010s. But Moynihan certainly wasn’t saying he’d be right forever, just that he was right, right then. As for Rovere, Moynihan’s interest and adoration mostly lies in his shift from communist to liberal; according to Moynihan, most communists either “denied what happened” or jumped straight to the other side of the horseshoe. (Is that true? Well… not exactly, but having spent some two hours researching it, I’m just going to say it’s complicated.) If this piece is a self-congratulatory lecture from a machine Democrat, it also reveals that a few malignant imperialists at least used to know how to write.
🥐 Something Extra
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA (that’s the name), in which a bare-faced Estonian clown solves audience problems in ways that are just heartfelt and dry enough not to scan as twee, absolutely worked its magic on me. It did also feel a lot like Mounsey and Weiss’ Open Mic Night on a high dose of sertraline.
Cold War Choir Practice was easily the strongest of the three Clubbed Thumb productions this year, a political farce packed inside an ‘80s family sitcom (or maybe the reverse), with plenty of other bits and bobs. Against long odds it coalesces.
Sunday Song:
Weekend special is for new songs now (for as long as there’s new songs I like). I’m upset that ‘the dare’ produced something this good but it is very good.
More (very) soon!