March 8, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🌱 The Weekend Special (March 3)

The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three Boyles (for fiction), Harrimans (for essays), or Parkers (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Boyle, Harriman, or Parker indicates a generally positive review.

🌱 Fiction

“Keuka Lake” by Joseph O’Neill. Two Boyles. pickup, pity, piece. An odd little character study in which a woman’s loss and loneliness manifests as a manic paranoia. O’Neill is an excellent prose stylist, and if he’s very reliant on the sort of repetitious sentence structure that often indicates dry comedy more than actually being funny, each of these moments still works in context. (“She is wearing Yolanda’s coat and Yolanda’s snow boots and Yolanda’s insulated mittens.”) I was surprised how much latitude O’Neill granted his protagonist’s troublesome thoughts about secret murder in the interview about the story; calling her partial break mere “disinhibition” suggests that O’Neill sees something admirable in it – and, read one way, the story can seem almost to glorify a manic episode. If that’s troublesome, at least it’s also interesting, and it’s certainly possible to read the story in a completely different way, as a portrait of how our awful, bloodthirsty, alienated world breaks through even the sensible and self-contained soul and fractures it. (One for the book club: “In Beatriz’s company, there are no other Nadias.” Is this reunification a sign of healing, of identification with Beatriz, of regression away from a more liberated internal self? It’s a central statement, but totally ambiguous.) The final paragraph breaks out into a transcendentalist meditation, all of a sudden; there’s also a parade of made-up names, mirroring a similar list at the start of the story – a really strange device which I suppose is meant to position this as an arbitrary sliver of life; it could just as easily be the story of any of these other people. Things never really coalesce, but I think that’s by design; this is one to puzzle over. 

🌱 Weekend Essay

“The Chat Room Behind the Pelicot Rape Trial” by Katie Ebner-Landy. No Harrimans. unconscious, uncanny, undercut. I’m pretty repulsed by the way Ebner-Landy dismisses one kind of determinism (sexual trauma) before arriving at another – that the real reason these men committed these crimes was because a chatroom website made it possible. At first I was willing to go along with her – certainly, anonymity is a powerful force – but things grow increasingly alarmist until she’s speaking of “‘more primitive psychic states’”, a “state of exception” in which these men were divorced from their realities, in a sort of dream-world in which they lacked agency. I don’t think this is entirely true, but I think that tech is at most a tiny part of what convinces these men of their lack of agency; a much larger part is the misogyny and alienation built into capitalist society. Part of Arendt’s point was that an entire “apparatus” was required to create the conditions under which evil feels banal; when Ebner-Landy says that only a “chat room” was needed in this case, she’s wildly, maybe willfully, misreading Arendt. Ebner-Landy takes an incredibly revealing quote from one rapist – that he did it out of “solitude and boredom”, pretty much exactly what Durkheim meant by anomie – and suggests that the real issue is just that he “hadn’t got what he wanted out of life.” But that’s not what he’s saying at all! Ebner-Landy is so wedded to the framework of capitalism that even this direct confession can only be taken as bitterness at a lack of capitalistic success. She suggests that society needs to work to understand these men, so as not to “let ourselves off the hook.” That’s fine – but suggesting that the trial’s lesson has to do with finding “where to draw the line between normal and pathological desire” and “in what ways desire is altered by the virtual world” is to completely misread the trial’s lessons. These men haven’t been “altered” by some other “world”, rendered abnormal by some strange pathogen – they’ve learned the lessons of the culture in which they live. The sickness comes not from without, but from within. 

🌱 Random Pick

“This Year’s Model” by Michael Kelly. (June 17, 1996.) Two Parkers. tenuous, technicality, talk. Who’d have guessed that the most blistering take I’ve read on the Democrats’ current travails would be something a centrist wrote in the ‘90s? I have a general sense of Clinton’s deal, but given that I was four when he left office (I know, I know) the details aren’t visceral for me, and it’s hard to know how literally to take leftists when they call him a social conservative. But Kelly, who I wouldn’t exactly call trustworthy in general (here’s Tom Scocca with a blistering and definitive posthumous takedown), I at least grant the trust of contemporaneousness when he says Clinton is, “on social issues,” running “to the left of Pat Buchanan but to the right of, say, George Bush”. It’s sick that Kelly’s issue with Clinton claiming he’s going to gut welfare and put far more cops on the streets is that he maybe can’t be trusted to actually do so; it doesn’t matter, though, because Kelly’s analysis is still sharp, and in many ways Clinton can be seen as a predecessor of Trump: “You vote for Clinton, and who knows what you’ll get? Maybe he’ll turn again – back your way.” There are no principles, there are only deals; it’s a politics of nihilism loosely cloaked in a politics of populism. And centrists still push this “we’re just following the polls” message. This is an uneasy glimpse of the past, clarified by the horrors of the present.

🌱 Something Extra

The first two acts of Henry IV at Polonsky, now closed, were the best thing I’ve seen in a long time, a fantastically performed and edited take on perhaps my favorite Shakespeare play. Third act was clumsier, but still excellent. Is there a better way in the world to spend three hours and forty-five minutes? Well – maybe at the just-finished Frederick Wiseman retrospective at Lincoln Center; I caught High School 2, Belfast, Maine, and Domestic Violence 2, all brilliant. I’ve also seen some really terrible stuff, including the ambitious but slickly idiotic Anne Imhov gesamtkunstwerk at the Armory, the dull as dirt Moby Dick opera at the met, and a historical play so amateur-hour it’s journalistic malpractice that the Times gave it a mixed-to-positive review.

Sunday Song: