Last Week's New Yorker Review: ☀️ The Weekend Special (December 16)
The Weekend Special (December 16)
Pieces are given up to three Jacksons (for fiction), Malcolms (for essays), or Rosses (for your picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Jackson, Malcolm, or Ross indicates a generally positive review.
Happy weekend, and welcome to… last weekend. Weekends will continue until morale improves.
☀️ Fiction
“Between the Shadow and the Soul” by Lauren Groff. Two Jacksons. touch, toward, together. I think the extended party scene in Fates and Furies is one of the best pieces of writing of the century, so Groff doing her usual thing is catnip to me. Really, the only reason this doesn’t earn a third Jackson is because it’s so comfortable for Groff – there’s no particular fire, it’s a variation on a theme. That theme being, I guess, radical heterooptimism leavened by weariness and resignation, here contrasted more literally with queerness than the usual contrast she draws between it and, like, the chaos of nature and/or the narcissism of the isolated ego. This is a very Heather Havrilesky-coded story, though it ends in a more defeated place; perhaps one can’t truly have “it all” – both the comfort of security and the thrill of the unknown. Or, at least, women in straight relationships can’t. Beyond the plot, which twists vertiginously in that thrilling Groff style and only looks moderately inevitable in retrospect, much of the draw here is Groff’s astonishing language, vining up the wall. (“...she would grow groundnuts on trellises, hibiscus like roses, jewelweed with the little green pods that explode, dooryard violet as ground cover. What joy it was to be dreaming in pictures, to be deep in research.”) There is something maybe offensive in the figure of the gardening teacher: androgynous, intense, slightly evil, obviously a fantasy of Groff’s and not a whole person, exactly. Still, her presence makes the story – it gives a tinge of melodrama that matches the combustibility of Eliza’s interior mess. The Neruda-derived title is a lot, but after weeks and weeks of “Minimum Payment Due” and “Heavy Snow” and “My Camp” and fucking “Plaster”, it’s nice to have a title that isn’t embarrassed by any show of verve.
☀️ Weekend Essay
“What Does a Translator Do?” by Max Norman. No Malcolms. expression, explanation, experience. Essentially a review of a new book philosophising about translation in ways that seem, from what Norman shares of them, pretty obvious and basic – though a lot of good philosophy can feel that way, I suppose. To find the depth in these carefully articulated but fairly simple ideas, one would need an interlocutor with a subtle touch, and Norman mostly lacks it; he spends more time on the plain history of translation than the history-of-ideas; it’s only five paragraphs from the end that Norman even addresses the main idea of the book he’s reviewing; that translation is really about “developing” the original through the translator’s lens. Translating “how a text communicates rather than simply what it says.” That feels, again, really obvious to me; if this sort of translation is a relatively contemporary invention, it’s still not a poorly understood one. And then of course at the end we get a rushed and hackneyed A.I. segue. Siri, how do you say “Enough!” in Esperanto?
☀️ Random Pick
“Mrs. Norris and the Beast” by Constant Reader. (April 14, 1928). Three Rosses. sparkling, sweeping, suffering. Ah, what a treat from the gods of chaos at Random.org! Dorothy Parker’s “Constant Reader” columns are defining classics of the magazine’s early years; a collection of the columns came out, actually, just last month. (Sloane Crossley’s excellent intro was published on the website.) This is representative and thus a blast, the headwaters of humorous American writing, the birth of blogging, et cetera. It’s impossible to overstate it or overrate it. It should go unsaid that I owe this scrappy going concern entirely to Parker. Here she mostly whines boozily (“I am the Under Dog. I am How the Other Half Lives. I am practically the Sewers of Paris.”) and gripes about her assignment, which she barely bothers completing. (“It seems that there is a current superstition that in order to review a book, you have to read it.”) It’s delightful. In fact… I think it’s time for a renaming of the awards. These are now christened Parkers. For the essays, I choose Harrimans, and for the fiction, Boyles. Au revoir, Shirley, Janet, Lillian; thanks for everything.
☀️ Something Extra
Presented without commentary (commentary available upon request): The 15 best pieces of theater I saw this year.
15. Once Upon A Mattress
14. Merrily We Roll Along
13. The Hours (opera)
12. El Niño (opera)
11. Mary Jane
10. Medea ReVersed
9. Maybe Happy Ending
7. Oh, Mary!
6. Public Obscenities
5. Enemy of the People
4. Appropriate
3. The Ally
2. Bad Kreyol
Have a piece from the magazine’s past that you want me to review? 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.
Sunday Song: