Last Week's New Yorker Review: ☀️ The Weekend Special (September 9)
The Weekend Special (September 9)
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.
☀️ Fiction
“Last Coffeehouse on Travis” by Bryan Washington. No Jacksons. curiosity, customers, cups. I generally really enjoy Washington’s writing: His dialogue is elevated in a startling and gratifying way, especially given the casual realism of his setups; his continual focus on the lives afforded by queerness, which can sound corny in theory, is gratifying in practice; he allows a story to take on emotional tenors delightfully perpendicular to what’s expected. (Visitor, in particular, is one of my favorite stories in the magazine in recent years.) And all of that is here. But somehow this story misfires completely. The central conceit about, basically, needing to love a cup of coffee in order to make it correctly, is just totally corny; even if the speaker’s wax-on-wax-off journey felt entirely genuine, it would still be considerably too narratively pat. Another thread concerns a “young” child who seems simultaneously five, twelve, and forty-seven, in the traditional manner of poorly written children. I appreciate that Washington is trying to let his narrator see this kid as “a whole human being,” as he says in his interview; unfortunately, the kid is so flimsy it mostly seems like the narrator is projecting, which doesn’t work for the story at all. The final thread, concerning the speaker’s situationship with Ken, a regular, is alright, but feels totally disconnected from the rest of the story, and doesn’t progress in especially dynamic directions. (That’s arguably realistic; it still weighs the story down.) While Washington’s dialogue still has a snappy, tart quality, it’s undercut by a weird tic – constant references to what people’s faces are doing (“Margo made a face that could’ve dropped an elephant”, “His face had turned absurdly red”), as if Washington is suddenly nervous we’ll misread his tone. (Often, that tone seems to be “ambiguity” – I counted six references to ambiguous or unreadable faces, which must be in service of some theme, but I can’t think what.) While I suppose the egregious sappiness of the piece is technically perpendicular to the banality of its plot, surely that doesn’t count as subversion. What a weird disappointment. It’s not me, it’s you espresso.
☀️ Weekend Essay
“The Beautiful Mystery of Rooting for Aaron Rodgers” by Zach Helfand. Two Malcolms. fans, facts, falls. A charming and low-stakes story about the divergence between the “messier personal” Rogers and the man on field. Of course, it’s low-stakes in part because Helfand doesn’t mention that the spectrum between “provocateur” and “monster” can be filled entirely with sports stars, and even just with NFL stars: The Wikipedia page for “NFL controversies” has a long list of “notable criminal NFL cases”, which doesn’t even include most of the domestic violence and sexual assault lawsuits and accusations. If Rodgers is a hero, in part that’s because on any given week he may be playing against Deshaun Watson (and for that matter, if Watson gets injured he might play Jameis Winston. Something is rotten in the state of Ohio.) “I find it’s best to know a bare minimum about the players on your favorite teams, and no more,” says Helfand, but everyone will have a different idea about when enough is enough. Plenty of people still cheer for Tyreek Hill – would Helfand? Of course, those cheers only fund Hill in an extremely indirect way – and when complicity is diffuse, it doesn’t sting as much. Maybe that’s for the best. If Rodgers is a fascist lunatic, well, so’s your uncle.
☀️ Your Pick
“Café Loup” by Ben Lerner. (September 5, 2022.) Three Rosses. chewing, choking, child. This structure, which expands the instant in which the speaker dies or nearly dies, is a natural fit for the short story, which is always concerned with its own impending end, and in the tricks words can play with time. In particular, Tobias Wolff’s widely taught “Bullet in the Brain” is a classic flash-fiction iteration. (It even shares with Lerner the last-second cut to an obscure childhood memory.) Lerner brings his usual wide-ranging and inimitable brilliance, which is impressively difficult to review: its recursiveness and almost compulsive poetico-theoretical idea-spinning means that it contains its own critique. It’s writing about thought that’s also about how writing about thought is a trap – a choking hazard. And here I am, thinking and writing about it. There’s some thought for food. (It’s also a very funny story, and setting it in a recently-closed writers’ hangout suggests it is in part a comedy about the death of the scene rendered literal.) It is interesting that my interpretation of the ending isn’t even mentioned by Lerner in his interview: Early on, it’s mentioned that “you’re everyone in your dreams”, and while the final line’s “you” that is “everyone” and everything in the restaurant is deliberately ambiguous (Astra? The speaker’s mother? The speaker? The writer? The reader?) the line clearly places us in someone’s dream – or, at least, in someone’s story. As with the best twist endings, it delivers us somewhere we knew we were all along, and we’re surprised to find ourselves there.
☀️ Something Extra
I got a job! Huzzah. I’m teaching 9th grade English in Harlem. Starting very soon. I’m going to do my level best to keep this newsletter coming on time, but I appreciate your understanding if and when it doesn’t. If you have any good teaching advice or readings, please send them my way! Here’s hoping autodidacticism can triumph over underpreparedness.
“Your Pick” is a piece chosen by a randomly selected paying subscriber. (Except when it’s a “Random Pick”, in which case it’s chosen by random number generation.) Have a piece you want to be "Your Pick"? If you're a paying subscriber, you can also skip the vicissitudes of fate and force your way to the front of the line! 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.
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The Sunday Song:
Your note about Ben Lerner's “Café Loup” as part of a sub-genre of fiction that "expands the instant in which the speaker dies or nearly dies, is a natural fit for the short story, which is always concerned with its own impending end, and in the tricks words can play with time," reminded me of the 1964 Academy Award and Palme d'Or winning movie "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" based on an Ambrose Bierce short story.