The Weekend Special (June 10)

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

“Beyond Imagining” by Lore Segal. No Munros. ladies, blindness, belonging. Segal’s extended series with these Upper West Siders is more impactful considered as a whole – it extends through time like life, and since Segal is 96, that’s a long life. Segal’s brief, rather modernist nuggets of daily life are always enigmatic but not always especially resonant. I’m not sure if her resolutely confusing setups, which feature a lot of name-dropping we have to keep up with, are meant to mirror something in life – or if her interest just lies somewhere far away from popular fiction’s impetus toward legibility. In either case, you have to reread to grasp every detail here, but none of those details add up to anything much. Her dialogue style is distinctive – it reminds me of Neil Simon with less jokes – but it doesn’t always benefit these stories. The tales are ordered rather oddly, moving from more to less emotionally weighty – so we start with the decline and death of Ruth, and end up with… the difficulty of getting rid of furniture. Because I myself have been working through the process of getting Austrian citizenship (my grandmother was a child survivor) I found the third section, exploring this very thing, the most interesting –but even then, it didn’t illuminate anything about the process. Those interested in Segal’s project should read this – it’s short – but on its own it doesn’t offer much for anyone else.

🍳 Weekend Essay

“How the Fridge Changed Flavor” by Nicola Twilley. One Sontag. capon, cheeseburger, tomato. A killer opening anecdote leads into a rather lumpy piece – it’s no surprise that this was excerpted from Twilley’s new book on the subject; you can practically see the scissor marks. Twilley’s not in any rush, despite the piece’s brevity (after all, she has a book to fill) – there’s a paragraph-long sidetrack into brain freeze that doesn’t add much – but these first two sections are generally very good fun. Before we’re even halfway done, though, she’s settled into her real focus, the ex-Monsanto researcher questing to make a supermarket tomato that doesn’t taste like cardboard. Those mealy pale orbs’ grossness is only partially attributable to refrigeration in the first place, though, and even so, this is a tangential topic. That could be forgiven if it were gripping, but Twilley just provides a stock description of the process of genetic engineering research. That’s a perennial topic for the magazine – see strawberries in 2017 or SweeTango apples in 2011 – which makes sense; it combines a light consumer-choice story with a research story. Still, the narrative is much the same every time, and Twilley’s quick iteration, without many notable details, is skippable.

🍳 Your Pick

“Anatomy of Error” by Joshua Rothman. Two Herseys. attached, atonement, tumor. These days, Rothman focuses mainly on philosophy, but here he discusses a medical memoir – and finds a way to weave in the philosophical that is both more elegant and deeper than some of his more direct treatments. Henry Marsh is a neurosurgeon whose reflections are uncommonly dark and anxious – he is burdened by his work. As Rothman puts it, “he writes about his errors because he wants to confess them, and because he’s interested in his inner life and how it’s been changed, over time, by the making of mistakes.” This is a fairly short piece, and it’s really only in the final section of just five paragraphs where Rothman really psychoanalyzes Marsh. Before that, it’s mainly a focused recap of the book, with enough quotes to give us a sense of Marsh’s style and temperament. Rothman guides our tour so carefully that his eventual conclusions might feel predetermined – but by grounding them in philosophical concepts (“moral luck”) and outside reading (the novel “Saturday”) they at least feel sturdy. He builds to a final three lines that are such a punchy summation of Marsh’s book’s whole deal – with implications so much wider – that they’re bound to stick with me long after I’ve forgotten the rest of the piece.

🍳 Special Letters Section

A reader recently pointed out that I hadn’t been highlighting the responses posted as comments in the letters section. Indeed, I thought I was being emailed whenever there was a new comment, but it turns out this was not the case. How embarrassing! I’m saving a few of those past couple months’ comments for the next regular issue, but here’s some of what we missed!

Heather writes in about Joyce Carol Oates’ story “Late Love”:
“…the story tells us early on that the husband and his first wife divorced before she died, which makes the murder-plot fear even less plausible / effective. I thought the subtle, slow revelation of the husband’s insensitivity, need to control, and dismissal of her concerns, was very well done, and it was shaping up to be a modernized Gaslight, except instead of the high stakes of death and estate planning, the stakes would be lower (being married to someone who, you realize, doesn’t respect you, and only seems to love you when you’re pretending nothing is wrong). If she had stuck to this, which would have been harder to land, the story could have been one of her best.”

Heather also wrote an excellent critique of Mary Grimm’s weekend personal-essay from a few weeks back: “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 overhearing a conversation she’s having with herself.” I actually think the second point is a strength of the piece – the obliqueness is sort of modernist, and though it will disappoint those hoping for more therapeutic unpacking, it’s a valid approach. But I agree on the other two counts.

Heather also-also recommends this episode of Decoder Ring to fans of Stereophonic (or just Helen Shaw’s review of Stereophonic.) I saw the show twice and will be listening shortly.

Caz defends Peter Singer, reviewed by Kelefa Sanneh: “He's in a whole other league to the other authors. A stooge? A glib and asinine dismissal of a man who has given more and deeper thought to the world than the rest of us ever will.” I agree that he’s an important figure – but I’m far from a fan.

“Your Pick” is a piece chosen by a randomly selected paying subscriber. 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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Does anyone enjoy my putting songs at the end of these things? I can easily come up with enough to include one in this edition along with the main edition. Here’s one this time, anyway.