Last Week's New Yorker Review: ☀️ The Weekend Special (November 18)
The Weekend Special (November 18)
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
“Heavy Snow” by Han Kang. Three Jacksons. budgies, bus, buries. I’m beginning to think my taste in short fiction is simply “excerpts from novels” – some of the most compelling pieces the magazine has published recently have been that sort of thing. Some credit certainly goes to the editing team for knowing how to snip out a detail so that it has clarity and resonance. There’s also something about a story that diverges from its set path, that gets lost in loops – a scene in this story with an old woman on a bus is perhaps the most reverberant part, but if the story were edited to its core, it’d be the first thing to go. Many hands have touched this story – Kang’s, two translators’ (I wonder how that works…), and many editors’. Incredibly, this has deepened its individuality; there are many fingerprints caught in its surface. I’m taking after the story by bringing everything back to hands and feet, the sensory appendages by which we interact with the world; clearly, the gap between self and other is a major theme of Kang’s, and especially the gap between self and nature. The bus scene reminded me of Louise Erdrich’s stellar story in the magazine also about a bus in snow; all the winter reminded me of Ryusaki Hamaguchi’s work, especially Evil Does Not Exist – and like both those pieces, there is a Man Vs. Nature urgency here that also considers the quixotic one-sidedness of any conflict with a force that is immeasurable and that we are all already subsumed by. Did I mention how gripping the story is, how easily it wields its quest narrative while also undermining it? Did I mention the latent political tensions it explores, tensions which I barely comprehend – I think the full book delves more into the history – but which shade this story in with specificity, with its own bipartite Kang-mal? This story has a visceral grace; it stills the air.
☀️ Weekend Essay
“The Feminist Critic Who Kept Flaubert on his Toes” by Victoria Baena. One Malcolm. letters, leftists, literature. I’m always happy to see someone new writing for the magazine; unfortunately, Baena’s prose is quite clunky and cliché-ridden. (“...their years of conversation and correspondence had also equipped her with certain tools. She had grasped the stakes of his method and knew how to counter it on her own terms.”) But Baena is just an academic who’s found some excellent material and is trying her best to make it accessible to the public. The piece doesn’t need to be literature; it succeeds on its terms, illuminating Bosquet and Flaubert’s rocky intellectual friendship with some fantastic epistolic quotes. They’re two brilliant and divergent personages: Flaubert is witty but self-serious (“Ink is an intoxicating wine: let us dive into dreams since life is so terrible!”) while Bosquet is principled in a way unique to those given no advantage yet determined to succeed – she knows her own merits, and can see when others lack them. It’s no wonder they eventually fall out (she critiques his book, which essentially caricatures her), but it should provide comfort to artists today: Even Flaubert was a messy bitch who lived for drama.
☀️ Random Pick
“On the Edge” by Calvin Tomkins. (October 7, 1996). One Ross. fame, face, phalli. Tomkins’ insider view of Yayoi Kusama is most interesting for what it gets (understandably) wrong about her quest for publicity; namely, that it was a sidetrack and a failure. With the benefit of hindsight, Kusama is now one of our most recognizable artist-brands; while this flattens most of her work for me, it’s certainly in line with her project. Tomkins’ reading of Kusama’s work, which emphasizes its gutsiness and “high-spirited” humor, isn’t hugely original, but it’s about right. His biography similarly won’t tell you much new, but that’s partly because Kusama’s story is a big part of her appeal; it circulates along with every Infinity Room selfie. Jackson Arn’s more recent, blisteringly cynical take is closer to my own opinion, but Tomkins’ pro-art curiosity is always welcome.
☀️ Something Extra
I absolutely loved Dominique Morriseau’s Bad Kreyòl, at Signature through the end of the month; after a matriarch’s death, two Haitian cousins, one from the states and one from the island, try to find friendship. I dunno, I’m terrible at elevator pitches. It’s a very funny show but had me in tears by the end; it harnesses the tools of melodrama but with critical/metatheatrical insight. I found it incredibly smart and powerful. $30 under 35 code: MTC30BK.
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Sunday Song: