Last Week's New Yorker Review: ☀️ The Weekend Special (September 23)
The Weekend Special (September 23)
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
“Ambrose” by Allegra Goodman. One Jackson. timing, tired, tights. On its own this isn’t much of anything – a carefully observed story about a sixth grader that doesn’t aim for any goal beyond that observation (no heights of emotion) yet is too caught up in underlining its own telling (or just sweet) details to work as a purer kind of realism. It’s more interesting as part of Goodman’s longer project, a series of stories about the same family; there, the perspective and tone aren’t set but shifting, and comparing this story to Goodman’s significantly more acidic “The Last Grownup” deepens both efforts. I look forward to the book, but this won’t be a standout chapter – its being picked for the magazine can be chalked up, I’d bet, to the fiction writers favoring tales of young women.
☀️ Weekend Essay
“The Pain of Travelling While Palestinian” by Mosab Abu Toha. One Malcolm. patdown, patience, occupation. The TSA being incompetent racists and the FBI being invasive profilers is not material that will surprise any American. It’s pretty awful what Toha went through, but it’s mostly awful by proxy, in the same way that any given microaggression isn’t that bad except for the endless history of racism and prejudice it echoes and furthers. So I don’t know if quite so much detail about the incompetent and dehumanizing bureaucracy of it all is needed – the point’s clear. The last three paragraphs, which pivot to a different speaker’s story, are more powerful than all that came before. Still, Toha’s spare and elegant language, which isn’t exactly poetic but is still recognizably the language of a poet, is so striking when paired with the dehumanization of his anecdote that this is worth reading.
☀️ Your Pick
“Hogarth’s Progress” by Andrew Graham-Dixon. (December 15, 1997.) One Ross. rake, regalia, realism. These days the magazine’s art coverage tends to be very centered on the formal qualities of the work under review, even for classical painting. This is technically a book review, which is all the excuse Graham-Dixon needs to totally abandon the formal and just talk about the sorts of things Hogarth painted, and what they might say about him. It’s not my favored approach, but it’s executed reasonably well – if you don’t mind the distinct taste of Graham-Dixon’s posh British accent on your lips. The opening anecdote is vivid but barely related to Hogarth at all; the best details in what follows are similarly loosely tied (“Make Sausage of thy Guts, & Candles of thy Fat”, goes a poem which Hogarth… probably recited at one point). It seems to all just be whatever Graham-Dixon highlighted in the book under review. Those details are what I read book reviews for, so I can’t rightfully fault it for being lazy.
☀️ Something Extra
Still thinking about that Rachel Syme perfumer piece. Bad New Yorker cartoon idea: A vampire ordering perfume says “I’d like a gourmand with a ferric quality”.
“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.
The Sunday Song: