The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three Boyles (for fiction), Harrimans (for essays), or Parkers (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Boyle, Harriman, or Parker indicates a generally positive review.

🌱 Fiction

“Jenny Annie Fanny Addie” by Adam Levin. Three Boyles. groping, growing, grogginess. A tiny masterpiece, finding a voice that reads somehow both as “a child” and “a Steinian modernist”, and using it to explore the role of narrative in shaping trauma in a revelatory and weirdly moving way. The story is short, and Levin makes the incredibly intelligent choice never to cast it as a future Addie thinking back on a past incident, but neither does he imply that the thoughts we’re getting are accessible to Addie in the moment; there is clearly processing and metacognition that’s been done, but we don’t need to hear that they were done in the future – Levin trusts us to hear the fully unpacked expressions of Addie’s cognition in the past tense and understand the passage of time that every short story contains but that most feel the need to self-consciously rub the reader’s nose in. (The closest he gets: “None of this was speakable. It was barely thinkable.”) The story is quite short, but Levin also makes time for a long digression into Addie’s brother’s discourse on the lyrics to The Band’s The Weight, which reflects the story sidelong, like a parable, while also fleshing out Addie’s family’s dynamics, thereby allowing us to guess at her relationship with her mom, and thus to understand this tiny rupture in that relationship which is also a huge rupture. A highly present and deceptively sophisticated story with something new to say about girlhood. Hasta la vista, baby.

🌱 Weekend Essay

“So You Want to Be a Dissident?” by Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer. No Harrimans. protest, promise, proven. None of this advice is anything other than repetitive and expected (which doesn’t mean it’s bad advice, neccessarily) – but when one gets to the bios and finds out one of the cowriters was a senior policy advisor to Kamala Harris who served in the White House for the last three years of Biden’s term… one wants to hurl. The setup is already pretty offensive, assuming that “Americans tended to think of dissidents” as coming from elsewhere, which is an incredibly sheltered viewpoint, especially at the beginning of the second Trump term. And pointing to Cory Booker – an elected official – as in any way a “dissident” for filibustering is extraordinarily blinkered. (What Booker did was great, but he was acting within the bounds of the system when he did it.) The section on preventing ICE from deporting people gets closer to an actually workable understanding of nonviolent protest; the associated advice, that people need to “find a political home”, is so vague and condescending as to be laughable. (And clicking the hyperlink to Fields-Meyer’s longer essay, one finds absolutely nothing more substantive – just some exceptionally disturbing A.I. art at the end.) Nikil Saval’s article on James C. Scott and resistance had better advice (read that instead!), and he wasn’t even trying.

🌱 Random Pick

“How They Feel” by Edith Oliver. (April 15, 1972.) No Parkers. lively, limp, loose. Really just a blurb of a late-era Tennessee Williams play, which, as you can probably expect if you’ve seen or read any of those plays or even any other reviews of those plays, doesn’t really cohere. Reading the review, like watching the play, “doesn’t add up to much but… isn’t exactly a waste of time, either.” Oliver is an important figure mostly for championing and critiquing upstart playwrights; Williams was not that and this isn’t the best representation of her style or her project.

🌱 Something Extra

I must absolutely rave about the stellar, strange, slippery Rheology, which, consulting my scores and notes, is the best American play I’ve seen in over two years. I don’t want to give anything away, as much of its brilliance is in its unfolding, but seriously – run, don’t walk, to Bushwick. Only through May 3.

Sunday Song: