Last Week's New Yorker Review: ☀️ The Weekend Special (December 9)
The Weekend Special (December 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
“Plaster” by David Szalay. No Jacksons. spending, spaceless, spheres. The magazine usually does such an excellent job at finding a short story to excerpt from within a novel, but this selection doesn’t quite work. In the context of an examination of a lifetime’s emotional numbness, this might work very well, but here it feels too much like another entry in a fairly well-worn genre of grim, numb Forever War PTSD narratives – The Yellow Birds, Redeployment, Bring Out the Dog, I’m sure there are more. After a nicely disorienting beginning, one can parse the genre quickly, and determine, if not the exact incidents that’ll occur, at least their tenor and emotional import. The attempt at mirroring numbness with lots of spare one-line paragraphs does essentially work, it’s just not revelatory – it accomplishes what it’s trying to accomplish and nothing more. The dialogue is quite good, believably capturing non-natives’ “global English” – it reminded me of Anora. There are many things to like here, and the full panorama may be blisteringly unique – but this detail, on its own, feels derivative.
☀️ Weekend Essay
“A Kamala Harris Canvasser’s Education” by Julia Preston. No Malcolms. knocking, knowing, knelling. A literally identical premise to Jennifer Egan’s brief piece in the magazine. Not just in that both are canvassing for Kamala – they’re both canvassing in Allentown, and they’re bringing pretty similar perspectives to what they see. Preston has more space, so her analysis goes a little bit deeper, which is not to say it’s surprising. Would you believe the Democrats’ campaign was impersonal? That a shift toward Harris wasn’t enough to make up for the brief timeframe of her campaign, and the lack of a “movement” that she represented? That the solution is not to imitate Trump, but to communicate with, and listen to, citizens’ needs? It’s all correct, sure – and all unsurprising.
☀️ Random Pick
“The Outside” by Croswell Bowen. (October 18, 1952). Two Rosses. early, exit, exemplar. A favorite subject of the contemporary magazine – the justice system – as seen through the lens of an earlier era, where the modus operandi was based more in observation than in journalistic storytelling. This feels almost like a hyperextended Talk of the Town, focusing on John Resko, a convict on death row granted a last-minute stay and release, who made a career as a painter. (He was played by Ben Gazzara in a biopic released a decade after this piece.) Resko is so eloquent and the piece so reliant on extended quotation that one starts to wonder if this couldn’t have been a short memoir-essay – indeed, Resko wrote a book-length memoir. Bowen brings a newsman’s tone and a snappy sense of timing. Mostly, the piece has held up well politically; it doesn’t explicitly condemn some of the more gratuitously draconian rules of parole, but neither does it exactly justify them. There is one section about Resko learning to draw a policeman more gently that feels pretty condescending, but there’s better stuff about falling in love with Rembrandt and Hopper. Mostly, one comes away with Resko’s monologues, full of patient insight, charged and reverberating. He’s shocked by how much Manhattan has changed, while also understanding that it’s the nature of the city; what’s remarkable to me is the walk he describes taking around-about Foley Square “at midnight or one o’clock in the morning” – I know the present iteration of those blocks well, and in my mind I’m walking with him. “‘It’s so completely deserted then that you can hear your footsteps echo. You see a few lights in the big buildings, yes. You know that the buildings are still filled with thousands of people – scrub women, porters, furnacemen, bookkeepers working late, watchmen. But nevertheless it seems empty. I think it’s about the closest thing you can get to infinity. Maybe it’s because walking down that narrow street is like being in a cathedral.’”
☀️ Something Extra
I’ve been thinking a lot about the new Audra McDonald Gypsy, which I did love – but more because it’s a non-ruined Gypsy than because it makes any especially interesting choices.I kept thinking it felt like a Gypsy for a Kamala era that hasn’t arrived – say as little as possible about the material, avoid offending anyone, and cross your fingers. Audra’s take on the title character is decidedly sympathetic; she’s a hard-charging mother but she’s never a monster, hardly even a narcissist – she’s certainly not mad. The happy ending is played straight. There’s a lot of potentially interesting stuff about Blackness – talented tenth rhetoric, vaudeville as descended from minstrel – that’s only barely visible at the very edges of Audra’s performance; mostly the production features clunky attempts to make the same lines about blonde wigs work in this new context. Even if it feels designed not to spark conversation, the show still works – it’s propulsive, it’s funny, “If Momma Was Married” is weirdly revelatory. But it could’ve been so much more.
Have a piece from the magazine’s past that you want me to review? 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.
Sunday Song: