Last Week's New Yorker Review: đ„ The Weekend Special (July 28)
The Weekend Special
Pieces are given up to three Knapps (for fiction), Downeys (for essays), or Fords (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Knapp, Downey, or Ford indicates a generally positive review.
đ„ Fiction
âThe Chartreuseâ by Mona Awad. No Knapps. face, falling, fabric. Starts strong! From the first itâs deliberately overegged, delivering lots of free-indirect monologue (helpfully italicized, even tagged with âshe thoughtâ the first two times; you know, for Goodreads) and noir-lit melodrama. Awadâs prose is corny but undeniably propulsive, and at first, it seems in service of a good joke taken half-seriously: A disheveled, post-breakdown shopping addict alienates those around her while trying to claim her newest dress from FedEx. Not mocking the central character, but the system that allows for her â a psychological social satire, basically. It takes a very long time â until the anticlimax of her confrontation with the Express deliveryman â for it to become clear that Awad expects a level of personal investment that the story has neither earned nor clearly asked for. Whatever the central characterâs relationship with her family was, we hardly know â so why should we care, or even believe, that the loss of her wealthy uncle âhad broken herâ? Various bits of language recur, usually one too many times (and six âherbs and flowersâ is fairly egregious), aiming to suggest the repetitive nature of the mind but landing far too neatly, since everything has an obvious metaphorical connection â apparently Awad was aiming for the surreal; she may just be too conventional to get there. The ending is really dire, combining a truly meaningless Gatsby riff (I guess?) with lazy fake âambiguityâ and as much melodrama as she can muster. Sheâs dressed for the story she wants, not the story she has.
đ„ Weekend Essay
âTo Be Young, Gifted, and Black at Fenwayâ by Michael Thomas. Three Downeys. books, boys, Boston. An excerpt from Thomasâ new memoir â his first book since his debut novel eighteen years ago. I assume the new book will address that gap â the synopsis gestures toward a âbreakdownâ and recovery â in context of which this piece may mostly be filling in backstory. But youâd never know it, so dynamic is Thomasâ memory piece, in which Fenway both typifies and stands in for the larger racist world which Thomas and his father move through, with different orientations. The sensory-detail-filled personal essay about identity is a timeless and well-worn form, and itâs not one Thomas destabilizes â he just fills it with so much life, light, and thought that it looks new. His extended portrait of his father, who was, âsimultaneously, honky-tonk and erudite, quoting Emerson while watching âThe Munstersâ on TVâ, is both comic and tragic. Thomas approaches Black literary culture with a refreshing lack of exposition, trusting us to, say, get the Audre Lorde reference without a namedrop (or, you know⊠a hyperlink.) As the story crests in a wave of angst, as Thomas reacts to what he sees as his fatherâs rejection of Blackness with a breakdown, it seems to vibrate with power. If this is the excerpt⊠donât miss the book.
đ„ Random Pick
âWhere We Are Nowâ by Pauline Kael. (Feb 27, 1977). Three Fords. fate, fewer, failure. Is there anything better than knives-out Kael? I have no idea if any of the misbegotten flicks she eviscerates in the back half of this article are any good; I still chortled as she turned the rotisserie. (Jane Fonda âplays one scene on the commode â probably because thatâs the only way anybody could figure out to keep the audience watching the sceneâ; Thieves âis a turkey that falls over without being shot.â) She also walks out of the new Fellini! I donât like his late stuff either, Pauline, but you sat through âa nitwit comedyâ thatâs âa piece of junkâ, and walked out of that?! This is all ignoring the star attraction, though, which is the extended rant eviscerating the state of the film business. Kael canât see the future, so her argument that film is fading would prove wrong on the economics â the tentpole strategy, after Jaws already prominent enough to irk Kael, would, post-Star Wars, become dominant for decades. (And was then replaced by a kind of tentpole-only strategy that she surely wouldnât prefer.) Sheâs also cantankerously repulsed by gore and insistent that it hurts sales â good luck with that. Elsewhere, though, sheâs prescient: Roots, which âshows how TV could finish off moviesâ, was an outlier, and TV would take a little while longer to compete for serious critical attention, but itâd get there; the reliance on TV to sell movies would only increase (even post-internet, a lot of people pick movies to see based on TV ads); and certain statements are as true now as then, albeit for slightly different reasons: âThere is no longer any vital connection between the people who finance the movies and the people who go to them (or stay at home). [ed: Pauline, if only you knew.] Thereâs a morass between. And there are no safe subjects⊠itâs all hit or miss, and if the audience doesnât respond to a big new picture, the producers say, âWhat do the goddam people want?ââ
Of course, Kael wraps things up by saying there are a few upcoming films sheâs interested in â you know, like Apocalypse Now, for instance. I canât say a film like that would never get made today, especially because, uh, you know. But what ambitious, American, auteur-driven movies do we have to look forward to in theaters? Well, I guess thereâs One Battle After Another. And Blue Moon. And Die My Love. And The Mastermind. And The Smashing Machine. And Marty Supreme. Hey, you know what? 2025 might just be like 1977.
And since Iâve covered Kael before, hereâs another:
đ„ Random Pick 2
âSong in Greenâ by Andrew Porter. (Feb 27, 1977). No Fords. winter, withdraw, well-tilled. Porter, the magazineâs opera critic for twenty years, here takes on multiple variations, in person and recorded, of Schubertâs setting of Die Schöne MĂŒllerin. He includes a very lengthy, somewhat stilted translation of the introduction, and huge gobs of quoted exegesis. Most of this is not very interesting, and while I listened to all of the English translation he recommends, and the performance is lovely, I had trouble appreciating it â itâs just so corny and stilted, telegraphing the usual Romantic themes instead of embodying them. I did, though, like the English setting of Schubertâs âThe Hurdy-Gurdy Manâ which Porter recommends. Eerie!
đ„ Something Extra
I had a very hard time making sense of The Gospel at Colonus, at Little Island for a few more days, but it featured some of the most glorious singing Iâve ever heard, and the goings-on were fascinating, even moving, despite my bewilderment.
Sunday Song: