Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🍳 The Weekend Special (Mar 25)
Welcome to the Weekend Special. Now with more 🍳 emojis, for the vibe.
Pieces are given up to three Munros (for fiction), Sontags (for essays), or Herseys (for your picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Munro, Sontag, or Hersey indicates a generally positive review.
🍳 Fiction
"Neighbors" by Zach Williams. Two Munros. lycra, west-coasters, separation. Fantastic execution of a well-worn short story form: "A weird thing happens to a guy in crisis." The trick to making it work is for there to be the right amount of separation between the weird thing and the crisis – not too much and not too little – so that each can be viewed through the lens of the other. Here, trouble in the man's relationship makes the inexplicability and unknowability of the other manifest in the stranger he encounters, and the stranger brings the man to a point of ego death that shifts his perspective on personhood. All this is handled with subtlety and grace – though the story does feel a little bit like a square white dude wandered into an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film and got freaked out. It makes sense that the story came to Williams in a dream, it has that feeling – and the dark figure is basically a sleep paralysis demon. The story lacks the haunting sweep of Williams' brilliant prior effort in the magazine, but it has a clever approach to the question of how we view other people – it gets there sidelong, which packs a punch.
🍳 Weekend Essay
"Life in a Luxury Hotel for New Moms and Babies" by Clarissa Wei. One Sontag. care, formula, pacification. A look into a very interesting Taiwanese custom that refuses to become anything else. The essay is steadfastly about the emotions Wei experienced in the moment; there is no later-date philosophizing. That gives things a certain flatness, which actually proves comforting – it reminded me of Taiwanese food, which can seem surprisingly mild to westerners focused on flavor over texture, but is incredible when you learn to love the Q. (I wrote this line before I noticed that Wei just published a book of Taiwanese recipes.) Still, I wanted a pinch of theorizing. Things are so focused on the present moment it seems counterproductive that the story's written in the usual journalistic past tense. It's difficult to assign broader significance to any of the moments Wei chronicles, because the story's world never expands outside her headspace. Yet there's also little poetry here; more than anything, the writing has the bare confessional tone of a diary. Take this for what it is, a finely rendered picture of a unique custom.
🍳 Your Pick
"The Fourth State of Matter" by Jo Ann Beard. (June 24 & July 1, 1996.) Two Herseys. weary, deathly, plasmatic. Tricky to discuss without giving too much away; indeed, even saying that will prick up the reader's ears to early intimations that aren't exactly subtle but still missed me on my first pass. It's clear Beard wants you to go in blind; the summary is coy, and since this piece was originally published in the Fiction Issue (as a Personal History) it's not as though a news hook is assumed – maybe this will just be... whatever they were calling autofiction in 1996. Instead, about halfway through it becomes clear a sudden act of violence is coming, and shortly thereafter the act arrives. I was surprised how much immediate detail the piece went into about the sequence and specifics of the violence itself; I expected it to sidestep the scene and stick with the observational first-person mode it had established. Frankly, the section feels out of place to me; it breaks the spell of intimacy in ways that are hard to recover from. (I wonder, though, if my perspective would be different at the time of publication, when gun-violence narratives hadn't become so horrifically commonplace.) But the piece's much stranger choice, to slot that incident after many paragraphs of the mundane horror of adult life – mostly, dealing with a very sick dog and a regretful ex-husband – works very well, and takes guts. It's a casually profound truth that we're often depressed and overwhelmed before we encounter the unthinkable, yet the far more frequent depiction is that of serenity disturbed. Those early sections aren't perfect; Beard's perspective on her ex-husband feels too manufactured, the setup reverse-engineered so the payoff will land harder. But their mood is very well-calibrated; neither maudlin nor mopey, just matter-of-fact the way depression really is. I take it this is something of a classic, and the last few paragraphs seem to be the big attraction; sure, they're fine, but the piss-soaked dog blankets will stick with me far more.
Have a piece you want to be "Your Pick"? If you're a paying subscriber, you can get a review of any piece in the magazine's history: Venmo $20 to @SamECircle, then write me an email letting me know you've done so and what your requested piece is! No limit on 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.