Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🥐 The Weekend Special (August 18)
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.
🥐 Fiction
“Something Has Come to Light” by Miriam Toews. One Knapp. grandkids, grain, grave. I will always think of Toews as the fantastic performer at the heart of Carlos Reygadas’ astonishing film Silent Light. She also turned her experience on that film into a novel, one of the cooler art-begetting-art stories. Almost all of her fiction concerns insular, conservative Mennonite communities; here, the story she tells is just too similar to various other classic narratives of repression in isolated places to really light to life. The epistolary form nicely sets up the build toward a confession, but doesn’t especially serve the story; most of the last two-thirds could easily have been an interior monologue, without sacrificing much effect. There is certainly some suspense and intensity here, which isn’t a given in a story this short; I appreciate, too, how much time Toews makes for almost random details – the hung photos, the sister in Santa Barbara – which keep the story from reading as some kind of object lesson on the part of Toews. (Even if perhaps the character intends it as such, in the world of the story.) The thing I’ll remember most here is the fantastic title.
🥐 Weekend Essay
“Always Inadequate” by Vivian Gornick. Two Downeys. visit, value, voice. It’s pretty awesome that Gornick is still writing; this is textbook late style, unadorned and gleaming. Whether its philosophy strikes you as zen brilliance or just an elegantly stated commonplace may very well depend on your mood while reading; whether you see Gornick’s conclusion as sad or joyous may depend on the light conditions in your room. Like Gornick's neighbors, you can take your pick.
🥐 Random Pick
“The New Metropolitans” by Paul Griffiths. (March 18, 1996.) No Fords. expression, engraving, exile. The random number generator is apparently obsessed with classical music! This is a mixed-to-positive review of a Met opera which seems to have been largely panned elsewhere. Griffiths’ prose is a little stodgy, sometimes to lovely effect, as in a very extended metaphor that still does the trick (“The sound is dark and taut; its gleam is the gleam on old wood, and Mr. Domingo’s vocal joinery is as expert as ever, the phrases integral and the ornaments fitted in justly"), but elsewhere in ways that mostly baffle: After a rather long aside proposing a minimalist staging to reflect the show's "rootlessness", Griffiths says that the over-the-top flourishes here are "all nonsense, of course, but in being nonsense it makes no claim to be embodying the real action of the piece, and thereby serves the opera admirably." Come again? Mainly, this earns no Fords just because I don't inherently care how the Met was doing Verdi in 1996, and Griffiths gives no reason for me to care. Sorry, heart of the cards: Maybe next time some synthesizer?
🥐 Something Extra
Any fans of the British quiz show Only Connect? The new series started recently and I’m reminded anew how much I love it. University Challenge is really good too.
Sunday Song: