November 5, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🥐 The Weekend Special (November 3)

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.

Deepest apologies for the unannounced pause, readers. I foresee nothing that will keep me from catching up, but I know your inboxes will be bulging uncomfortably as I do.

🥐 Fiction

“Outcomes” by Nathan Blum. One Knapp. projections, prayers, practice. Manages against all odds to have its late-breaking twist not seem especially emotionally manipulative, which is important to a story essentially about how truly random life is, and how all narratives are created after the fact. Blum gets his point across, but there isn’t that much dynamism in the execution, and if you aren’t willing to go along with the not-hugely-inspired romantic comedy this initially suggests itself as, you probably won’t think much of the turn. But its minor charms were enough for me, personally – Blum does well with the erotics of learning and teaching, and he understands how to get things across in dialogue without speaking them directly. The ending doesn’t work – the cut to black needs to come a few beats earlier, maybe after “…he’d said it would” – and why Blum bothered making up a fake Maine college, I have no clue. (Are we merely in Almost Maine? I suppose that’s the land of the corny meet-cute…)

🥐 Weekend Essay

“On My Last Leg” by Lucinda Rosenfeld. No Downeys. stiff, stem, stranded. An offputtingly bloggy treatment of a recurrence of illness, even structured as essentially a series of posts. Lots of material like: “…it all felt strangely inevitable. Like Freud’s return of the repressed. Or maybe Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Past. By the time I found myself stranded on a Brooklyn street, it seemed as if the ghost had reappeared to point out not my miserliness but my foolishness for ever having believed that I was O.K.” …Clunk. There’s not a lot of profound insight here, less elegant prose. Things keep coming back to the classically euphemistic “bad headlines” in a way that eventually – the third or fourth time – feels blithe and self-serving. This is too mean a review for a basically harmless piece; people in SaaS houses shouldn’t throw anti-blog stones. But illness is one of the classic personal-essay topics, and this is comparatively unambitious stuff. You can safely skip it.

🥐 Random Pick

I’ve already reviewed Kael here, and the rule is one author one piece in this section, but I still usually read whatever I spin, and I greatly enjoyed her review, so for the record:

“The Bull Goose Loony” by Pauline Kael. (Dec 1, 1975). Three Fords. psyche, psychedelic, psych-out. Totally nails One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a “powerful” but frustrating film; Kael is given enough space to get into Kesey’s text (especially its bone-deep misogyny), Forman’s style, and Nicholson’s acting; she’s dead wrong that Antonioni “wiped him out” in The Passenger, but her description of his take on McMurphy is wonderful: He “doesn’t use the glinting, funny-malign eyes this time… McMurphy’s eyes are farther away, muggy, veiled even from himself… He actually looks relaxed at times, punchy, almost helpless.” Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched, meanwhile, displays “virginal expectancy – the purity – that has turned into puffy-eyed self-righteousness… the company woman incarnate.” Kael sees “a streak of low, buffoonish peasant callousness running through” Forman’s films (“he likes faces that don’t take the light”) and he “gets laughs by pretending that mental disturbance is the same as ineptitude; this “minor aspect” has grown only more troublesome with time, as popular tastes grow less tolerant of mockery and disdain, even in supposed service of liberation. Kael nails this one.

But I still spun again, so also:

“Running” by Elizabeth Drew. (Dec 1, 1975). No Fords. process, pressure, presidency. Did you know that running for president is grueling and endless? Would you like that grueling endlessness formally enacted by a text so unrelenting in its repetitiveness it can fairly be described as cruel? Masochists only need apply, but there is a sense in which this article is a sweeping success, especially knowing what we know now: That despite his endless efforts, Mo Udall lost to Carter; all his campaigning was for naught, and Carter – a centrist compromise candidate – would somehow end up the furthest-left president of the last fifty years and also a single-termer with few accomplishments, whose decent reputation was largely earned post-presidency. What a country! Drew deliberately avoids just about any discussion of policy; this is a horse-race piece that focuses on the health of the horses. It’s unbelievably boring, frankly, and mostly unrevealing, and if this is ‘by design’ that’s still a brutal design. I would go beat-by-beat but then we’d both be bored and honestly I just want to get this newsletter out. See you in Iowa.

🥐 Something Extra

Have seen a few winners lately! Caroline, up for another week, is as straightforward as it gets, a three-generations-of-women story with addiction and Trans identity as central themes, but David Cromer knows how to do straightforward without doing stale, and he gets stellar performances from all three actors, including one of the most fully-lived child performances I can recall from River Lipe-Smith, a discovery.

Jewish Plot, up for a few more days (though maybe it will get extended since it just got a few mixed-positive notices), is one of the most genuinely daring pieces I’ve seen, unafraid to give tonal whiplash or even court monotony, and ultimately successful in its aims. I won’t forget it soon. For best results go in blind.

And just last night I “saw” By Heart at L’Alliance, Tiago Rodrigues’ monologue about memory and obsession which includes ten audience members participating in an act of memorization… and I was one. (The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan!) Had a lot of fun with it, and was genuinely moved.

Also some good opera, which I’ll address next “week”.

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Sunday Song: