The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three Boyles (for fiction), Harrimans (for essays), or Parkers (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Boyle, Harriman, or Parker indicates a generally positive review.

🌱 Fiction

“Love of My Days” by Louise Erdrich. One Boyle. detective, december, death. A wintry period-piece Western, written in Erdrich’s signature free-indirect discourse. There’s a plot revelation that totally eluded me until I read the interview about the story, and then I was just confused. (E.g. why would Timble’s knowledge about his initial location prompt his violent action?) This comes with the territory when eliding the key moments and revealing them a moment later is so central to a story’s movement, and this approach proves more successful elsewhere, especially in the brief climactic scene of animal afterlife, which successfully reverberates with all the story’s other losses without pressing the point too much. (Not pressing the point too much is Erdrich’s signature.) Generally, I couldn’t quite see why the story treats Timble with warmth and understanding but Budack with horror and hostility. They both remain cyphers to us, they both murder people. Does it really matter so much that Timble is anxious and Budack bloodthirsty? It’s also interesting to see Erdrich tell a story that so centers whites in North Dakota. One might have expected her to write a story about whiteness on the plains, but Erdrich never delivers quite what you’d expect.

🌱 Weekend Essay

“Why Tom Cruise Will Never Die” by Tyler Foggatt. No Harrimans. star, stunt, stride. I’ve never totally understood why we’re supposed to care about the personal lives of actors. Pop stars I get – it’s all about persona – but while actors certainly bring their personas to roles, too, their performances are still almost always in service of the film they’re in. (Elvis’ films are perhaps the biggest American exception – and he’s a pop star!) If this were a profile of Cruise, that’d be one thing – but it’s more of an arch hagiography, excusing his Scientology and exalting his risk-taking. Actually, the usual fan line on the Scientology (he hardly mentions it anymore, he’s probably being blackmailed, he’d have to cut off contact with his daughter) is barely mentioned by Foggatt, who instead claims Cruise is “grandfathered into modern Hollywood” – but this is a fairly ridiculous claim; Cruise was pretty directly cancelled for his weirdo public appearances, certainly facing more flack for it than Elisabeth Moss (who has more recently been loud about the whole thing) and if any celebrity has been punished more harshly since for espousing devotion to a cult, well, Foggatt doesn’t mention them. Not this one, not this one, definitely not, uhhh… anyway, without more actual reporting and less believing the press-day line, it’s hard to say whether Cruise’s stuntwork is as life-threateningly stupid as the Mission Impossible people clearly want you to think it is. In any case, yes, the man is a very good actor (Is there anything behind Cruise’s eyes? I agree with Foggatt that there is, but I wouldn’t say “everything”, I would say, mostly, raw need); the M.I. franchise is a very mixed bag (I’m not hugely enamored with the McQuarrie films, which have grown both dumber and more self-serious with each installment, but 1, 3, and 4 are each up there with the best action movies ever, so I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to call the franchise the greatest – unless you call Mad Max “action.” Then that wins easily.); but none of what Foggatt says here hasn’t been said before by Cruise-obsessed critics like Amy Nicholson. Nicholson did not like the newest M.I. flick, which is sort of the ultimate pan. I’ll miss it; should you choose to accept it?

🌱 Random Pick

“The Canal” by Suzy Eban. (Dec 5, 1970). No Parkers. colony, company, contrast. A diaristic account of a childhood spent in Ismailia, this is more interested in striking a reflective mood than explaining anything or taking any political position. But because of this, it’s hard not to read it as excusing the colonial presence of Eban and her family – and given that Eban was the wife of the Israeli foreign minister, it’s clearly meant to act as soft propaganda excusing the Six-Day War and reinforcing the narrative of Israelis as victims; literally sad children displaced from their homes – albeit with enough intellectual pretense that the magazine’s readers may not have noticed. Gross, obviously, especially given that the Yom Kippur War, where one of the key battles was fought over Ismailia, was just a few years away. The text is overtly racist to the Arabs it discusses, who are pitiable to a one – “revolting apparitions” – and even more vile sentiments are wrapped in a very thin layer of moral distancing: “But for the French enterprise, we all believed, there would have been nothing worthwhile in the eastern part of Egypt. It would have remained another of those vast expanses, roamed by jackals and trekked by occasional caravans, in which the country has abounded across the centuries.” Did Eban still believe this? It’s ambiguous – or it might have been, then. Fifty-five years later, the deniability is no longer plausible.

🌱 Something Extra

Sunday Song: