Last Week's New Yorker Review: The Weekend Special (Feb 26)
Welcome to the Weekend Special (which will hopefully be published within the actual weekend, in future.) We're starting with just Fiction, but are now just 5 paid subscribers away from also including the Weekend Essay, and I have another fun feature to announce once we hit that goal. Here's the review.
Stories are given up to three Munros. As with restaurant stars, any number of Munros indicates a generally positive review.
"On the Night of the Khatam" by Jamil Jan Kochai. One Munro. gathering, chai, disbelief. Each of Kochai's first three stories in the magazine – all of which are gathered in his debut book – was a knockout, combining playful postmodernist conceits with a grounded and detailed perspective on Afghanistani and Afghan-American life. Occupational Hazards was especially moving, despite or perhaps because of its distancing device. This story's conceit, a collective-first-person perspective, succeeds in presenting the Afghan refugee "type" that Kochai grew up around, but it leaves the reader a bit too distant to pack the punch of Kochai's other stories. There's a constant barrage of references to unfamiliar political disputes, the language of which is quite melodic as presented by Kochai. All the obscured meaning makes you need to hunt and peck for the real, sublimated meaning, as in a Wes Anderson film. It's twofold: The "fragmented and unfinished" nature of the narratives, referenced by Kochai in his interview, mirrors the elisions and fragmentations of historical memory among immigrants. But there's also the slippery story of Fahim, which is given in a rush (as a synopsis of a seemingly autofictional "novel" he's written) at the very end. It's a dramatic story, but I wasn't invested enough in Fahim for it to pack the proper punch. All we've gotten of him is one paragraph of backstory and his conversation at the Khatam, in which he accidentally starts a few arguments but tries to defuse them. Kochai's concision to the point of poeticism is a strength, but here it feels somewhat breathless. Still well worth reading – with a great illustration.