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

“The Golden Boy” by Daniyal Mueenuddin. No Knapps. shoes, shops, shalwars. I’ll be honest, this probably would have earned one Knapp if not for Mueenuddin’s interview, an unfathomable display of grandiose, self-satisfied obnoxiousness which curdled in my throat as I read it aloud. Mueenuddin was previously covered in the Random Picks, where I declared him “a highly suspicious nepotistic landowner who sees himself as the victim in every situation” but I still liked that piece because he’s such a studied devotee of detail and fine description. This excerpt from his upcoming novel (his first book in seventeen years) is meant to be a stand-alone novella, apparently, but I have to imagine it gains some context and sense from the rest of the book, where incident that here disappears and is forgotten can crop up again as motivation. This is an awfully long and often dull hunk of writing to press through, and while its rewards include consistently beautiful and meticulous description, this is ultimately a narrative of the impossibility of transcending class in which the ultimate betrayer of the working poor is the other working poor – a story I find hugely distasteful from an upper-class Pakistani like Mueenuddin, who went to frickin’ Groton. (Here’s what he has to say about this: “The victims of prejudice and inequality are always the best guardians of the ramparts that sustain those miseries.” Easy for you to say, buddy!) This is a story in which Seriousness and Importance acts as a distracting scrim atop jaded cruelty, which is a better metafictional metaphor for the class system than anything Mueenuddin has actually written.

🥐 Weekend Essay

This week’s Essay, “A Battle With my Blood” by Tatiana Schlossberg, went a bit viral and will now be included in the next issue of the magazine, so I’ll cover it briefly in the main edition. I was planning on giving it one Downey; the section on R.F.K. that everyone has praised is just three scant paragraphs, and the rest of the story is a standard illness narrative with unexceptional prose. Which is not to discount Schlossberg’s courage entirely; the piece is ultimately quite moving, and I can see why it’s caught on.

🥐 Random Pick

“Letter from Europe” by Jane Kramer. (Oct 5, 1987). Three Fords. memory, measure, meaning. It would probably sell like, um, coldcakes, but a compendium of this magazine’s writing on the trials of Holocaust perpetrators would span every period of its existence and also serve as a compendium of some of its best writing, period. Along with Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), easily the piece I reference most often in this newsletter, there are of course Rebecca West’s vivid reports (1946); more recently has come an Elizabeth Kolbert piece on memory and justice (2015) and a Timothy Ryback essay on narrative and physical evidence (1993). This superb Jane Kramer piece, landing at perhaps the post-war pre-aughts high water mark for fascio-nationalist revisionism, expertly unpacks the structural hypocrisy of colonial France, and the way its society inevitably leads to groups like the FN. Specifically, the role of history in France is to teach a certain idea/identity of France and French nationalism, not to present the truth. Kramer makes her nuanced and astute defense of universalism sing with an associative style that is, under the surface, formally precise. The opening anecdote, in which Parisians performatively return from vacation, plants the seeds for the later critique of self-representation; Kramer’s worldly irony, though not always the easiest thing to follow, is a prime example of the uses of this magazine’s tone: It makes digestible what might otherwise be a polemic. Quite a fantastic piece of writing.

🥐 Something Extra

Saw Far Away, a short and hard-to-stage Caryl Churchill play, at a new venue in Bushwick. A long trek for a short show, but it was excellent. Are The Bennet Girls OK? keeps getting extended, and no wonder – it’s a delight, committing to its sort of corny premise (Pride and Prejudice in zoomer-speak) without a hint of irony, and pulling it off – largely due to newcomer Edoardo Benzoni doing a superbly farcical multi-role performance as every male character, a la Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets. Masha Breeze, the playwright’s sister, is a winningly awkward Mary; Caroline Campos is a dialed-to-thirteen Georgiana. Most of the cast is fresh out of school (quite a few are specifically fresh out of Yale) but this doesn’t feel like college stuff.

Sunday Song: