Last Week's New Yorker Review: ☀️ The Weekend Special (December 2)
The Weekend Special (December 2)
Pieces are given up to three Jacksons (for fiction), Malcolms (for essays), or Rosses (for your picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Jackson, Malcolm, or Ross indicates a generally positive review.
☀️ Fiction
“Paris Friend” by Shuang Xuetao. Two Jacksons. finding, finishing, five. Julian, who loved this one, says: “Unsentimental but moving – a hard balance to strike.” I concur: Jeremy Tiang’s translation is spare but makes a near-surfeit of incident feel less overwhelming. The main thread of this story is – big spoiler – a fairly standard catfishing incident, but around this Xuetao packs all sorts of random-seeming details and diversions. Some of these concern the Chinese immigrant community in Paris; there are PhD students and a bookstore named after a Melville movie (Xuetao’s ambience is mildly Melvillian), but also shady black-marketeers demanding favors. And there’s also material about the older woman the speaker helps tend to, and memories of his mother she stirs up. None of this coalesces in a traditional narrative sense, but it’s compelling material and it deepens the psychological portrait – a character study with little to no direct characterization.
☀️ Weekend Essay
“The Island Where Environmentalism Implodes” by Ben Crair. One Malcolm. green, growth, ground. Sets up a fascinating battle which literalizes the argument between conservationist environmentalists and tech-positive environmentalists – namely, that an island full of rare ecology also holds nickel reserves which are crucial to electric-vehicle batteries. Crair, though, is more interested in touring the island and remarking upon its beauty than in really considering the political and social implications of both sides of the argument. (Then again, it’s not the argument that’s destroying New Caledonia, it’s the miners.) If the piece’s structure is a bait-and-switch, it’s still true that Crair’s descriptions are visceral and striking. (“The tree was latched to the roots of its host, which belonged to another endemic conifer species. It reminded me of an anatomical model of the blood vessels inside a lung.”) Mostly, this piece just could have dug deeper – though I suppose digging deep is the whole issue.
☀️ Random Pick
“Waddlers and Bikers” by Pauline Kael. (May 18, 1981.) Two Rosses. he-man, headgear, heresy. In classic Kael fashion, the ill-begotten farce Cavemen is fun for the whole family, while the ambitious but lesser Romero flick Knightriders prompts a long digression on the emptiness of his classic Dawn of the Dead. But you can never be that annoyed at Kael, whose mastery of withering erudite snark has rendered her name synonymous with the style. Here, I was mostly struck by the sprawl of these two reviews; it’s not that they’re far longer than the film reviews these days (although only one of these would run in an issue, not two at once) but that Kael has no interest in trimming things to the bone: If she wants to try to remember a quote from Pal Joey in a parenthetical, she will; if she wants to use the final paragraph to triple-underline a point about Romero’s ineptitude, she will. The Cavemen review is highly unconvincing – the movie is “an original, consistently enjoyable comedy”, apparently, but it sounds on the page like hackwork (which is also how pretty much every other contemporaneous reviewer described it.) But the withering takedown of Knightriders and Romero in general is pretty convincing, and Kael’s prose, obviously, sparkles – not only line-by-line, as she’s so often quoted, but paragraph-by-paragraph; her ideas build on one another, and there’s never a sense she’s just lobbing insults, as the popular caricature of her style can seem to indicate. I’ll cap things off with a lengthy quote; take it away, Pauline: “If there’s an emotional appeal in the movie, it’s probably in the sunny, well-meant scenes of the racially and sexually integrated barnstorming group as a community. As with most modern American evangelical groups, nothing is difficult and there’s no question of faith being tested – if there were, it would be multiple-choice. Salvation is a cinch: turning up is confirmation of faith. And evil is easily defined. The picture has a core of very crude, easy social satire, and an even cruder social message. The outside world is represented by predatory sexual slobs and by the obnoxious loudmouth rubes who come to the fairs for the daredevil feats and the crashes.”
☀️ Something Extra
Here’s a poem I wrote about three years ago.
Childhood
It’s difficult, but not impossible.
Our setting is a range between these points.
Spit it out. Hunger is sweet, silent,
manic, heaving air, doubled over,
an injured poet gripping a fresh wound.
A wound clock
is a child to time, its doubled breath never yet over,
visibly silent, seen-not-heard,
facing points unknown.
Newborn difficulty. Faceless enigma. Fresh cup.
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Sunday Song: