December 31, 2024

Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🌱 The Weekend Special (December 30)

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

“The Leper” by Lee Chang-dong. One Boyle. escape, escort, espionage. I know one word of Korean (“화이팅!”) so I’m talking out of my ass here, but this strikes me as a very literal, note-for-note translation, and in trying to lose nothing small, something big may have slipped away. The main narrative line, despite, astonishingly, coming largely from Lee’s life, never feels quite real; it’s such a complicated conceit, and at the same time I quickly saw where it was going – the father confesses to avoid becoming the titular leper – so all the second-half character portrait seemed a bit like padding. That’s a shame, because it’s the strongest part of this story. The psychology of the speaker’s mother, despite or maybe because she’s only glimpsed sidelong, is nuanced and fascinating; her past pain feels more present than the present of the story. The resentful aunt, too, is a compelling character, and Lee’s ear for realistic dialogue is superb, even if at times one can sense his urge to just write a film script surfacing. Lee was a fairly young man when he wrote this story, in the ‘80s; I wonder if he didn’t quite have the confidence to tell a story that departed from a youngish man’s perspective. That wider view might break things open; without it, a grim absence rests atop this story like a heap of snow.

🌱 Weekend Essay

“The Father of Chinese Authoritarianism Has a Message for America” by Chang Che. No Harrimans. rapid, rational, radical. Quickly it becomes clear that the “message” this figure has is basically a shrug and an Urkel catchphrase, and that he’s more than willing to stick to the American Right’s party line on various social issues. Che spends the ending of this piece damning Xiao, but it’s never totally clear why he felt the need to talk to Xiao at all. “I wanted to understand the scholar who had helped salvage the strongman from the dustbin of history,” he writes, then says he’s shifted from “reaction to reflection” and implies he’s damning Xi Jinping by proxy, who may not be the “wise” strongman Xiao hoped for. Whoopsy-daisy! Good thing there’s a chance to repeat the mistake by villainizing the same people Trump is villainizing, with only the weakest and most hedged warnings about the dangers he brings. Che paints Xiao as the Peter Thiel of the East, but what’s more troubling is that the West has its own Xiao Gongqin.

🌱 Random Pick

“About the House” by B.B. (February 13, 1943). One Parker. hearth, home, horse. The same issue with many of the On and Off the Avenue columns applies here – it’s impossible to visualise these objects, and Google is surprisingly little help. Before the hyperlink were people just content to not know what things looked like? Baffling. Here, though, there’s a little extra interest because the omnipresence of the war has had such an effect on home goods. Horse blankets as substitutes, soon-to-vanish aluminum coffee makers, cotton pile rugs instead of wool – none speak to privation, really, but they shade in the ‘40s, which are too often skimmed past in American history for reasons of, I assume, misogyny. (If the able-bodied men are in Europe, then that’s where the history is, too.) There’s enough mild wit to keep what’s essentially a list of objects readable. (“If it’s too small for your vase or lamp, Adams will fit it for an extra charge, generally about $2. If it’s too big, it can’t be done at any price.”) Why not be transported?

🌱 Something Extra

Happy new year! 🥳

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