Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🍳 The Weekend Special (Apr 8)
Welcome to the Weekend Special.
Pieces are given up to three Munros (for fiction), Sontags (for essays), or Herseys (for your picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Munro, Sontag, or Hersey indicates a generally positive review.
🍳 Fiction
"Bozo" by Souvankham Thammavongsa. Two Munros. ache, crush, drinks. Thammavongsa has published a few of her enigmatic and elegant flash fiction pieces in the magazine – they share a steady rhythm despite different themes. This one is hard to fault, it pulls off its portrait of longing and creates a portrait of its speaker that attains the weight of life despite a near-total lack of identificatory detail – as Thammavongsa says, "I disappear what we usually do with character." You can see the seams slightly between the thrust of the story and its preordained ending; it's clear that Thammavongsa had the ending "in mind" and wrote the story to lead up to it. It still works. And Thammavongsa's poetically spare style is a good match for this speaker, who's intelligent and alive to the beauty of the world but also desperately lonely. Everybody knowing your name isn't enough – they don't know your nickname.
🍳 Weekend Essay
"The Day Ram Dass Died" by Christopher Fiorello. One Sontag. finality, fear, feet. A few years ago, after a film festival screening of a documentary on Dass, the room video-called him and experienced his distinctive post-stroke presence; his lively eyes contrasting with the forty-five seconds it took him to say each word. His charisma was undeniable, and while the spiritual trappings of his belief system don't compel me much, the general principal that we are more connected that we think (what Dass calls oneness or the divine, and could also be thought of as a kind of human superorganism) is genuinely profound and important. Fiorello's history of Dass, both his life and ideas, is an excellent recap, concise but accurate, and his personal history with Dass ("I gobbled it all up, feeling my spiritual life deepen exponentially by the day") is well-told and witty. Things get trickier once he's in Hawaii; his critique of "quasi-religious fervor" is strangely mean-spirited and individualistic – weirdly un-Dass-like – I mean, of course they aren't going to cater to you particularly when they're in the middle of their chanting practice; there's still a big gap between that and an extremist Protestant church, namely that the ideas underlying the worship practice aren't (that) doctrinaire or hateful. There's also such a focus on Dass himself; I wanted to know what happened to the Dass complex after his death, or how that death impacted others working with him, but Fiorello is only really interested in two main characters. The final beat, in which he feels "betrayal" over, basically, his interpretation of the look in Dass' eyes as he dies, is both compelling and startlingly individualistic. (Everything comes back to his perception, "...how I thought he was supposed to die.") Maybe Fiorello wasn't really hearing Dass' message as I understand it, which isn't that there is no fear or that there ought to be no fear, but rather that fear brings us back to the individual, and by embracing the collective we can limit fear's control.
🍳 Your Pick
"Cat People" by Louis Menand. (December 23 & 30, 2002). Two Herseys. fun, fish, phonics.
Stand at attention and give a great hand
to the Seussian Analyist Louis Menand.
His takes, they are Freudian, and yes, rather hottish;
Cat's mother's strange absence perturbs him a lottish.
(I buy that it's odd, but perhaps not erotic;
it seems a mere setup for japes episodic.)
On Seuss' background as Cold War innovator
Menand is straightforward but fun. Somewhat later,
he claims that Seuss changed our whole system of schooling –
but phonics' takeover has faced some retooling.
What Seuss taught worked wonders, yet teaching's a war,
its Zooks and Yooks battling for who-knows-what-for.
This piece slides from study to history loosely,
with joy and surprise that are practically Seuss-ly.
Have a piece you want to be "Your Pick"? If you're a paying subscriber, you can get a review of any piece in the magazine's history: Venmo $20 per request to @SamECircle, then write me an email letting me know you've done so and what your requested piece is! No limit on the number of requests, BTW. If you want to give me a more open-ended prompt ("1987 reported feature by a woman") that's great as well – and pieces from other venues are okay too, if you ask nicely.