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

“Safety” by Joan Silber. Three Knapps. legal, lessons, leave. Silber is a legend, and I was totally riveted by this even in its first half, before the from-the-headlines twist comes in. Actually, I was briefly skeptical of the necessity of that twist, which thankfully doesn’t seem retroactively foreordained but is still placed so obviously as a fulcrum that the author’s hand shows; but Silber handles the psychological state of sidelong engagement with injustice quite brilliantly, and the procession of the story had me gasping for breath, not because it evoked such pathos – though it did – but because it accomplished both its high-flung literary aims and its declarative political aims without any disjunction and without raising a sweat. I’ll remember this brief paragraph for many years: “I had gone through law school thinking that our legal system was a hollow structure, a sham, but it turned out that I hadn’t actually thought that. I had thought it was a mess, but real. Now it wasn’t real.” It’s hard to pinpoint what makes Silber one of the greatest prose stylists alive: Her touch is lighter than air, never showy but never cold or clinical; you’d have a hard time calling her a minimalist or a maximalist. Everything has the heartbeat and the life of a fully told story, and although it may not be the most massive leap to write across generations – we were all young once – I’m not sure there’s another eighty-year-old alive who could render a thirty-something protagonist, in first-person, as cannily as Silber does here. I could go through this story and just name every detail, as each one has a chasm beneath it: The retraumatized parent with her literalization of trains as dangerous; the entirely believable mid-level standup world; the role of sex talk and gossip as a shibboleth in both Yasmina’s friendships we see, but in totally different ways… Silber doesn’t have to nod to these directly for them to come back over and again, opening the story into something cavernous and wrenching, the way memory always is.

🥐 Weekend Essay

“My Mother’s Memory Loss, and Mine” by Anna Holmes. Two Downeys. mental, medical, menopause. Is it widely known that menopause can cause memory loss? I didn’t know it, and now I feel like the ignorant sucker in some reddit thread. But this is a really heartfelt personal essay, describing a small anxiety without overindulgence or defensiveness, and charting a small journey of understanding without worrying that it’s not big enough. It’s quite lovely, and while I wondered if it would end up feeling slight, I found myself really moved by the ending.

🥐 Random Pick

“The Perceptionist” by John Heilemann. (Sep 1, 1997). No Fords. distortion, discussion, dissuasion. Probably deserves a schaden-Ford, because each of Heileman’s predictions is so wildly incorrect it becomes pretty funny. Heilemann is now a notable pundit but in ‘97 he was just a youngish upstart, here to declare that Steve Jobs had an extremely difficult task ahead of him: Turning Apple from a floundering wannabe-hemoth into a “profitable niche player”. “In all probability, Apple is destined to become, at best, a break-even company”, he says. The “Apple myth” is nearly erased, he says, and Jobs will have a hard time finding a “top-calibre CEO” – to his credit, he basically guesses that Jobs himself would become CEO, which happened just a week after this piece was published. The history of Apple’s blunder years is an interesting story but Heilemann doesn’t have quite enough distance to put the emphasis on the right syllables; sweat-soaked Gil Amelio is an interesting character, but focusing the piece as much around his travails as Jobs’ is, in retrospect, a bit silly. It was less a power struggle than a power resignation. There is a lot here, too, about NCs, a sort-of-ahead-of-its-time Chromebook-esque technology, something Apple would not end up touching. It is not easy to tell the future in tech, and perhaps we shouldn’t laugh at Heilemann for getting it so wrong. On the other hand, I like to laugh.

🥐 Something Extra

I finished two novels about immigrants in New York City, both from an earlier time for such things than Silber’s story above – when the rules seemed corrupt and broken, “a mess, but real”. (I choose pairs of books solely based on number of chapters and pages; it is coincidental when they happen to have a lot in common, but boy did these two. They even introduced the prospect of green-card marriage in identically-numbered chapters.) Preparation for the Next Life is a bold, sweeping, fairly depressive tale with some romance at its heart but too much self-conscious grit. Bing Liu turned it into a recent movie which I haven’t gotten to yet; I liked Minding the Gap a lot but it didn’t make me think ‘what will this guy do next’ exactly. Behold the Dreamers is a surprisingly jaunty take on the making-it-in-America narrative, given that it came out in 2016, is set in 2008, and has that slightly annoying stump speech-y title; it spends a lot of time developing a central character whose growth the narrative totally abandons, which is maybe meant to feel like a coup de grace but instead feels like a dropped trick, but the line-by-line prose is terrific and the book is definitely propulsive, even if it’s mostly propelling you toward an obviously preordained conclusion. (You can guess what the last chapter entails just by reading the title and thinking about the era.) Both are in that flawed-but-solid range.

Patricia Brennan rocked my socks off at Roulette. Listen to this! Come on!!

Sunday Song:

(from the Pitchfork year-end songs list)