Last Week's New Yorker Review: š³ The Weekend Special (Apr 22 & 29)
The Weekend Special (Apr 22 & 29)
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.
š³ Fiction
āLate Loveā by Joyce Carol Oates. One Munro. uncanny, unconscious, unspeakable. For its first half or so, I thought this might be my favorite thing Iāve read by Oates. Its focus on the deep and unspeakable horror of the impossibility of truly knowing the other feels core to Oatesā work in general, but rarely expressed with such honed austerity. The language that balances between pure animal description and a removed philosophizing is a perfect match for the mindās state when falling asleep; highly creative and drawing inferences with a schizophrenic edge tempered only by our own forgetting. Itās quite amazing. On top of this is the nature of fiction, in which characters dissolve when off the pageĀ āĀ the story has a metafictional component which is far stronger for never being directly foregrounded.
Itās very clear, though, by that midway point, where the story is going ā that it will be uncertain, in the end, who is dreaming and what is a dream; that all these dark musings are part of fictionās mystery ā like something out of a Joyce Carol Oates story ā but not, perhaps, as tangible as love, as connection. So why do we need all the cheap grotesquerie? Oates ought to at least have picked between the leech stuff and the murder-plot stuff; they clash terribly, and neither can be given enough air. The leech stuff at least has a logic, or illogic, accurate to dreams; the murder-plot is such an over-obvious way to represent fears of violence and the unknown other. In either case, the story sags terribly in its last third, getting away from the simplicity that made it so gripping, with little reward. Everything between āā¦like the eyes of a wild creatureā and the last brief section ought to have been excised. Stillā¦ What a start!
š³ Weekend Essay
āThe āEpic Rowā Over a New Epochā by Elizabeth Kolbert. No Sontags. stratigraphy, neologism, coup. If you entirely missed the story about scientists voting down the āAnthropoceneā ā both the initial reporting and the hasty clarification of its meaning or lack thereof ā this is a perfectly good place to get the gist. But Kolbert is frustratingly unable to get the details of exactly what went down; after lots and lots of buildup she provides a one-line quote (āIt was like a palace coup, basicallyā) and the explanation that it was ultimately a āproceduralā argument. Okay, fine, but you have to tell us about that argument, not just the conditions leading up to it! Weāre here for the epic row weāve been promised, we donāt need another explanation of āAnthropoceneā as a term. By glossing over the fight, the piece feels like highfalutin clickbait. Our planet is hot, but this gossip aināt.
š³ Your Pick
No pick this week, as Iāve caught up on the paid picks and I wonāt start randomly generating paid subscribers to pick pieces for another month or so. Since this is a double issue, Iām taking next week off! Usually I like to do something fun with the extra weeks ā but Iām hard at work on my MFA thesis, and I really need a break. Iāll see you next on May 2.
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 or a note on venmo 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 ā and pieces from other venues are okay too, if you ask nicely.
I agree about the JCO! First of all, the story tells us early on that the husband and his first wife divorced before she died, which makes the murder-plot fear even less plausible / effective. I thought the subtle, slow revelation of the husbandās insensitivity, need to control, and dismissal of her concerns, was very well done, and it was shaping up to be a modernized Gaslight, except instead of the high stakes of death and estate planning, the stakes would be lower (being married to someone who, you realize, doesnāt respect you, and only seems to love you when youāre pretending nothing is wrong). If she had stuck to this, which would have been harder to land, the story could have been one of her best.