Last Week's New Yorker Review: ☀️ The Weekend Special (September 16)
The Weekend Special (September 16)
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
"Autobahn" by Hugo Hamilton. One Jackson. power, pockets, polizei. Two stark gestures reflect each other, like road lines on a highway. A hitchhiking man is harassed and held at gunpoint by a police officer; this provokes a reverie on his abusive father and one obscure moment of kindness from that father. It's elegant and spare, but not withholding; it states its themes forthrightly ("Time has collapsed, and you are in two places at once"). The speaker is an Irishman raised by Germans, now traveling in Germany, and the story charts a stoic German spareness with a more lyrical Irish eye. I don't think this is the kind of simple story that you can stare at until it opens up before you; it's all there to be seen, but it's a poignant picture.
☀️ Weekend Essay
"When France Takes its Clothes Off" by Lauren Collins. One Malcolm. propriety, promotion, program. A charming, brief review of a French exhibit about naturism – essentially, political nudism. Sandwiching it is a Talk of the Town-ish scene – Collins attending a nude tour of the exhibit, first clothed and then less so. Collins' eye for wry detail is unmatched (a folding table offers "cups of water, potato chips, gummy bears, and informational literature", including a pamphlet loudly proclaiming that "'the self-respecting naturist NEVER goes out without a pareo or a little towel'".) There's not much to this – Collins briefly notes that the show doesn't "grapple with the whiteness of the naturist milieu", but neither does Collins grapple with this or much of anything else. No trouble: It's charming, and it doesn’t take long to read altogether — in the altogether!
☀️ Your Pick
"The Birth of the Bleus" by A.J. Liebling. One Ross. madness, meaninglessness, memoir. Structured in a way you only ever see in the archives of this magazine: a long, somewhat digressive synopsis of Sartre's first novel, followed by a devastatingly catty one-sentence burn of the translation under review. Whether or not it was labored over, the piece clearly wants to seem dashed-off; I wish more contemporary writers would recognize the beauty of that first-draft feeling, and that it's not synonymous with Beat-y indulgence. There's something annoying about it, too, though; when Liebling quotes Sartre at some length and then simply moves on, it feels less like writerly confidence and more like studentish procrastination. But Liebling's charm and intelligence are still entrancing, and when they're juxtaposed with vintage advertisements for aluminum, Canasta, and the new book by Ogden Nash – I swoon.
☀️ Something Extra
I recently reread this poem I wrote in college and I think it’s kinda fire. Since the regular edition’s must-read also concerned dorm-room nihilism, it seems fitting.
Meaning
Things have a tendency to drip away. Problem one:
Assignation of goodwill to writing that is not about
shouting ideas. Problem three: Impossibility of
argument. Problem two: Lack of ideas.
Problem Ø: Things have a tendency.
God's stone rockets towards us.
Do you really expect me to lift this?
Answer one: 𝘐𝘭 𝘯'𝘺 𝘢 𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯 𝘦𝘯 𝘥𝘦𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘴 𝘥𝘶 𝘵𝘦𝘹𝘵𝘦.
Answer three: First, we must invent the 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘢.
Answer two: No, mister Bond, I expect you to die.
“Your Pick” is a piece chosen by a randomly selected paying subscriber. (Except when it’s a “Random Pick”, in which case it’s chosen by random number generation.) Have a piece you want to be "Your Pick"? If you're a paying subscriber, you can also skip the vicissitudes of fate and force your way to the front of the line! 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 – and pieces from other venues are okay too, if you ask nicely.
The Sunday Song: