Last Week's New Yorker Review: đ„ The Weekend Special (September 22)
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.
đ„ Fiction
âThe Poolâ by T. Coraghessan Boyle. No Knapps. drinking, dripping, dropping. A story of casual alcoholism that feels, while reading, like four anecdotes connected by a location â the pool at the speakerâs new suburban house. Boyle says in the interview this is basically autofiction, which explains why the writer seems to hate the speaker so much â is there anyone we tend to disdain more than our unhealthy, unbalanced past self? Still, the cynicism here mostly turned me off. The stories themselves should hardly matter for what Boyle is trying to do â show us a character through his experiences â but Iâm not sure theyâre chosen well. The possum section is so sickening it throws the balance of the piece off, and the Jeremy material is gratuitously meaningless. The child rescue works a lot better, showing the empty luckiness of prosperous anomie, but with enough surrounding incident that one doesnât realize that takeaway till a bit later. Boyleâs prose, while especially numbed here, is skillful as ever; midlife crisis narratives, though, are a dime a dozen, and thus must be held to a fairly high standard.
đ„ Weekend Essay
âThe Ritual of Civic Apologyâ by Beth Lew-Williams. No Downeys. residents, reconciliation, recognition. Written in an academic style which is so carefully phrased â so as not to overstate any cases â that it ends up barely making its point at all. Reading into the piece, that point appears to be that apologies for racial trauma are usually just attempts to be forgiven, and that more meaningful remembrance and reckoning demands that the apology not be asked to do more work than it can. Itâs a pretty nuanced point, and one feels Lew-Williams straining to hold back some inner rage. There is also too much disjunction between the troubled official or formal apology and the way that people have of speaking in apology and blame â the archivist that keeps apologizing, presumably because Lew-Williams is Asian. The material is interesting, but delivered with a lack of emotion that feels unnatural and hard to believe. Lew-Williamsâ voice is quite literally missing: Even in the radio program anecdote, she quotes everyone involved except herself. Maybe this is an attempt to meet the countryâs insincere or partial apology with silence, but it undercuts this essay, a form which is generally, at least partly, personal. Lew-Williams tries to hide in her own words.
đ„ Random Pick
Since my policy is not to repeat authors in this section, my initial pick of a John Updike book review of Alan Hollinghurstâs gay fantasia The Spell wonât do; I read it anyway, and while Updikeâs obvious discomfort at the abundant homosexuality is sorta funny, you didnât miss anything. Then I spun again in the same issue and got â can you guess? â classical music.
âE Pluribus Clevelandâ by Alex Ross. (May 31, 1999.) One Ford. space, standards, standouts. I was much more interested in the far-too-brief reviews of contemporary music than the coverage of some apparently excellent Mahler. Itâs sort of an obvious angle to gripe about Geffen Hall, whose former subpar acoustics I never had a chance to experience. Ross has always been an excellent writer, of course; here we have âconvulsively oddâ orchestration that achieves âa weird majestyâ and elsewhere ânotes on the harp which come shining through a hazy Mahler texture like lanterns in fog.â Peer for yourself.
đ„ Something Extra
I saw Wu Man play the Pipa in a concert at the Met Museum and it was quite astonishing and transporting. This song was her attempt to transpose the music of Central Asia, a heritage which the pipa likely evolved from, back to the voice of that instrument.
(Second) Sunday Song: