Last Week's New Yorker Review: ☀️ The Weekend Special (August 26)
The Weekend Special (August 26)
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
“The Particles of Order” by Yiyun Li. One Jackson. end, endure, encounter. This story has great ambitions – to present as a mystery which then resolves into something more humanist, to speak to the author’s unspeakable double loss while examining a character who is moving through the same loss, to create a fitting foil whose understanding of and reaction to that character will reveal something about life and ways of living. Unfortunately, I don’t think it entirely succeeds at any of those ambitions – all its pieces have been placed deliberately, but they’re a bit too neat. The story never feels like a mystery, and the question meant to drive suspense, whether things will suddenly tip toward murder or some other balance-upsetting extremity, never felt truly at play, perhaps because Li’s style doesn’t allow it. The autofictional element speaks from heartbreak more than it speaks to heartbreak; it’s Li’s first time writing toward this subject, and while the wound is clearly raw, this leaves the narrative feeling raw as well. Lillian comes to life mainly because she is so obviously a direct projection of the author; Ursula never comes to life because her existence as a foil is too tidy – she makes sense only as a type of character, not as a person. Still, the story does have a spark – most of which comes from the separation between what is said and the feeling behind it. I appreciate how little Li allows the reader in; Ursula and Lillian largely remain closed doors to us and to each other even as they broach deep and painful subjects, and there is a kind of respect in this. There’s something cultural there, too – restraint is a notable part of British, Chinese, and Chinese-American culture, not to mention the culture of writers and of professors – but its uses and aura differ drastically between all of these. I appreciate Li’s stern tenacity, and the way she holds the forces of truth and fiction – order and chaos – in balance.
☀️ Weekend Essay
“Democracy Needs the Loser” by Barbara F. Walter. No Malcolms. rally, radicalization, race. I think there’s some truth to Walter’s perspective that the American right is largely driven by demographic change, and that violence is most likely to crop up in places with a 50-50 demographic split between whites and nonwhites. I’m not sure that’s the whole story, but neither is it the whole story in Nigeria, I’m sure, where Christians and Muslims were locked in bloody violence. I wish Walter would make clear the vast landscape covered by the word “violence”, but I understand that trying to forecast the future without resorting to punditry necessitates a degree of vagueness. The biggest issue comes in the last paragraph, though, where Walter seems to suggest that Republicans may be kept from resorting to violence by the possibility that they could draw Latino and Asian voters to their side. That seems blinkered to me, and Walter phrases the conclusion in such vague terms it undercuts her message.
☀️ Random Pick
“Check, Please” by John Colapinto. (September 10, 2012.) No Rosses. fine, finance, fifty. Either accidentally or perhaps intentionally scathing; a portrait of two restaurateurs obsessed with ranking and reviews over all else, completely devoid of any soul or spirit. I don’t think this is what Colapinto is going for, though; if the piece leaned into its nasty side, it could be quite fun, instead it’s just depressing. Is it the passing of time that’s revealed these emperors’ nudity? Their pivot to fussy veganism certainly unleashed some knives, while the NoMad project chronicled here wasn’t a high-profile failure so much as a slow deflation. But even though they were mostly lauded as wunderkinds when this piece came out, the signs are all here. At one point they brainstorm a series of vision-statement adjectives related to Miles Davis, an extremely charter-school-coded exercise. The empty theater that the 50 Best list overemphasizes has recently been taken to task, as has Eleven Madison’s incredibly low pay for kitchen workers. But Colapinto mostly seems to admire the cutthroat approach – it sure makes a lot of money. This is good reporting, but its perspective hasn’t aged well. 86 it!
☀️ Something Extra
Okay, ready for some deep lore? I wrote a nascent version of this newsletter and published it on my personal Facebook page for a few months in late 2019. Here, selected entirely at random and presented unedited, is the October 7, 2019 edition.
Must-reads:
“Heavy,” Peter Schjeldahl looks at new work by Richard Serra. A majestic piece of writing, incomprehensibly dense and poetically gorgeous throughout - a sort of 50-ton steel cylinder itself. There is a deep rhythm to the language, but always in service of its subject, which expands and contracts from Serra’s new work to Serra in general to minimalism as a whole - the pocket defense of minimalism here is hugely convincing. And Schjeldahl’s hilarious and relatable honesty about his own emotional response to Serra (“I would dislike him if I could build a case from the visible evidence equal in strength to my itch to dislike him. But beauty kicks in.”) makes the whole piece float despite its weight.
“Show of Force,” Rachel Aviv asks why it’s so easy for police officers to get away with abuse when the victims are their spouses. An absolutely horrifying deep dissection of an individual incidence of injustice that indicates a broader systemic issue, with all the soaked-in empathy and interest in personal history that is common across Aviv’s writing. Sometimes Aviv stuns with prose, here she’s able to stun with just the facts. Its only flaw is its pat final section, which surrenders to easy dichotomies, especially that of good versus bad men/spouses.
“Belief System,” Adam Green gets tricked by the mentalist magician Derren Brown. There is something about descriptions of magic tricks being performed that, in the hands of an expert writer, can be even more compelling than watching magic be done. Mark Singer’s profile of the magician Ricky Jay is the quintessential New Yorker profile, period; this piece is clearly something of an homage. It really works, the language sparkles and there is propulsion, humor, and fun to be found throughout. In places, uncritical of its subject almost - but not quite - to the point of advertisement. But rescued by the topsy-turviness of its own universe, in which Green presents himself as something of a mark, and by so doing, earns our trust.
“Walks of Life,” Dan Chiasson reads the late work of Fannie Howe. Chiasson is a master of line-by-line poetic explication - and it takes a master to make reviews of poetry not feel like pictures of dark rooms taken with the flash on. Here, the mood is preserved.
Window Shop:
“The Ends of the Earth,” Dana Goodyear watches Thomas Joshua Cooper take photographs. If you like stories about men with a death wish doing dangerous things to deal with their mommy issues, or whatever, this piece will certainly hit the spot, as it could genuinely be mistaken for a parody of the form: a profile of a photographer who will only take one picture in each location, who chooses locations based partly on their names, who clearly relishes the danger he puts himself in to get photos, who uses a willfully archaic method that means photos take two or three hours to shoot and fifteen hours each to develop, and that most of the photos he takes don’t develop properly. Unfortunately, while it’s admirable that the piece is frank about how bad of a spouse and parent Cooper can be, it doesn’t actually take the time to develop his wife and children beyond stock types. A piece split more evenly between them and Cooper might be less uncomfortable to read.
“Notes on a Scandal,” Lauren Collins reads a Norwegian novel that’s probably definitely based on its writer’s life. The excerpts from the book aren’t very good, and Collins uses a lot of off-puttingly undignified metaphors for unclear reasons (Reality television! Pop-up ads!) but the core of the piece, the thematic analysis, is strong, and it’s smart to save one twist (which opens the third section) for so late in the piece, where it can really pack a punch.
“Abandoning A Cat,” Haruki Murakami remembers his father. I’m not the biggest Murakami fan, but I think part of his appeal is his ability to twist between the mundane and the strange. Here, because it’s nonfiction, there’s no escape from the mundane, and the conclusions aren’t especially compelling, at least in translation. Still, there is a minimalist elegance to the prose.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Memory Play,” Alexandra Schwartz attends the play The Height of the Storm. Well-written, but a mixed-to-negative review shouldn’t wait until its last paragraph to register its primary criticism.
“Inside the Machine,” Jennifer Homans goes to a new dance by William Forsythe. It is still so strange to read dance pieces not written by Joan Acocella, the strongest prosaist at the magazine and their dance critic for twenty-one years. (And still writing excellent pieces on other subjects.) Homans is only the magazine’s third dance critic ever, their first, Arlene Croce, lasted twenty-five years herself. So far, her prose rings flat; there’s no joy to the language here, and the piece’s construction is a bit old-school: First, Forsythe’s career, second, the current piece. No frills, really. Hopefully Homans will develop more of a voice, and/or I will develop an appreciation for her style. (Total sidenote: I just went down an hour-long internet rabbit hole reading Croce’s most controversial piece, a review of a show she didn’t see because its depiction of the AIDS crisis she viewed as “victim art.” This was followed by four pages of letters in the magazine, by a who’s-who of thinkers and intellectuals: Tony Kushner, bell hooks, Hilton Kramer, Midge Decter, Camille Pagila, and more. Sort of fun to immerse oneself in the intellectual controversies of the recent past. The Tony Kushner letter in particular is vicious and brilliant - pg. 8 in the Jan 30, 1995 issue, if you’re interested.)
“No Laughing Matter,” Anthony Lane watches Joker. Sounds like a bad movie, man, but Lane is, incomprehensibly, too afraid of the trolls to tell us why! Really striking spot art, though.
What do you think? I have no ability to assess whether my writing was already decent or if I needed a few more years in the slow cooker. If you want more of these for some reason, they require no work on my end, so I’m happy to provide.
“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:
Haruki Murakam has spent a lifetime working as a translator, it's why his books are equally crispy and compelling in English or Japanese.