Last Week’s New Yorker Review: January 22, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of January 22
"Balanchine? The Book of Job? Harry Potter? Arsenic?"
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Must-Read:
"Joan Acocella" (Postscript) - Alexandra Schwartz memorializes the magazine's alchemical dance critic. A wonderful obit, flickering with warmth, perfectly pinning down Acocella's sui generis prose style. ("...her fabulous erudition was melded to a frankness that was so unaffected as to seem effortless... She liked her diction blunt, earthy, threaded with startling touches of beauty... "'I like a little sand in my oyster,' she said.")
Window-Shop:
"Witchy Women" - Rivka Galchen weighs the same as a duck. Hews closely to the book of history under review, but keeps things focused on the "trial" side of things more than the "witch" side. That's a smart choice: Really, this is a piece about miscarriages of justice through the ages – and how they provide insight into the societies in which they occur. Most compelling, actually, is the Austrian trial in which justice is actually done. Usually, we only get stories from the past in which procedure fails massively, since these failures are presumed to have lessons embedded in them. But successes also have lessons, and the merits of bureaucracy are on full display here.
"Detail Oriented" - Carrie Battan has no complaints about Jacqueline Novak's head. This might not be the out-of-the-park homer that causes me to reconsider my frequently established position that it's basically impossible to write about stand-up comedy, but it's a solid hit. Battan's secret is to focus less on Novak's comedic style and more on her personality – it helps that she's a real weirdo, who's going on a tangent about "the untimely death of a Kundalini-yoga figurehead known as Guru Jagat" when she's not "thinking of what it was to be the fetus" in Peter the Great's cabinet of curiosities. Her "kinetic disposition" never feels too antic or performed, thankfully – Battan doesn't overload us, which helps. There are still stretches of this piece where Novak's deliberately building a career or going over her special with a fine-toothed comb – two situations where the biggest of personalities will be tamped down. And despite the piece's evidently rather long gestation period, Battan somehow hasn't gotten a single good quote from any of Novak's comedic friends. [^1] But as a profile, this works – we get a sense of Novak beyond her work, and we understand how she approaches her work. It also sold me on the special, which hopefully won't suck... or, I guess, hopefully will.
"Ghost Town" - Inkoo Kang shivers for the refurbished True Detective's ice-cold case. Any formal analysis would be nice – this could practically be a review of the show's script. But Kang reveals the show's hidden thesis regarding "the moral authority that can be reflexively assigned to women over men in our fantasies of female vengeance for male aggression." Maybe comparing the new True with the old is an easy trick; certainly it seems to be one intended by the creators. Regardless, Kang pulls it off.
Skip Without Guilt:
"Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" - James Wood reads Hisham Matar's novels of displacement and missing fathers. Matar's work is "rich in literary references" and Wood follows suit, crowding this piece with referents with the eventual consequence of stifling Wood's reading of Matar. Wood seems more interested in Matar's themes than in his particular way of expressing them: while the piece thoughtfully engages with the histories Matar probes, it doesn't give a sense of his prosodic voice.
"Impasse" - Helen Shaw debates the instantly dated Prayer for the French Republic. A long show "about argumentation" would seem to provide many hooks for a review, but Shaw's disinclined to really spin a thesis, pointing out that its characters are "animated position papers," but taking no real position of her own, gesturing toward the war in Gaza mostly as awkward timing. It's not the gutsiest choice, but there's not much space for a deeper stab. Still, it means that the review is largely redundant with those elsewhere.
"Do No Harm" - E. Tammy Kim just says yes to the Stabbin Wagon, a safe drug-injection van. A worthy topic, handled with an unfortunate paucity of verve or style. Harm reduction obviously works, and the argument against it falls into the usual Liberal trap of caring about appearances more than results. (Or the usual Fascist trap of caring about conformation more than humanity.) Better to have the police force the tents off my sidewalk than to listen to the people inside. If you haven't accepted the efficacy of giving people what they ask for (instead of arresting them), though, the piece never makes the argument with much pep; it's mostly content to point to data – and there's often an implied "despite what you might have thought." Stabbin Wagon seems to have been chosen because it pushes on the bruise of ill appearances without shame; Kim's conclusion is essentially that before you get mad, you should consider that it's just one piece in a much bigger puzzle that's under construction. Fair enough, but it's worth considering why Stabbin Wagon's name and mission provoke that reaction in the first place. The shame attached to drug use runs deep; Kim's approach skims the surface.
"Hostages" - David Remnick tunnels into Benjamin Netanyahu and his opposite number Yahya Sinwar. Hamstrung by the bounds of its own reporting, which becomes clear when Remnick lists his sources on the war: "former Prime Ministers, Knesset members, Israeli journalists, defense and intelligence officials, businesspeople, hostage families, and many others." Remnick is scrupulously fair and often foregrounds the Palestinian experience, but he can't get access to sources outside Israel. This is made incredibly blatant in a scene in which he goes to its "northernmost town," as close as possible to the border with Hezbollah without crossing it. I don't blame Remnick for lacking those voices, but I think the piece needs a more detailed explanation of why they aren't being heard from here.
The piece is at its most affecting the further it gets away from Netanyahu, whose psychological and practical motives have been expounded upon plenty to similar effect. I knew less about Sinwar, and could've used an exploration of his psychology as detailed as the one Netanyahu recieves. (Clearly, Remnick just doesn't have access – "It is folly to guess" at his motives, he says at one point.) The sections exploring the trauma of kidnapping victims can feel odd, even as Remnick is sure to implicate Netanyahu's choices directly in their plight. In one gripping scene, a captive Israeli family is held "in a building next to one that was being shelled by the I.D.F." – the mother says, "'They know my children are here... when I came back, I saw we were not the most important priority of the Israeli government.'" Yes, that's outrageous, but surely the Palestinian civilians in the building that's actually being shelled are also worthy of our outrage?
"A New Life" - Leslie Jamison is like, "Baby, baby, baby, oh." Absurdly overindexed on enigmatic details, which becomes oddly hilarious midway through when she tells her students at Columbia she "wanted specifics – wanted them stress-eating cookies as big as their palms, their fingers smelling like iron after leaning against an ex's rusty fire escape." I'm glad she knows what she likes, but she's telling on herself a bit – she's prompting her students to write in her style [^2], not to find theirs. Also telling on herself: The entire rest of the piece. I mean... where to start?
Maybe with Judy Chicago, whose Dinner Party Jamison strolls around. [^3] Jamison doesn't have to answer for her, of course, but her lauding of Chicago is one small piece that hints at a viewpoint unwilling to see the flaws with second-wave feminism. To be honest, second-wave feminism probably gets too bad of a rap these days from many leftist sources, whose righteous anger at its flaws around race and biological essentialism can obscure the ways its analysis of experience had profound effects on our modes of thought, in and out of the academy. But Jamison writes as if she'd just emerged in a time machine from 1974, ready to awaken everyone to profound truths regarding motherhood and women's bodies. These stories are always worth telling, but Jamison really ought to use a lens which considers the experiences of others as a way of more deeply understanding one's own. Her one mention of an imaginary "maintenance worker" feels profoundly patronizing, a half-assed way of making up for work not done elsewhere.
When the piece doesn't feel like it's from the '70s, it's because it feels like it's from the early '10s, the xoJane era of oversharing essays by young writers, a trend that's been thoroughly critiqued. (And has been, in some ways, reborn in its own higher-minded second wave, the autofiction trend.) But Jamison has been carrying water for the earlier style for a while. I won't litigate the entire form; suffice to say that one of its issues is the ways that shaping your life into a narrative ends up leaving important things out. Here, one of those things is Jamison's stepdaughter, whose presence would change the tenor of the piece dramatically, probably for the better. The characters here have no air: The husband, C, is generically angry and dissatisfied, the baby is a baby. This lack of complexity on the page makes it feel like Jamison lacks complexity in her viewpoint, which feeds into the broader issue with empathy. A character who stands outside that dynamic would widen the piece's view.
I could write much more about this piece, which deserves some praise for being compulsively readable and shareable – but then again, the same could be said for “My Gynecologist Found a Ball of Cat Hair in My Vagina."
"Is A.I. the Death of I.P.?" - Louis Menand charts the complicated course of intellectual property. Doesn't get around to the titular question (which is oddly click-able for a magazine title – usually those are enigmatic where the online titles are blaringly blatant) until the final section. Before that, it's a surface-level journey through copyright law that's clearly written by a non-expert in copyright law. The music-copyright issue was covered in depth in the magazine just last June; even then it was somewhat old news. It feels like Menand is spinning his wheels because he knows he has no perspective on the A.I. issue; when it finally comes up, there's a lot of rhetorical questions and statements like "I.P. experts completely disagree on what the answer should be." Menand also conflates the idea of human "permission to read" with computer permission to use as data. Sometimes in the Cartoon and Poem Supplement (subscribe!!) I say that a cartoon caption wouldn't be funny if someone said it to me in real life. Well, this article wouldn't be cogent if someone recited it to me in real life. It's a shame, because the book ostensibly under review sounds quite compelling, but Menand mentions it twice then completely forgets about it.
Letters:
John and Matthew both wrote in to point out what I missed about the passionfruit/passion-fruit/passion fruit copyediting in Hannah Goldfield's piece extolling the tart spheres: "It's 'passion fruit' when used as a noun and 'passion-fruit' when used as a compound adjective," (John); "The magazine simply loves an antiquated two-word version of a compound noun" and frequently "uses hyphens for compound adjectival phrases... this magazine would never let a chance to hyphenate pass!" (Matthew). I appreciate the clarification.
Regular correspondent Michael says the "highlight of the issue was learning that John Lee Anderson's sister got inoculated by Papa Doc Duvalier. What a crazy life!"
[^1] "She says things like it's an observation she's just sharing with you personally. It's a little bit like she must have just thought of this right before she went onstage." That's Fred Armisen, apparently ChatGPTing "observational stand up comedy woman positive comment."
[^2] Which is... maybe just the style of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where she did an MFA?
[^3] I wrote a bit about Chicago then decided to put it down here because it was messing with the flow too much. Look into Chicago's Womanhouse and you'll find a fascinating and hugely influential art environment that also functioned as a sort of cult of Chicago, in which she justified the authority she wielded over the other women by insisting their issues stemmed from biases against powerful women, and presented herself as the only source of feminist consciousness-raising, ignoring its history elsewhere. Dinner Party was also made with unpaid labor, and features only one Black woman at the table, who is the only woman whose plate has no vagina. Further reading on Chicago and Dinner Party's legacy can be found here.