Last Week’s New Yorker Review: July 29, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of July 29
"like a feckless baby elephant stranded on the veldt."
Must-Reads:
The best thing in this issue is the short story by Sarah Braunstein, reviewed in the weekend edition, but in lieu of any long nonfiction that’s good enough, I’m choosing a pair of Talk of the Towns to highlight in this space.
“Paris, 1900” (Talk of the Town) - Michael J. Arlen gives his great-grandmother her flowers. A wonderful reminiscence with only the loosest news peg. Arlen wrote for the magazine for 33 years but left 34 years ago; it’s good to have him back to pay a visit, and in fine form. There are so many wonderful details of slightly counterintuitive prosecraft – “…Mr. Wright disappeared somewhere in Montana in the eighteen-eighties, looking for oil or looking for something”, “a bunch of them would sail off… my mother, then a girl, allowed along for the ride since she had some small proficiency on the mandolin.” Anything written by a 90-something-year-old about the memories of their forebears is also, of course, a piece about history and its nearness. Arlen brings it so close you can touch it.
“Tilt” (Talk of the Town) - Henry Alford shreds soles with the walking guitarists of Tilted Axes. Good fun, strewn with moments of observed detail. (“One older woman cautiously rummaged in her handbag for a lozenge.”) That’s clearly the right way to capture this kind of action, where the response is nearly as crucial as the thing itself.
Window-Shop:
“Dead Reckoning” - Nick Paumgarten sees something shakin’ on shakedown street. When Paumgarten is focused on the Dead in relation to the Sphere, this is an excellent little travelogue. He’s a real expert, and comparing his memories of Vegas then (“we had beer and some seedy brown weed and a romantic sense of ourselves as renegades crossing the desert at night”) to his view of it now (“People seemed more weary and dazed than elated, as though overwhelmed by the sensory experience, the scale of the place, and the distance of the walk along endless faux-palatial hallways”) is great fun. There is less ironic remove in Paumgarten than in Jackson Arn; relatedly, though, there is more of a self-conscious complex about lacking ironic remove. This sometimes gets in the way, especially in the early sections focusing on the Sphere itself. The middle of the piece mostly focuses on interviews around Vegas; Paumgarten finds some fascinating people to sketch. (“‘We’d sneak the tapers’ gear in, and they’d give us coke, which we’d share with the band… All that cocaine and alcohol, it rewired my brain. When the crowd chanted “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry,” I thought it was “Russell, Russell, Russell.”’”) The next-to-last section, where Paumgarten gripes about people talking during the show, is incredibly banal – Paumgarten should gripe about that stuff on Reddit, it’s not pertinent or compelling in this context. So things are uneven – nothing like the Sphere’s endless smoothness. Maybe that’s for the best.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Beach Boys” - Hannah Goldfield capes for Cod. Proportioned oddly: The first section sets us up for a journey through Provincetown, and the second section plops us at Sal’s Place, our one and only stop. The “brilliant, imperious” Siobhán Carew clearly interests Goldfield, but the piece turns into a compendium of the gossip on her – it’s engaging enough, I suppose, but it’s not what’s been advertised. It’s also strange tonally, since none of Carew’s “enemies” would grant Goldfield an interview. It makes the dirt on her come across as more frivolous than it otherwise might.
“Old Money” - Lauren Collins finds gold in that thar shipwreck. Surprisingly difficult to follow – I’d recommend jotting down characters’ names as they appear, because this is definitely an ensemble piece. Most other magazines would have a little sidebar with names and photographs; that’s not the style here, but it’s too bad, as it would help this piece. Your reward for keeping track of all the moving parts is a story that’s… kind of interesting, I guess? Its pleasures are all on the surface – Gold bars! Malaria! Curses! (Collins seemingly gets a lot of pleasure in semi-ironically bringing up the curse again and again; it didn’t work for me.) French courts! (If you liked Anatomy of a Fall for its vision into the genuinely bizarre world of French justice, there’s a bit more of that on offer here.) The in medias res beginning seems to promise death and disarray, but by the time it’s eventually circled back to, most of the story’s already revealed itself; there’s no other shoe to drop. One issue with a roving ensemble piece: There is little to no psychological depth on offer here. Not every story needs that kind of depth, but these particular details just didn’t glimmer enough on their own to entrance me. Then again, you know what they say about all that glimmers…
“A Young Artist” - Rebecca Mead has a brush with tenderness. Hurt immeasurably by the lack of reproductions of Ducrot’s art; online, there are two images, which is far better than nothing, but still not really enough. Photos might not be enough, in general: Mead tries to describe the work, but its scale and presence are clearly part of what make it resonant. Small and on a screen, it just looks like a sketch. Ducrot’s elderly ebullience is of a piece with her work’s childlike wonder; it’s deeply felt, but not as unexpected as Mead presents it to be. The best part of this piece by far, though, is the one block quote where Ducrot’s writing speaks for itself. (“You must howl if you seek propriety, consistency and accuracy.”) Perhaps in this case there was no need for an outside observer to paint her portrait – she’s plenty good at that.
“Bizarre Reality” - Vinson Cunningham colors outside the lines with Julio Torres. Ah, turns out Cunningham’s review of the NBA Finals was not a one-off; he’s moving to the television beat. It would be fun if this means the magazine will find a second theatre critic; more likely, I assume, they’ll continue the gradual and somewhat foreboding trend away from NYC-based in-person stuff and toward streamables. Frankly, there’s not much analysis in this review that wasn’t covered by Michael Schulman’s pandemic-era profile of Torres, and Cunningham gives away too many of the new show’s bits. I’m still excited to see what he does at this beat.
“Overcorrection” - Adam Gopnik has it on lock. I usually quite enjoy Gopnik’s Liberal-eye-for-the-Leftist-guy routine, in which he makes the reformist’s case for various apparently radical policies, like replacing police with community organizers or getting rid of cars or reducing prosecutorial overreach. As usual, he makes some excellent and surprising points here: True, the rhetorical focus on capitalism can sometimes occlude the unique evils of American imprisonment; yes, we ought to consider even Sam Bankman-Fried as a victim of the incarceration system. (That Gopnik can’t find any decarceralists who agree with this second point suggests merely that he hasn’t actually been talking to many.) The weakness of this piece is just that it refuses to engage with the substance of prison abolitionism on its own terms, insisting that their ideas for different ways to sanction “violations of the social covenant” begin and end with Angela Davis’ proposal of Betty Ford Centers for all. He hasn’t actually engaged with the literature, so it’s hard to grant his counterarguments much weight. The online subhed says that we must “freely imagine alternatives”, but Gopnik hasn’t sought out the very scholars who are imagining those alternatives. The reference to “Downstate” is also just weird, relying on a very narrow interpretation of the show. And his usual blithe, scoffy tone isn’t really appropriate for this subject. A wider range of scholarly voices is needed, so Gopnik can get every perspective – bar none!
“Heavy Weather” - Richard Brody gets his knickers in a twist. I’m a bit fed up with Brody taking every possible chance to bemoan the lack of depth of characterization in blockbuster flicks. Surely he can understand that this flat quality is, in many cases, a deliberate choice – keeping things “impersonal” is a bit like drawing cartoon faces; you want the audience to project themselves into the thrills. Brody’s plot synopsis is better than usual; the description of Glen Powell as “irrepressibly but self-consciously charming… a precise fit for the role of a preening showman endowed with untested depths of character” is spot on. But his unwillingness to consider the flick on its own terms, instead of his, is tiresome. Can’t he spin up something new?
“What Happened to the Yuppie?” - Louis Menand sees number go Yup. Bizarrely predictable and unsurprising, presenting the conventional wisdom on the Yuppie as if it’s revelatory. Would you guess that Yuppies came into being because Reagan made the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? Would you guess that Yuppies never really disappeared, they just stopped valorizing their wealth quite as egregiously? Would you guess there were never really that many Yuppies, but that the “moral anxiety” around economic disparities caused them to have a bigger place in the cultural imagination than they otherwise might have? Maybe this is all a great surprise to many readers, but it’s identical to my preconceived notions around Yuppiedom, so I was left waiting for a deeper analysis that never arrived. It’s all surface! Remind you of anyone?
“The Brink of War” - Dexter Filkins says a war may be en route to Beirut. There are some really odd details here. I’m sure the magazine does its best to rigorously verify its sources, and if Filkins is claiming he’s talking to Hezbollah commanders, it’s hard not to trust him. But it’s very strange, almost implausible, that the commanders would be criticizing the organization to Filkins’ face. Not providing any counternarrative to the “senior American diplomat” who says Iran and Hezbollah “‘sing from the same song sheet’” is troubling. The detail about a translator’s ear appearing out of a hijab is… just a strange thing to draw attention toward. These bits of weirdness and imprecision undercut the general thrust of the piece, and Filkins paints rosy portraits of displaced kibbutzers and Maronites stuck in a middleground, while hardly extending the same sympathy toward anyone Islamic – in fact, I don’t think there’s a single Islamic civilian quoted in the piece. I can’t criticize this piece as harshly as I did Filkins’ coverage of American immigration; I have even less expertise on this part of the world and Filkins has considerably more. But even when I disagree with the politics of pieces in this magazine, I always feel I can trust them to be essentially fair and accurate. I’m not sure that’s true here.
Letters:
John pointed out that last week’s Ian Frazier piece on the Bronx is excerpted from an upcoming book on the topic – “hence the dated details.” That explains it! “The book is good, FWIW, but yeah, the edit/selection was a bit hamfisted.”
Susan points out a fantastic detail from that same piece, asking, “who is going to write the novel that must be written about this?” Here’s the quote: “The Andrew Freedman Home takes up a block behind its iron gates and seldom mowed grounds. It was built originally as a home for indigent millionaires, offering them amenities that they had been accustomed to before they lost their fortunes. Freedman, the founder of the home and provider of the funds, promised that it would welcome people of all races, religions, and ethnicities, as long as they had at one time been wealthy.”
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