Last Week's New Yorker Review: March 10
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of March 10
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of February 17 & 24
“in what’s meant to be the squalor of a failing avocado farm’s kitchen, characters often turn up in pristine, off-the-rack clothes.”
Must-Read:
“Home Again” - Helen Shaw makes a Signature move. Which Way Western Man? Upstairs at the Signature, a bleak but reparative miniature, and steps away, a pessimistic epic – both informed by the masculine travails of the American West. Shaw’s choice is easy: The Hunter is “deft” while the Shepard revival “collapses in its first few instants and then drags itself painfully along for two hours and forty-five minutes” – yowch! Shaw’s prose is at its snappiest, whether describing Paul Sparks (a “foxlike comic presence with a wheedling drawl”) or a telegraphing Christian Slater (“If Weston is tired, Slater rubs his face. When Weston’s hungry, Slater rubs his stomach.”) – but what’s special here is the elegant reading of Grangeville. (“With a diorama, the artist’s hand can always come down into the shoebox, to move and adjust the figures inside.”) She deepens that show’s darkness. As for the Shepard – has any actor in a poor production received more unanimously glowing reviews than the onstage sheep? Maya Phillips says she “nearly steals the show”: “Truly, some of Lois’s bleating fell perfectly in pace with the dialogue opposite Slater and Flockhart.” Jackson McHenry says she’s “a star with big dewy eyes, a melancholy turn of her mouth as she chews, and ace comedic timing… How could you compete with a stage presence like that?” And Shaw raves: She’s “a full-sized ewe so immaculately fluffy and confidently vocal that she keeps the audience chuckling in admiration. (Her name is Lois, and she is a diva!)” Truly, if the Obies aren’t cowards, they’ll commend this nonhuman person.
Window-Shop:
“The Politics of More” - Benjamin Wallace-Wells shouts YIMBY-ki-yay, centrist suckers. It is hideous the way these centrist thinkers, facing fascism, decide the real problem is– would you believe it?– regulation! Wallace-Wells’ tone is never vicious, but he does point out the issues with this: Namely, it abandons everyone but the tiny technocratic elite who’d experience the bizarre amenities Klein and Thompson fetishize (the giveaway is that they imagine a “roof” with “solar panels” – in other words, a homeowner) and it plays directly into the hands of Republicans who are happy to tear down red tape for their own reasons. The real issue isn’t regulation but corruption and bureaucratic waste; the horrifying thing is that following the guidance of these bright bulbs will allow for far more of such things. And the Democratic self-flagellation Wallace-Wells critiques (“That so many leading Democrats are enthusiastic about their arguments somewhat undercuts the case”) is practically part of their motto. Plus, no wonder these writers position “stagnation” as a “national emergency” – it’s a friendly-faced take on disaster capitalism, using a manufactured sense of chaos to push through deregulation and privatization. It’s all profoundly depressing, and because Wallace-Wells focuses on three books making variations of the same argument, there’s no alternative plan to advocate for – one comes away sick, sad, and demoralized. I can’t wholeheartedly recommend a piece that doesn’t advocate for its own brighter future, but it’s still worth knowing what the controlled opposition has in mind for us.
“Death Becomes Him” - Justin Chang takes seventeen hits from the Joon-ho Bong. Nicely balanced – Chang touches on all sorts of elements, from an over-the-top Ruffalo whose character makes a political point that has now soured, to mandibled creatures that emphasize Bong’s “animal-rights advocacy”, to Pattinson’s performance, which seems to hold a secret Chang isn’t giving away. It’s a mixed review that makes one want to see the film in question, to compare notes if nothing else.
“Dreams and Nightmares” - Nick Paumgarten takes a Go Birds-eye view. Call it Unease and Depression In Philadelphia, this is a sort of sad-dad take on Gonzo journalism. I also have familial connections to the Iggles, and while they don’t supersede my always talented but increasingly tortured hometown team, they’re certainly my secondary investment. Football triggering feelings of “tacit abetment” in liberals is certainly nothing new, though it does have a slight air of compliance-in-advance in our new political reality. Paumgarten’s initially arch but increasingly real-seeming sturm und drang is compelling enough, and his writing is strong, though certainly there’s a solipsism to loudly resisting the monoculture while also participating in it. Most interesting is the section on the media hall, a “hive of content generation” that has genuinely changed the meaning of sports, turning it into the same kind of consumptive, obsessive fandom that is increasingly presented as the default mode of consumption, and that inevitably alienates those with even an ounce of critical perspective. (The game itself is “the one real thing” amidst the bullshit, Paumgarten wails.) It’s funny to think of Paumgarten and Goldfield (below) in the Big Easy concurrently, one melting down while the other eats cake.
“Tragedy at Rock Springs” - Michael Luo finds big trouble in little China. This made more sense when I noticed it was an excerpt from Luo’s new book; it’s rare that the magazine will publish what’s essentially a historical piece without a news hook, and while the piece is bookended by archaeology, these sections don’t feel entirely related; the bulk of the piece is just a chronological account of a horrific atrocity. I do wish Luo would connect the massacre more directly to the post-Reconstruction era in which it occurred, as it’s a useful reminder that it wasn’t only anti-Black racism that flourished in those years (and that those weren’t the only covered-up massacres.) There’s a brief mention, but it’s passive-voiced (“a time when noble visions of liberty and equality in America were foundering”) and not punchy. Luo does well to convey the role of Union Pacific in creating the conditions that allowed for the massacre, though he might do more to unpack the fact that the Chinese immigrants were brought in to scab. The class dynamic is complicated here, and Luo’s ending commemoration, that Chinese-Americans have “‘prevailed and excelled in spite of many trials and tribulations’”, raises the questions – why is that? And is there a subtle suggestion that other groups have not ‘prevailed and excelled’? My guess is that in the context of the book, these questions are addressed; this excerpt, though, leaves a few threads hanging.
Frazier on Trow (Takes) - Essentially a letter of recommendation for the piece in question, and a convincing one!
“If You Can’t Stand the Heat” - Rebecca Mead finds the flashpoint. This is yet another book review published as an essay for unclear reasons. The books are narrated by women who were blindsided by menopause and wrote the book they wanted to have read, and Mead points out that, of course, those books have already been written, and in fact menopause has had a series of moments, stretching back to at least the early days of feminist theory. It takes Mead quite a long time to point the finger at health policy; the books she’s reviewing sound pretty lightweight, and problematically so – if menopause is not a cultural issue demanding systemic consideration but just an individual issue requiring a product to be purchased (not merely hormone therapies but hydrating gels and eyelash curlers) then the supposedly new understanding of menopause is actually the same old understanding: It’s an individual trial, all part of the prison of gender. But what comes after a period could be the end of the sentence.
“Crown Jewel” - Hannah Goldfield is the King Cake Baby mascot. A moderately charming travelogue, though putting this in a section called “The Critics” is stretching the definition of criticism to its breaking point. There are only three or four lines about how the cakes taste; mostly, Goldfield walks around chatting to people. Peg that to a news story or a trend and it makes some sense, but here the impetus appears to be that Goldfield wanted to write off her vacation. She finds some compelling characters, especially in the second section on the wonderful Dong Phuong; on the other hand, there’s probably too much on féves, a charming tradition that is also the one thing everyone already knows about king cakes. The fava, the son, and the hole.
Skip Without Guilt:
“As Harvard Goes” - Nathan Heller parks the McCarthyism in Harvard Yard. The magazine’s (and especially Heller’s) relentless focus on one specific élite institution as representative of all of higher education continues to be frustrating, and if in this case Heller’s argument is easily and convincingly extrapolated to the rest of the higher-ed world, well, all the more reason that the piece might have been written about, say, the University of Kentucky. This is a scattershot piece; it’s best when it’s narrowest, delineating exactly how the university became so much more corporate and administrator-governed, and why this threatens its purpose. Going over and over the Claudine Gay material is less necessary, and as usual Heller gives so much space and time to the most malignant people – transparently special-pleading pro-Israelis, vampiric venture-capitalist donors – and when he occasionally and briefly talks to actual students and faculty members, it’s more for the moaning and gnashing of teeth they provide than for their visions and solutions to the problem Heller is raising. Heller also focuses so much on medicine as the unignorably good thing that a solid university system provides that he replicates the bias he later points out, that faculty members in the fields that used to produce university presidents now feel “beside the point”, as presidents are now exclusively practitioners of medicine or professional administrators. What would be lost if Harvard continued on its path to being “the world’s most élite trade school”? Heller gave some of his answers the last time he checked in on the ivory tower, but there are surprisingly few convincing ones here, and virtually no student voices. If a university falls in Cambridge and nobody is there to be taught by it, does it make a sound?
“L.A. Conflagrational” - Anthony Lane goes to a book, burning. Yeah, I’m just not convinced that this random detective novel is somehow prescient just because it concerns a fire in L.A; maybe if Macdonald anticipated climate change I’d be impressed. Because Lane chooses this newsy hook, he has to cut rapidly back and forth between his book review (with quotes that I didn’t find especially striking) and an uninspired recap of the Palisades disaster – an explanation of the wildland-urban interface sits awkwardly in the middle of things. The last section veers into biography, and Macdonald’s life is certainly bleak, though I think it’s distasteful to call a positive book review in the Times a “blessing” that “interrupted” the “dark fairy tale” of his life. Lane brings up Raymond Chandler so much Macdonald mostly comes across as a different flavor of the same thing; he didn’t have “premonitions” of a future disaster, he was just using fire as a backdrop. Was Ed Ruscha prescient, too? No – fire has always haunted the area, this just happened to be the (other) Really Big One, waiting for its moment.
Letters:
I’m putting the letter I received in next week’s edition! See you then.
drip
coffee