Last Week’s New Yorker Review: March 18, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of March 18
"'nothing,' 'hungry people,' 'dogs,' 'soldiers,' 'stairs,' 'houses,' 'gardens,' 'infidels,' 'my father.'"
The Weekend Special now includes both fiction and essay reviews. Thanks for your support! As I mentioned there, in a few months I'll begin the subscriber-lottery-choice feature as well – and if you're a paid subscriber and can't wait, for just a $20 Venmo (@SamECircle) I'll cover any article you wish right now, online or print, past or present.
Last time I told you footnotes were now working and, whoops, they were not; they're a bit trickier than I thought to implement in Buttondown so until there's an update we'll have to live with their brokenness. Sorry about that!
Must-Read:
"Invisible City" - Anand Gopal visits Al-Hol, the impossibly massive prison camp where ISIS holds sway. A masterpiece of sweeping and brutal intensity. This is Gopal's third in a series of astonishing journeys across the Middle East – they drop once every four years, perhaps the slowest drip rate of any regularly contributing writer, but they're always worth it. Don't be turned off by the first paragraph's horrific violence – yes, the rest of the piece is brutal, with an impossible body count, but it's not bloody. Gopal's style could be described as novelistic – things do unspool according to laws of narrative and catharsis – but it's never at all showy; Gopal balances the instincts of a journalist and a storyteller so elegantly it obscures just how tricky an act this is.
The story centers around Jihan Omar, a character whose story encompasses so much of what Gopal wants to say it's a wonder she's not a composite – but who, at the same time, feels vivid and alive. We don't merely feel her pain, we wrestle with the same questions she does: How to deal with her husband joining ISIS, the abandonment of her family, so much sudden death... and this is merely the first third of her story, as told here. Gopal knows what he's found in Jihan and never tries to use her story as a deliberate example while he's telling it (by interlacing didactic paragraphs, for example), he first focuses on the telling, full of patience and detail, and only in the end uses her story to make dual, deeply profound points about acceptance and rage. By that time we've also met Abu Hassan, a figure so many writers would paint as flatly monstrous; it's truly remarkable how much of his curdled humanity Gopal reveals. And we've spent time with the children of Al-Hol, whose unknowing acceptance of their imprisonment prompts an emotion in me that I cannot name. When all these characters meet at the climactic clown show (which Gopal trusts us to understand his reasons for staging) it feels like the swell at the end of an epic tale. This story is forceful, stunning, yes, sure – but this metaphorically violent language isn't fitting. Gopal writes with a power that transcends muscle: the pen is mighty.
Window-Shop:
"I See London, I See France" (Talk of the Town) - Zach Helfand thinks the new baseball uniforms are sheer madness. Keeps topping itself – the premise is already tailor-made for Talk, but interviewing Isaac Mizrahi and his fashion cohort is a couture flourish. Helfand makes the wise choice to get out of the way and let the quotes take over. If this doesn't delight you, you might just have your knickers in a (visible) twist.
"The Accidental Satirist" - Benjamin Kunkel introduces the Janus-faced novel Chevengur. An excellent extended appreciation for a great book pulled from the archives. That's always a favorite form in the magazine, and it's reliably fascinating. I appreciate Kunkel's willingness to give us big, chunky block quotes. I could have read a whole piece just discussing the utopia of Chepurny, though I wished there was a bit more contextualization after that last big block quote – a more historical perspective, not just a literary one. The only history we get is biography. I also wanted just a hint more historical grounding; it helped that I recently watched a Soviet comedy from roughly the same era, so I could transpose these stories onto that scene – but who knows if that's roughly accurate or totally wrong? The USSR is, definitively, big – and I felt a bit unmoored. These quibbles speak mostly to my own ignorance; this is largely excellent. More from Kunkel, please, and more on the literature of the Left.
"You Tell Me" - Maya Binyam ditches the luncheon with sprightly satirist Percival Everett. I get that Everett has a new book out and that another of his books just got turned into a major motion picture; still, it's been less than three years since Julian Lucas' fairly detailed and comprehensive review of Everett's oeuvre – not a long time in novelist-world. That leaves this profile a bit constrained in its coverage of Everett's writing, and Binyam, a novelist herself, seems most at home when she's just hanging with Everett, not trying to find his work's master key. (There's a phrase Everett could riff on for hours.) Everett assumes a coy-cantankerous mode that clearly brings him a bit of joy – which Binyam ably brings to the page. ("'You don't have to write the profile,' he said as we walked toward our cars. 'We could just be friends.') The piece really comes to life in its last two sections – if Binyam seems maybe too thrilled at the opportunity to make like a fiction writer and draw subtly sweeping conclusions from tiny observations of life being lived... well, that's likely because she's damn good at it. ("In the distance, the mountains were an unlikely gray... Everett handled his cigar like a cigar. The river was a river.") In fact, Everett's mask is such a mirror that, as with Nick Carraway describing Gatsby, we see Binyam's reflection as much as Everett's face.
"Bodies of Evidence" - Richard Brody plays Mad Libs with Love Lies Bleeding. Oh, hey – I guess the new film critic will also make space for Brody, who's been online-only for ages, to occasionally appear in the magazine proper. That's fun! Brody is a fascinating character; he has some of the most sui generis taste of any working critic, and he's especially fantastic at reading films as political objects. At the same time, line by line, his prose leaves me a bit cold. All of that basically applies here; I'm fascinated by his trend-watch that films increasingly present "protagonists whose intellectual and cultural lives are portrayed only to the extent that they serve the plot," and instantly I can start deciding if it's true – I think it is, but I'd add to the list a film Brody loved, Passages. Brody's not the greatest at plot synopsis (you can really tell he's trying not to give away a twist,) and his take on Kristin Stewart isn't revelatory. But his inimitable voice is a welcome presence in these pages.
Skip Without Guilt:
"Tone Poet" - Alex Ross goes tonally mad for Schoenberg. Doesn't justify the time it spends on Schoenberg's life in L.A, really; it's not totally uninteresting, but what does it have to do with the music? The attempts to claim Schoenberg for the city are forced ("It's hard to imagine how Hollywood could have functioned without the language of dissonance." I can imagine it...) and it takes Ross far too long to get to describing performances; really, it's only in the piece's last column. He's as sharp as ever on that front, of course: One quartet "brought out not only the work's sumptuous Klimtian hues but also the almost cubistic sharpness of its contrapuntal lines." If that doesn't paint you a picture...
"Gone with the Wind" - Jill Lepore is on the hunt for John Wilkes Booth. An ungainly subject: Kind of a review of a new T.V. series and the book it's adapted from, also a comparison of that series' treatment of history to what's presented in that book and various other historical sources, also vaguely a profile of the Booth family... there are too many strings, and Lepore never figures out the through-line. It's also a piece in which a historian gauges the accuracy of a fictionalized work of media – basically a clickbait premise at this point, though there's still considerable power in presenting the gap between the show's overindicated Black positivity and the "less comforting" reality. Lepore seems excited to write a T.V. review, and she should've been granted the opportunity. The further away from that aim the piece drifts, and the longer it gets, the more unmoored it feels.
"Old School" - Emma Green does some Greco-Roman wrestling with the proponents of classical education. Green continues to cover "education" through the lens of the right-wingers pushing a culture war. She's not exactly credulous; she examines their ideas carefully (though she has major blindspots) but it still feels like ceding ground. Surely the left is experimenting with education, too? You wouldn't know it from this piece, which presents a flat and misleading dichotomy: On one side, the rigid bureaucracy of so-called progressive mainstream education, [^1] prioritizing "the interests of the child" but neglecting some degree of rigor, on the other, reactionaries securing a future for "Western" wisdom. The reactionaries do get a few things right, but this is entirely accidental – as it turns out, if you try to reverse the mainstream, you'll stumble on some good ideas. (Phonics work, the Greeks could write!) When these good ideas are taken up by, say, supposedly well-meaning charter schools like the one Green discusses in the first section, the right-wingers claim credit. It's telling, though, that the one thing the mainstream "progressives" and the classicists can agree on is the importance of discipline – perhaps because that's the true goal of any pedagogical model that ultimately seeks to create colonized subjects.
It's a real shame Green doesn't speak to a single critical educator (or anyone left of center, really), because the second half of her piece features scenes which are vividly rendered but lack any rational perspective: What are the real goals of establishing an explicitly Zionist classical school, or of teaching a group of African kids to rote-memorize the Old Testament? Where is the line between education and indoctrination – and what kind of ideal society do we imply by the way we raise and teach our children? These are deep and important questions, and Green's approach is both shallow and blinkered; we're just meant to scoff at both the nutty Fascists and the doctrinaire progressives, not to ponder the deep fear undergirding both of their philosophies – the fear that children with autonomy might grow into people with power.
"Talking with God" - Vinson Cunningham dialogues with John Patrick Shanley. Makes the bizarre and highly counterintuitive choice to focus entirely on the text and performance of these shows while ignoring their formal qualities on the stage. I suppose it's meant to be a look at Shanley's work as a writer, but it ends up stifling Cunningham's greatest strength (I live for his descriptions of stage lighting) and amplifying his rather thin reading of Shanley's work. The second review hardly mentions Cunningham's reaction to the play, even; the focus is entirely on what the text "keeps asking." The focus is so far away from the visual, Cunningham could literally have written this review with his eyes closed.
"O.K., Doomer" - Andrew Marantz seeks p(doom) of choice. Oh my god these people are annoying! And, look... Marantz's whole thing is reporting on extremists in a way that presents their lunacy plainly but without any nudging indication. He's good at it, and it's basically what he's doing here, so if you want to soak in a big bath of tech-cult nonsense, be my guest. But the real issue with this piece is that it takes at face value the conditions presented by both the boomers and doomers – namely, that A.I. is incredibly powerful. Whenever there are two sides with a vested interest in making it appear like they are the only two possible sides (think: Republicans and Democrats) it's worth considering what standards are enforced by both those sides (think: imperialism!) It's pretty funny that these nerds, who think exclusively in terms of what fallacy they can accuse their debate partner of perpetuating, are willfully blind to the fact that their entire premise is based on one of the oldest fallacies in the book: False dichotomy! If this piece is meant to accurately replicate the experience of being around a group of extraordinarily blinkered and delusional people in a literal doomsday cult (and their friendly boomsday neighbors who also believe the comet is coming, but think they can catch the comet in a butterfly net and sell it for a tidy profit), it succeeds; but in that case, there has to be a voice for the sane, or the piece will inevitably be read as supporting the deeply stupid ideas it presents. Stick that in your basilisk and smoke it.
Letters:
Meave Gallagher (who, by the way, helps orchestrate the Morning News Tournament of Books, one of the greatest things on the internet, which is going on now) says that Jackson Arn was a bit tough on Keith Haring: "Comparing him to Jeff Koons? Is there a crueler insult? ...Haring capitalized on right time, right place; Koons was a literal stockbroker before he started casting his stupid dogs and his weird "look at me I married a porn star ooooh aren't I subversive"-ass paintings. ...I worked for POZ for... 6 years on and off, and I have a giant soft spot for anyone we lost to AIDS complications."
Meave also highlights a "top notch" documentary, Ayotzinapa, El paso de la Tortuga, which explores the lost-students story covered by Alma Guillermoprieto. It gives "lots of backstory about the student-teachers and their school's project... their families, their work, class & politics in Mexico."
What did you think of this week's issue?
A read of the post may be quite continental – but 'scribing is a girl's best friend.
[^1]: Whether the normative methods now present in most schools can by any reasonable metric be called "progressive" is up for debate, I'd say; what John Dewey meant when he said that "the school must represent present life — life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, or the neighborhood, or on the playground" is probably not that the school should accurately simulate the highly surveilled, rampantly unequal conditions under which we live – but it sure does! (Much more on the warping of progressive schooling and on this issue in general can be found in this very good Rebecca Mead piece from 2017 – from which I drew the quote.) ↩