Last Week's New Yorker Review: October 21, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of October 21
"a weary pantomime of thinking and feeling, outrage and offense."
Must-Read:
“Origin Story” - Parul Sehgal doesn’t get The Message. Last week I said that Alexandra Schwartz’s takedown of the new Rachel Kushner novel “certainly isn’t written to go viral and inspire lots of discourse.” Well… this is! Like Schwartz, Sehgal’s beef isn’t with the past work of the author, but solely with their latest effort. And like Schwartz, Sehgal feels that the new book is essentially a betrayal of the writer’s chosen form: For Kushner, realism; for Coates, journalism. But where Schwartz sounded weary, Sehgal is fairly gleeful to unsheathe her daggers. In part that’s because she’s found a smoking gun, an old Atlantic blog where, contrary to the narrative he’s espoused on his press tour, Coates directly admits that Israel is a blind spot he’s well aware of and has intentionally avoided confronting. To be honest, I think it’s pretty important for any social movement to have a moderately narcissistic figurehead who’s willing to do press rounds and speak the truth – when they go Phyllis Schlafly, we go Betty Friedan. As Moira Donegan’s 2023 piece on Friedan says, she was “one of those characters whom history responds to, someone who shapes public opinion through the force of her personality”, but that doesn’t excuse her sometimes insidiously retrograde viewpoint. It’s for history to judge Coates as a public figure, but it’s for Sehgal to judge his book, and in it she finds a “failure to represent other perspectives”, both the perspectives of the people that live in the three places he travels to, and uses largely as “a painted backdrop for his own meditations”, and the perspectives of the “critics on the left” and his own “intellectual heroes”, who might complicate the narrative of “sudden epiphany” he’s selling. I don’t think I’d have lodged this criticism of Coates on my own, but reading Sehgal brought me to a “sudden epiphany” of a different kind – this emperor is, at the very least, not wearing the same kind of clothes I thought he was.
Window-Shop:
“Twerker’s Comp” - Justin Chang thinks Anora-nce is bliss. Really fantastic writing, engaging thoughtfully with Baker’s larger project (he “has made the case, in movie after movie, that there is no tougher, more resourceful, and more cruelly stigmatized labor force” than sex work) but sparkling even when Chang is just recounting the plot. (The protagonist “can’t resist Ivan’s horndog enthusiasm, his party-hearty vibes, his obscene fortune.”) Chang generally has an auteurist attitude, I’ve noticed; every film is analyzed as part of its director’s oeuvre more than as a self-contained vessel. That approach fits here, because Baker is both a major and distinct voice and an underanalyzed one, perhaps because his films aren’t formally flashy; he draws far more subtly from his influences (mostly mid-’70s exploitation flicks) than, say, a Tarantino. But all the more reason to dig, no? Chang points not to Russ Meyer, though, but to Preston Sturges, “the most class-conscious and marriage-minded of screwball auteurs,” while noting that Baker “seems bent on pushing realism, humanism, comedy, and action well past the point of formal compatibility.” But that’s really just a description of any campy B-movie; what’s notable is that Baker manages the mashup while maintaining the mood meticulously enough to merit a Palme. Chang doesn’t catch that the film is putting a brutal twist on those trappings, or maybe feels it goes without saying. I’d also stay away from this review if you’re planning to see the movie (which you should – it’s fantastic) because it reveals a few things that are quite deliberately obscured in the film’s marketing, and in its first hour or so. Still, for prose like this, I’ll toss lots of ones.
“Pecking Order” - Rivka Galchen hears more than tweets the eye. A charmingly starry-eyed piece, this gets points just for providing relief from an issue that’s otherwise cover-to-cover grim politics. Galchen’s daughter even chimes in as a fount of wisdom; she’s well-spoken but not in a Woke Toddler way. (I’m gonna say you can start quoting your kids in your stories when they hit double digits.) When I was a kid myself, my family spent summers in Ithaca, and one of my favorite places was the back room of the Lab of Ornithology where they had an interactive Macaulay Library display – basically a digital audio workstation that showed spectrograms of recordings and let you play around. I would mostly just practice saying things backward so that I could play them in reverse, a la The Arm, but I absorbed enough that this piece’s premises made intuitive sense to me – not always the case with science stories. Maybe that’s why I felt very slightly condescended to – Galchen cannot stop reiterating the central question of the piece, over and over, in nearly every section: Is birdsong speech? Is birdsong speech? She presents her journey from “baselessly” assuming “that birds had little on their minds” to believing that birds “were full of concerns” – but for the reader who’s most of the way to that conclusion, the repetition gets tiresome. Birdsong is beautiful until you have to hear the same call over and over.
Skip Without Guilt:
“The Impresario” - Hilton Als has the cure for what Ailey. Bizarrely uninterested in Ailey’s actual career – Als spends easily two-thirds of the article on Ailey’s childhood and creative backstory, which isn’t unimportant but also isn’t the thing. Most of the other third is spent on Ailey’s most famous dance, “Revelations”, but this is also handled strangely; before we’ve heard anything about the piece we get two separate lengthy block quotes proclaiming that Ailey’s later work is largely derivative of “Revelations”, quotes which Als critiques on what’s essentially a linguistic technicality (albeit a very valid one) but never actually addresses the substance of. Line by line, Als’ writing is strong as ever, and Ailey is an interesting subject, but this piece feels severely under-edited. Arch those toes.
“As Bad as All That” - Adam Gopnik lives here, and is home by now. I was dreading this piece, but it’s actually quite enjoyable in its loopy, semi-coherent way. It does read like the middle of an hours-long filibuster, and certainly the idea that the piece is in any way “about” the fear of re-electing Trump, or anything else, is a pipe dream. It’s entirely free-associative – billboards, spaces, the Civil War and the Cold War, the supposed and actual nature of polarization, the gap between cultural power and political power (this is the highlight – Gopnik’s idea about the left and the right securing exactly the kinds of victories they undervalue is ticklish and memorable), podcasts and spammy political emails (this is where things start to feel like Gopnik is filling time with random gripes), the trap of belief in liberal institutions, immigration (and not the lack of a welfare state) as the Right’s actual driving force… and have you noticed we’re more than halfway through and haven’t mentioned Trump? When he pops up, Gopnik mostly just wants to point at him and say “evil!” like a demon-smiting Catholic. I can’t sum this piece up wittily – even Gopnik can’t sum this piece up wittily! But I thought it would be a slog, and it decidedly wasn’t. A bit like this presidential election, I guess: More anxious and less depressive than expected.
“Prison Diaries” - Alexei Navalny is Russian to conclusion. I’m certainly not opposed to publishing memoir in the magazine, but Navalny is a fundamentally different kind of celebrity from, say, Paul McCartney – he’s a politician, and while his death is tragic, it doesn’t retroactively make him a saint, just a victim of persecution. Navalny admits that his story is nothing special but for his stature: “If you open any book by a Soviet dissident, there will be endless stories of punishment cells, hunger strikes, violence, provocations, lack of medical care. Nothing new.” He reiterates the material conditions under which he’s held, affirms his core beliefs, and dabbles in motivational speechifying: “We must do what they fear—tell the truth, spread the truth.” His prose is standard; the highlights are the moments of sly humor, but mostly he projects a (useful, but seemingly legitimate) image of steadfastness. This isn’t a Letter from Birmingham Jail because Navalny isn’t making an argument; he’s less a political philosopher, anyway, and more an investigative activist, but he isn’t investigating his own prison sentence, he’s just posting through it.
“American Attitude” - Vinson Cunningham thinks Trump is a Vince McMahon for our seasons. Essentially expands on the aside in the Gopnik piece that Trump is a pro-wrestling-esque figure, something that’s already been remarked upon by, you know, everyone with eyes. It’s remarkably un-fun, and Cunningham doesn’t seem very interested in the show he’s reviewing except insofar as it gives him an excuse to drop some political takes that are correct but not acute; it’s hard to say anything new about the Trump phenomenon but “he’s a manic showman” is certainly not it. There’s also some everything-happens-so-much rumination on the surreal and rapid pace of events in the contemporary political theater, which, again, isn’t wrong, but reiterating these ideas with this “something’s bugging me” affect ignores just how much theorizing has already been done about these very concepts. Call it Future Shockmaster, and try not to keel over right away.
“The Ascent” - Evan Osnos says Harris looking at you, Kamala. A remarkably perspective-free trip through everything you already know about Harris. The brief fifth section (beginning “San Francisco politicians”), which outlines the big-tent pragmatism and business-suit respectability politics that defined Harris’ rise, is well worth reading. Everything else is bland and distant; it’s always clear that Osnos is trying to piece together a story from events that happened a while ago and that everyone would like to spin as part of a triumphant rise. That makes it impossible to actually figure out what Harris means – nobody is willing to risk saying her story’s anything other than The Rise of Madam President. So Osnos prints the party line.
Letters:
Empty mailbag. Well… Michael did remember Rocketboom.
What did you think of this week’s issue?
the new Eater app is pretty awesome
no more googling “eater + [whatever part of town i’m in]” anymore; cheers to that.