November 11, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🥐 The Weekend Special (November 10)

The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three Knapps (for fiction), Downeys (for essays), or Fords (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Knapp, Downey, or Ford indicates a generally positive review.

I continue to play catch up, for now but not forever.

Many thanks to Delia Cai, who was kind enough to link to this humble endeavor in the superb and long-running Deez Links. Hi, new readers. Here in the Weekend Edition, I review the weekly short story, the online-only Weekend Essay, and a randomly selected (as in, truly random, using random numbers) piece from the archive. In the main edition, I review the features and critics’ pieces. The Cartoon and Poem Supplement, meanwhile, goes out to paid subscribers only (mostly). All are encouraged to reply or comment with their thoughts, which may be published in a future edition.

🥐 Fiction

“Mother of Men” by Lauren Groff. No Knapps. contact, concentrate, construction. I am a very big fan of Groff’s work, in part though not solely due to her variegated and biting view of the cruelty of gender dynamics. But this is just far, far too expected, presenting a stalker as a sort of stand-in for a more generalized fear of men, while also placing a strong but gentle son in as his foil. It’s a stunningly literal and claustrophobic treatment from a writer that generally knows better. Especially jarring is the treatment of the Venezuelans working on the speaker’s kitchen, who are instrumentalized in order to make a point about, I think, the speaker’s pain at her own complicity. A worker goes missing, probably taken by ICE; the foreman has a Trump bumper sticker – euphemistically described in the usual cringe-inducing way – which enrages the speaker. Then the point is shrugged off. It’s wildly insensitive, especially because the plotline is immediately abandoned. I wondered for a moment if the idea was to make the stalker problem look small by comparison, but the more obvious read is that Groff is actually trying to equate state terrorism with one specific threatening individual. (The police also make a fairly heroic appearance at the end, which is hugely dissonant considering what came just before.) The first line is good, sure, but it promises a madness which the narrative does not deliver. The central woman is never less than sane, never less than relatable and reliable. If there’s any textual indication that we aren’t meant to buy into the semi-paranoid gender essentialism she lands on, it eluded me. Ooh Mamma!

🥐 Weekend Essay

“Art Rats in New York City” by Patti Smith. No Downeys. real, record, rescue. There is something theoretically interesting about Smith responding to the acclaim her first, fairly comprehensive memoir received by deciding to hard pivot her career to the memoir form; this is an excerpt from what is now her fourth memoir (roughly, depending on how you count) in fifteen years. This one is apparently more “straightforwardly autobiographical”, but who was clamoring for that, exactly? This sliver has some pretty redundant Mapplethorpe stuff and some for-the-fans Horses trivia. Smith can write, but the prose here certainly isn’t as visceral as anything in Just Kids. There is also more than a little bit of grandiosity evident – perhaps that’s inevitable when you’re writing your fourth consecutive memoir?

🥐 Random Pick

Until now my policy has been that I only review one piece per author in this section. This week I spun up a rather long and fairly interesting piece by an author I’ve previously covered, and didn’t feel like continuing to spin. That would be:

“Quest for Mollie” by A.J. Liebling. (May 26 & June 2, 1945). One Ford. soldier, search, schvindle. A two-part war story, told in retrospect. The first half takes a rather long while getting going, with some war-narrative brutality that is striking only insofar as it goes against the usual narrative that WWII vets stayed silent about their experiences. (Of course, a journalist is probably who one would expect to buck that trend.) Skip the scene-setting, I think; the second part of the article stands alone as a quest narrative to discover the real life story of a war hero who was also an unrepentant nonconformist. (Not generally what one wants in a soldier, but clearly it has its uses!) The degree to which Liebling inserts himself, Jerry Thompson-style, into this story surprised me; it’s not just Mollie’s story, it’s a story about why Liebling felt he had to tell Mollie’s tale, and how he gathered the truth, to the best of his ability. As a profile, there is not much profile in it; after all, Liebling never even met Mollie. Neither does Liebling try to make this a universal portrait; Mollie is definitively an individual. Some of this is a mild sort of pro-democracy propaganda; the Nazis did not allow this sort of individuality, goes the line – perhaps that helped us win. Liebling doesn’t strike a faux-triumphant note, though; Germany’s defeat wouldn’t bring this strange and singular young man back, and the most we should feel is melancholy at the lives burnt up to wrest the world away from evil.

🥐 Something Extra

I promised to address some opera here! Two shows at the Met featured not only some world-class singing, but also acting on par with anything on Broadway. Erin Morley, as the titular character in La Fille du Régiment, delivered a wide-eyed Betty Hutton meets Carol Burnett physical comedy tour-de-force, totally embodying the spunky role; Lawrence Brownlee was a thoroughly winning and full-voiced Tonio. The production was generally pretty phenomenal. A new mounting of La Sonnambula was similarly excellent, with staging attuned to fine detail and a surprisingly convincing woke-ified (literally!) ending. Xabier Anduaga made a nebbishy Elvino, which worked for this take on the material; Nadine Sierra as the lead, though, gave one of the best pure vocal performances I’ve ever heard at the opera, without at all neglecting emotion or physicality. Really exceptional stuff all around.

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Sunday Song:

I am always interested in what will be nominated for the Most Random Grammy, the “best engineered album” award. This year along with some folk music and the new Japanese Breakfast LP is this lovely, bassy jazz fusion record.

I also made a spotify playlist of songs from albums nominated for Grammys that also had high ratings on rym (rate your music) – for my own edification and perusal, because it’s impossible to listen to very much of the random and interesting stuff that gets nominated for Grammys, especially without sorting through a lot of junk.