Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🌱 The Weekend Special (March 24)
The Weekend Special
Pieces are given up to three Boyles (for fiction), Harrimans (for essays), or Parkers (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Boyle, Harriman, or Parker indicates a generally positive review.
🌱 Fiction
“The Frenzy” by Joyce Carol Oates. No Boyles. mistake, misery, mistress. The prose and pacing are very technically strong here, which, obviously – it’s JCO. My issue isn’t so much that the main character is unlikable, or whatever; it’s that his nauseating inability to gain any perspective and the damage he predictably inflicts on the young woman are just so tiresome and overdone. I knew immediately that Cassidy would have his comeuppance at the end, and said comeuppance was so lackluster – ah, he’s made a mess, now someone has to come clean it up! – that it’s almost as though the story forgives him. Oates describes him in the interview as “yearning for… meaning” but no yearning comes across; he’s as hollow as a dried gourd, and the story’s brutality is similarly empty. There is little in this universe but power, hate, cruelty; it’s not a “romantic/erotic adventure” for this pair at all; there’s nothing romantic or erotic about it. Is the reader supposed to gradually realize Cassidy’s shittiness, perhaps? Mission failure, then; it’s plain from the word go. As for Brianna, even her final act is filtered through its meaning to this man; no real human can be entirely summed up as a pile of raw impulses, and Oates seems uninterested in her interiority. This story is bleak and stomach-churning, for no satisfactory reason.
🌱 Weekend Essay
No weekend essay! Double Random Pick instead!
🌱 Random Pick
“Current and Recurrent” by Robert A. Simon. (Feb 22, 1947). One Parker. clash, clear, circulation. Fun to hear about a very young Leonard Bernstein doing Rite of Spring, and charming to get a reference to the first music coverage in the magazine, printed when Bernstein was just seven. (What a long strange trip, etc.) Everything else is just alright, the mention of jazz is both not as square as you might fear, and also still pretty square.
🌱 Random Pick
“Through a Glass, Darkly” by Anthony West. (May 28, 1960). No Parkers. model, misunderstanding, Machtpolitik. West is best known as the son of Rebecca West and H.G. Wells; he idolized the latter while condemning the former, although they both neglected him about equally. Here, he comes down harsh on a biography of Joseph Conrad by Jocelyn Baines, a book which does seem misbegotten, although frankly West’s criticisms are so veiled and insidery it’s hard to tell. Things start strong: The book is “the sort of thing an up-and-coming critic with a care for his standing in academic circles has to turn out if he wants to keep coming.” Sure! But then there is some business concerning a remark D.H. Lawrence made about Bertrand Russell which has gotten Russell condemned in a certain circle of academe ruled over by a Dr. Leavis, which means West sees Baines’ dismissal of Russell as received wisdom, given that Conrad was on the record enjoying and corresponding with Russell, and to accept this would mean “the presumption is that Lawrence’s opinion of Russell was unfounded and that the great Leavisian critical apparatus was functioning poorly when he accepted it.” Did you follow that? Better question: Do you care? I like this sort of gossipy academic minutiae, but West doesn’t make the stakes (or the context) clear enough for it to be enjoyable, it’s just a muddle. The rest is similar – West seems to think it’s very funny to overuse the adjective “O.K.” to mean, basically, nifty; he includes two paragraphs-long block quotes simply to make the point that one is a muddled summary of the other. (“It is not necessary to belabor the point”, he concludes, which… sure.) I’m no fan of adding rigor to literary analysis, so I’m firmly on West’s side in this fight; my qualm with this piece has only to do with its construction.
🌱 Something Extra
Liberation is a fine drama, set in a 1970 consciousness raising circle, which probes the line between the personal and political. The reviews have been beyond glowing so you probably don’t need me to tell you to see it.
Sunday Song: