January 23, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🌱 The Weekend Special (January 27)

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 St. Alwynn Girls at Sea” by Sheila Heti. One Boyle. ordinary, orchestrating, oracle. As far as I can tell, Heti hasn’t published fiction this “non-auto” since 2005. Obviously genre markers are arbitrary, but it’s still odd to see a writer who’s known for stories that, at the very least, explore the realm of the personal, suddenly publishing not only a straightforward story but one that distinctly resembles, in form and content, a young-adult boarding school novel. (It’s also not the sort of thing one sees much of in this magazine.) This then creates a parsing issue: Is this story to be read straightforwardly, or as a sort of political statement about the act of writing a story like this, one that obsessively chronicles the ins and outs of very young women’s lives and obsessions (while only loosely sketching in a vaguely political conceit that allows for their separation from their families)? Certainly, there’s much to be mined from the latter approach – Heti is proclaiming the value of the fixations she describes (while also allowing space for dissent, here embodied by the wonderfully grumpy and probably queer-coded Lorraine), she’s poking fun at the self-seriousness of war fiction, she’s attempting some sort of fictionalization of her own childhood, or a tribute to the books she loved. Unfortunately, this story, a petal-light thing, sags and wilts under these readings; any joy is lost. It can’t survive its own cleverness, especially at this length. But if the reader manages to take it at face value, its joys are more obvious; Heti’s close observation allows for laugh-out-loud humor and, as with the lovely ending, a searching metaphysicality. The central drama isn’t exactly riveting but there’s some surprise in it, and the balance of side details is mostly well-managed. (Not sure how I feel about the extended digressions into the schoolmaster’s doggerel, but I did chuckle.) Read one way, the story owns its lightweight quality and is to be admired for it; read another way, the story is self-consciously lightweight, which is to say, not actually lightweight at all, in the same way that camp which knows it is camp is not actually camp but schlock. I’m torn. It’s worth reading to decide for yourself, anyhow.

🌱 Weekend Essay

“How a School Shooting Became a Video Game” by Simon Parkin. No Harrimans. fury, fun, furniture. Is a videogame which removes any and all sense of play and instead serves as a didactic, propagandistic tool actually a game in any meaningful sense at all? As worthy as the cause is, I’m frustrated that something so deliberately artless gets fawning, press-release-ish coverage, while the magazine entirely neglects the video games that people actually play. (Parkin did game year-end lists for a little bit, but nada in the past two years.) It’s very odd to me that even as the magazine becomes more and more about screen-based media consumption, there’s virtually no consideration of this massive sector. It’s hard to come up with a metric by which this is the rare game that merits consideration, except one that values self-seriousness far above artfulness. Parkin’s prose, usually decent, is here quite stiff.

🌱 Random Pick

“Zanuck’s Joads” by John Mosher. (February 3, 1940). One Parker. starvation, silhouette, society. Mosher, the magazine’s first film critic, is awed by The Grapes of Wrath but mostly lauds it with generalities. (“...the best of the past has been used, every lesson learned.”) but there’s something charming about a contemporaneous flat-out rave of a film now regarded as a great classic. Mosher notes the influence Ford took from Soviet films, and the way the film’s heart is not any particular performance but “the grandeur of the landscape or… the huge mass movements of many people”. All correct. It’s a good movie – that’s not hard to see! 

🌱 Something Extra

Always interesting to see coverage of the magazine from elsewhere. 

The Oscar nominations came out and they’re decent! Nickel Boys in off the bubble for best picture; cheers to that.

Sunday Song: