Last Week's New Yorker Review: The Weekend Special (Mar 11)
Welcome to the Weekend Special. Bear with me, these are going to come out on Mondays sometimes. We've hit the goal, so the Weekend Essay will now be included! And as I hinted at, I have another feature to announce... I'll do that down below.
Pieces are given up to three Munros (for fiction) or Sontags (for essays). As with restaurant stars, even one Munro or Sontag indicates a generally positive review.
Fiction
"Hostel" by Fiona McFarlane. One Munro. partners, strangers, evil. This would read very differently in the context of an entire book of stories about characters touched indirectly by – spoiler, I guess – a serial killer. The violent reveal, which tilts the whole story unexpectedly on its axis, would become more like a bomb we know is planted, waiting to go off. Would that suspense make this story, which is a deliberate mess of framing devices and stories-within-stories, some of which are only theoretically being told, read more neatly? Maybe – for me, the bomb going off from nowhere felt arbitrary; what was interesting about the story was the tenuous relationship between the speaker and her friends, and the way the narrative plays with the passage of time to obscure the situation it circles until the last moment – the veiled present-Roy and the veiled past-speaker, meeting impossibly on that fold-out couch. The murder feels secondary, another framing device or veil, but one too forceful and thus less elegant than all the others. This wasn't the only detail that felt off – Roy's goofy nominal determinism is a device I wish fiction writers would permanently can: only to the writer, who is freshly picking out a name, does it matter that much what a character is called. I admired this more than I was really taken in by it; it's very clever, but I couldn't find a pulse.
Weekend Essay
"My Anxiety" by Lauren Oyler. One Sontag. nerves, neuroses, normality. With this kind of piece, it's tricky to separate my thoughts on the essay itself from my casual and uninformed judgements of Oyler, my attempts to figure out what's really going on with her. I sense an undercurrent of worry about morality (and its sister, mortality) which can't help but skew her perceptions of her own mental health – if you feel, even in a suppressed way, that you are bad for being mentally ill, it makes receiving help far harder: Medication is a solution you don't deserve; therapy revolves around the ability to "think seriously" about the self instead of, simply, the practice of loving the self. And of course, intellectualization is the brain's favorite trick for routing around baser truths: the body's signals cannot simply be unfortunate misfires, but must be indications of some deep, sick fact: that you are "abnormal," that you are worthless.
I'm not here to armchair-psychoanalyze Oyler, though the piece does sorta encourage you to. How about her writing? Well, it's frequently funny, with its litanies of tribulation and attention to the specific meanings of our odd vocabularies around mental selfhood. Its best joke begins a late section: "An essay like this is supposed to have a narrative." You don't say! That section is the piece's strongest, as Oyler unpacks the difficulty understanding anxiety – or any abnormal condition – as a collective issue, since that narrative seems to detract from the individual experience. ("Solidarity" is not "solace.") But Oyler turns away from this rich vein, oddly – and there's something unintentionally revealing in how she sets up the stakes: "If my suffering has nothing to do with me... why should the reader, or the well-meaning friend, care?" She then immediately concludes that "this is why" more individualistic narratives "make a lot more sense." Oyler unwittingly rejects the very idea of collective care – the idea that, in communion, we might find solutions which the atomized world deprives us of. That's a shame and an omission – and from there, the piece loses any pedagogical heft; it's mostly just interesting how far Oyler will stretch herself – from jaw yoga to, you know, writing a personal essay on this website – to avoid confronting her "own mind." She even admits this, but in a tone of impatient exasperation, as if any of us can ever truly have any subject other than our own minds. Oyler ends looking for an "epiphany" – but striving just isn't the way to reach acceptance.
OK, here's the new feature. I was inspired by Michael Sicinski, one of my favorite film critics, whose Patreon includes a feature in which paying members are randomly selected to choose movies for him to review. So I figured, why not do that but with articles from the magazine? Here's how it will work: In a couple months (probably once my school semester is over) I'll start randomly generating four paid subscribers each month. I'll email you, and you can respond with any article from the entire history of the magazine (online-only is fine!) past or present. You can even respond with a more general prompt, like "something from the '70s" or "long-form journalistic feature by a female writer in 1998." Every week I'll cover the selected article, and if I don't get a response, I'll just pick something at random.
But there's a twist! If you're a paying subscriber and you want to skip to the front of the line, you can Venmo $20 to @SamECircle, then write me an email letting me know you've done so and what your requested piece is. If you ask very nicely, you can even pick something published in a different periodical. (The horror!) The paid feature is available right now – so you don't even have to wait till May for the gates to open. Just pay and email! Fun, no?
Hostel is diluted by the multiple cul-de-sacs, any number of which could have been removed to produce a more vital story. The murder, for you, is ineffective, when it's revealed. However, McFarlane draws directly on the real "backpacker murders", a notorious serial killing case. For any Australian reader, the point of the story lands with a greater punch. I read her other story as well, linked in the NYer, and can see how the concept likely works well across the collection.