January 19, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🌱 The Weekend Special (January 20)

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

“Ming” by Han Ong. Three Boyles. crazing, credibility, chrysanthemum. Ong is always solid, with a world-beating ear for dialogue (and every character distinct – not true for so many that omit quote marks) and a sly way of bending a narrative into unexpected, wabi-sabi shapes. This is an especially successful outing, a character study of what A.A. calls a “dry drunk” who pulls himself back toward something like openness or steadiness. It’s all pretty occluded, despite constant presence and humor (there’s a laugh-out-loud late scene with the appraiser, which nearly derails things, but is worth it) – the present-tense third-person means we’re along for the ride, and Thaddeus’ motivations are obscure, probably even to himself. The treatment of recovery as a sort of manufactured charged communal-theatrical zone makes sense, coming from a recovered playwright; if Ong isn’t writing from experience, he’s still managed the ring of truth. The psychology of el-Masry is even more obscure; the reader can ruminate, but there are only scraps of evidence in any direction. Yet the story never feels spare; there are all sorts of charged details, they’re just more concerned with the exterior stuff of life than with therapizing. Whether these bits come together will depend, probably, on your mood; I felt they did, though I certainly can’t say why. Even if you don’t have a moment of zen, though, the surfaces are so finely observed you’ll enjoy yourself. This cup runneth over.

🌱 Weekend Essay

“What’s a Fact, Anyway?” by Fergus McIntosh. No Harrimans. challenge, checking, chiropractor. This masturbatory celebration of the magazine’s fact-checking department comes to us courtesy of the guy that runs the fact-checking department. If this embraced being an inside baseball essay about how the facts get checked, I’d probably love it; instead, it holds the reader’s hand through a load of Journalism 101 material, circling the basic points about the basic themes. I kept waiting for a thesis to arrive; one never fully develops, but seemingly McIntosh thinks the way to build trust with the public is by checking facts, and the aggressive dismissal of facts by a majority of the populace will magically be solved if we just check our facts harder. Ridiculous. People being worried about “fake news” does not mean they’re secretly dying for rigorously fact-checked information, it means they’re laboring under delusions – duh!! This feels about a decade behind the curve as far as understanding the news environment, which is kinda concerning; it’s also dry as dirt. 

🌱 Your Pick

“A&P” by John Updike. (July 22, 1961). One Parker. hard, haggling, ha-ppy. This is an oft-taught, oft-anthologized brief comic story with a punchy ending. It’s mostly, by word count, about a teenager ogling three young women. There is something of a leer here, certainly, but it’s really more about first-ogle than an experienced ogler’s ogle, which arguably renders things more tolerable. The speaker quits his job over his boss’ asking the women to cover up, and the final punch lands – the world is going to be “hard” for the narrator, because the strictures of society can’t be quit. (Especially when you aren’t rich enough to avoid a supermarket job.) That’s my reading, though there’s enough ambiguity to power a half-hour class discussion. The reader who asked for this pick left this note: “I'm not sure I have read anything else by Updike, but that story alone has made me a lifelong fan. For me, its power cannot be undone. I re-read it maybe 10 years ago and it gave me more pause, but whatever it had was still there.” It didn’t reverberate for me, really; I admire it, but at a remove. It does feel realistic that a late teenager would start to really reckon with the rigid class structures and social structures around him; I suppose the story can serve as a door through which to encourage late teenagers to explore those same things. It’s definitely a period piece, and it captures an early-60’s feeling – that things were just about to break open. (Not that I’d know – I’ve only seen Mad Men.) It’s elegant, standing in the twelve-paragraphs-or-less line – but any hidden heft eluded me.

🌱 Something Extra

Went to a slew of Under the Radar fest productions. General trends: Lots of projection (mostly not used that successfully or compellingly), lots of monologue, lots of unceasing bleakness, and oddly multiple crucial “two bright lights indicate an oncoming train” moments. Most of what I saw ranged from narrowly to wholly unsuccessful. An exception was Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, an ultra-meta shambolic Japanese circus-show, which brought a totally different energy and was much-appreciated. 

Sunday Song: