February 19, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🌱 The Weekend Special (February 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

“Chuka” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. No Boyles. husband, humiliation, hurry. There’s something I find a bit expected and largely unproductive about the central character here, who appears to be a version of Adichie who is much the same except for not being famous and successful and happily married. The real Adichie is who she is; she’s proven herself; if people say the sorts of trivializing things to her that they say to this storyteller, and I’m sure they occasionally do, she can (hopefully!) shrug them off without too much trouble – when your Wikipedia page begins “Regarded as a central figure in postcolonial feminist literature”, nobody can tell you shit. Adichie is also married to a wealthy doctor. But “Chiamaka” here – could it be a closer name to Chimamanda? – is frustrated, unknown and unknowable. Adichie hasn’t released any adult fiction since her breakout hit over a decade ago; a Larissa MacFarquhar profile of her in 2018 was, as I remember it, pretty melancholy, her existence in “a suburb of Baltimore” described as “calm, spacious, bland, empty—the opposite of Lagos.” (I lived in Catonsville for a few years and went to college nearby; I believe I’ve been to the small African market Adichie describes in this story. I have fond memories of the place but can’t totally dispute this characterization.) I wonder how much this story is a way for Adichie to create a vessel for anger and hurt where it would feel more justifiable, less like rich person problems. That’s iffy, though – there’s something condescending about it, as though obstacles to empathy were shoved out of the way to make the story’s emotional realities more legible. Adichie’s writing has a pleasant rhythm and the story moves, but there’s so little surprise to the way the narrative unfurls – the tenor of the story is established in the brief first section, and nothing after really complicates it. (The good sex is surprising, a bit, but Adichie keeps it at a remove, which spoils the effect.) Somehow this story is both too removed and not removed enough – a purpose-built container that still doesn’t suit its contents.

🌱 Weekend Essay

(Please note: Joshua Rothman’s essay on academia and reporting was published as a Weekend Essay, but is also listed in the index of the 100th anniversary edition. I’ll review it as part of my anniversary extravaganza, which I aim to drop by Sunday.)

“My Life with Left-Handed Women” by Megan Marshall. No Harrimans. heroine, heritable, herself. Hurt by its conceit, which Marshall never convincingly justifies – why it matters that some of the women who’re important to Marshall were left-handed, I really couldn’t tell you; the section that delves into left-handedness through history is by far the weakest, its anecdotes predictable and its conclusions asinine. There are good moments here, especially when Marshall focuses on history (it makes sense that this is her comfort zone; she’s usually a biographer.) The way her grandparents’ relationship was torn apart by gender bias is painful and telling, in a way some of Marshall’s other anecdotes are not. Mostly, Marshall adopts a self-consciously essayistic tone; I’d more easily go along with her family histories if she treated them with the same research-based intensity of purpose she granted, say, Margaret Fuller. By trying to honor her family but always bringing things back to her feelings, her interiority, she ends up trivializing her progenitors; her anxiety about taking on a non-historical subject is apparent, and instead of addressing that anxiety she assumes a defensive stance that renders her prose awkward and sometimes self-serious. It’s also clear she’s not exactly a feminist historian, even if she is both a feminist and a historian; her attempts to tie her family’s stories to the story of the second wave feel cursory and underthought. I wasn’t left with much.

🌱 Random Pick

“Some Clubs and a Cub” by Check. (January 25, 1941). Two Parkers. girls, gags, gay. Wish I knew who this anonymous writer was; it’s not Lois Long, but it’s certainly someone who writes with snap and a sense of humor. We are barred from the nightlife of the past; this isn’t even Times Square Blue, it’s Times Square Black & White. I Googled the menu of the Gay White Way and was thrown off by something called Chatterbox Pudding; I couldn’t find a definitive answer as to what that even is. But if some of Check’s details fly by, the delirious brightness of this past era still glows. (It lacks the romance and risk of the imagined ‘20s; indeed, the very early ‘40s are completely missing from the popular U.S. imagination, which jumps directly from the end of the Great Depression to the States’ entry into WWII – but clearly there was an interregnum in which to party, albeit with some restraint.) An early report from the Village Vanguard is especially noteworthy; they already had some jazz at the time, though the main attraction was a group of comedians including Comden and Green, who later wrote all the Kelly-Donen films (Singin’ In The Rain et al), and Judy Holliday, who’d become a legendary comedic actress. And we’ll never party with any of ‘em!

🌱 Something Extra

Laura Jacove’s My First Vagina, a brilliant metatheatrical-satirical monologue about Trans creativity which I saw at a tiny venue in Brooklyn, has already closed, but I still wanted to shout it out as the sort of clever, risky, surprising theater people often complain nobody is making anymore. Maybe they’re saying that because they’re seeing shows like The Antiquities, a pile of dumb alarmist bullshit about A.I. that’s being presented with infuriatingly undeserved finesse at Playwrights.

Sunday Song: