January 15, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🌱 The Weekend Special (January 13)

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.

I appreciate your patience, readers. The newsletter will keep coming till the day it stops.

🌱 Fiction

“Prophecy” by Kanak Kapur. One Boyle. stone, study, stars. Interesting reading this along with Romeo and Juliet (for, need I remind you, ninth grade English Language Arts), another tale of young lovers crossed by stars (though in this case they do spend a life together.) Kapur dispenses with years in the gaps between sections, but there’s not much disjuncture or disorientation; this is a linear narrative of family and fate. Kapur has hardly been published (this may be the exceedingly rare slush-pile fiction piece to make the magazine, or Deborah Treisman may just have friends at Colgate) and there is a steadiness and self-assuredness here that belies her experience. Her prose is elegant but not especially voicey; everything is perfectly balanced… but at the same time, nothing stuck out enough to stick with me. Having read the story while tired, I had to read it over again… and still it was hard to keep in focus (with the exception of an ending that I found more jarring than revelatory). Maybe that’s just a function of pairing narrative sweep with thematic restraint. If a few stars are defied here, nobody’s shouting about it.

🌱 Weekend Essay

“Writing as Transformation” by Louise Glück. Two Harrimans. source, sound, something. A friendly jot, clearly written for an assignment and not labored over. It’s only Glück’s recent passing that gives it any extra significance. But this is still a master’s sketch. The charged phrases Gluck speaks of, “suggestive, haunting, but unintelligible”, and nearly impossible to control, are my kin, too. (There is considerable overlap with the so-called “intrusive” thought; the thought here does intrude, but if it doesn’t spark upset, one doesn’t have to feel invaded by it.) Glück mentions analysis, and she’s doing a self-analysis here, searching for the top of her sky. (“But with whom was I communicating? Unclear.”) One can’t touch that sky, but one can read it.

🌱 Random Pick

“Both Rough and Tender” by John Updike (January 22, 2001). One Parker. rage, rebel, riot. A refreshing single-section blast of old-fashioned book review – no contextualization here; there are but a few lines on Carey as a writer (and they come two-thirds of the way through), and the history covered is relevant only insofar as the novel addresses it. That leaves time for plenty of delicious quotes! Unfortunately, they aren’t to my taste. Whatever project Carey is working at, it doesn’t come through in excerpt, where the deliberately excessive voice just seems a belabored conceit. (Just so non-click-through-ers have a sense of what I’m talking about, here’s one block quote: “Then we was playing what they call THE GAME you never knew so many hooks and buttons and sweet smelling things we took them off her one by one until she lay across her bed there were no sin for so did God make her skin so white her hair as black as night her eyes green and her lips smiling.” That sort of thing.) Updike seems to dig it; there’s enough quoted to draw your own conclusion. Otherwise, things are unadorned; there are a few quips and a handful of minor demerits, and not too much else. Call it Rabbit Down Under!

🌱 Something Extra

Nickel Boys is superb… and also proof that a director can be totally hopeless as a director of actors – the performances are all willy-nilly, arching in various random directions – and still achieve triumph through raw mise en scene and elbow grease.

Sunday song: