Last Week's New Yorker Review: ☀️ The Weekend Special (July 29)
Pieces are given up to three Jacksons (for fiction), Malcolms (for essays), or Rosses (for your picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Jackson, Malcolm, or Ross indicates a generally positive review.
☀️ Fiction
“Attila” by Nell Freudenberger. One Jackson. demand, demarcate, dementia. A very nicely realized character study, this succeeds despite not quite knowing where to go in terms of plot. Martha is fully formed, and if Freudenberger can’t quite keep from pitying her, it’s at least never a condescending pity. The dementia-stricken mother has depths of her own, and with so many dynamics explicitly pointed out, it’s good that Freudenberger is able to resist any direct meditation on the ways Martha’s had to mother her mother. There is a lot of circuitously telling dialogue, all of which is very well executed; if it didn’t have so many scenes, this would be a good brief play. The first line is, I think, too good – it came as no surprise that it was Freudenberger’s starting place. As a Baltimorean, any entry into the literature of that city is welcome, although the distinct absence of race as an explicit topic is maybe more noticeable when your story’s set on a fairly white campus in the middle of a majority-Black city – at least real estate gets discussed early on, though not with much depth; Hopkins certainly has some demons in that department. Some of this is in the deep undercurrents of the story, but Freudenberger brings so many other things to the surface that the omission feels less Modernist, more thoughtless. Martha “still believes” in certain increasingly unfashionable things, as the story says – and from a certain perspective that can look like conservatism.
☀️ Weekend Essay
“Inside Out” by David Owen. One Malcolm. fly, flow, flu. Another homespun history from Owen, after the piece on personal archives. This is just as charming and a bit more unexpected, though it doesn’t suggest as many depths; it’s never much more than pleasant. Easily the most interesting section is the middle, beginning “Leland Ossian Howard was…”, which concerns the deterrence of flies. Who knew that metal porch screens started off as grain sieves, or that horse manure was responsible for a multitude of flies? (In a way, they were a dark prelude to car exhaust.) Things are cozy enough when Owen’s reminiscing, but pretty insubstantial. It’s a porch substitute for a personal essay – which is to say, it’ll do.
☀️ Random Pick
“A Recurring Wagnerian Troupe – Mostly Films – And a Few Concerts” by Robert A. Simon.1 (March 28, 1931). Two Rosses. suite, sailor, seaweed. Leads off with a wonderfully snappy review of, uh oh, a German company performing Wagner overseas. Their conductor Max von Schillings was, indeed, an “opponent of the Weimar Republic and a declared anti-Semite”, sez the wiki. He died in 1933, before which he was able to hurt the careers of Käthe Kollwitz, Thomas Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, and many others. In any event, he was surely a skilled conductor of antisemitic melodrama. His troupe played in what was then called Mecca Temple and is now New York City Center. Mostly, I’m just here for Simon’s little quips: Tristan provided a “handsomely unfavorable first impression” – it “had vitality, but so has a high-jumper. It moved, but it got nowhere.” The Flying Dutchman fared better: “The chorus was euphonious and Mr. von Schillings made the most of the youthful lushness of the score.” Simon starts the next section like this: “Evidently some of our cash customers for concerts are so young or so inexperienced that they consider an evening of films with orchestral obbligati a novelty.” The things time passing will do: Nowadays, such a program puts one in mind of the end of Tár. The three very young composers in the program don’t get much praise from Simon, but they all went on to make good, in various ways, on their early promise; the organizers, Aaron Copland and Roger Sessions, come in for more praise (they “probably had no intention of outshining their guests, but did”) – both of their best days were ahead of them, too, though in intriguingly opposite styles; vernacular and atonal, respectively. There are also some brief reviews of recorded pieces; these are too concise to allow for many flourishes. I love taking a peek into the history of the city’s culture, and past wits make good docents.
☀️ Something Extra
I greatly enjoyed Catherine Breillat’s new drama Last Summer, which explores the troubling and escalating relationship between a lawyer who deals with young victims’ rights and her husband’s son from a previous marriage. Léa Drucker as Anne is quite astonishing, whether enacting treachery2 or la petite mort. Samuel Kircher is also excellent – he was cast after his older brother dropped out of the role and suggested him; it’s his first part, which is quite remarkable. All the performances are very good, making a melodrama of ambiguity and calumny into more than its parts. The film doesn’t disguise a psychological reading in which each character is motivated by their own counterphobia – Anne tells Théo that her fear is of everything she has being lost (or something like that – I wish I had a screener) and her own experiences of sexual trauma at roughly Théo’s age clearly drive her recreation of similar circumstances. Théo, meanwhile, seems afraid of becoming an adult; naturally, he gets entangled in the ultimate French adult experience, an affair with a married woman. Pierre, Anne’s husband, is so afraid of destabilization and abnormality he becomes willfully blind to it. That last line and final fadeout is a subtle coup. Currently running at Quad Cinema.
“Your Pick” is a piece chosen by a randomly selected paying subscriber. (Except when it’s a “Random Pick”, in which case it’s chosen by random number generation.) Have a piece you want to be "Your Pick"? If you're a paying subscriber, you can also skip the vicissitudes of fate and force your way to the front of the line! Venmo $20 per request to @SamECircle, then write me an email or a note on Venmo letting me know you've done so and what your requested piece is. No limit on the number of requests, BTW. If you want to give me a more open-ended prompt ("1987 reported feature by a woman") that's great as well – and pieces from other venues are okay too, if you ask nicely.
The Sunday Song:
Credited as R.A.S. – and I have to credit, unfortunately, ChatGPT, which found in moments the name that ten minutes of my own Googling could not.
Her performance put me in mind a bit of Rhea Seehorn’s in Better Call Saul – the ironically self-destroying thrills of self-preservation über alles.