Last Week's New Yorker Review: The Weekend Special (Mar 4)
Welcome to the Weekend Special. Today there's a fiction review for you, and we're 4 paid subscribers away from also including the Weekend Essay. I have another fun feature to announce once we hit that goal. Here's the review.
Stories are given up to three Munros. As with restaurant stars, any number of Munros indicates a generally positive review.
"The Spit of Him" by Thomas Korsgaard. No Munros. courtesy, legacies, stickers. I've seen this sort of narrative before – the child doesn't fully understand the implications of the adult world around him, while still having a keen observational eye for other kinds of details – and this story didn't give it any twist that rendered it particularly interesting. More than that, I just wasn't convinced by Korsgaard's psychological rendering of these characters, especially Henrik, who seems like a flat image of grief and anger that doesn't allow the human experiencing these feelings to peek through. There's also a very oddly placed section break (between "the rain sheeted down" and "'Come out of that weather'") that robs the revelation of Birgitte and Henrik's specific loss of much of its potency: All the buildup and tension is lost when the "scene" changes. I gather these section breaks are not always chosen by the authors, 1 but regardless it's an odd and counterproductive choice. I still enjoyed the interview with Korsgaard, which gets into class issues in Denmark that could've been more forcefully rendered in this story; the setting's rurality wasn't especially clear to me. I feel bad giving no Munros to an author who brings up Munro as an idol, but he's missing the "startling human insight" he admires in her work.
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I'm basing this mainly on having read a few stories excerpted from novels in the magazine and again when they're published as novels. The section breaks frequently change dramatically even as the contents of the story are altered in only minor ways. ↩