Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🌱 The Weekend Special (April 14)
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
“From, To” by David Bezmozgis. No Boyles. family, faltering, fascism. A weepy portrait of the conflicted Jewish response to (what neither the author nor his main character would want me to call) the Palestinian genocide, filtered through the loss of a mother. Bezmozgis clearly wants us to empathize with his speaker’s extended stomachache, and I do – I see this family as only degrees removed from my own family of (far more secular, far more Western European) Jews, really – I just think granting this person an entire hour to indulge a hatred of Arabs that borders on the genocidal is not really appropriate, no matter how self-aware he is of the fascism of those thoughts. In the interview, Bezmozgis speaks of a “sparsely populated middle” that he and the character both inhabit, but the middle is a subjective thing, and just because one ought to have an understanding of the many sides of the conflict and the very real traumas and emotions of Jews, this doesn’t mean that finding the exact midpoint between two imagined opposing sides is the ethical thing to do. This story has something in common with Joshua Cohen’s “My Camp,” though that story was far wittier and less self-serious; it’s still troubling that the magazine has published two very long short stories about conflicted middle-aged Jewish American Zionists, and no other fiction about the conflict. The story also reminds me of the fantastic play The Ally, which addresses some of these same arguments, but unlike Bezmozgis, takes them all the way to their endpoint, letting everyone express the complexity of their views in full. This story is content to let its main character get the last word, and find a bit of moral superiority in his own torturedness, a torturedness he imagines that no one around him has. Really, though, I don’t think Bezmozgis is extending his empathy as far as he wants to believe he is. It’s a self-indulgent tale, both in its telling (some of the descriptions are really overlong for what’s essentially a character study) and in its implications. Who needs protecting here? Who is willing to journey (“From, To” – a fantastic title, I will say) and who is stuck in place?
🌱 Weekend Essay
“Desperate for Botox” by Sarah Miller. Two Harrimans. shot, show, shit. I know Miller as “Heather Havrilesky’s friend”, mostly, and this is a bloggy blast from much the same world. Could so easily be strangled by paragraphs about the history of injectables or whatever; thank goodness Miller keeps things face-first. Nora Ephron, whose schtick is easy to screw up, certainly comes to mind; Miller’s tonal balancing act is trickier than it appears. This piece is very good read aloud, but it’s not so punchline-saturated as to resemble a standup set; it has bite, but it isn’t crude or cruel. This piece is like a vintage wine from xoJane’s cellars; it’s deeper and richer and funnier than those articles ever were, but at the end one can still say: It Happened To Her.
🌱 Random Pick
“The Prince” by Elsa Walsh. (March 24, 2003.) One Parker. condition, compromise, con. More theoretically compelling than it is actually interesting; Walsh’s tone is dry and newsy, but her story is essentially a centrist antecedent to Farenheit 9/11, setting up the astonishingly close relationship between Prince Bandar and Bush administration officials, but not quite landing the punch; in the absence of later evidence that the Saudi government likely did fund the attacks, Walsh repeats the Saudi line on the matter, and does a bit of cleanup regarding the Bin Laden family evacuation.1 Walsh was married to Bob Woodward, who wrote four books on the Bush administration’s decision-making in Iraq; it’s interesting to consider whether Walsh relied on the same sources as her partner. Woodward’s first book, which preceded this article, was fairly supportive of Bush; his second book, which came out a year later, after the WMD scandals, was quite critical (or so I gather – I haven’t read them.) Walsh doesn’t exactly condemn Bandar, but reading the piece with the benefit of full information, his obviously wide-reaching influence is disturbing. Especially gutting is the idea that Bush was just on the verge of supporting Palestinian statehood when the 9/11 attacks occurred, at which point he tabled the matter for after the war. Ouch.
🌱 Something Extra
Okay, quick theater hits.
I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan – insidery genius, transporting and ticklish. Through end of April.
Deep Blue Sound – a subtle group portrait of lives changed by climate. Very, very good. Saw closing night.
Wine in the Wilderness – best Childress show of the three I’ve seen, snappy, smart, political, great central performances. Through the 19th.
Grief Camp - Sneakily ambitious episodic narrative; succeeds at about three quarters of what it tries, which isn’t bad at all. Through May 11.
Death Becomes Her - First act is lunatic brilliance, second act is much rockier but still fun; Jennifer Simard is absolute dynamite and I wish she’d have attempted category fraud and run for the Featured Actress Tony because obviously it’s Audra’s year in Lead but she deserves a prize. (The Tonys don’t actually allow that sort of thing, because they’re run by adults, unlike all the other major awards.) Open run, of course.
Two Sisters Find A Box of Lesbian Erotica In The Woods – I didn’t find this all that funny, but it’s smart and loopy and very well-performed, and the set rocks. Through April 26.
Buena Vista Social Club – Cutting down the book: It works! Choreo is probably the best thing Justin Peck has ever done. Just a good time. Open run.
Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp. - Four short pieces by one author. First half is lumpy and tonally strange, but after intermission is a wonderful one-act – not that ambitious, just well-honed and piquant – worth price of admission. Through May 11.
Amm(i)gone - One-person slideshow show, performed in a theater-teacher register I don’t care for, but so thoughtful and fully realized it still worked, and really moved me. Saw closing night.
Sunday Song:
Random factoid, which maybe everyone already knows: Osama bin Laden’s father, brother, and stepmother each died in separate plane crashes, decades apart and all apparently accidental. ↩