Last Week's New Yorker Review: ☀️ The Weekend Special (November 25)
The Weekend Special (November 25 – that’s last weekend, for those playing along at home.)
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
“Minimum Payment Due” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh. No Jacksons. decision, destiny, debt. Not terrible, just not much of anything. Sayrafiezadeh’s stories tend to have a still surface, and in some of them, like the phenomenal “A, S, D, F”, there is a universe of suppression and compartmentalization roiling a few inches under that surface. Here, it’s too obvious what’s being suppressed; the themes are literal and impossible to miss. Everything is visible. This borders on condescension toward the main character – surely it can’t be that hard to avoid cults and toxic messaging, because we, the educated readers, can easily see through everything the speaker is falling for. That’s a dangerous message – as NES Garfield says, you are not immune.
☀️ Weekend Essay
“The Lizard King of Long Island” by Ben Goldfarb. Three Malcolms. spotting, spreading, species. Holy cow, what a yarn. Sometimes the world changes by accident, and sometimes it changes by nutcase fiat. Sperling seems well-adjusted and prosocial, he just cared solely about the things he liked, and didn’t care at all about their impact. It’s narcissism, but it manifested in quite a bizarre way here. (I’m trying to preserve the surprise a bit – although the subhed reveals all, annoyingly.) Goldfarb is ultimately less interested in psychoanalyzing Sperling than in discussing non-native species and deliberate acclimatization; contextualizing the anecdote instead of unpacking it. Ultimately I think that’s a fine choice; Sperling clearly wanted his motives to go to the grave, and so they have. But Goldfarb does wind his way back toward a guess – that “tiny, furtive critters” might deserve notice, too. Sperling himself was a furtive critter – maybe he looked in the mirror and saw scales.
☀️ Random Pick
“Circus in Moscow” by E.J. Kahn, Jr. (August 18,1980). One Ross. appearances, boycott, caviar. A longish piece about the years’ Olympic games. Most interesting when Kahn is dissecting the political situation that lead to the American boycott: Palestine, Afghanistan, the Soviets, even Puerto Rico – familiar political actors, but younger and thus different-looking. Kahn mostly sticks to the liberal American consensus; he’s more dismissive than aggrieved. That tone persists throughout, the kind of worldly snark that will be familiar to perusers of the late Shawn era. Mostly, he’s put off by the “troubling inflexibility” of the Soviet way of doing things: Runners can’t take a victory lap, celebrations are muted. There’s an “atmosphere of suspicion and isolation”. Still, sports do what sports do – they lift. Kahn spends most of the piece giving us a montage of highlights. It’s not the deepest thing, but if you wish old episodes of SportsCenter were hosted by Alistair Cooke, this pretty much does the trick.
☀️ Something Extra
I was shocked how charmed I was by the polished-to-a-shine Maybe Happy Ending, a jazzy new musical with a deeply silly high concept. (Robots in a retirement home!) Mostly, that concept is just an excuse to serve up a classic screwball comedy, perfectly paced and very well performed. The sets are also a technical marvel, yet never distracting. I highly recommend it.
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Sunday Song: