Last Week's New Yorker Review: đł The Weekend Special (June 17)
Pieces are given up to three Munros (for fiction), Sontags (for essays), or Herseys (for your picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Munro, Sontag, or Hersey indicates a generally positive review.
đł Fiction
âChicago on the Seineâ by Camille Bordas. One Munro. ghost, home, movie. Bordas is a master of these elliptical, somewhat depressive narratives, in which a series of enigmatic scenes gather associative force as both character study and meditation. This isnât her strongest effort â the mortician segment, in particular, falls very flat, an overdetermined effort at spectrality. But the narrator does have a developed internal life; it isnât too surprising that this story was carved out of an abandoned novel. Bordasâ usual mode is already quite haunted, so some of the ghostly thematic material is overkill; better is the material with the main characterâs father. Thereâs some compelling gender-identity stuff latent under the surface, too; the scene where the narrator mentally inhabits the dead female body rhymes with his discomfort around the fatherâs strict male-ness; metafictionally, Bordas doesnât make any obvious effort to have her voice âreadâ as male, and I kept switching the narratorâs gender as I read. Thereâs plenty of material here about space and place, service and care work, the nature of belief. Usually, Bordas is amazing at whipping that thematic material up into a stiff meringue; itâs a little loose here, but certainly edible.
đł Weekend Essay
âHow âThe Real Worldâ Created Modern Reality TVâ by Emily Nussbaum. No Sontags. polite, political, pop. Doesnât make any sense at all outside of the context of Nussbaumâs new book on the genreâs early history. Even in that context, reality is a genre that lends itself better to analysis than reportage. Part of the appeal of reality, really, is that nothing too interesting happens â there is a crucial separation between âactualâ news, grim and un-resolvable with no narrative footholds, and the vast soapy universe of reality, which occupies the same arbitrarily narrative territory as sports (even in non-competition shows, where the strategy behind presenting yourself on camera is positively competitive). So finding things that are worth reporting on here mostly means following the editor who focuses on âbright colors and visual jokesâ, or the associate producer who forms âa crucial bridgeâ between cast and crew. But Nussbaum hardly gives us a sense of who these people are; and in the absence of any sort of profile, theyâre just⌠doing their unremarkable jobs. Reality isnât some auteurist invention, after all, itâs a product of market forces (union avoidance, cheap light cameras) stumbling on a remarkable innovation. Nussbaum sort of admits this, but never focuses on processes (at least in this excerpt), keeps coming back to people â without ever telling us very much about those people. The piece feels empty; too much and not enough.
đł Your Pick
âDealmakerâ by Mark Singer. Two Herseys. passion, phone-call, paper. The reader picking this piece (Iâve been keeping the pickers anonymous, but theyâre welcome to identify themselves) called my attention to a Financial Times interview with Hollywood agent Bryan Lourd. Lourd says: âSam Cohn lost all his clients to me after I read that article⌠Had I not read that article, and had he not let [the reporter] follow him around, I wouldnât have ended up representing his clients, or buying his agency.â The readerâs question: âDoes Cohn actually reveal anything that remotely resembles a usable professional secret, or is Lourd merely indulging in some bullshit personal mythology here?â Yeah, to my eyes itâs definitely the latter. Singer is much more interested in profiling Cohn the character than in addressing the nuts and bolts of his job â itâs practically a running joke that those nuts and bolts are difficult to convey. The long conversation Cohn has with Dino De Laurentiis â vivid and incredibly of-its-era, down to the rude remark Cohn makes to the secretary (ââWhereâs the coffee, Mindy? Are you harvesting in the mountains of Colombia?ââ) â is the only scene here that even approaches âaccessâ, really, and the only thing an outsider could take away from it is to befriend the wealthy and act self-assured around them. No duh. Maybe what Lourd means is that Cohn lost clients because he comes across badly in the profile, but itâs not exactly a hit piece; Cohn has an edge, and heâs a bit quirked up â he eats tissues â but heâs clearly incredibly committed to his clients. Notably, Lourdâs path ran through the âmail roomâ that Singer references as the usual route; Cohn âskipped that partâ through privilege, something you canât learn from a magazine article.
Even if you arenât trying to steal Cohnâs secrets, the piece is well worth reading; Singer is an incredibly gifted crafter of prose, and I was reminded of Patrick Radden Keefeâs long piece on Gagosian, another complicated art businessman with a nasty side, whose taste is questionable but whose dedication is not. Singer isnât quite as funny, and this piece gets shaggy toward the end; the next-to-last section is almost entirely superfluous. But the martini-lunch mood of Singerâs piece is unbeatable; plus, reading it decades later, you have the added thrill of knowing how all the referenced films turned out. The vast majority are stinkers; early-80s Hollywood was a tough place to make a good movie, and itâs practically the era of the botched studio cut: Heavenâs Gate, Blade Runner, Brazil, Possession, and, naturally, Superman 2, a Cohn-associated film. That additional context â that Cohn was fighting for directorial control at the exact moment directors were losing most of their power â ought to make him heroic⌠until you remember the auteurs at hand were mostly past their prime (Mike Nichols), too troubled to work (Bob Fosse), or merely masters of the middlebrow (Robert Benton). Only Cohnâs leading ladies, Streep and Weaver, became long-running superstars. Does that speak to his method or just to the era? Did Cohnâs influence wane by the end of the â80s because he wasnât right for the dawning age? Because he bet big on too many flops? Because of the vagaries of fate? Or because of this very article? Read it â maybe youâll get a clue.
âYour Pickâ is a piece chosen by a randomly selected paying subscriber. 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 â and pieces from other venues are okay too, if you ask nicely.
The Sunday Song: