Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🍳 The Weekend Special (May 27)
Guess what?1
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.
🍳 Fiction
“Thataway” by Thomas McGuane. No Munros. siblings, silence, sidetracks. McGuane is a master of carefully observed elliptical narratives, often character portraits, rendered with simple artistry and sardonic wit. He’s sort of a Munro of the American West. This story seems like his bizarre attempt to play against his strengths by stuffing a million moving parts, most of which lead to no particular end, into a convoluted and surprisingly unfunny shape. Clusters of supposedly droll detail overwhelm all other stimuli. (“Mildred was quieter on her return, adopted awful Wayne, and spent the rest of her working life at J. C. Penney, and her Sundays in church…”, “[Constance had] married handsome Phil Akers, who played the saxophone in a rockabilly band with Cooper (who had no musical talent whatsoever but was awarded a consolation tambourine).”) I was reminded, more than anything, of a Robert Altman misfire, where all the improvised scenes fail to cohere into anything in particular. As in most of those Altman flicks, the remarkable talent of the artist still shines through – he can frame a shot, McGuane can craft a line – but that only adds to the frustration. There is little more enervating than goofiness to no end.
🍳 Weekend Essay
Strangely, no Weekend Essay was published this week. I waited to see if there was a late drop, but no dice.2 I assume this is just a pipeline issue, but if the feature’s actually cancelled, something else similar will appear here next week.
🍳 Your Pick
“When Preachers Were Rock Stars” by Louis Menand. (Online April 14, 2024). One Munro. freedom, frankness, frenzy. This is a repurposed introduction Menand wrote for a republication of a series of articles from the magazine – by Robert Shaplen, from 1953 – exploring the Beecher scandal. Menand has two goals: To sketch in Beecher’s backstory, and to contextualize Shaplen’s approach. The former is done very quickly and quite well – the abolitionist “slave auctions” are a fascinating detail – though it’s so compressed it can’t get too far beyond the Wikipedia page. Whether Menand needs to recap the old-school journalist’s belief in producing “prose that does not give work to the reader” and that lets “the facts speak for themselves”, I’m not sure – his contextualization is interesting (“aloofness… was part of the magazine’s sensibility in the nineteen-fifties because it was an attitude to which its generally upscale readers aspired”) but could be pasted into any review of the magazine’s output in that era. As he admits, the style “works beautifully for the Beecher trial.” So it’s an odd place to protest so much.
“Your Pick” 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 – and pieces from other venues are okay too, if you ask nicely.
Buttondown has actual footnotes now! HUZZAH!
That’s why this edition is delayed! Not simple laziness… nah… never!