Last Week's New Yorker Review: ☀️ The Weekend Special (August 19)
The Weekend Special (August 19)
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
“The Narayans” by Akhil Sharma. No Jacksons. yours, youth, yogurt. An elegantly grim story centered around what we can and cannot forgive. “We” is the operative word there – it’s in a strange second-person plural which allows for a surprising amount of roving – to places and situations that “we” could never possibly be. This is an interesting choice, but I don’t quite know what to make of it – it destabilizes the entire second half of the story, as if a friend telling you gossip suddenly pulled out CCTV footage of the events. This is especially true regarding Mr. Narayan’s life in India – I’m really not sure what it adds for us to know about his travails. At least it’s an unobvious choice, though, and I’m willing to support it on those grounds – unfortunately, the story ultimately rests on two crucial gestures, both of which I found rather thudding. (These are climactic, so the spoiler-averse ought to look away.) The bowl of yogurt on Madhu’s mother’s head is underplayed by the prose, which stays just as dry as it was before, (“Mrs. Narayan’s shoulders went up”) as though to say, “this is but another thing that happened, and only the climax of this story by happenstance.” It’s probably also meant to keep the gesture from becoming comic, which it is, with strange connections to semen and mother’s milk – maybe it’s too comic for the tone of the story; it feels almost as though Sharma is dismayed that his grim tale has ended with a jester’s flourish. I think leaning into the weird comedy, the bodily nature of the gesture, could unveil more resonances. The lawnmowing, on the other hand, he makes too much out of – its innocent noisiness mirrors the kind of disruption that Madhu represents in ways that are fairly explicitly outlined. It could work at the end of a different story, but this tale was so unaffected to that point that the sudden burst of metaphor feels less like a poetic flourish and more like an untied shoelace.
☀️ Weekend Essay
“The Trouble with Friends” by Weike Wang. No Malcolms. necessity, network, nest. There is no frustration like the frustration of hearing someone recount anxieties which are remarkably similar to your own, but which you have largely processed and can cope with. An attempt to fix their problem, to hand them the key that fits your lock, is presumptive and usually unhelpful. Simply holding space for their anxieties risks projecting onto them the disproportionate resentment we all feel toward our past selves.1 Telling them with a smile that you can deeply relate inevitably betrays the unspoken finish: “…until I got over it.” All of this to say that as someone with friendship baggage of my own, I found this essay largely enervating, and mainly useful as confirmation that all of us are talking about the same few things in therapy. Wang’s prose feels thoroughly considered, but the mild cynicism of her thoughts still has the odor of an unedited journal entry – the baseline alienation of the ego seeps through. In other words, I found this piece annoying – exactly the emotion Wang ends on, its dissipation her lesson learned. I struggle constantly with annoyance. (I wonder if critics share this problem? We vent our minor, specific annoyances at a work of art in order to proclaim our great and abiding love for art in general.) “Letting it pass” is fine advice, but it doesn’t get to the root of the problem: Noticing. Wang is, as I am, someone who notices the social world repetitively and past the point of usefulness. The cure for that is not more mindfulness – if you’re writing a long personal essay on the subject, you’ve meditated on it enough. What works for me – the key that fits my lock – is a devotion to action, paired with an internal insistence on my own competency and capability. You aren’t going to pass or fail the friendship test based on how much you study.
☀️ Random Pick
“Mundial Notebook: Ariel V. Caliban” by Alastair Reid. (September 29, 1986). No Rosses. hand, foot, mouth. In my head, I mainly associate the William Shawn era of the magazine with the sixties and seventies, but it actually ran to ‘87, giving this extremely Shawn-ian piece a fairly out-of-time feeling. At one point Reid uses a “video-game addict” in a metaphor, and even though the video-game in question would be the original Legend of Zelda, the moment still feels like Seinfeld getting an iPad. At the same time, this recounting of the 1986 World Cup makes clear how little the culture of the national teams has changed. Uruguay is "brutal", France is "intelligent", Brazil has "superb players" but strategic issues. Elsewhere, history continues to rhyme: Argentina is lead by the best player in the sport, who scores an astonishing goal; Morocco overperforms; the English find a reason to complain. And FIFA, as always, is incredibly corrupt and fairly inept. Reid doesn’t bother trimming his notes to fit a narrative form, he just stuffs everything in, which can be annoying (see below) but has the benefit of reading well decades on when all the games have been forgotten. A knockout bracket has its own appeal, and being taken game-by-game through the results of that bracket with a witty and cantankerous host is my idea of a nice evening.
But there are so many issues. Really, this piece is a handy demonstration of many of the weaknesses of the Shawn-era feature style (which, of course, I generally adore.) Let’s run through my gripes.
Nothing comes without a prelude. This is forgivable when it comes to reiterating soccer rules I already know, but less so when Reid is, for example, giving multiple paragraphs of explanation of the difference between Latin American and Anglo-American “conversational modes”.
I usually like the dry humor that peppers these pieces, but often here it grows performatively dry, as with this remark: “The teams looked to me extraordinarily small until it dawned on me that they were boys dressed in the colors of the participating teams.”
Reid’s crankiness is fun when he’s mocking the English for their sensitivity, less so when he’s complaining that the Mexican sportscasters sound too excited for his liking. (That’s not even his hottest take: He asserts that the following four sports are among the most “telegenic by nature”: Golf, tennis, cricket, baseball. I couldn’t do worse.)
All the talk about Mexican politics and the mood on the street is interesting enough, but literally none of it is sourced. Where is Reid getting this stuff from? I assume he has sources, but we don’t hear from them directly – there are only imagined dialogues with theoretical Mexicans. I’d almost rather he quote his taxi driver.
Mostly, things are just repetitive. The same little schpiel about the “distinctive atmosphere” of a good soccer game seems to begin every section. There is no sense that Reid respects the reader’s time. No wonder, really, that he likes watching golf, tennis, cricket, and baseball on TV.
☀️ Something Extra
Instead of more of my yammering, here’s an excerpt from the book I’m currently reading, Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald.
“If Newton thought, said Austerlitz, pointing through the window and down to the curve of the water around the Isle of Dogs glistening in the last of the daylight, if Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, then where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river's qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is fluid, rather heavy, and translucent? In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it? Why do we show the hours of light and darkness in the same circle? Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another? Could we not claim, said Austerlitz, that time itself has been nonconcurrent over the centuries and the millennia? It is not so long ago, after all, that it began spreading out over everything. And is not human life in many parts of the earth governed to this day less by time than by the weather, and thus by an unquantifiable dimension which disregards linear regularity, does not progress constantly forward but moves in eddies, is marked by episodes of congestion and irruption, recurs in ever-changing form, and evolves in no one knows what direction? Even in a metropolis ruled by time like London, said Austerlitz, it is still possible to be outside time, a state of affairs which until recently was almost as common in backward and forgotten areas of our own country as it used to be in the undiscovered continents overseas. The dead are outside time, the dying and all the sick at home or in hospitals, and they are not the only ones, for a certain degree of personal misfortune is enough to cut us off from the past and the future. In fact, said Austerlitz, I have never owned a clock of any kind, a bedside alarm or a pocket watch, let alone a wristwatch. A clock has always struck me as something ridiculous, a thoroughly mendacious object, perhaps because I have always resisted the power of time out of some internal compulsion which I myself have never understood, keeping myself apart from so-called current events in the hope, as I now think, said Austerlitz, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments of time have co-existed simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true, past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them, although that, of course, opens up the bleak prospect of everlasting misery and neverending anguish.”
Good, yes? I’d already transcribed it just for myself, but I figured I’d share.
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The Sunday Song:
I think most people view Banks as a troublesome weirdo with one truly great song, which is way off – she’s a troublesome weirdo with one truly great (and wildly underappreciated) album.
Along with, of course, disproportionate love, once you find it. ↩