February 4, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🌱 The Weekend Special (February 10)

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

“My Friend Pinocchio” by David Rabe. One Boyle. pottery, possibility, powerful. A twisty little story of two male friends navigating a variety of scenarios that mostly relate to intimacy and gender. In the moment, that connection isn’t always clear; the story feels aimless, revolving around the friend’s death but not in any straightforward or tragic way. Much of Rabe’s fiction operates in a casually surreal landscape, so the world’s continuing mundanity in this story (even if his phraseology can be esoteric) is surprising… but not in a way that electrifies. Instead, this has a dreary, sunken, maybe drunken energy, despite a few scattered bits of mild drollery; that’s not an inherent problem, I don’t need a cozy place to spend an hour; I do wish I had a clearer idea of what that tone was in service of, what idea Rabe was circling. I can draw targets around bits of thematic material, but I feel like a Texas sharpshooter doing so.

🌱 Weekend Essay

“The Hidden Histories Lost in the Los Angeles Fires” by Alex Ross. Two Harrimans. past, palm, Pacific. A really moving followup to Ross’ 2021 piece on Richard Neutra, this doesn’t try to be about anything more than a few houses – and because it isn’t exerting itself, it becomes so much more, a tribute to the L.A. area as a “hidden” hotbed of modernism. It’s also, especially toward the end, just about Ross’ eye as he drives around, looking at the “stupefying endlessness of the destruction”, and all the things that destruction can reveal. There is capriciousness and plain injustice; as in any major disaster, there are a thousand minor disasters – and a few hundred more averted. By narrowing his view, Ross allows us to imagine all these stories, veiled in smoke.

🌱 Random Pick

“Feminine Fashions” by Lois Long. (November 13, 1965.) Two Parkers. collar, curves, custom. Long, who wrote for the magazine across more than forty years, is best known as a prototypical flapper and Roaring Twenties nightlife columnist. This is from the very tail end of her tenure, and her engine has slowed down not a bit; this is a nose-to-tail delight, as evinced by the nose – “Sentiment is a beautiful thing in its proper place (wherever that is today)” – and the tail – “It is also, I think, enough to prove that one thing may still be said for those who labor in our made-to-order enterprises: Custom does not stale.” In between are lots of lovely descriptions – hard to visualize, always an issue with On and Off the Avenue, but still snappy. (“…a fat bunny coat, planned by Nina Ricci, with six double-breasted buttons of the fur in pompon form, plus two flap pockets way, way down. It’s fine for taking off in a chilly region and arriving in a sunny one.”) It’s also a look back at a now-departed era of custom fashion tailored for the very rich and not the extraordinarily rich. There’s a strange echoing nostalgia to reading a flapper’s survey of mid-60s clothes, today – Long betrays no curmudgeonliness; her cocked eye is timeless.

🌱 Something Extra

I was absolutely gobsmacked by how much I enjoyed A Wonderful World, the Louis Armstrong musical on Broadway. It does not try to transcend the biopic-musical form in some sort of fancy or metatheatrical way; instead, it commits to that form, and finds a story about Armstrong as a man wrestling with himself and with history. The structure has been criticized as “too neat”, but if you can’t enjoy a neat structure in a Broadway musical, I’m not sure what to tell you. The four women around Armstrong each deliver knockout performances in what could easily be mere sketches. Nearly every beat lands; it’s an intelligent piece of theater that’s also a blast. I expected very little and mostly went because they had rush tickets available, but for my money it’s the best musical currently running. They close at the end of the month and are playing to 60% capacity crowds, so you can and should score a ticket too.

Sunday Song: