Last Week's New Yorker Review: ☀️ The Weekend Special (October 7)
The Weekend Special (September 2)
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
“Hi Daddy” by Matthew Klam. One Jackson. worry, worn, woodshop. Doesn’t do anything new with its genre, the detail-dense lineage piece – a leaving daughter, a dying father, and our speaker trapped in between. So it’s all in the execution, and Klam’s is pretty excellent, nailing a tone of unmoored numbness without muting his language. Probably there’s meant to be some depressive humor in it, but that aspect didn’t activate for me; as it develops, Klam moves closer to the realm of elegiac prose poetry, which is both a better fit for his themes and a more expected one. The portentous horse is, like, a little much, though.
☀️ Weekend Essay
“What Is Privacy For?” by Ben Tarnoff. One Malcolm. obscenity, obscurity, oblivion. A very straightforward rave for a fascinating-sounding book; this is not really an “essay” in any meaningful sense. Lowry Pressly’s conception of oblivion (what I usually think of as “ambiguity”) is something I’ve tapped into myself as a key to fulfillment; still, I’d never have phrased it quite as he does, and I like a work of moral philosophy which considers how to live in our society as it is and not as it has been or might be. Tarnoff’s late turn toward psychoanalysis is the main thing he adds to Pressly’s thesis; it’s compelling, if not revelatory. I don’t really like reading philosophy, so I appreciate a piece like this for giving me a sense of what’s going on. Tarnoff is a decent but unexceptional summarizer; his own work sounds potent, and I’d love to see more stuff like it – left-skewed tech thinking – in the magazine. I suppose there’s Anna Wiener, but her writing is so experiential. Something headier wouldn’t have too much overlap.
☀️ Random Pick
“Whodunnit?” by Alma Guillermoprieto. (Sep 25, 1995.) No Rosses. incoming, incorruptible, incorrect. A fairly interesting story told in a fairly uninteresting way. It’s quite odd that Guillermoprieto has sapped this fundamentally political story of almost all its politics, turning it into a beat-by-beat true crime tale that also touches on Mexican corruption – but not, you know, its causes. Things are also fairly confusing. Names fly at you; you have to read closely or get lost in the weeds. In Guillermoprieto’s defense, the actors she suggests are corrupt and ill-intended have been positively verified as such with time [sometimes in pretty shocking fashion], which makes the story tidier now than it would have been then. There’s a lot of vague gesturing towards the unprovable. If you’re interested in Mexican politics, it’s clear these crimes are still affecting them, and the prose here is certainly more flavorful than what you’ll find by Googling. In a vacuum, though, I can’t quite recommend this one.
☀️ Something Extra
I have seen 128 shows since I moved to NYC and I recently saw the worst one (which I know because I log them all with star ratings out of five [with half-stars] and this was my first-ever one star.) That’d be Grounded at the Met Opera, a bizarre white-guilt drone-strike-operator show whose first act was just wall-to-wall uncomfortable chuckles at the manic, goofy tone, and whose second act was far worse, paying off nothing and building to one of the most unearned, unbelievable, and distasteful finales I can remember. Avoid, or go go go if you enjoy truly terrible art. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
“Your Pick” is a piece chosen by a randomly selected paying subscriber. (Except when it’s a “Random Pick”, in which case it’s chosen by random number generation.) 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.
Sunday Song: