Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🍳 The Weekend Special (July 8 & 15)
The Weekend Special (July 8 & 15)
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.
It’s the Fiction Issue this week, so this’ll be a long one!
🍳 Fiction
“The Drummer Boy on Independence Day” by E.L. Doctorow. Two Munros. pace, past, parade. By coincidence, I’m currently about two-thirds of the way through Doctorow’s The March, and unfortunately I’m finding it quite a slog1, so I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this tale, a flash-fiction piece about war’s legacy in the living. Doctorow’s writing is sharp and believable, not stripped-down but with no extra complications. There is certainly something troubling about the way the story assumes a generally anti-war stance but never reckons with the deeper sicknesses undergirding the Lost Cause; to do that, though, Doctorow would have to destabilize the scenario in ways that are impossible at this length. This works as what it is – and the major novelist shows he can get his hands around a short story, too.
🍳 Fiction
“Kaho” by Haruki Murakami. No Munros. plain, pleasant, place. Like about two thirds of Murakami’s late work, this feels drastically under-edited. That’s an odd thing to say about a writer who’s been noted for an uncomplicated, straight-line quality, but that quality doesn’t actually mean that his story is doing its work in an especially elegant way, and here it’s impossible not to see Murakami’s fingers working the strings. That can occasionally be a charming quality, for example in children’s stories like the one in this story’s final act, but because only the story’s first moment is “out of the ordinary”, it lacks any sort of fantastical charge – it’s just thin realism to an opaque aim. (Which is still certainly better than thin realism to a didactic aim.) Murakami’s looming close-third-person gaze on this young woman has an odd effect – when the story tries to get inside her head (“My own life may be taking a clever revenge on me: she couldn’t help thinking this”) I had the odd sensation of not believing what I was being told about her interiority. That effect could probably be used to interesting ends, but here it’s just discomfiting.
🍳 Fiction
“Opening Theory” by Sally Rooney. Two Munros. move, motive, modicum. Rooney right in her comfort zone: Two socially awkward people flirting with one another. Believe it or not, she’s associated with this scenario for a reason; she’s an absolute whiz at constructing this arc in ways that are closely observed enough to satisfy as literature, but also, unignorably, hot. This story has been excerpted from Rooney’s upcoming novel with a great deal of finesse; major props to whichever Fiction editor had the assignment. If Rooney’s previous effort was a bit colder and more removed than the writing that made her famous, this feels like an embrace of the “Rooney style” – which could feel like a commercially minded or insincere turn if not for the heart and tenderness with which Rooney paints this dual portrait. A certain kind of reader might say that just as Normal People was Rooney’s (sometimes shockingly anti-kink) BDSM novel this is her age-gap novel – who knows if that actually plays out in the book, but it’s definitely present here, and it provides much of the frisson beneath this encounter. Another reader might posit that these characters are two sides of Rooney – the unsure wunderkind and the tentative thirtysomething nerd – meeting to see what they think of one another. Regardless of interpretation, this is just a good time, a warm and sweet beach read, guided by an expert hand.
🍳 Fiction
“The Hadal Zone” by Annie Proulx. No Munros. garden, glamour, Gargantua. Proulx is An Original, with all that implies; if you can’t roll with her more-is-more prose styling and her not-quite-hysterical-but-certainly-frantic realism, you’ll be left in the dust. Some of her writing has worked for me, but perhaps, after some time off, she ought to have returned with an impetus to make things new. Instead, this story feels dressed up in bad Annie Proulx drag. I found it relentlessly unpleasant and pointless, signifying everything-everywhere-all-at-once and therefore not much of anything. About a quarter of her sentences are home runs, but she swings at every pitch, so her strikeout rate is ridiculous. She’s left so breathless by all her stylistic exertions she mostly leaves the plot as an unrevealing character sketch, with assorted irrelevant elements. I don’t need to be guided by a heavy hand, but it’s an odd feeling to have no idea how Proulx wants me to feel about anything that happens, or even, sometimes, what happens – in the interview, Cressida Leyshon brings up a moment when the central character snaps at a woman (whose thin caricature is rendered more insulting by Proulx’s halfhearted attempt to grant her pathos), and Proulx responds that she “cannot agree” that it’s a snap. That’s just bizarre: What else could it possibly be? And did I mention that this story is endless for no particular reason, except that Proulx likes to take up space? She’s certainly achieved that much, I suppose.
🍳 Weekend Essay
“The Knotty Death of the Necktie” by Adam Gopnik. Two Sontags. loop, seam, twist. A very fun and bubbly cultural history, no longer than it needs to be. (No extra fabric here!) The first section revs up a bit slowly, but Gopnik’s brief, roving collection of anecdotes on the theme is wonderful – how the necktie’s in-group club symbology proliferated outward until it was consumed by, and thus negated by, all other fashion. It’s a fascinating point, made lightly. The brief visit to Seigo Katsuragawa, aging Manhattan maker of silk ties, is also excellent. Gopnik makes the smart choice to write this section as a Talk of the Town; he even refers to himself as “a visitor”, in that style. Seigo is a real New York character with a story to tell – I could’ve spent even more time with him, but Gopnik doesn’t belabor things. Whether the baseball cap is the new identity marker2 or if that’s just the case for a particular kind of aging businessman, perhaps one generation younger than the last real tie appreciators, I’m not sure. I want to know what Blackbird Spyplane thinks of ties – are they ripe for reclamation, or forever-cursed s**t?
🍳 Random Pick
“The Blackout” by Anna Kavan. (March 24, 1945). One Hersey. fugue, unit, auntie. I do choose these Random Picks completely by random (I spin up a year, then an issue, then a piece within that issue) so it’s entirely a coincidence that Leo Robson wrote a really excellent appreciation of Kavan’s work, published in the magazine in 2020, which briefly mentions this story. The reader would gain a lot from reading Robson’s piece first: The knowledge that this story is in the Kavan style (eerie modernist character studies of dark mental states) and that it’s drawn from her work in London with traumatized soldiers. One expects the story to deal with war trauma, and it’s only quite late that we discover the trauma isn’t war-related at all – or at least not in a way that the story makes directly apparent. Whether that misdirection is intentional or accidental, I’m not sure; I don’t have a good sense of the cultural awareness of what we’d now call PTSD. If it is meant to be a misdirection, I don’t care for it – it’s not to any particular aim I can see, and the true cause of the blackout isn’t especially satisfying or surprising. More likely, though, this is just meant to be a brief modernist freakout story, which builds not to a revelation but to a scene of pure alienation, the soldier chewing on a gutter sausage that’s “gray, slimy, like the wrist of a dead baby.” The circular ending is far too neat; if Kavan left us at that point of dissociative climax, the mood would linger longer.
“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.
The Sunday Song:
I didn’t love Billy Bathgate either, though I read that in April 2020 and so was not really of sound mind.
I tend to hope Gopnik’s right about this; I have a recurring desire to order baseball caps with little slogans embroidered on them. So far I’ve had two actually printed – “WELL-INTENTIONED” and “ENIGMATIC PHRASE” – but I have a document where I collect ideas; I currently have twenty.