Last Week's New Yorker Review: đ„ The Weekend Special (September 8)
The Weekend Special
Pieces are given up to three Knapps (for fiction), Downeys (for essays), or Fords (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Knapp, Downey, or Ford indicates a generally positive review.
đ„ Fiction
âVoyagers!â by Bryan Washington. Three Knapps. family, faces, farther. Not just a return to form for Washington but a story so carefully wrought and deeply moving it is absolutely wild he seemingly just wrote it as an experiment in third-person agency. Washingtonâs unique hyperreal dialogue style can be hit-or-miss but when he finds characters whose voices it makes sense in, it can be glorious. Usually portioning out information that is already available to the characters adds distance; here Washington achieves his aim â to make it âakin to meeting and learning about a new personâ: we are close to Cali and Ronny, we hear them speak, and eventually we learn something of their history. Washington is fairly manipulative, dropping things at just the right moment, but itâs done so skillfully it feels more comforting than overwrought. Then thereâs also the uniqueness of the central dynamic here, not just a straight woman and a gay guy but two people wrestling over their degree of parental presence in opposite directions, and fighting through it without naming it. (Thatâs what I picked up on, at least â there are many currents.) To misquote Sondheim on the subject of old friends: Hereâs to them. Whoâs like them? Damn few.
đ„ Weekend Essay
âThe Mystery of the Cat Mysteryâ by Rivka Galchen. Two Downeys. fear, fever, feline. Seems charmingly scattered but pulls together with a surprising degree of cohesion. Perhaps, Galchen posits, we read murder mysteries as a sort of exposure therapy to death more generally, and the cats are there because, well, if they fits they sits. Galchenâs literary journey is wide-ranging â from Warriors to Wodehouse, from The Master Cat to The Master and Margarita. (No âThe Cat Came Backâ, however, an exception to the happy lose-return cat narrative that proves the rule.) The ride is a bit cutesy, sure, and sometimes distractable â why do we hear about the theatre group plotline? â but still good fun; I laughed out loud twice â Howard tearing down the teeth drawing and the ending â and smiled throughout. I did not sneeze, though, so go ahead and mark it âvery hypoallergenicâ.
đ„ Random Pick
âLetter From Parisâ by Janet Flanner1. (March 19, 1938.) One Ford. prestige, propaganda, portrait. The recap of politics is a bit hard to follow. More interesting are scathing reviews of a few recent cultural products: a pro-Marie Antoinette play (just think: Sofia Coppola couldâve reasonably played it straight just seventy years earlier) and an anti-Marie movie, made by âthe painter Renoirâs sonâ, who made âa bad investmentâ. This was Jean Renoirâs followup to La Grande Illusion, to be clear, which is a reasonable contender for the greatest French film. There is also a noted volume of Man Ray drawings, just in time (in the present) for his new show at the Met. She says his portrait of the Marquis de Sade âlooks like George Washingtonâ, and so it does.
đ„ Random Pick 2
I owe you another since we were off last week. (The Weekend Essay was covered in the regular edition â no Knapps â and there is no extra Fiction piece.) Somehow the Random gods have once again selected something having to do with classical music.
âIdea Flourisherâ (Profiles) by Barbara Heggie and Robert Lewis Taylor. (Feb 5, 1944). One Ford. slight, surprise, speed. Iâd never really considered the cultural gap between movie-and-vaudeville-palace conductors and orchestra conductors, though it does make sense. Even the conductor of the biggest house, Rapee, profiled here, is dismissed a bit by the writers â the constant references to his obsession with fast tempos and high volumes seem to be a sly way of saying that heâs not as interested in subtlety of expression. He also comes across as something of a bully, or at least an obsessive who accidentally bullies. He does seem more showman than artist (he uses a Lucite stick as a baton!) but his obsessive knowledge of exactly what piece of music fits what particular mood is a definite craft, one thatâs surely now mostly lost. This is not the most pertinent article, but itâs quite readable. Sadly, Rapee died of a heart attack less than a year after it was published. His bridge-playing son, mentioned briefly, went on to become one of the most important bridge players in the country. As for the writers, Heggie is quite obscure but I did find her family tree online; Lewis Taylor won the Pulitzer a few decades later for a western novel. Iâm not sure why they were paired together on this piece and I canât find any mention of a connection anywhere; itâs not a piece that would seem to demand two writers. In any case, they keep time together.
đ„ Something Extra
I read novels in twos, and the last two I finished were both extremely good: The Son by Philipp Meyer, a generation-spanning melodrama about Texas thatâs⊠better than its description (though certainly very masculine) and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, a familial epic of colonialism and collapse. I give them my strongest recommendation. Theyâre also both long without ever being extremely or unnecessarily long.
Sunday Song:
As with Touchstone/Dounce last Special, Janet Flanner, credited as GĂȘnet, was very recently covered in the magazine â Andrew Marantz criticized her softball coverage of Hitler. â©