Last Week's New Yorker Review: ☀️ The Weekend Special (Midyear)

The Weekend Special (Midyear)

Time for a midyear refresh! Here’s what’s been changed:

• The emoji in the subject line!

• The award names!¹

• New occasional section where I put something extra: Something Extra!

• Fiction will now appear for the coming week’s magazine, as they’ve been posting the stories on Sundays, ahead of the magazine drop. I figure I may as well read it a week early, too.

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.

First off, here’s a brief continuation of the Prospect of the Periodical segment from last week’s main edition, covering Fiction and the Weekend Essays. Since I give point values to those sections, it’s possible to figure out my average score – and, incredibly, over 27 weeks I have given exactly 27 points to pieces of fiction. This about matches my view of the section –there have been a few high peaks, most of which were fairly unassuming – the very subtle “Consolation” by Andre Alexis is my favorite story of the (non-academic) semester – but also far more ambitious faceplants than usual, especially from the section’s stable of regulars. I’m not sure what I’d attribute that to – maybe post-Covid, writers are trying to lift too much weight without practice and throwing out their backs in the process? That’s a wild guess. It all evens out to an average of good – but not even a little bit great. The other three-star stories, so you don’t have to hunt, are Addie Citchen’s heartstrings-tugging “That Girl” and Olga Tokarczuk’s visceral “Woman, Frog, and Devil”.

The Weekend Essay section was extremely close to a 1-point average itself, but ended up just under, at 0.9375. Here, though, the data is rather different – there weren’t as many 0s, but there wasn’t a single 3, and the clear majority of essays got 1 point – basically, most everything was fine, nothing was fantastic. Clare Sestanovich’s personal essay on belief was the standout, but it’d only be a mid-Window-Shop in an issue. Adam Gopnik’s piece on neckties last week was also good.

☀️ Fiction

“Freedom to Move” by Ayşegül Savaş. One Jackson. minutes, middles, miscommunications. Proceeds in an orderly fashion, recounting a visit in which the speaker lavishes a shallow kind of empathy, based mostly on misunderstandings, on her grandfather’s live-in aid and her daughter, before betraying her in a minor way. Is this story, despite its “subtlety”, in the sense that it’s about close observation and minor moments, a bit obvious? I can’t decide. Pretty much every single moment serves to further the thematic aim; at the same time, none of those moments felt unrealistic. There’s something verging on moralistic, though, about the story – while we empathize with the speaker, the flaw in her position, that she is too caught up in obligation to connect more deeply, or even just to relax, is both clear and emphasized further by her every action. Certainly a simplicity of aim is a feature of many great short stories; one doesn’t criticize “The Tell-Tale Heart” for focusing too single-mindedly on the speaker’s guilty conscience. At least there, though, there’s something beneath the floorboards – here, we hear right away that the speaker “could no longer say” that she “enjoyed” her outings to relatives, because, of course, nothing is as it was in her childhood. That statement resolves the rest of the story, in a certain sense – there isn’t enough tension left over. All of this is just to try to explain why I wasn’t in love with a story that does so well sketching out its characters, all of whom glimmer with interior life.

Something unrelated and odd, probably just an error: Online, at the bottom, it says this story was “drawn from ‘Long Distance.’” That’s the title of a previous story by Savaş which was published in the magazine, but isn’t a book-length work. Savaş’ novel “The Anthropologists” just came out, but I don’t think this story was drawn from that – if so, wouldn’t it be mentioned in the interview, where they discuss that novel? Is it an unpublished manuscript? Even though it perhaps shouldn’t, it does inform my reading of these stories whether or not they’re drawn from a longer work. I’d be interested to know!

☀️ Weekend Essay

“The Surreal Simulations of a Reality-TV Restaurant Empire” by Naomi Fry. No Malcolms. public, purpose, pump. I was going to be nasty and call this a cut-rate Caity Weaver impression, which it is, but actually, after a lot of searching, the specific Gawker-adjacent piece I distinctly remember making fun of SUR with much more panache was by Kara Brown – it’s truly a blogger’s classic, and while I know writing for TV is in most every way a step up from blogging, I do feel a great talent is being wasted by the She-Hulk TV show. I’m procrastinating because I don’t have much to say about this, which fails the very basic test of gonzo journalism – you have to be having fun, even (especially!) if you’re having fun about how much you’re not having fun: You have to quite literally make fun of yourself. Fry feels zoned-out –Baudrillard reference here, Miley Cyrus reference there – and impersonal, in ways that are hard to quantify. I can’t point to a particular reason her jokes fall flat (well, maybe one: Putting random details in parentheses doesn’t magically make them funny) or a noticeably clunky sentence, but taken as a whole there’s just no zhuzh. Maybe the issue is that Fry feels that being openly mean would make her look like a reality-TV critic, but being openly nice would make her look like an influencer, so she puts on a particular mask: Intellectual casting a shrewd eye on a strange landscape. Thing is, that’s not her – she admits she’s a fan of these shows, but she seems afraid to write like it. She can’t make fun of herself because she doesn’t resemble the character she’s supposed to be! Anyway, there’s my pan – Fry is welcome to throw a martini in my face when next we meet.

☀️ Your Pick

“The Rise of Mr. Ponzi” by J.B.C.² (May 8, 1937). Two Rosses. dough, dirt, deportation. A thoroughly delightful recap of the Ponzi scam, stapled to a brief Talk of the Town-ish portrait of the man in his exiled dotage. The writer doesn’t always do the clearest job of explaining nuts and bolts – I don’t understand, for example, whether the paid-out investors got to keep their money – which may be due in part to the past century’s prose stylings. Everywhere else, though, it’s those same stylings that tickle me so, with their inimitable newsman’s cocked eyebrow. “They cheered Ponzi whenever he showed himself, and he reciprocated by ordering frankfurters and coffee served them.” That’s entirely representative. The storytelling is snappy and the second half leaves the detailed psychoanalysis to the experts, focusing mainly on ironic detail and local color – preferably both, as in this anecdote: “…in their games of scopa, in which the loser pays for a round of black caffé espresso or sweet vermouth, Signor Ponzi plays his cards as carefully and anxiously as anybody else. Whatever his life may have been, it is now threadbare and precarious.” The final cap is a where-are-they-now summary in four perfect beats. To me, the funniest running joke is the writer’s disdain for the Boston press, which they give zero credit for breaking the Ponzi story, instead pointing out how long it took them: they “avoided mention of Ponzi’s scheme as carefully as if it had been an elevator accident in a department store.” (No clue what that means, but I love the way it sounds!) Of course, the button: The Post “won the Pulitzer Prize for its activities in connection with the Ponzi case.” The more things change…

☀️ Something Extra

Since I have a readership here, I’m gonna start putting random experiments in from time to time. I’ve been both annoyed by and obsessed with the Times’ recent “Best Books of the Century” feature, which has mostly been an exercise in praising the award-winning-est books of the era. Critical consensus hasn’t had much time to shift (even in situations where it really maybe should have – Junot Diaz at #11, man, sheesh…) and god knows there are plenty of literary awards already, so it’s a very odd task they’ve set for themselves. Others have tried to fill in Timesian blind spots, but I’m more interested in something different: What are the most critically acclaimed works of fiction which did not make this list? (The Times’ list has a few literary-nonfiction works on it, but it’s mostly fiction.)

Luckily, I have an ongoing project in which I assign literary awards and end-of-year lists point values, and then read all the fiction which scores enough points. Based on those tabulations, here are the Top 10 Biggest Snubs plus my reasoning for why they might have been left out. (Again, to be clear, this is an arbitrary mathematical exercise and has nothing to do with the merits of these books.)

Counting down from 10:

10 There There by Tommy Orange. 2018. Pulitzer finalist, Times’ ten best books, Washington Post’s ten best books, National Book Award longlist. Why the snub? Honestly, this one is pretty baffling to me. Maybe the book was a bit short and a bit juvenile – it does have a Y.A. simplicity to it, though I liked that about it – but considering the list’s very surprising total shutout of Louise Erdrich, surely one of the most accomplished fiction writers currently working, space ought to have at least been made for other Native American writers.

9 War Trash by Ha Jin. 2004. Pen Faulkner award, Pulitzer finalist, Times’ ten best books. Why the snub? Jin’s work is fairly subtle – perhaps this is not the kind of book that springs to mind as one of your favorites, even if its elegance is undeniable when you’re looking to grant an award. Jin’s novels haven’t won any prizes since, so his name wasn’t on the tip of anyone’s tongue. Still, if you’re going to fill your list with award-winners, you ought to favor lesser-known award-winners, not snub them.

8 Blackouts by Justin Torres. 2023. National Book Award, Morning News Tournament of Books winner, National Book Critics Circle finalist. Why the snub? Too new and too experimental. Nothing from 2023 made the list, including this slim and strange novel.

7 The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. 2021. National Book Critics Circle award, Times’ ten best books, Washington Post’s ten best books, Kirkus prize finalist, National Book Award longlist. Why the snub? No clue! Size can’t be the issue, since 2666, which is about two hundred pages longer than this gargantuan novel, is in the top 10. Maybe Jeffers needs to establish a reputation beyond her debut? That’s all I can think of. This seems like exactly the kind of book to make a list like this.

6 The Topeka School by Ben Lerner. 2019. Pulitzer finalist, Times’ ten best books, Washington Post’s ten best books, National Book Critics Circle finalist, Pen Faulkner longlist. Why the snub? Presumably, Lerner’s earlier efforts were judged more groundbreaking, and this novel’s praise was viewed as a makeup. That’s too bad, though – I love this book.

5 The Good Lord Bird by James McBride. 2014. National Book Award, Morning News Tournament of Books winner, Washington Post’s ten best books, Publisher’s Weekly ten best books. Why the snub? McBride’s total absence from the list is baffling and inexplicable; I can only imagine that his consistency combined with the lack of a single obvious Great Novel split his vote. (Maybe that’s what happened with Erdrich too.) Pretty much everything in the top 20 is by a writer whose distinguished career has a very obvious peak (e.g. most people that love Freedom probably love The Corrections even more.)

4 The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson. 2012. Pulitzer Prize, Morning News Tournament of Books winner, National Book Critics Circle finalist. Why the snub? I think the politics of the moment were aligned for a very brief period such that a Native American writing about the North Korean experience in a fantastical manner could be viewed as a bold experiment, not as something potentially troubling. “Cultural appropriation” was the Grantland trend of the year, but everyone was still redrawing the boundaries of acceptability. North Korea has also been pushed out of the news cycle by more present horrors.

3 The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. 2019. Pulitzer Prize, Kirkus Prize, National Book Critics Circle finalist, Publisher’s Weekly ten best books, National Book Award longlist. Why the snub? Presumably Whitehead’s previous effort, number 7 on the list, was viewed as a bolder experiment. Sometimes being up against your own work can hurt you. Still, it’s a silly snub – this is a vastly different book, and hugely successful.

2 The March by E.L. Doctorow. 2005. National Book Critics Circle award, Pen Faulkner award, Pulitzer finalist, National Book Award finalist. Why the snub? A white dude writing about the Black experience of the Civil War is a bad fit for the present moment’s politics, especially because Doctorow uses some pretty over-the-top eye dialect. I actually just finished this book, and found it both scattershot and dull; I have to imagine some of its plaudits were just lifetime achievement awards for Doctorow (not that his earlier work hadn’t also won awards).

1 All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. 2014. Pulitzer Prize, Morning News Tournament of Books finalist, Times’ ten best books, Booklist Top of the List, National Book Award finalist. Why the snub? Sometimes I think success works against a book’s legacy. Before its popularity, this book is a risky attempt to prod our empathy and subjectivity, after its popularity, it’s a middlebrow romance where one of the protagonists is a Nazi. A chintzy Netflix miniseries adaptation solidified the latter view. (The Goldfinch could’ve ended up in a similar spot, but Tartt’s ‘mysterious Lesbian’ persona has a je ne sais quoi that Doerr’s ‘friendly bald dad’ can’t hope to match.) Doerr’s more ambitious followup, Cloud Cuckoo Land, wasn’t a complete flop, but its mixed reviews put a certain kind of sprawling, therapeutic feel-good historical fiction novel in the rearview mirror, at least as far as awards go.

If you read all that, I hope you enjoyed. Let me know if you like this sort of experiment, if I should leave it in my drafts, or if it ought to be its own separate email. I know the last choice would increase reach, but I’m disinclined to spam my readers with constant missives they didn’t sign up for.

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The Sunday Song:

1. After the gutting revelations published by Alice Munro’s daughter, it didn’t feel right to give this silly honor in her name; I figured I may as well change up the others (and a few more things) while I’m at it. All three picks are white women; it’s difficult to find writers of color who 1. have long histories at the magazine and 2. are dead. If you have suggestions, please let me know; I’ll re-christen the awards every once in a while.

2. I have no idea who this is or how I’m supposed to find out. Everyone else in the issue is credited by their full name.