Last Week's New Yorker Review: The Weekend Special (Mar 11)
Welcome to the Weekend Special.
Pieces are given up to three Munros (for fiction) or Sontags (for essays). As with restaurant stars, even one Munro or Sontag indicates a generally positive review.
Fiction
"The Time Being" by Joseph O'Neill. Two Munros. vulgarity, wisdom, dogsitting. Reading this was a trip: Entirely by coincidence, the last novel I finished was O'Neill's Netherland (witty, nuanced, generally excellent) and it was hard not to notice the many shared themes between that novel and this story: An adrift Wall Street stockbroker, in the midst of a romantic crisis, befriends an odd older man and takes on responsibilities for him, until his sudden death causes the stockbroker's perspective to shift. Colonialism is a central theme. Netherland is doing a Gatsby riff and this is not, but it's largely as if this petits four is fashioned from the same ingredients as that main course.
The casual excellence of the writing here puts one in mind of a tailored suit, but somehow that suit critiques its own formality. To call this narrator "unreliable" isn't quite right, it's more that he's opaque – every reader will walk away with a different understanding of his psyche. There's an honesty to this approach – none of us can know each other, despite what most first-person fiction would imply – and it worked very well for me, though my guess is that some readers will find this story stony and impassive. It doesn't offer obvious entry points, and it requires digging but never requests it. The odd ending, with its unannounced flash-forward, makes us wonder whether the "chapters" of life that the speaker saw in older people ever truly appeared for him – if his wealth, or perhaps some other, deeper phenomenon of the psyche, kept him from certain pockets of experience. There are a number of moving parts in this story, all credible (though maybe the jerk son-in-law bearing "the mark of the national rot to come" is too on-the-nose) but none obviously central – what the story is "about" depends on where you place your attention, which is also truer to life than a narrative which guides your hand. While it doesn't have any obvious po-mo flourishes, in this sense the story is very postmodern. Any life story is tentative, partial, and evasive – this one no less so just because the shoulders fit and the jacket buttons smoothly.
Weekend Essay
"Has Putin's Invasion of Ukraine Improved His Standing in Russia?" by Joshua Yaffa. One Sontag. re-election, retaliation, resignation. Very newsy for this slot – and Yaffa's prose is clean but doesn't elevate the material. But I was fascinated by the attempt to get inside the heads of ordinary Russians as their lack of power over the situation leads them toward self-justifications of their own morality and goodness. It's very human, sadly relatable – and it reveals how rare it is for the Western press to extend empathy to the citizens of enemy states. I was less interested in the guesstimated Putin psychoanalysis in the second half, and if the quantitative data on his support is so skewed as to be useless, it's better to just not mention those numbers, no?
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