Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🍳 The Weekend Special (Apr 15)
Welcome to the Weekend Special.
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.
🍳 Fiction
"Finistère" by Kevin Barry. No Munros. trips, teens, spectrums. Barry is, unfortunately, probably my least favorite of all the magazine's short story regulars – something about his Irish ambiguity and focus on masculine heartache totally fails to connect with me – and, really, turns me off. There are various parts here, spinning around each other in ways that feel both predetermined and arbitrary. The dialogue is stagy and elevated without playing into those qualities (though Martin McDonagh does the same thing, so it may just be some Irish thing), the descriptions are lovely enough, though a good third of them feel willfully ambiguous – no idea what "there were odd pulses like worms at the base of his throat" is supposed to mean or make us think of. It all swirls around until the ending, which is also ambiguous – there's a great swirl of emotion (at least, we're told there is), but death peeks from behind some of the clauses. I'm left cold – but maybe you'll enjoy it, if you can imagine the guy at the end of the bar is reading it to you in a thick accent.
🍳 Weekend Essay
"Is This Israel's Forever War?" by Keith Gessen. One Sontag. injustice, invasion, indulgence. I'm not sure why Gessen feels the need to lead with two very similar framing stories back to back. Just skip the first section – you really don't need it, as Sheline's story, the second one, is way more compelling and gets the point across. Besides that quibble – and a few places where Gessen's point gets muddled (no idea why it "does not help matters" related to building safety that Hamas "put scarce resources toward its extensive underground tunnel network") – this is a smart and politically pointed examination of the U.S. response to Israel. (The title doesn't really convey the piece's main thrust, but whatever.) It's easy to take for granted that the president (at least, when the president's not Trump) is basically acting in accordance with some geopolitical community consensus, even when that consensus is inhumane; it's important, then, to convey how much of a "mystery" his continued "failure to intervene" is – especially as he trumpets a different message in speeches. Now, geopolitics being what they are, this piece already needs an update; still, its clarity and conscience are to be commended.
🍳 Your Pick
"White Angel" by Michael Cunningham. (July 25, 1988). One Hersey. acid, brother, caution. I only know Cunningham from The Hours, so this very different story was a treat. His extremely perfumed style isn't quite my aesthetic, but undeniably he pulls it off – everyday things take on an operatic depth. Here, the climax is somewhat literally operatic, and it didn't really work for me – perhaps it's an end-of-the-Sixties analogy, in which case it's a bit distasteful; perhaps that's reading too much into it and it's just a grandly gruesome image, [^1] in which case, well, maybe I'm just too postmodern and prefer an anticlimax, especially when the tension has been so clearly established by that early clause which shows us the ticking time bomb – and especially when we're in the present tense. There's too much blood in my face, I feel like I'm in the splash zone. Everything before that is quite fantastic, with a childhood acid trip – no easy scene – a particular highlight, given depth and seriousness but still somehow feeling recognizably of a child's consciousness. Whether the sixties details are actually veracious is for others to judge; there is a slightly hysterical edge to the extremity of everything here, and perhaps if I'd given myself over to it all more the ending wouldn't have jarred – still, Cunningham's craft is impeccable. This would make an interesting operetta, actually, especially since Cunningham operas are all the rage. It couldn't turn out worse than the film of The Hours, which, as I'll state to anyone who'll listen, is my pick for the worst film ever made.
I was interviewed in the newsletter Foofaraw about my media consumption habits. Check it! I also picked one of my favorite songs to run at the end.
Have a piece you want to be "Your Pick"? If you're a paying subscriber, you can get a review of any piece in the magazine's history: Venmo $20 per request to @SamECircle, then write me an email 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.
[^1] Weirdly, it's the second piece of culture I've consumed in the past month with a dramatic death caused by, spoiler, running into a sliding glass door – the play Grief Hotel (very good) recounts a nearly identical incident.