The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three Ellises (for fiction), McClellands (for essays), or Whitakers (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Ellis, McClelland, or Whitaker indicates a generally positive review.

⏰ Fiction

“Floating” by Souvankham Thammavongsa. One Ellis. days, date, daydream. Thammavongsa’s usual beat – very brief, almost ambient tales with alienated but generally wise protagonists. Here the narrator meets a man who apparently falls in love at first sight (she hears this only second-hand, and most of the actual information in the story comes from one friend); she daydreams about him in a very fiction-writer-ish way (“the narrator’s discernment has an incredible clarity”, says Thammavongsa in the interview, with maybe a tiny bit of self-aggrandizement) and things quickly drift off with a final, poetic nature-image. That sounds critical, but this essentially holds together, and resists slipping into anxiety or dismissiveness the way so many stories about dating or not-dating tend to. Elegant, just quite un-intense.

⏰ Weekend Essay

“My Season of Ativan” by Amanda Peet. Two McClellands. diagnose, disturb, die. Browsing IMDb, I don’t think I’ve seen Peet in anything, but That’s-Not-Amy-Heckerling can write! This is a small-scale story, if a fraught one: Peet got a cancer diagnosis just as both of her parents, on opposite coasts, were dying. Her writing is neither too stark nor too showy; if anything, it can feel a bit neat, a bit practiced in its wryness. (“It seemed undignified to make my dad leave the building he’d lived in for thirty-five years in the service elevator, but I guess nobody wants to run into a dead body while they’re taking their dog out for a walk.”) Ultimately, the important thing is that the piece come across as neither self-pitying nor cloying, and it finds the balance, depicting the everyday trauma of loss without trying to wring a message from it.

⏰ Random Pick

“Connors’ Year, Not Lendl’s” (The Sporting Scene) by Herbert Warren Wind. (Oct 11, 1982). No Whitakers. hold, hooked, hours. The random picks giveth, and the random picks make you read an article about the 1982 US Open that is so gratuitously long and mind-numbingly boring you want to cry. Wind is best known as a golf writer, apparently, and invented the phrase “Amen Corner” to describe the… something something golf. This piece starts with an unprecedented six-hour-long match, then rewinds to the very beginning of the tournament and goes beat by beat through every single match leading up to it – and usually giving the competitive background of both players involved. It is certainly thorough. There is a lot of material like this: “Lendl began to hit the ball harder, and when he did so, Wilander, put off by the fast bounce of the ball off the DecoTurf, made a number of short returns that Lendl put cleanly away with his favorite shot, his inside-out forehand.” If you don’t like that, you don’t like US Open tennis! And I don’t!

⏰ Something Extra

Mother Russia (at Signature through the 29th) and The Monsters (I caught the closing matinee) have already gotten their flowers from the real critics, but, yeah, they’re both superb. Both scripts are so intelligent. The former blends so many modes and styles of humor without ever feeling bumpy or confused; the latter is an impossible-to-resist melodrama of siblinghood that requires its performers to do fight choreo, often solo, pretty much continuously. The Reservoir was perfectly fine; the second act was a lot stronger than the first.

Some fiction I finished recently: The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick, surreal tales of city intellectualism and its discontents – absolutely great; When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, eerie tales of quantum mechanics relayed in a stark but deceptively psychedelic tone; Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, a fragmented book of musings on travel; My Friends by Hisham Matar, a superb immigration tale with little pretense – apparently I didn’t care for James Woods’ review but I’ll have to reread it; and the only dud of the bunch (but I still had fun with it) The Echo Maker by Richard Powers, a book that dares to ask: what if Oliver Sacks was an annoying straight man?

Sunday Song:

I can’t remember if I’ve picked this one before but it’s just glorious.