Last Week's New Yorker Review: April 10, 2023

she heard a bicycle bell, and spotted a man on a bicycle wearing a straw cowboy hat with a toy sheriff's badge pinned to a faux-leather vest.

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of April 10

Must-Read:

“The Fog” - Larissa MacFarquhar paints a triple portrait of American adopted people: Deanna, who is white and represents ‘plausibly invisible’ or same-race adoption; Angela, who is Black and represents transracial adoption; and Joy, who is Korean and represents international adoption. A resonant, sensitive, intelligent, and substantive piece. The structure is perfectly chosen and keeps the very long narrative from ever dragging, as each chapter both reflects and contrasts the story which came before, thereby revealing the similarities among adoptees and the distinctions between different types — and between individuals. Deanna’s story peaks early, with her reunion narrative, which artfully foregrounds the threat of rejection; Joy’s peaks late, with her activism and the story of her mother’s residence. Angela’s story, though, is the highlight here, and wrestles with racial questions of selfhood with a depth remarkable for its seemingly secondary nature to the piece — until you remember that the self is, of course, the topic being discussed; the thing obscured in the titular Fog. MacFarquhar’s sense of balance, not just between the narratives but also in terms of when the political questions need to be examined from afar and when they should be placed more directly in the context of the stories at hand, is exquisite.

Window-Shop:

“Outliers” - Anthony Lane is overjoyed by Saim Sadiq’s debut, Joyland. Lane says it’s been since Gerwig’s Little Women that he’s “been struck by so potent a sense of place,” and I’d expand that to say it’s been about as long since he’s turned in a review this obviously enthralled by a film. It looks good on him: Freed from his wisecracks, which, while often funny, can smack of disinterest, he makes a strong and peppy proselytizer. I rarely use single reviews to make cinematic choices, but Lane has me convinced. Given that the review’s thesis is that the film’s success comes from its surprise, it would be expected for the review to feel like it has a hole at its center, the unsaid/unsayable/“spoilerific” (ouch.) But the hole is filled by Lane’s sheer emotion (and, for once, helped by the piece’s brevity; there’s no space for unneeded explanation.) The enthusiasm even trickles down to the other film on offer, Acidman, which sounds compelling if not as glorious.

“Familiar Haunts” - Helen Shaw sees a Sweeney Todd that’s “frequently sensorially ravishing” but lacks a sense of “palpable dread,” and a Crucible prequel, The Good John Proctor, which has dread in droves. It’s too bad the latter show has closed already, as this piece makes it sound delicious and dark, despite barely glancing on its plot. (Oddly, perhaps because it’s closed, it’s not even mentioned in the table of contents or sub-hed, which isn’t the usual practice for a dual review.) When it comes to Shaw’s Sweeney take… As usual, I can do nothing but cede the stage and indulge in a parade of her gorgeous quotes: “A twenty-six-person orchestra plays like mad under the stage, but the audience, on the verge of mob hysteria, provides its own dynamics,” “Sondheim’s sooty, sour-hearted music and lyrics are the things that etch themselves into your mind,” “every time [Ashford’s Lovett] pecks at the reluctant Groban, fluttering all over him, it looks as though someone threw a chicken in his face.”

“Blasted” - Amy Davidson Sorkin reads a new history of the I.R.A. hotel bombing that nearly killed Margaret Thatcher, and muses on its implications. Segmented somewhat awkwardly; Carroll’s book is narrow in focus and Davidson Sorkin presses through its bulk and begins musing episodically on Gerry Adams, the American point of view, and the effect of Brexit on Ireland. Each of these diversions is quite compelling, although the last feels too far removed from the source text (and the last line… woof.)

“It’s Not That Deep” - Rachel Syme delights in Preston Sturges, and wishes Crooked, but Never Common, the new book of close readings of his films, would lay off a bit. Syme is surprisingly great at summarization; she loses very little of the wit of the scenes she recaps, which is quite a feat, and dissects quotes with aplomb. (“The [speaker’s] repetition… captures the silly, often disingenuous dance of flirtation, its choreographed guile.”) I’m not sure I agree with her critique of Stuart Klawans’ book, though I haven’t read it; it seems to me that close readings demand intricacy and dissection in their analysis, so the idea that they “favor the message over the fun” or somehow spoil the joke by over-explaining is a reach. Connecting that, tangentially, to the broader cultural move toward “an age of slickness and hypocrisy” feels almost anti-intellectual; surely social critique isn’t causing social collapse.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Young and Restless” - Hilton Als chats with Michael R. Jackson about his new musical, White Girl in Danger, and his last one, A Strange Loop. Als is mostly interesting in rehashing the greatness of Strange Loop, which deserves it, but doesn’t especially need it. (The extensive quotes from the libretto, especially, feel like filler.) The new show sounds compelling, but we’re mostly given background context on Jackson’s love of soaps; there’s little on form (“The show is more sonically complex” says nothing). When Als is just kikiing with Jackson, there’s depth and sparkle, but there’s hardly any of that material; really, this should have been a Q&A.

“The Citadel” - Emma Green strolls the grounds of Hillsdale College, a self-described “small, Christian, classical liberal arts college,” where the old-school conservative practice of winking and weaseling out of your own racist beliefs still nonsensically reigns. Hillsdale is an obviously repugnant institution, and Green gives its president Larry Arnn too much latitude to extemporize on themes of racial homogeneity (“it’s not as important as having people here who want to be here,”) silence during Black Lives Matter protests (“George Floyd was not a particularly good fella. That matters, right?”), student counseling (“I’ve never liked it,”) and Christian nationalism (“there’s no such thing.”) Each of these quotes is damning, but Green offers no pushback, and seems a bit tired of politics, as if she wanted to write something theoretical for the Journal of Higher Ed but realized midway through there was too much white nonsense to ignore. She’s much more invested in Arnn’s mission (closely but indirectly related to his White-supremacist mission) to elevate primary texts to higher-ed, and reduce both qualitative and quantitative analysis, focusing instead on the “wisdom” of the texts. As Green says, after pointing out how one chosen textbook ignores the racial terror of Reconstruction: “At best, this is a problem inherent to the study of famous primary texts: those powerful enough to write history rarely focus on the stories of people at its margins.” But when the most pointed critique in the entire piece begins with “at best,” it’s a sign of soft pedalling. The piece overemphasizes the engagement of students in rather silly ways (“Hillsdale kids tend to be studious and eager… I didn’t see a single cell phone,”) and runs the risk of linking that engagement, and some pedagogical ideas which may be compelling out of context (science classes “learn about the human aspects of the scientific process”), to the entire repugnant experiment, thereby justifying it in the eyes of those that can excuse racism, but draw the line at the decline of higher ed.

Letters:

Heather agreed that the Roupenian Kelly Link piece was lackluster: “Do we really need those first sentences explained line-by-line, not for their craft, but for how much they sound like a fairy tale? (And I don’t even fully agree with her categorizations!)”

Robert Cottrell, the editor of widely-read longread-curating newsletter The Browser, was kind enough to link to this humble publication in their editor’s letter this week, writing, in part, “I find it well-written, and I generally agree with Sam's judgements… if you want to be alerted to the best things in the New Yorker… then Last Week's New Yorker might be the answer.” Hey, thanks!

They continue, “The counter-argument is that, whereas an annual subscription to Last Week's New Yorker costs $40, a digital subscription to the New Yorker itself is today being advertised at just $49.99, at least for the first year — a limited-offer discount which seems to me an extraordinary bargain.” Well, just to give the counter-counter-argument: The New Yorker has access to the coffers of Condé Nast and operates out of a skyscraper in Midtown. I am an MFA student married to a PHD student — yowch! — and this publication is written from my five-hundred-square-foot apartment in scenic Jersey City. Yet despite this, Last Week’s New Yorker Review remains entirely free, and only “relies on” your donations in the same way that the American healthcare system “relies on” GoFundMe. Give only if you can!