Last Week's New Yorker Review: August 7, 2023

selectively concocting a PG-rated soap opera for her wide-eyed Zoomers.

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of August 7

Must-Read:

“Taste of Cherry” - Katy Waldman reads Ann Patchett’s “wistful,” optimistic new novel. Manages to blithely give away most of the plot of not just the novel being discussed, but one or two previous Patchett novels as well — there’s almost a laissez-faire attitude Waldman puts on; you might find yourself thinking it’s sort of romantic to not care about spoilers. But Patchett’s books, among their other virtues, tend to be a bit twisty; if you plan on reading Tom Lake, avert your eyes. I’m perversely selecting this review as the must-read anyway, because, for those of us with contractual obligations, this is superb, drawing a thread through Patchett’s oeuvre effortlessly (her books concern “how people… press beauty from constraint” — Yes!) and mounting an extended reparative critique (in other words, a note that is given a purpose) of the book’s “determined positivity,” which prompts in Waldman a “paranoid reading of the three Nelson girls, scanning for covert signs of distress,” but eventually settles into an appreciation of the “subversively wise and self-aware” quality of the book’s “investment in its own fantasy… a locus of gentle make-believe.” This is brilliant, and Waldman managing to make such a complex point entirely clear without actually requiring us to read the book at hand might just be worth her divulging the entire premise beforehand.

Window-Shop:

“The Making of a Mutiny” - Joshua Yaffa gives a history of the Wagner Group, the mercenary outfit that fought for Russia in Africa and Ukraine, then started a mutiny against its leaders. If you’re looking for a clear answer to the question “Why did the Wagner Group attempt an armed uprising?” you won’t really find it here. After the opening section, this is mostly a nauseatingly brutal journey through the Group’s missions, depicting fighting conditions so inhumane they put the word to shame. I had to push through it, but if your thing is the dark shadow of the human soul, if you think Come and See is a nice night out, this piece is probably for you. Certainly, Yaffa manages some incredible feats of access, and he makes the complicated noun-and-name mess of Russian battalions relatively clear. This is a piece to be admired, but I left it nearly as confused about the Wagner group as I came in.

“Bodies of Work” - Ariel Levy strips the painter Lisa Yuskavage. Most compelling as another entry in Levy’s ongoing series of profiles of notable women, each of which deepens all the rest by being as much about womanhood as they are about the figures at hand. Yuskavage is an excellent choice, since her art skirts the edge of shock and objectification before pivoting away toward something deeper. I’m not sure Levy ever quite articulates that deeper thing, though; she points toward “empathy,” but that’s not quite it; she references Yuskavage’s friend’s trauma as important, which is likely true, but also insufficient. It has something to do with the implications of looking, and it’s important that Yuskavage’s figures are often making eye contact with us. Beyond the greater project, this is smartly structured fun, building to a hilarious quote about how Yuskavage isn’t actually a working-class outsider anymore, she’s “been crushing it for decades… She’s Gwyneth.” The stuff on paint handling will always be tough to put into words; Levy doesn’t solve that puzzle. And an ending anecdote is uncomfortable because it’s spun for grimy pathos instead of pure grime. But that’s the way with Yuskavage’s work, I suppose — the leering and the humanism are all aswirl.

“Hidden Depths” - Rachel Monroe holds her breath near Adventures with Purpose, the true-crime-adjacent YouTube salvage diving outfit, whose founder has his own secrets. I’m not sure about the decision to keep the “twist” here to the third act — it throws the story a bit off-balance, and adjusting our assessment of Jared Leisek’s character from “highly self-interested” to “vile” feels relatively minor, his crime shocking but not exactly surprising. The early stuff spends too long on true-crime as a genre, sketching a landscape it then abandons in favor of a portrait; besides, Leisek says himself he hates “the true-crime community,” and A.W.P’s appeal seems related but not identical. If the bifurcation here doesn’t quite work, Monroe’s reporting is still excellent throughout; she gets telling quotes from all parties (even those who should definitely know better). Her prose is concise, like a good whodunit, and leaves you with a sinking feeling.

“The Children’s Crusade” - Louis Menand uncovers a lesser-known battle in the war to enforce Brown v. Board: That of Clinton, Tennessee, the first school to desegregate. Totally scattered — every section essentially has its own thesis — but frequently fascinating. You can safely skip the first two sections, which spend a long time on dry setup, the details of which you probably know, or could guess. In its back half, though, Menand discusses the case of John Kasper, “acolyte” to Ezra Pound, and makes plain that Pound’s virulent fascism was not merely a “regrettable eccentricity” but something with clear material outcomes — likely, terroristic ones — in the States. Menand also briefly discusses the ties between New Criticism and Southern supremacy, a topic on which I’d happily read a whole article. In the last section, he pushes all this completely to the side to write a compelling, if a bit axiomatic, take on “the burden” of desegregation; namely, that it was “insane” to place that burden on children.

“Role of a Lifetime” (Talk of the Town) - Gideon Jacobs bows down to the actor who plays Jesus in a new TV show. A few cute gags regarding the overlap of celebrity-worship and worship-worship, made funnier when you learn Jacobs was a child actor.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Lover Boy” - Vinson Cunningham sees a multifariously dated Tennessee Williams revival, with a “paper doll” of a man at its center. I’m not sure I buy Cunningham’s supposition that feminism has successfully erased the myth of the “strong, emotional, mysterious man whose sexual appeal and moral courage are as natural as a Southwestern rock formation,” and created in its stead the red-flag-laden figure of the “fuckboy.” Fuckboys have their own kind of “bad-boy charm,” and the older figures also bore warnings of their ill intent.

“Evolution” - Amanda Petrusich listens to the “normie” new record from Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino. Petrusich is unconvincing when she says it’s merely “tempting to regret” the shift from punk experimentation to music for “the air-conditioned aisle of pharmacies and supermarkets.” She seems afraid to sharpen her knives, as if Cosentino’s sincerity in her schmaltziness means it’s not worth calling the cornball cornball.

“Dreaming in Babylon” - Safiya Sinclair grows, then cuts, her dreadlocks. It’s all too obvious that Sinclair is a poet writing a memoir; the obvious “poetic” lines barge in to interrupt the narrative, and in the absence of a poetic structure, their perfumed metaphors feel badly out of place. The anecdotes here also feel scattershot, and what could be an interesting interrogation of the patriarchal abuse tucked into Rastafarianism is instead taken as a given, not actually interrogated. Scenes of outside microaggression feel especially rote, their scheme almost universal (who hasn’t been prodded by a bigoted teacher?) but their tenor stubbornly individual. The conceit of this newsletter feels cruel when aimed at a trauma-laden personal history, but, like the contemporary memoirist, I have to “tell my truth.” I didn’t like this.

Letters:

An empty mailbag! No thoughts on that Gagosian novella? (She brings it to you every ball, why y’all gagging -osian?)