Last Week's New Yorker Review: December 4, 2023

You apparently cannot have a private moment in New York without a dance crew butting in to do interpretive work.

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of December 4

Must-Reads:

“Songs of Herself” - Helen Shaw breaks biographical off-Broadway. Shaw at her best — a very high bar. The vocal character portraits make an effortless metaphor out of careful description: “Moon’s soaring, youthful tone has a gorgeous rasping burr to it, while Bean’s astonishing sledgehammer voice has a similar, fractured quality. The mother-daughter relationship is contained in their two approaches to that rough-sawn sound — one takes it easy, the other wields her stress like an audible weapon.” But the piece really comes alive in Shaw’s broaching of the latent childhood vulnerabilities at the heart of both shows, the “rage” that prompts a desire in “women with precocious success” to “imagine a life lived a little longer under a parent’s care.” The insight is potent — you don’t have to have gone to the shows to suddenly see something you couldn’t before.

“Fraternal Eclipse” - Adam Kirsch considers the Singer brothers, Yiddish writers of “different literary generations.” A searching, thoughtful historical analysis, one that’s able to draw lines from each of the brothers’ work to the separate demands of their eras. Both I.J. and I.B. Singer were innovative, the former moving from the “comfortably parochial” work of early Yiddish writers to complex societal portraits a la Thomas Mann, and the latter “turning inward,” toward “philosophical quandaries and sexual obsessions” — but, Kirsch shows, ultimately still reaching similar conclusions. Kirsch fits an astounding amount into this small package, addressing the brothers’ family life, their changing receptions over time, and their work itself, giving just the right amount of plot summary so that we get the idea without being overwhelmed, and choosing two beautiful and unexpected block quotes to give us a taste of their styles. Everything is balanced and erudite, and if it’s not leavened by goofy sweeteners, well, there’s more to life than noshing on blintzes — sometimes you have to eat your vegetables. Ess! Ess, mein kindt!

Window-Shop:

“The Aftermath” - Jennifer Gonnerman reassesses an early school shooting. Gonnerman is expert at the slow unspooling of information in a patient, uninflected, yet hugely gripping style — what Ira Glass describes as “This thing happened and then this thing and then this thing.” This story is very methodical — there are three long sections before we even learn about the shooter Kip’s schizophrenia, a fairly central detail. Stick with Gonnerman and she rewards you with a telling, if mostly unsurprising, portrait of a child who inflicts extreme violence. Mostly, Gonnerman lets the story’s broader lessons remain implicit; a leftist reader’s preexisting perspectives on imprisonment, restorative justice, gun control, and the perception of mental illness probably won’t be challenged by this piece. But it’s still worth reading for its two tender character portraits, which accumulate details both telling and mundane like brushstrokes on canvas. The third-from-last section (beginning “Kristen moved”) in which Kip is interviewed directly and his sister realizes how much she didn’t know about how he was raised, brings up the deeper issue of the masculine culture of gun ownership in ways that are thoughtful and arrive directly from the scene at hand. If the story sounds too weighty for you, it’s still worth reading that section, which has the resonance of deep truths breaking through received wisdom.

“You’re Glowing” - Jackson Arn gets well soon at Ilana Harris-Babou’s new show. It’s a rare treat to get a gallery review in the actual magazine’s pages, not to mention one given a full spread, not just a brief capsule. Arn seems very invested in assessing whether the work is funny, which takes away from other insights he might mine. But in the second section, he dispenses with critique and takes advantage of the space to spin a compelling thesis on authenticity and self-absorption — key to self-care and to art.

“Interiors” - Rebecca Mead hosts ghosts with actress Sandra Hüller. Hüller is coolly philosophical, and gives very German quotes (“The word is basically the last thing that you use onstage, since ultimately everything can be told through the body.”) The piece doesn’t spend long on her rise, it’s mostly interested in using her as a frame to discuss two recent Cannes-award-winning arthouse dramas, Anatomy of a Fall and, especially, The Zone of Interest, a Holocaust-adjacent art-horror film which commands more than half the piece. Hüller’s voice is convincingly severe regarding Germany’s “fairy tale of de-Fascistization” and the “ghosts of the past” she felt near the concentration camp. Still, it’s odd to hear so little from the film’s director or creative team when it’s discussed at such length. (The director has only secondhand quotes — perhaps he wouldn’t grant an interview.) Hüller’s voice can only go so far.

“Things I’ve Heard Myself Say Aloud to my Kids” (Shouts & Murmurs) - Jay Katsir takes four Reading Magnets off the Reward Timer. Has an odd, dark poetry — not something I thought I’d say about a Shouts & Murmurs column. The phraseology of modern parenting is skewered, sure, but what’s really examined are the ways parents use language systems to hide their terror at their own illusory control from their children.

“The Man Behind the Nose” - Hua Hsu faces front with makeup artist Kazu Hiro. Oddly repetitive concerning Hiro’s career — we learn twice that he quit Hollywood to make giant heads, twice that Gary Oldman persuaded him to return, three times that he won two Oscars, and endlessly that everyone considers him amazing, stupendous, the best in the business. None of which is very interesting, and feels like strained compensation for the difficulty of describing such a visual medium in text. But the sections concerning Hiro’s life are more compelling — Hsu makes everything revolve around the human face and head: His psychedelic epiphany (“‘The next day, I felt like I could see the back of my head’”) and his unexpected reunion with his father (“‘I was looking at him and trying to figure out what happened to him during the thirty years… Posture, the amount of hair, age spots, how the form changes.’”) It’s a winning choice, and Hsu pulls it off while relying largely on Hiro’s own words — which suggests there really is some truth to it as an underlying psychological recurrence for Hiro, it’s not merely metaphorical fancy. The ending finally addresses Cooper’s big nose, but it’s largely defensive, and frames all the criticism as concerning antisemitism, when just as much was simply critiquing the aesthetics of the makeup. Its main problem is actually addressed in the piece, when Cooper says he “wanted to find a medium between Lenny and me… so we created this hybrid.” Unfortunately, the hybrid simply looks like Bradley Cooper with a giant nose and a weird chin. Hiro had to take half-measures, and they don’t measure up.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Here Comes Trouble” - Anthony Lane couldn’t escape if he wanted to. Lane indulges his annoying habit of wasting time recounting the plot of a film he doesn’t like but doesn’t really hate before briefly dismissing it. That’s all Napoleon earns, along with some flat jokes (“chocolate, sausages, and bread: the popcorn of the revolutionary age.”) At least there’s a nice description of Vanessa Kirby, who “feasts on the delicious ennui of her character.” The Monster review is even more frustrating — why give away so much about a film if you’re not going to share your understanding of its “gradual enlightenments”?

“The Chosen Chip” - Stephen Witt processes Nvidia in parallel. Exactly the kind of credulous A.I. story that’s terrified about all the wrong things. That’s especially egregious because the subject of the story, Nvidia’s C.E.O Jensen Huang, isn’t even pushing the A.I.-pocalypse narrative — Witt chooses that framing of his own volition, buying into the A.I. doomer/boomer dichotomy in ways that further the work of techno-fascists. It’s honestly surprising to see this in a magazine that, two weeks ago, published an entire A.I. issue that was largely devoted to, if not deflating, at least closely analyzing the hype. Compare Daniel Immerwahr’s thoughtful piece on deepfakes to Witt blubbering that some A.I. “will steal your likeness and reproduce it; some will mimic the voices of the dead… Some will write music; some will write poetry. If we aren’t careful, someday soon, one will outsmart us.” Spare me! It’s a shame, too, because buried within this piece are bits of a fairly solid profile of Huang, a compelling character who Witt presents as monomaniacal, wildly nitpicky and a bit conniving, but doesn’t quite damn completely — it’s reminiscent of, say, early Elon Musk profiles that presented him as an asshole-genius who gets results. Which, for as long as you get results, is true… Then one day you wake up in a cold sweat and post a Qanon meme to your dying digi-folly. Well… power corrupts!

“Star Crossed” - Andrew O’Hagan third-wheels celebrity couples. Annoyingly overwritten, in a snarky mock-erudite tone, like a parody of an article in this magazine: “The danse macabre of blame and heroism in soccer doesn’t exert the same grip as the Beckhams’ marriage, a story of modern fantasy and bronzed narcissism which seems only to enlarge with the accumulation of family members and sponsorships.” Try as it might, the overabundance of voice can’t disguise just how little O’Hagan has to say about this subject. The piece goes in circles, delving into anecdotes you already know about contemporary celebrities you don’t care about, without adding much of anything, then switching to anecdotes of yesteryear’s celebrities, which prove neither more interesting nor more pertinent. Sometimes I genuinely can’t tell why O’Hagan is telling us these stories — a very long anecdote about Humphrey Bogart grabbing a model’s wrist seems to have absolutely nothing to do with his relationship with Lauren Bacall. Shield your eyes from this piece like it’s a paparazzi flashbulb.

Letters:

Regular correspondent Michael says last week’s must-reads for him were “the Zadie Smith fall piece (which reminded me I need to get around to reading her new novel) and the [Hannah Goldfield] New Haven pizza piece.”

What did you think of this week’s issue?