Last Week's New Yorker Review: February 27, 2023

the fact that he could joke with you didn't make him any less dangerous

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of February 27

Must-Read:

“Minister of Chaos” - Ruth Margalit scrutinizes Itamar Ben-Gvir, the new Israeli Minister of National Security, and his long history of extremist aggression. A remarkable, distressing litany of crimes and provocations. Like every story about radical fascist extremism, it’s all so unthinkable it becomes hard to reckon with. Margalit pulls no punches; she does emphasize how cordial and friendly Ben-Gvir is, but only ever in a way that intensifies the foreboding: As his supporter Almog Cohen says, “It’s a ruse. You know what a Trojan horse is?”

Window-Shop:

“Fluidity” - Jennifer Homans is immersed in light at Justin Peck’s new ballet. Homans’ first review of the year, and her best yet at the magazine, not just because it’s the first positive review of a New York City dance in more than two years, when 2020’s first issue highlighted a flamenco show. It’s been a while, in other words, since the movement world had something big to be excited about; even Gia Kourlas at the Times, who basically hated the Peck ballet, spent twenty-one paragraphs picking it apart; usually those reviews are half as long. Homans finds surprising things to be excited about in the Peck, and manages to group those things under a thesis about utopian innocence: The bright stage, which “gives the illusion throughout of absolute transparency,” the gender neutrality (or, perhaps, disinterest), the lack of sexual charge (Homans loves to point out sexiness or lack thereof, a fairly sensible habit for a dance critic, but an oddly rare one). This wholesome escapism would be easy to deride as shallow, but Homans spins it to a positive: “They just go… the movement is the feeling… [Peck] needed an open range.” Her extreme pleasure in these chaste bodies
(“…there is only them dancing, from the inside,”) has, itself, a whiff of the perverse about it, which is deeply compelling, and articulates her perspective for me in a way her writing hadn’t previously done.

“After the Gold Rush” - Kimon De Greef digs into the history of South African zama-zamas, illegal gold miners who take extreme risk and are exploited by local organized crime and broader forces. Viscerally brutal throughout, with an extremely high body count. You can’t help but start to feel the fatalistic outlook of those involved as you glimpse just a bit of the horrors that define their lives in the dark. And you won’t want KFC any time soon. Could probably use more framing and political perspective; there’s no easy “solution,” as the piece confirms, but by ending with a police crackdown we’re given the sense that enhanced law enforcement is, if not an efficient option, at least a plausible one, even as the reality of what state security accomplishes in these situations should be clear enough from the statistic, confirmed by an investigator, that “seventy per cent of the local police force had been in the kingpin’s pocket” at one point.

“You First” - Manvir Singh problematizes the concept of indigeneity, highlighting its inextricable colonial connections. Somewhat dry prose, with an academic’s habit of circling back to the thesis at the end of each section. But the topic is more than worthy, and Singh weighs the many sides of the issue fairly and with poise. This sort of theoretically distanced take on broad issues can sometimes feel disconnected from the actual concerns it chronicles; it’s to Singh’s credit that the Mundas, Maasai, and Maori are all easily kept straight, both the connections between their individual struggles and the places where those connections blur and break down.

“The Pits” (Talk of the Town) - Micah Hauser tries to broker peace between the covetous Eliot Spitzer and the co-op that covets his ditch. This is fun, its sarcasm well-pitched. I’d seen the story elsewhere, but Hauser gets choice quotes (“I’ve never done a drug before, but…”) By the way, don’t click that Eliot Spitzer hyperlink if you know what’s good for you.

“Dutch Treat” - Rebecca Mead gazes at Vermeer, as represented by the Rijksmuseum’s landmark show. Mead has no particular “take” on Vermeer, so this rather extensive review serves mostly as a grab-bag of observations, some lively (“only a critic who has never been pregnant would look at a woman who appears to be in her third trimester and see stillness”) and others a bit worn out (“The eye is tricked into believing that it sees the world reproduced; what it actually sees is the world enhanced.”)

“A G.P.S. Route For My Anxiety” (Shouts & Murmurs) - Jesse Eisenberg walks to the Y. Not really funny, but surprisingly decent flash fiction.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Out of Focus” - Helen Shaw grimaces through two misfires. Shaw, for my money, is a master of the mixed review¹; her raves tend toward the “oh-just-see-it,” and her roasts, like these, lack any sense of pique and seem mostly interesting in scrounging for nibs of worth. She describes “taking pleasure in [a flop’s] ridiculousness” as going “to the dark side” here, a reservation which may be exacerbating the problem.

“Death Becomes Her” - Katy Waldman examines the new Rebecca Makkai novel “I Have Some Questions For You,” a thriller shaped around the true-crime podcast. Uninterested in any deep discussion of prose or structure, so as to allow plenty of time for repetitive discussion of journalistic ethics, #MeToo, and the woke mob. I can’t tell if it’s the novel that’s rehashing the same ground or if the piece is flattening it (Makkai’s previous novel “The Great Believers” was a moving tale that also, at times, reminded me of a prestige TV miniseries.) Even the connection between crime and high-school was a theme in Serial, though to be fair to Waldman, her sharp prose, present throughout, clarifies the idea’s depth: “the nimbus around adolescence, the retrospective force field that both intensifies and distorts.”

“Turn Off the Light” - Adam Gopnik takes a dim view of Johan Eklöf’s “Darkness Manifesto.” Gopnik is precisely as good as his divergences from the main thrust of the piece; these are among his worst, from the confusing Robert Smithson reference (a reference to land art in general might have been astute, but Smithson didn’t singlehandedly serve as a ‘corrective’ to minimalism) to the absolute groaner that a moth is “as ready for one-night stands as Bobby in Sondheim’s ‘Company.’” Ultimately, I think Gopnik actually gets our era wrong when he relates it to Romanticism and says that “Today, we would stress that rain is essential to life,” rather than its sensual aspects, which speaks to an ideology that “holds virtue to be more important than pleasure.” The pleasure/virtue dichotomy certainly shifts more rapidly now, and perhaps Gopnik is a pivot behind.

“Late Shift” - Hua Hsu shoots Shortcomings with actor-turned-director Randall Park. Gets on my bad side early by framing Baby Mentalist, the riotously funny and hugely underappreciated 2013 webseries, and Park’s other work for Channel 101, less as a prelude to Park’s current project and more as something he did to stay engaged while struggling to climb Hollywood’s ladders. Those ladders are hypervisible throughout the piece, and just as “the subversion of the [asian male] stereotype continues to uphold the stereotype,” as the actor Justin Min points out, the piece’s constant proclamations of Park’s independence from the Crazy Rich Asians model (what a character in Shortcomings calls ‘a garish mainstream rom-com that glorifies the capitalistic fantasy of vindication through wealth and materialism’) upholds the Crazy Rich Asians model somewhat. It doesn’t help that Ronny Chieng drops in while filming a cameo to obnoxiously expound on his reading of the film as essentially sympathetic to Crazy Rich Asians, something Hsu does little to dissect. A broader issue is the unrelenting maleness of the perspective here; by my count, the only direct quote from a woman is Stephanie Hsu’s fifteen words agreeing with something Chieng said. Where is Park’s wife, Jae Suh Park, an accomplished actor herself who has acted alongside Randall? Justin Min, the male lead of Shortcomings, is quoted; Sherry Cola, the female lead, is not. Constance Wu, Park’s longtime costar and now a movie star, would be a compelling voice, but is not here. Maybe this is only noticeable if you’re looking for it, but in a piece grappling on some level with identity and even with manliness (a central anecdote concerns Park’s emasculation at the hands of a bullying director), the lack of women’s voices is a major absence.

Letters

Heather adds to Zoë Beery’s discussion of obscure language: “I find it refreshing to be sent looking for a word with a long, storied life--a nice break from scurrying after neologisms on Urban Dictionary and Know Your Meme.”

What did you think of this week’s issue? Any Baby Mentalist fans out there? Write in!

1. Vinson Cunningham is best at raves; Hilton Als just required a notable lead performance, good or bad.