Last Week's New Yorker Review: January 30, 2023

surveying the life styles of the celibate and destitute

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of January 30

Must-Read:

“Novels of Empire” - Elif Batuman reconsiders the great Russian novelists, in the wake of the war in Ukraine. The juicy centerpiece of a generally excellent issue of the magazine. Far from your average work of lit-crit, this is really a “diary of the mind,” similar, in a sense, to Batuman’s two recent novels, but clearly fixed in the present day. There may initially seem to be no need to ground nuanced literary analysis with place-setting like “My flight from Istanbul was overbooked and delayed,” but this duality ends up reflecting one of Batuman’s critical points, that “literature, in short, looks different depending on where you read it.” In a lesser writer’s hands, trying to use the structure of personal narrative to support the analysis of an essay would end up confusing the point, but Batuman pulls it off with aplomb, because she is so intricately able to unweave the conflicting strands of her own thought, to enact what she credits Tolstoy with, “conflicting voices and perspectives” that “worked together to generate more meaning,” entirely within the framework of her individual perspective. (She still gives plenty of credit to others for their ideas, when she draws on them; the synthesis, though, is hers.) The cherry on top is how pleasurable and easy to follow the piece is, despite its weighty subject matter and constant reference to great works, many of which I haven’t read. But neither does the piece feel pre-chewed; there’s enough room for your thoughts to slide in among Batuman’s.

Window-Shop:

"Eat, Pray, Concentrate" - Casey Cep bunks with some monks, detailing the minutiae of their lives as described in Jamie Kreiner's "The Wandering Mind." Reveals monks as the lifehackers of their day, monitoring their time in service of God with the zeal of bullet journalers, just in pursuit of, basically, focused nothingness instead of the distracted everythingness of contemporary secular capitalism. It's one thing to hear the academic Medievalist's favorite line, that it's a myth the dark ages were culturally barren. It's another to feel this immersed in the "riotously strange" details of the era, particularly those to do with everyday life and, especially, mental states. Cep's voice is funny and light, and conveys Kreiner's best details memorably, in the classic New Yorker style: Four-fifths aggregation, one-fifth colligation. By assuming "clarity" on the part of the monks in terms of their view of the "warp of the world," Cep is making a more incisive political point than it might initially appear, and it's a model of restraint to not hammer the point home but leave that conclusion to the reader.

"Friend of the Mayor" - Eric Lach chronicles Eric Adams' shady acquaintances and their travails. Something I don't think I've seen before: a piece initially published online before being placed in the print edition the subsequent week. I don't mind it here, although I hope it doesn't signal a trend toward publishing more breaking news in the magazine; personally, I like that it's a space for more considered and processed after-the-fact reactions. This hardly needs the news hook of the connection to Adams to be compelling; Whitehead's fraud is over-the-top, especially the questionable claim of filiation to Arthur Miller, the police-murdered businessman (which, for me, ought to be the story's lede; the influence-peddling pales in comparison, although I get that there's much more hard evidence and legal wrongdoing there.) There's something so grotesque about propping up the police while claiming to be the son of a Black man murdered by the police. I'm not sure if Adams is a fellow con-artist or just a rube; the story plays fair by keeping it ambiguous. It also does well to present Whitehead not as a sleazy operator but as a sweaty and conniving but mostly incompetent grindset hustler, a portrait it paints with subtlety and without diverging far from the simply-presented facts of the case. In other words, it works as straight news and as feature, which is why it deserves cross-publication. My only note: The misogyny undergirding Adams and Whitehead's connection (everything is about their fellowship "as men") could have used more dissection.

"One of a Kind" - Beverly Gage travels to the National Institutes of Health campus, in hopes of a cure to her unique genetic disorder. I knew of the NIH only as a government issuer of press releases; I never realized the extent to which it's a working hospital of oddities and special cases. Gage balances the personal and informational aspects of the story nicely, telling her story without dramatizing it, building to the fascinating point that "the new age of genetic testing seems to be producing a never-ending stream of one-off mutations," then, at the very end, connecting the two strands with a gorgeous, if dispirited, flourish.

“Pro Choice” - Vinson Cunningham dissects the “graven images” of The Appointment. Awkwardly, Cunningham has duplicated the ending of a review of his from a month ago (“Maybe even just a laugh” versus “You might even get a laugh,” used in much the same context.) Otherwise strong, dissecting the meaning of the abortion imagery the play “mashes our faces into,” the abstracted pictures one can only describe “in a befuddled ekphrasis.” The review itself is ekphrastic in describing “the imaginings that come by way of looking.”

“Growing Pains” - Anthony Lane is surprised by two coming-of-age stories. Serviceable and charming, but with an awkward intro, and lacking in formal interpretation.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Lula’s Restoration” - Jon Lee Anderson gives us the recent political history of Brazil. Anderson is a reliably stellar political reporter, dissecting the situations in various parts of South and Central America with clear characterization and a lucid point of view. He usually benefits from the lack of other deeply reported U.S. coverage of many of those countries, though; something that isn’t the case with Brazil. His prose here also lacks some sparkle; as long as the piece is, it mostly lacks vivid scenes, progressing in confusingly semi-chronological manner, topic by topic. The best moment, and biggest exception, is the interview with Valdemar Costa Neto (in the section beginning “In speeches”) which demonstrates the pragmatism ad absurdum that’s clearly endemic in Brazilian politics.

“Falling Behind” - Idrees Kahloon tackles gender inequality from the point of view of an economics graduate. Oof. Look, it is what it sounds like: A pop-economist gesturing vaguely in the direction of an entire realm of human existence while saying “The numbers!” That is, after all, their modus operandi, and I can’t muster the testosterone for a line-by-line takedown of this profoundly misconceived piece. Among the many concepts the piece either misunderstands or willfully misconstrues, the most egregious is “toxic masculinity,” which Kahloon says reduces men’s struggles to their “undeserved privilege,” and associates with a “messy… process” of unsympathetic “moralizing.” The actual concept, while far from a perfect model, comes so much closer to coherence than any of the theories Kahloon cites (including the ‘60s expansion of the social safety net infantilizing men - seriously!) that he can only be eliding it for ideological reasons. Now look the writer up on LinkedIn and think for five seconds about what those reasons might be.

Letters

Not much in the bin this week, but Michael did give commentary on a few pieces, saying of the Lasdun “Murdaugh” story, “The first person narrative and not bringing a lot of new original reporting was not what I was expecting from it,” and also highlighting the Talk on the incorrigable Gersh Kuntzman’s unsolicited license plate restoration: “…a must-read. As a non-New Yorker this was a scam I wasn't really aware of. The arch style of Talk of the Town suited this story well.”

For next week, drawing on the Batuman: What’s a work of art you’ve reconsidered the political implications of recently? I rewatched Rosselini’s “Rome, Open City” a few days ago and was far more aware of how it functions as somewhat hamfisted pro-Italian-Catholic propaganda, minimizing their collaborative role in the war. That’s probably obvious, but I wasn’t thinking about it when I watched it as a teen.