Last Week's New Yorker Review: March 20, 2023

In a purple panic when Violet Queen was dropped, we clinked our glasses too soon over Burgundy

Welcome!

Lots of new readers have subscribed after this newsletter was featured in Today in Tabs, including a few of my favorite writers across the city and beyond. I hope you find the company interesting and the seating comfortable. As ever, I want this newsletter to feel like a discussion starter, so please write in with your takes!

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of March 20

Must-Read:

“Pay Dirt” - Jill Lepore tries her hand at Last Season’s Seed Catalogue Review. Just like heirloom seeds are new manifestations of old produce, this is a fresh vittle modeled after Katherine S. White’s 1958 “Romp in the Catalogues.”¹ Lepore finds some wonderfully weird prose lurking in the seed catalogues, and presents political connections that are persuasive and not overbearing. White’s piece, though it dwells too long on roses, is just as good, and the two are best read together, to see how the changing soil of ‘this magazine’ impacts the way the story grows. After similar setups, both bear perfect final paragraphs which could hardly have more different flavors.

Window-Shop:

“Close Listening” - Helen Shaw sits in on Amy Herzog’s new, “ascetic” production of A Doll’s House. Vintage Shaw: Nora is “dizzy” on the surface, with “bird-witted self-preoccupation,” the actors are “melting vampirically into the shadows,” Herzog is “friskiest” with her take on Torvald, whose endearments “plop out of his mouth like a wet octopus.” I couldn’t quite tell if she liked Chastain in the role or not — maybe she wasn’t sure. But on the mechanics of the production, she is, as usual, revelatory.²

“Use Your Hands” - Lauren Oyler appreciates the translated writing of Maylis de Kerangal. Oyler’s absolute rapture is clear; the piece is mostly devoted to precise explication of various passages from each of de Kerangal’s books. Her shimmeringly multivalent writing deserves Oyler’s fanfare. More could be said about the translation process; why, for example, is Moore’s translation of Mend the Living “the one to use”? But the thoughtful and appreciative literary analysis is worth your time.

“Abolish the Poor” - Margaret Talbot reads Matthew Desmond’s new “manifesto” Poverty, by America. The new Desmond book sounds excellent; although there wasn’t much novel information or thought, for me, in what’s summarized here, that may be a fault of reduction, in which the most startling factoids are also the most widely spread. Talbot’s slight critique that it lacks political and structural analysis to some degree is perceptive. As she says, it would be good if this became “one of those books you see people reading on the subway”; hopefully this review will help with that.

“Pill Battles” (Comment) - Jeannie Suk Gersen files a clarification regarding Walgreens’ recent abortion-pill decisions. The “Comment” section beginning each issue, which offers a slightly editorial but mainly factual take on the week’s big news story, is usually missable. But this Walgreens story is one the press and politicians mostly got wrong, so the clarity here is helpful. Even better is the swift breakdown of the many lawsuits flying around the issue: Suk Gersen’s tone is straightforward but not removed (“nineteeth-century sexual morality now shapes the twenty-first-century abortion debate”). ³

“Personal News” (Talk of the Town) - Emma Allen reads Jennifer Mills News, the one-page paper that chronicles the most meaningless moments in the life of the titular subject. The newsletter you’re reading, of all publications, has to give props to any silly media idea taken very seriously. Writing a paper with headlines like “Girl Inhales Snowflake” certainly qualifies. This piece unfortunately loses some of the humor and magic evident in the sheer brilliant inanity of the thing itself.

“Magic Realism” - D.T. Max unmasks the Black writer and academic Herman Carroll, who reinvented himself as Hache Carrillo, an Afro-Cuban. A conversation piece that doesn’t quite nail down its conversation. Max seems to think what makes the case unique, beyond Carroll’s non-Whiteness, is that he actually lived as an Afro-Cuban, which seems to mean that he played Celia Cruz records, made arroz con pollo, and wore guayabera shirts. Frankly, though, his daily life feels unremarkable to me, and familiar from any case study of a compulsive liar. The more interesting question is: What’s going on in academia and publishing, that someone engaged in such a sloppy “burlesque” of Cuban identity in his work can achieve even modest success? G.W.U, which was harboring Carroll and Jessica Krug (who posed for Black), should take at least a little flack; it gets none here.

The not-especially-interesting question which is posed is something like, “Should we judge Carrillo on the same terms with which we judge White race-imposters?” The more interesting question, which is only touched on, is, “What does it mean to write authentically, and what aspects of a minority culture (and, by proxy, the majority culture) does the elevation of cultural ‘shtick’ end up reaffirming?” As the piece says, “critics who took [Carroll’s novel] at face value became part of the joke,” a joke which is a kind of burlesque (and different from minstrelsy only by degrees.) Even if Carroll were the genuine article, his work would still be an appropriative flattening of culture for digestion by a mostly White cultural elite. But the issue isn’t with him as an individual, it’s with a system that awards work which is boldly shallow, work which “amplifies” its “qualities… to the point of parody.” The piece should make more of its most telling detail: That Carroll was organizing the judging process for the PEN/Faulkner award, literally volunteering as gatekeeper.⁴

Skip Without Guilt:

“A Little-Known Planet” - Elizabeth Kolbert is “consumed by” insects along with David Wagner, who may know “more about caterpillars in general than anyone else on the planet.” Most interesting when it’s focused on the bugs; I could hear all day about “bundles of cells known as imaginal disks” that, inside a pupa, “develop into legs,” wings, and genitals. Or about how the camouflaged looper “confuses potential predators by chewing off bits of plant matter, like petals, and attaching them to its back.” Less compelling are the humans: “From a caterpillar’s perspective, humans are boring,” says Kolbert, and perhaps the rest of the piece is written from that perspective. Wagner is a straightforwardly optimistic and only slightly buggy nerd, and the entomology conference seems dull and depressing in exactly the way I’d have expected. Unfortunately, the ratio is off, heavily favoring the monotonous mammalians.

“Villagegate” - Zach Helfand chronicles the fight over the little Greenwich Village paper WestView News, which has been taken over by a conspiracist and possible elder-exploiter, and the New WestView News, to which virtually all the contributors have fled. A good yarn, but one covered snappily by Clio Chang in Curbed two months ago, in a recap of extensive reporting in The Village Sun. Helfand’s narrative is more linear, but most of the reported details he adds waver uncomfortably between crudity (Capsis’ clear signs of discomfort — “his face twisted in rage” — aren’t fun) and self-serious justification (“The squabbles, rumors, and side-taking enacted something like a community.”) Also: Dumb title.

“Drill Bits” - Carrie Battan gets a lesson in U.K. slang, and drill music, from transatlantic star Central Cee. Serviceable, but stretched thin by a need to accommodate the news hook of British police using rap lyrics as evidence in court. And Cench’s biggest hit may sample a song, but it’s not the kind of hyperliteral TikTok sample Battan cites it as. It’s still a rap song with no chorus; it’s results-oriented thinking to say that it’s “global pop crossover” “party music” in a way his early material wasn’t. Really nice spot art by Dennis Eriksson, though.

“The Good Earth” - Hilton Als sees Senga Nengudi’s poetically biomorphic art at Dia: Beacon. I love Nengudi’s art, and this show sounds great. Als’ prose isn’t at its sharpest, though; there’s a persistent indeterminacy to the phrasing. (“You may not know specifically what she is referencing here, and that’s O.K., because you can feel it,” “The flight… feels like a form of release — of energy… landing somewhere. In our dreams, perhaps.”)

“Good Talk” - Hua Hsu wonders if we need to rescue conversation. Hsu ends the first section by making clear that conversation isn’t “a debate (too contentious), or a colloquy (too academic.)” Then he spends an entire section on debate and another on academic colloquy (the seminar, apparently, is a “great model for conversation”; as a current student, I beg to disagree in practice.) We also get a section on the “national conversation,” which is really a metaphor and not an actual conversation. In the midst of all this, it’s hard not to feel like Hsu has absolutely nothing to say. Could this frustrating muddle be intentional, making a point about talking around the issue? Maybe, but that doesn’t make it pleasant to read.

Letters:

Caz and Joanna (and many others around the web) couldn’t stand Callard; Caz “would have included a lot of expletives” in their commentary and Joanna “couldn't bear to read the whole piece because I started snickering uncontrollably around the 3rd paragraph.”

Shouts to the Washington Review of Books, a charming and detail-dense aggregation ‘sletter, which was kind enough to link through to yours truly.

What did you think of this week’s issue? There seemed to be a semi-theme I’d call “Weird Adventures In Publishing,” from seed catalogues to the WestView News to Jennifer Mills News to Hache’s novel. What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found brilliant prose?

1. Not sure where Lepore gets that charming title from, as I don’t see it in the archived issue…

2. A quick note to new readers: The pieces aren’t merely grouped in their subheadings, they’re (roughly) ranked, as well; this week, the Shaw and Oyler pieces are nearly Must-Reads (and in a weaker issue, they might well be).

3. Another note to new readers: I read the whole magazine every week, but I only review non-feature pieces (Comment, Talk of the Town, Goings On, Sketchbook, Shouts & Murmurs, et al) when they’re especially good or just noteworthy. For now, I’m not covering Fiction, Poetry, or the cartoons.

4. No real shade to the PEN/Faulkner, lmao, that’s one of the better literary awards.