Last Week's New Yorker Review: March 13, 2023

I remember watching them play on the furniture and suddenly realizing: this is the point of furniture.

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of March 13

Must-Read:

“Marriage of the Minds” - Rachel Aviv visits the philosopher Agnes Callard, her ex-husband Ben, and her new husband and former student Arnold, as they raise children and explore What Marriage Is together. I mean, where to begin? This isn’t a must-read because I think it’s perfect, or even especially well-structured (though line by line Aviv’s prose is as sharp as ever,) but moreso because it’s so much fun to turn over and analyze, like a special episode of Normal Gossip where the people being gossiped about keep popping in to spill their somewhat deranged musings about the situation.

Since Callard says “thinking is not something that one person can do alone,” I’ll credit my thoughts as belonging equally to the lengthy combination Socratic dialogue/Comedy Central roast of the piece that was held recently in the media gossip channel of the Today in Tabs Discord. I’m a bit less harsh than most of them on Callard, at least as a thinker; I’ve read many of her articles and find them compelling if frequently obnoxious. There’s something sort of amazing about how seriously she takes the absurd idea of approaching everything from “first principles,” which, as she enacts it, often looks like performing the role of a petulant child. It’s like Buddhism’s “beginner’s mind,” but more peevish. Callard is in a position of power, though, and her focus on individuals and the ways they interact ends up totally oblivious of the meaning and presence of power structures. So it’s no wonder that when faced with a hot grad student, she wouldn’t stop to think about the societal structures underpinning their interactions before delving into a lot of hot social play. Callard hates it when her colleagues say “I’m so glad it worked out,” which Callard takes to mean that part of the narrative of her life resolved cleanly in their eyes, but maybe is meant to mean “Congrats on escaping professional consequences while retaining your boy toy!”

Still, I must credit Callard for the freshness of her ideas’ expression; it turns out that you can find unique-sounding phraseologies for your mind’s workings when you intentionally avoid reading anything written after the Partition of Babylon. In general, though, I think Callard is so focused on her openness to other ideas that she’s a bit blind to how much intellectualization’s role as a defense mechanism is unignorable and fundamentally important to her experiences. Her practice is in large part that of coming up with new, more accurate names for things that have already been named, which is interesting, and can even be worthwhile, but runs the risk that you will someday come upon a chair and be so focused on making sure everyone knows it’s a ButtSit that you forget it’s for sitting your butt on. In other words, marriage is a social engagement with a vast social history, one that is innately linked to capitalism and property rights, gender (bafflingly ignored by the piece), class… all of which Callard studiously avoids as she tries to drill down to What It Really Means.

Eventually, I came to see the whole piece reflected back as about an anxiety around play and silliness. Why does Callard feel the need to take these abstract concepts (marriage, love, etc) so seriously? Is there no room to laugh, here? Callard is willing to look beyond the traditional social arrangements, but only if she can take the new arrangements at face value. All these machinations feel so ridiculous, but there’s a constant suppression of laughter in the piece: Monogamy is a tragedy, and because any new approach doesn’t solve all its problems, it must be a tragedy too. ¹ Callard, the piece says, “felt as if she were constantly trying to open [her partners’] eyes to the tragic aspects of their lives, and they weren’t seeing it.” Yet there are clearly aspects of life Callard is unable, or unwilling, to look at, too. This fear of Callard’s might come from a deeper fear of anarchy, of a place where these boundaries break down in a more fundamental way and the utter ridiculousness, silliness, play, and camp of life becomes accessible. A phenomenologically queer place. Callard’s lack of access to that movement in herself is the real tragedy.

I have even more thoughts on this piece, but I’ve gone on long enough; I’m always open to in-person gossip, though… or should I say, in-person philosophical debate.

Window-Shop:

“Running Scared” - Parul Sehgal is tick(tock)ed off by Jenny Odell’s new meditation on Saving Time. As much as I like what I’ve read of Odell, I’m here for the drama of a brutal review of a usually lauded writer. It seems that Odell’s new book is too focused on “trying to outpace” criticisms of her previous book, which is a sure recipe for a very flat loaf. Sehgal probably makes too many quips about the irony of having had her time wasted, and a better piece would find time to formulate its own, deeper take on the material Odell skims, but I’ll gladly take the wonderful Anne Truitt quotes Sehgal provides in lieu of that.

“Milking It” - Molly Fischer tours Biomilq, a company working to make no-breast milk, and chronicles the political history of breastfeeding. Spends too long setting up various characters at Biomilq, none of whom have much relevance, and giving detailed but too-dry descriptions of the science behind their process. Then suddenly revvs to life with the lengthy historical section two-thirds in (beginning “The story of breast-feeding in America…”), essentially a review of Jacqueline Wolf’s Don’t Kill Your Baby, as Fischer concisely and snappily chronicles the injustices and travails of women yanked around by unsupportive medical and social systems. This section alone is a must-read, the kind of politically-engaged, detail-attuned summarizing this magazine excels at. And the critiques Fischer lodges of Biomilq, that it “seems tailored to parents whose… interest in breast-feeding is grounded in statistics,” and that “the emotional core of its pitch is a promise of relief for new parents’ sense of personal inadequacy,” are such mic-drops it’s jarring when she pivots back to a straightforward tech-chronicle for the last section, which rushes through various Big Questions but doesn’t deeply engage with any of them. (Will it take forever? Will it get FDA approval? Will anyone buy it? Will the company manage to balance “social good” and “business” success, and avoid becoming ‘just a standard capitalistic for-profit company’? …Yeah, good luck with that one…) The stellar history stands on its own, though; consider it a “must-read in brief.”

“The Way Things Work” - William Finnegan recounts the long history of wheeling and dealing around Penn Station and James Dolan’s “ten-story trash can” that pushes it underground. This is somewhat overlong, and I knew most of the history going in. (You will too if you read Curbed regularly.) But Finnegan keeps the story chugging along smoothly and in a straight line. Chakrabarti never gets properly shaded-in as a main character, and the piece could reckon more with the knotty questions around new “super-tall” construction that it tosses in at the end. But it gets you where you want to go, and for an added bonus you can read it while you get where you want to go, for example on those Seventh Avenue escalators with no headroom.

“Village People” - Helen Shaw sees a “high-gloss, big-name treatment” of Lorraine Hansberry’s last play. Unlike the disengaged pans from two weeks back, Shaw has enough historical investment in Hansberry to sound genuinely disappointed in this “portentous production” with its unnaturally “pristine and camera-ready” touches. A deeper dive into Hansberry’s political intent with Sign would be fascinating (a Times interview with the director and actors was horribly shallow but inadvertently speaks to the gap in political motivation between Hansberry and the theater world), but there’s no time. Blair McClendon wrote an excellent gloss on Hansberry for the magazine (Jan 24, 2022 issue), which is mostly interested in Raisin but still helps shade in some details.

“The Gardener” - B.D. McClay reviews Birnam Wood, the new novel by Eleanor Catton, a novelist with “a profound command of how perceptions lead to choice, and of how choice, for most of us, is an act of self-definition.” Good to see McClay in the magazine; I follow her newsletter and she’s been dealing with debilitating pancreatitis for a bit. There’s a lot to chew on here, and some fairly nuanced discussion of story structure in a concise package. Catton is presented as unique in the way she handles plot, although I’m not sure the piece fully explains why. Certainly, there’s a lot of literary fiction nowadays that “largely concerns itself with other things: moods, problems, situations.” But there are also plenty of recent plotty novels which move in the manner of serialized television, in which things occur in a preordained set of linked episodes, like dominoes toppling. (This is not a roast: many of these novels are excellent; R. Makkai’s The Great Believers is one example.) It sounds like Catton’s “sideways approach,” which centers human choice, subverts this by providing a more realistically human narrative even as its style is often elevated. But apparently its “true turns are all carefully set up,” which sounds like the domino style after all. Part of the confusion, I think, is that McClay seems to be reluctant to reveal too many of the new novel’s twists: A kind approach, though one that destabilizes the essay a bit.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Mysteries of Love” - Alex Ross sees a characteristically multivalent Kate Soper opera in Long Beach, and connects it to a Wagner production at the Met. The Soper show is clearly far too “disparate” to be coherently put into words, and Ross spends too long trying, with vague phrases like “a male character named the Dreamer… soon falls prey to emotional complexities.” The Met review is predictable; one senses Ross’ exhaustion with critiquing the institution’s unambitious style.

“News in Exile” - Masha Gessen follows the independent Russian channel TV Rain as it’s pushed out of Latvia. Hammers the same few points into the ground: The valiant reporters feel lucky despite the difficulty of their situation, any mistakes TV Rain made were due to difficult conditions and a lack of time, also they were misinterpreted, also the initial apology was “flawless” so all the subsequent “non-apology apologies” shouldn’t matter so much. Gessen could really use more quotes (and not just tweets) from Latvians that had reason to distrust TV Rain, instead of just willful surprise at how understanding the TV Rain journalists are of Latvian critique. Ultimately, the issue with Korostelev’s erroneous statement that the channel helped Russian “servicemen with their gear… and basic necessities at the front” isn’t from a conspiracy borne of misinterpretation, but its reflection of the reality that in war, it’s counterproductive to hope the conditions your enemy is fighting under are safe and humane. (Especially though not exclusively so when the enemy is committing lots and lots of war crimes.) Perhaps the outrage had unjustly widespread consequences, but the reporters’ unwillingness to face that deeper issue certainly made things worse, something Gessen doesn’t touch.

“A Little Bit Rock 'n’ Roll” - Kelefa Sanneh turns the dial to country radio, where he hears early-aughts “Butt Rock” inflecting songs by HARDY. Pop-music coverage in the magazine has a continuing issue with picking the most blatantly illustrative examples of the trends being covered; this usually results in music that’s over-obvious or simply poorly made. (See: Gayle representing TikTok pop; Orville Peck representing queer Nashville; glaive representing Zoomer hyperpop.) The truth is that most musicians do not focus on how they’re “expanding the boundaries” of a given genre when they make music; the few that do are probably more invested in their branding than their music, and it’s unfortunate that that focus results in more press coverage, since the music is basically its own press release. HARDY, actually, is a highly technically skilled songwriter, especially when it comes to lyrics. But most of the songs on this new album are so topically invested in the idea that they “don’t quite sound like the country music you’re used to” (song titles include “Here Lies Country Music,” “Sold Out,” “I Ain’t In The Country No More,” and “Radio Song,” the last with the chorus “Well, this ain’t no radio song - fuck!”) that they forget to be compelling on any other level. Sanneh isn’t actually writing a music review, he’s writing a trends piece in disguise, and HARDY’s provided a tidy hook. But the annoying ending gestures toward a critical investment in the artist that feels faked.

Letters

A bit of a back-and-forth on the Heller humanities-major piece: Michael says “I think he did a great job synthesizing the issue compared to other coverage I've read on it,” while Craig (who happens to be my dad) counters, “I could not bear to actually read Heller's piece as the click-bait title alone suggested the many versions of the "humanities in crisis" theme over many decades.” I do think the piece was hurt by its title, which isn’t a particularly accurate summation of its contents; I still have major reservations about those contents, though, regardless.

Michael also recommended a John Lanchester piece in the LRB over the Ben Taub Wirecard article from last week.

I do hope you all share your thoughts on the Aviv piece, which seems written For The Discourse if ever a piece was.

1. The quote about the children playing on the furniture suddenly revealing to Arnold that their play is the point of furniture is perhaps the most unintentionally loaded statement in a piece full of more obviously loaded statements.