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

The great motif of this book, besides fame, is snacks

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of November 27

Must-Reads:

“Personal Statement” - Rachel Aviv is Joyce Carol Oates’ secret admirer. Fascinating. On the surface, Oates is a terribly difficult subject, deeply skeptical about the entire enterprise of profile-reporting and criticism (“‘The biographical “science” is a lie.’”), and so relentlessly guarded in her public life and her remarks not only to interviewers but even to close friends that, as she remarks, “‘none of my friends really know me.’” (Even her husbands are kept at arms length — the first remarks “I feel I don’t even know you” after reading a positive book review — from her intense devotion to her writing practice.) Aviv, meanwhile, is perhaps the foremost practitioner of the profile as psychological inquiry, seeking not so much to encapsulate a subject’s work as their psyche. But the tension of this misalignment drives the piece, with Aviv’s searching continually stymied by Oates’ evasions and denials. Aviv grasps toward a truth which is unreachable, even as Oates insists it exists — and, after all, she should know. The secret becomes a kind of metaphor for storytelling itself, with Aviv the student hoping to be inspired and Oates the master insisting that these lessons can come only from within. Oates is also, despite her withholding, a wonderful hang, whose surface-self is in no way rendered dull by its falsity — perhaps she feels this persona is not truly her, but she still exercises it in the manner of a skilled writer manipulating a protagonist, making sure to never be trite or boring. This story is a nice escape, without mortal stakes, and with the dark richness of the gothic tales Oates writes.

“Are You Entertained?” - Rachel Syme can’t predict Barbara Streisand. Delightful, perfectly capturing Streisand’s inimitable voice and making the case for her hulking memoir as a maximalist apex of the recent “flood.” There is just the right balance of quotes, analysis of Streisand’s writing, and discussion of her life, the peak being Syme’s amazing metaphor between Streisand’s prose style and her singing style: “Streisand often seems just about to swerve into nonsense, then steers herself back to the point… What makes Streisand one of the greatest song interpreters of all time is her essential unpredictability. She never thinks her way through a song; instead, she acts her way home, note by note, half step by half step, as if feeling her way out of a cave with those long, gleaming-beige fingernails.” Syme fits a lot in — there’s even a discussion of the audiobook. She exalts Streisand, and the reader comes away convinced.

Window-Shop:

“Point Blank” - Eren Orbey writes himself into his father’s murder. Subtly assumes a Rashomon-like structure, beginning with Orbey’s single hazy memory, continuing to his sister’s reminiscences, the little he can extract from his mom, the police reports and photographs, and finally the killer’s life and re-enactment of the event. The piece is most loaded, and therefore most compelling, when it sticks to Orbey’s family, and the choice to present Orbey as a child and teenager for the first few sections is fascinating — his “petulance” and desire to become part of the story come across at first as the present self looking back at his past, before the gradual reveal that many of these possibly childish feelings persist to the present-day. The material on Turkish culture wasn’t quite as resonant, but this is still a sophisticated look at the psychology of a traumatic event — one that informs a reading of Orbey’s other work, much of which deals with those same traces in others.

“Conduct Unbecoming” - Anthony Lane waves his baton to Maestro. Continues Lane’s recent hot streak — perhaps it’s just that this has been a fairly strong year for the winter-released prestige movies that he’s especially good on. I could do without the long list of subjects not covered by the film — a bit weird, though I get his point — but otherwise, this is lovely, and sells the film very well. A few choice bits: Bernstein is “adenoidal, snowy-haired, and armed with the tools without which he can’t exist: a piano and a cigarette,” Carey Mulligan as Felician “can manifest such sweetness of nature without a trace of cloying, let alone mush.”

“Upper Crust” - Hannah Goldfield eats apizza in New Haven. A delectable blend of personal pizza-history with food review — it’s nice to see Goldfield have a bit of space to stretch. The focus on a mediocre Brooklyn establishment trying to replicate the authentic charm is ill-advised, but once the piece gets to reminiscences about the differences between and recommended orders at the three most famous slice shops, it drips with detail: “At Pepe’s, the sweet, meaty chopped littlenecks slosh like seawater, and taste like it, too, their bright brine married with fresh garlic, dried oregano, olive oil, and pecorino.” You want to lick your sooty fingers.

“Home Bodies” - Hilton Als assemblages the life of Bettye Saar. More of a charming capsule-profile than anything else; Saar gets plenty of quotes and Als is clearly interested in promoting her as a profound and important artist, not in eyeing her work critically. That’s perfectly fine — her work is important, her story compelling, and her voice deeply wise. (“‘There’s always other. And if you open yourself up to other, you can do and think all sorts of things.’”) There is maybe a whiff of press release, but there are far worse things.

“The Fall” - Zadie Smith slips. A charming narrative of teenage follies and wisdom, pleasant and witty (if not really funny) — and a bit first-drafty. I could do without the opening and closing sections, which ground the whole thing in Smith’s motherhood and fears of the contemporary in ways that are self-aware about their fretfulness… which doesn’t keep them from being fretful.

“Big Love” - Amanda Petrusich strums with Chris Stapleton. I kept getting deja vu reading this — eventually I realized it was because 4Columns’ review of the same album was eerily similar. That’s neither writer’s fault, of course, and Petrusich delivers a solid album review, which saves the background biography that sinks a lot of the music coverage in this magazine to the back half, thereby saving enough space to really dig into the album at hand. Still, that background is pretty clunky — you can skip it, and focus on lovely nuggets of description, especially concerning Stapleton’s singing: “He has the sort of muscular, room-shaking voice that carries emotion well, but it is nevertheless gritty enough to avoid sentimentality… I like Stapleton’s voice best when it has a little bit of wanton swing.” I’ll swing to that.

Skip Without Guilt:

“The Violence of the Rams” - David Sedaris can’t take the bleat. Hardly the length of a prose poem, so there’s no time to build to the surprising emotional intensity of Sedaris’ best pieces. But there’s also no time for his annoying gripes, and the subject matter (the life of rams) is unlikely enough that the piece doesn’t feel like a rehash of his usual themes, either. Nothing much, but not bad.

“Birth Pangs” - Jessica Winter wonders how global warming will effect parenthood. Well-written, but never really gets past the conventional wisdom on the subject. The books under review — confusingly written by a Rush and a Rushton — both have flaws so major that, in dissecting them, Winter’s never forced to really reckon with the issue; is it really news to anyone, anymore, that corporations ought to bear the bulk of blame for the planet’s condition? And I wasn’t convinced by the concluding section boiling down the reasons why someone with an unhappy childhood would decide to have kids: “For one abused or neglected child, attempting to break those cycles may represent a triumph of resilience. For another, it may be the height of arrogance — just imagine causing an entire other person to be born, and all to thumb your nose at your shitty folks.” This strikes me as hugely reductive; surely these impulses and many others are interlinked?

“Gotta Have Faith” - Vinson Cunningham sees a grab-bag of shows. I continue to feel that covering three shows at this length is a basically impossible task, and in this case the Godot review, which sounds like the best and most interesting show, unfortunately gets short shrift. The other two capsules fare better: I like the summing-up of Danny’s theme to “absolution,” and the description of Chavkin making “a big mess among the bodies and every now and then achiev[ing] something symbolically or choreographically interesting.” Still, neither has the spark of really deep engagement — probably the shows don’t deserve it, but checked-out never reads well.

“Ghost, Writer” - Leslie Jamison finishes her friend’s sentences. Mostly, this feels like a kind of introductory note to Godfrey and Jamison’s novel, which never feels substantive enough to sustain a feature piece in this magazine. Certainly, it’s an interesting setup — completing a friend’s novel after her death. Mostly, what’s compelling there are the philosophical questions about authorship and identity, and Jamison touches on these a bit, but is mostly interested in delving into her memories of Rebecca and the intricacies of her book and its subject matter. Outside of the context of the book being discussed, this all feels a little weightless, and Jamison’s sentimentality doesn’t help things cohere. She also has a tendency to resort to strained similes — “their love could survive only under certain secluded conditions, like a rare plant in a particular cave,” “I made a set of rules, almost like Odysseus getting bound to the mast in preparation for hearing the sirens’ song.” The emotion comes through, but like an unnecessarily large glass vase, it’s a little overblown.

“Now and Then” - Thomas Mallon remembers when. An almost hallucinogenically discursive discussion of nostalgia, jumping from reference to reference, completely unmoored from any structure I could intuit, and thus, almost comically hard to follow. There’s something sort of thrilling about this, at first, much in the way reading critical theory can thrill, but eventually you realize this dark cave holds no titillating inner depths the way theory can; Mallon’s ideas are too shallow to warrant dissection. I must have read this line eight times before parsing it (context does not help): “Mashups are now constructed with no real deliberateness but as part of a steady acquisitive spree through the video that crowd our screens.” But all he’s really pointing to is context collapse, an idea that’s already become a sort of cliché. In places, Mallon seems to be trying to reinvent media theory from first principles using only the precepts of political science. This is incredibly ill-advised.

Letters:

Regular correspondent Michael writes, of last week’s James Somers piece on coding, “As some folks on Hacker News noted, the author wasn't coming at this as an expert (the specific example of getting random entries from a dictionary he cites is easier than many coding interview questions at tech firms). But the overall sentiments mostly rang true, even if the prose could be better. I doubt coding is fully going away but it certainly is changing a lot.”

Heather wrote a long and very smart critique of Anthony Lane’s review of Killers of the Flower Moon (which, by the way, is phenomenal — for my money, the best American film of the decade so far), saying, in part, “Leo [DiCaprio’s character] is actually perfect as a go-between here. He’s simple enough that he doesn’t really seem to understand what’s going on most of the time, but this gives him enough plausible deniability for us to truly believe he loves Mollie. At the same time, from the first scene he displays a gleeful desire to participate in needless violence that plays out over the course of the film. How much he is actually not grasping and how much is willful ignorance is part of the friction of the film, and it reflects a common American approach to history--refusing to look at and engage with the true violence of our country’s past (and present) is an excuse for false absolution… I’ve noticed a knee jerk tendency in reviewers to see endorsement in depiction, which I feel is a bit at work here. To me, the point of view here avoids giving the viewer with the grace that alignment with the victims or the eleventh-hour investigators would provide, forcing them instead into complicity with the villains and their heedless, heartless violence.” The full comment is worth reading.

Over on BlueSky, Alice highlights Jackson Arn’s accidental reiteration of the middlebrow: “Psychoanalysts would call this The New Yorker’s ‘model scene.’”

What did you think of this week’s issue?