Last Week's New Yorker Review: October 2, 2023

Fat bees buzzed around the sudsy glasses on the tables.

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of October 2

Must-Read:

“Behind a Locked Door” - Margaret Talbot goes to Austria with a woman who was held in a kinderbeobachtungsstation, where children were treated with cruelty under the guise of suppressing misbehavior and sexual urges. Even for a “Reporter At Large” piece, this is exceptionally long, and details a linear narrative in beat-by-beat detail of the sort more commonly found in books than periodicals. Some readers might be put off by that, or by Talbot’s occasionally labored turns of phrase (in New York, “your past didn’t have to trail you like the clattering cans on a newlywed couple’s car.”) Sometimes Talbot spends an extra beat or two on details that don’t feel central to the story, but this adds to the piece’s intimacy, painting the picture of Evy Mages’ life, say, just for the sake of doing so. Talbot’s decision to take her time unspooling the piece’s information (without holding any particular beats back as twists) and to include many details of specific interviews puts the reader alongside her and Evy in the investigative process.

What should draw readers to the piece, though, is the clever way Talbot explores how Nazi authoritarianism made its way into every crack of Austrian society, and the way those tactics contributed to trauma that’s been passed down through generations. Talbot could have focused narrowly on Evy’s “personal” story, cutting out the contextual details of the wider world and focusing on her traumatizing conditions. But this would actually do a disservice to the political aspects of that personal experience, the ways in which Nazi ideology and the “deeply flawed de-Nazification” programs in Austria created an environment in which Nowak-Vogl’s sick quest to remove the vitality, sexuality, and character from children could be seen as legitimate. It’s helpful to get this context early, so that later scenes, which focus more squarely on Evy’s personal confrontations and life as a mother, resonate not only as an individual’s breakthroughs but as an example of the breaking of an historical cycle. A bit of personal backstory: My grandmother is a child survivor, and through a new program of the Austrian government, I now have dual citizenship in that country. So I was especially interested in the glimpse the piece gave of the “alternative Austria” which attempts to reckon with the failings of de-Nazification. These scenes, both those with leftist researchers, early on, and with the punk squatters in the ending, subtly position political freedom as “a benediction” with the power to heal the wounds of “rigidity and surveillance.”

Window-Shop:

“Digital Memory” - Amanda Petrusich steals the smallest thing she can find with electronic music pioneer Oneotrix Point Never. Not hugely ambitious; OPN is given lots of space to expand on his influences and ideas, but he seems mostly like a chill, nerdy hang, far from a tortured genius. Petrusich’s descriptions of her reactions to his music border on overbearing: It “gets the mind soft enough to see god,” it helps “build a space… in which various eras and ideas, both dead and alive, can speak to each other.” Overexplaining the vibe can kill it, and OPN’s music is all about vibes. Probably for the best, then, that this is kept short and breezy; a couple verses of lyrics to set up the long instrumental outro.

“Valhalla-On-Thames” - Alex Ross sees Wagner across the pond. Ross continues his tour beyond the boroughs; in England he finds a classical-music world that feels besieged but still has plenty of action, a tricky balance to articulate which Ross handles well. On the new Rheingold, Ross is excellent on the “uncanny, psychically unsettling images” onstage (“The gold takes the form of a glowing liquid that pours from gashes in the tree, like the bodily fluid of a suffering Earth.”) Regarding individual performances, he still slips into a vague shorthand I don’t love, as in the phrase “actorly panache,” but I’ll let you opera nerds enjoy those notes.

“Plant Life” - Helen Shaw sees two weedy plays. Pulls its punches regarding Swing State, which gets a mixed review that feels like it’s straining to see the positives. (The “set is imaginatively detailed,” apparently.) But Shaw’s positively vicious toward Dig, which sounds seriously misbegotten; apparently, it “eventually becomes repulsive.” Its negatives are seemingly quite evident, because Jackson McHenry at Shaw’s prior employer picked out most of the same details to lambast. Yet somehow, it still got a critic’s pick in the Times.

Skip Without Guilt:

“In Other Words” - Jennifer Wilson gets lost in translation with the “signature sparseness” of J.M. Coetzee. Teases out Coetzee’s key theme of understanding and translation, linking it both to the plot of the new book and the narrative surrounding it (it was released first in a Spanish translation, which Coetzee enigmatically says “better reflects [his] intentions.”) This is an interesting thread, but it’s a slightly obvious one, and Wilson ends the piece abruptly, without any detailed critique of the work — it’s almost as if a section is missing. What’s here is fine, but without more of Wilson’s thoughts, it’s all book and no review. Gorgeous art by Tomek Epalińsky, though.

“Red Shift” - Manvir Singh debunks the meatfluencers. Brief and simple: Skeptically examines the all-meat reactionary fad diet, shows how little the evidence supports it, and wraps up by warning against novelty diets in general. Nothing that new here, especially if you’ve already been following the Liver King saga, and the tie between the right-wing coveting of hypermasculinity and the all-beef trend might have been examined in more depth.

“Mom Genes” - Hilton Als is sweet on Michelle Buteau’s caring comedy. Als’ very occasional comedy column is usually compelling, but after presenting Buteau’s persona as unique due to its kindness, Als needs to do more to explain how she manages to make her show funny anyway. Quoting her bits certainly doesn’t work — her act is likely dependent on her delivery and her “extraordinary presence,” because on the page, everything falls flat.

“You Must Remember This” - Ian Buruma sparks a prairie fire with the underground historians of China. A decent, brutal history gets quite muddled when dealing with religion and the present-day. I’m not nearly expert enough in China to attempt a rebuttal of any kind, but Buruma’s late-breaking Nazi metaphor feels disconcertingly loaded, and his take on Xi Jinping feels like it has a thumb on the scale. Apart from all that, Buruma’s prose is a bit circumlocutory, gesturing toward his points instead of stating them. Forgettable, ironically.

“The Parent Trap” - Sheelah Kolhatkar has Sunday dinner with the parents of Sam Bankman-Fried. If you’ve already been following the FTX implosion, the only thing new here is the character study of Bankman-Fried’s parents, which is decent — they come across as academics in over their heads. I wish there was more of that, or maybe just less rehashing of the FTX scandal, because if you haven’t been following those details already, Kolhatkar renders them in a manner which is both dry and yet skims over the level of minutae at which things get really interesting. Probably, you couldn’t possibly write that piece as a reported feature; you absolutely need to delve into opinion to fill in the gaps where the government hasn’t reported certain things and Bankman-Fried is telling fibs. (For that, of course, there’s always Matt Levine.) Kolhatkar got access, but for obvious reasons didn’t want to write a piece all about what relatively normal people the Bankman-Frieds are, so she wrote a fairly generic piece on the scandal with those details sprinkled in. This piece is obviously pegged to the Bankman-Fried trial, but putting it out before the start of that trial means it keeps gesturing vaguely toward things that might soon happen.

“You Rule” - Adam Gopnik de-votes himself to liberal democracy. Deeply muddled. The problems begin with Gopnik’s assertion of two apparently dichotomous viewpoints: That liberal democracy “was a façade for the free market” or else “an essentially healthy… pluralist society.” The same basic problem occurs throughout: Gopnik has a narrow view of the possible range of thoughts, so his idea of liberal democracy as a place where every thought can matter is undone by the thoughts he doesn’t consider. Of course, violence is a different ball game; Gopnik is happy to make clear that anti-democratic violence cannot be tolerated. But what of anti-democratic policy? Apparently “if Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan… are not democratic leaders, then no one is.” Reagan was democratically elected, sure, but is opposing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts not anti-democratic? For Gopnik, I’d guess, the remove created by policy, its non-viscerality, means it doesn’t count. A bit ironic, then, to argue that distance and scale is what makes liberal democracy work.

Letters:

Michael “read an earlier, different book on pockets than the one reviewed” by Hua Hsu last week. “Wasn't as fun a read as I hoped, although I did learn about a faction called the Anti-Pocketists who wanted to keep the reticule.”

Susan “was disappointed in the piece on Ross Douthat… I've got to believe that there are more (fairly) liberal people just like me who read the NYT and have learned through repeated experience to avoid anything Ross writes… Chotiner seemed to take it on faith that there is an overwhelming liberal audience out there that perceives Douthat as a credible voice on the right. I'm not sure that's accurate.”

As ever, thanks for reading. By the by: I’m currently looking for some gainful employment, ideally a gig that will pair well with my grad school schedule. If you need a niche of some kind filled and this newsletter makes you think I could handle it, please reach out! No job too odd. I’m so close to NYC you wouldn’t know the difference.