Last Week's New Yorker Review: October 30, 2023
I have eaten my share of lotus seeds, a delicacy in Chinese cuisine, without achieving oblivion.
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of October 30
Must-Read:
“If Not Now, Later” - Yiyun Li tends to what blooms. The magazine has lately been on a real kick of gardening pieces. This one bears the most formal resemblance to Jamaica Kinkaid’s lovely poetic reminiscence, though Li’s style is cooler. It has a great deal of thematic similarity to Jill Lepore’s excellent piece on seed catalogues from just earlier this year, as it also draws on the writings of Katharine S. White, who published many articles in the magazine. A few of Li’s observations on catalogues do feel redundant, but mostly this piece offers a new perspective. Despite Li’s uninflected, near-minimalist style, that perspective does feel a bit cluttered, between the recurring formal references to Woolf’s brackets and Rebecca West’s devices, the etymological breakdowns of every term in sight, the dissection of White’s catalogue pieces, and of course the family tragedy that lurks behind the rose bushes. But at its best moments, Li’s realistic and grounded philosophy shines, like the titular reflection that a stray thought, “What if spring never returns?”, is countered by two “books that had taken years to be written. Were these words not enough evidence that spring always comes, if not now, later?”
Window-Shop:
“Drilling Down” - Anthony Lane sees Scorsese’s newest. An especially pretty synoptic section (“…we see men of the Osage Nation, stripped to the waist, dancing in slow motion, and in unfeigned joy, as a shower of oil falls upon them”) gives way to some gripes about Scorsese’s role as storyteller and DiCaprio’s supposed difficulty playing grim. I could do without those, but I’ll still turn up for an engaged and thoughtful Lane. Much closer to an actual review than his usual song-and-dance.
“Reorienting ‘Butterfly’” - Alex Ross plugs into a new adaptation of Puccini’s classic. Begins with a fascinating capsule history (Madama Butterfly was apparently received in Japan as a sort of Asiatic Springtime for Hitler) though I can barely grok what Ross is saying about the minor differences between different editions of the show. The review of the Detroit production is very good, too — the lead performance is “a full-blown psychodrama… a feverish hallucination.” Surely Ross could fill one more paragraph of thoughts, instead of rushing through the latest lackluster Met show — though it is always helpful to know what to avoid there.
“The Marriage Plot” - Rebecca Mead puts a ring on it. The two books under review sound frustrating in near-opposite ways — Baum’s reliance on media “produced and consumed by members of the transatlantic cultural cognoscenti” sounds annoying, while Kearney’s “bloodless” Brookings Institution quantification in service of an argument that marriages provide “institutional inertia” gives me a think-tank migraine. If Mead criticized both books more I might have had a more fun time, but she keeps things sober and thoughtful, pitching the two books against each other and showing the ways they strengthen and weaken each other’s pitches — I loved the supposition that “if, as Kearney argues, two parents are demonstrably better than one at maximizing outputs in the form of successful children, does it not follow that adding yet more parental figures into the mix — a stepparent here, a queer known donor there — might lead to still more impressive results?” For a piece that focuses on the philosophy of marriage, things are kept perhaps too tangible; I wanted more thought experiments, more willingness to go wild. But many prefer their marriage texts, like their marriages, more grounded.
“Trapped” - Hua Hsu casts his eyez to Tupac. Hsu keeps things fairly reportorial, outlining Shakur’s life and summing up his character but never taking things to a poetic place, which might have been appropriate, but could certainly have turned derivative. Hsu’s central take on Tupac, that distrustfulness and persona-play were core to his character, is persuasive but not always enough to shape the piece — there’s so much on his family history and upbringing, and the lines Hsu draws between that period and Shakur’s later life aren’t always convincing. There could be more, on the other hand, on Shakur’s “paranoid descent,” and Hsu hardly delves into Tupac’s influence at all, which means the ending feels cut short — perhaps in a kind of tribute.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Eye For An Eye” - Jackson Arn steals a look at Henry Taylor’s new Whitney show. Arn remains committed to throwing ideas at the wall furiously, like a nervous pitcher warming up a fastball. Some of these are way outside the strike zone (“dribbles and scratches” are apparently “the visual equivalents of ‘um’s and ‘like’s” — but can’t that kind of placeholder language be used to compelling effect in the right context? It’s a boomerish complaint) while others still draw a swing (I don’t fully get what Arn is saying about “the difference between upsetting art and unsettling art,” but I’m still compelled.) I just wonder if the frantic edge isn’t keeping Arn from the soul of the art he’s looking at — everything is takes on surfaces, which tend to look like surface takes.
“China’s Age of Malaise” - Evan Osnos surveys a China in dire straits. Osnos certainly sticks to his thesis — he finds evidence at every turn that Xi Jinping’s pursuit of dictatorial control has taken precedence over the country’s growth. But he has a hard time structuring the piece, because some of his evidence is minor and some major, some easily sourced and some only gleaned from vague anecdote, some cultural and some economic… basically, instead of writing a piece about any given aspect of China, Osnos takes his conclusion as a given and finds it everywhere he looks. I’m not saying he’s wrong, but drawing geopolitical situations with a broad brush is always dicey, and the conflation of open-market liberalism with an inherently healthier and more prosperous country, while true when the alternative is dictatorial authoritarianism, can make the piece feel like a message from the U.S. state department.
“Needful Things” - Elizabeth Kolbert gets stuffed. I have absolutely no idea why a piece this brief and strictly focused on two books is published as a feature and not a Books piece in the critics’ pages. It’s not a big deal, but it does make this piece seem especially slight. As I’ve asserted before, Kolbert’s strength is vivid reportage; she doesn’t bring much verve here, and the ending asserts a theme that Kolbert has hammered into the ground — namely, that the history of human environmental degradation is long and deeply rooted, and there’s no easy option on the horizon. There have to be ways to deepen and complicate this argument, but Kolbert doesn’t get to them here.
“Life After Calvin” - Rivka Galchen builds character with a new book from Bill Watterson. Clearly, the new text doesn’t have a ton to delve into — it’s a forty-three-line picture book. So Galchen instead writes a tribute to Calvin and Hobbes that reads like pretty much any other tribute to the strip, revealing little new about its magic or the significance of Watterson’s seclusion. And nothing is more awkward than trying to translate lines written for comics to a purely textual medium. There’s something frustrating about this — there is so much interesting work being done in the comics medium, very little of which gets coverage. As great as they are, these strips don’t need more Gen X attention. Let sleeping tigers lie.
“The Wrestler” - Jonathan Blitzer is misinformed by fascist pol Jim Jordan. It’s clear the ending was hastily rewritten to account for Jordan’s humiliating fall from consideration as speaker; the rest of the piece positions him as basically a canny operator, if also a nutjob. But the piece can hardly focus on Jordan’s character, it’s far more interested in one conspiracy theory he helped spread, that an obscure government agency was serving as an arm of the deep state. Maybe some of this could be of theoretical interest as a case-in-point of how conspiracies spread from right-wing public “intellectuals” up to the halls of power, but the details are incredibly boring, and delved into at excruciating length with little color. Jordan is mostly irrelevant to this story, and everything feels oddly low-stakes — it’s clear this conspiracy is a narrative the Congressional right has been pushing, but it’s mostly an excuse to give them the appearance of doing something, since they can’t actually legislate, and probably don’t want to. The most telling detail here comes early: “In his seventeen-year career in Congress, Jordan has not once sponsored a bill that became law.” Giving his theories space, even to disprove them, feels like playing into his hand.
Letters:
Susan says Nathan Heller’s “piece on SF is big here in SF, as you can imagine. I appreciated it more than you did, and thought he got many things right that have been missed in other reporting.”
What did you think of this week’s issue?
Agreed I don't understand why Kolbert's book reviews were elevated to the level of feature, although I did like the piece more than you did. I'm already interested in reading Material World and this review pushed me more in that direction.
Nothing really gripped me this issue, though. Osnos's piece on China's age of malaise is an interesting topic, but he didn't bring much new to it that I hadn't heard in other venues.
Agree that it’s always nice to see Anthony Lane do an actual review instead of a tap dance, but I thought his complaints about the film missed the point. In order to understand just how despicable the white men are in this story, you have to witness them at work. Telling the story from the FBI’s perspective makes a hero of the State while insinuating that the criminals here require deep investigation to be caught. The reality is, these men are stupid, careless, and evil--they’ve gotten away with so much because the law either doesn’t care about them or is actively involved in their murders.
Leo 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 felt that Mollie’s perspective was well illustrated. One of the strongest aspects of the movie is that it trusts the viewer to understand the characters’ motives without giving them a speech in which they explain them directly. Most people don’t really know why they do what they do, and have a variety of motives that rotate precedence depending on context.The acting and dialog here does the work of providing insight into character cumulatively, rather than dumping it on you directly, all at once. By the end, I could articulate why Mollie married Burkhart, why she stayed, and why she finally left, without her telling me in so many words.
If the movie were closer to Mollie’s perspective, I think we’d have trouble, again, understanding just how incompetent and brutish these murdering men are. We understand the depth and breadth of the death and violence here, but seeing just the results of the violence, divorced from the perpetrators and act of perpetration, would create a mystery into which the viewer could project, as is their wont, a more devious mastermind--instead, it’s clear that these plans were made in haste, thoughtlessly and cruelly, not as part of a scheme, but out of a sense of brutish entitlement.
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.