Last Week's New Yorker Review: Week of January 2 & 9
So may we start?
Huh?
Back in 2015-16 I was in love with an anonymously published newsletter called "The Tilly Minute" which would give capsule reviews, a few lines long, of every piece in that week's New Yorker. (There was no actual affiliation with the magazine.) The newsletter got me into my current practice of reading the entire magazine cover-to-cover every week, and for about a year circa 2019 I copied the format of The Tilly Minute for posts on my Facebook page which were read by, basically, my parents and nobody else. I still sometimes jot down thoughts on the magazine's articles for an audience of none. Anyway, I figured I'd once again steal the newsletter's format, this time for a Substack which I'll call "Last Week's New Yorker Review."
(I won't be covering fiction, poetry, or cartoons here; the tilly minute had separate columnists for those sections... if anyone wants to volunteer their takes, just reply to this newsletter. I think that works. I'll also only cover the Goings-On or Talk of the Towns when they're particularly notable.)
Last Week's New Yorker Review:
Week of January 2 & 9
Must-Read:
"Blood Lines" - Parul Sehgal is unsettled by the corpus of Partition literature, and looks toward the future of its remembrance. Exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting in the speed with which it synthesizes and compares texts. Relentlessly bleak, and not only when quoting stories; visceral autobiographical details jar the dry tone of the rest of the piece and keep us on edge, taking things personally. When images recur in new contexts (Statistics Babu, the "little knife") they're reconfigured to provide new meanings and resonances. The combined effect is that this erudite and rigorous essay itself becomes a fragmented Partition narrative and archive, thus enacting its own formal critique of the canon.
Window-shop These:
"Down the Hatch" - Vinson Cunningham gets sloshed on two plays. Cunningham's prose is, as ever, sparkling; an unshowy free modifier like "plate by plate" reverberates with precision. The "Des Moines" review is unimpeachable, but it could really use the extra two paragraphs that the unfathomably paltry "Between Riverside..." review takes up.
"Trapped in the Trenches" - Luke Mogelson bunks with a crew of foreigners fighting for Ukraine. A real feat of access, and Mogelson's prose is crisp without being overbearing, as ever. Because of that access, this piece isn't too invested in broad-strokes geopolitics, it's mostly concerned with telling a "The Wild Bunch"-esque narrative of doomed outsiders with predictable distinctions of personality (the haunted one, the ironic one, the one oddly at peace with death, etc.) Your tolerance for beat-by-beat war narratives will determine how much you enjoy this piece; only at the very end does it aim for broader significance, and not with any particular conviction; war tends to blur convictions, after all.
"The Painter and his Court" - Julian Lucas outlines the painter Kehinde Wiley. Wiley's work is an outlier: Painterly realism that's mostly interesting for its concept and can feel visually repetitious. Usually that's the critique of minimalism or other postmodern strains, and on some level Wiley's weakness in this respect is what makes his work marketable. Indeed, this piece presents Wiley as unrepentantly driven by fame. While the text is leavened by the usual Audre Lorde-quoting critiques of Wiley's work, it's less interested in art exegesis and more in namedroppy descriptions of parties. That approach befits a painter who, despite the presumed political seriousness of representation, is ultimately a fairly breezy and apolitical subject.
"Live, from New York" - Hilton Als educates us on a Bronx Museum show of plasters. Post-Pulitzer, Als has clearly been given carte blanche and decided to make his beat "things I like." That can give pieces like this one an "introductory essay" quality, in which the eye being used is less that of the critic and more that of the historian/memoirist/pedagogue. Als makes it work through the strength of his prose, but the syllabus-like bookends of Jane Jacobs' "Death and Life..." and a 1992 Jane Kramer art review in "this magazine" are a bit much.
Skip Without Guilt:
"Top of the Heap" - Anthony Lane masticates two maximalist mishmashes. Both films sound misbegotten in fairly obvious ways, which doesn't make for especially nuanced reading (not that Lane is ever especially nuanced.)
"Game Theory" - Alex Barasch walkthroughs the making of the TV adaptation of "The Last of Us." Oddly credulous in its description of what sounds like a fairly traditional post-apocalypse narrative with major pretensions of grandeur. A line like "One [team member] asked me if I cried easily [before screening an episode for me]" isn't leavened by irony, but reinforced by someone else being passed a box of tissues moments later. Just because it's avoiding some of the pitfalls of prior videogame adaptations, doesn't make it worthwhile art, and just because HBO is plowing an astonishing amount of money into it, doesn't mean it has to be taken quite this seriously.
"Dolorous Haze" - Inkoo Kang is bugged by "Fleishman Is In Trouble." Kang is new to the magazine, and perhaps I'm just not used to her voice but her prose reads as alternately flat (when digesting plot and its political implications) and awkward (when giving critiques) to me, especially compared with the incredible Doreen St. Felix who she succeeds after a too-short two-and-a-half-year stint. The show's a "vexing slog" for most of its runtime, but eventually its "stock satire... fully pays off," yet she's "reluctant to recommend a show that sticks you with fairly grating characters." All that fairly-ing and fully-ing, plus the mix of strong and weak adjectives, ends up feeling like pointless equivocation. And jeez, that title is an awfully long way to go for a pointless Lolita pun.
"Uneasy Rider" - Patricia Marx pedals e-bikes. Stuffed with the vaguely goofy observational humor that's Marx's stock in trade, and which I personally don't care for. A few groaners like "My trepidation was similar to how I feel about trying heroin: what if I like it?" or "the motor leaves me alone, knowing when it is wanted and when it is not. How does it know? E.S.P.?" go a long way, but there is no respite here. I know very little about e-bikes and I learned nothing (besides some brand names,) and the “review” component is paltrier than the average Wirecutter comment.