Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

February 14 & 21, 2022 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. This may be just me, but Miriam Toews’ personal history piece, “The Way She Closed the Door,” in this week’s issue, seems unreal. The device of recounting her life as if she were talking to that youth in the Paris café seems just that – a device. And that river walk is too much, too patterned, too dreamlike to be believable. The same goes for the river cracking up and the cracked window and the piece of glass lodging in her forehead. I’m not saying these events didn’t happen, but the whole thing just seems too shaped, too artful to be a chronicle of real experience. 

2. Michaelangelo Matos’s “Goings On About Town” note on the Black Dog’s new EP “Brutal Minimalism” contains these delightful lines:

The grainy, gray-toned percussion, redolent of cracked concrete walls, and the low-mixed chimes, like faraway train signals, add to the verisimilitude. Even when the beats come forward, they amplify the background details.

3. Perhaps the most beautiful sentence in this week’s issue appears in Anthony Lane’s “Living for the City,” a review of Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World”: “Like most of Trier’s work, it also takes you aback with its sadness, which hangs around, after the story is over, like the smoke from a snuffed candle.” 

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