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 Galchen, 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.

Thursday, December 17, 2020

December 14, 2020 Issue

Anthony Lane, in his “Plotting the Course,” a review of Steven Soderbergh’s new movie “Let Them All Talk,” in this week’s issue, asks one of the great questions of 2020: “Could Susan be the first person on record to discuss her distant sexual history while playing Monopoly and Scrabble, and, if so, does a threesome count as a triple-word score?” I read Lane’s piece avidly. I saw “Let Them All Talk” last week on Crave, and enjoyed it immensely. But I found myself struggling to say why. Yes, there’s the treat of watching Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen, and Dianne Wiest interact. But I feel there’s more to it than that. Lane says, “Much of the tale has a noodling and speculative air.” “Noodling” is an apt description of this film. It has an easy, improvisatory air, like a Bill Charlap or Joe Lovano riff. Soderbergh has taken the slightest of storylines – a famous author goes on a cruise trip with her friends and nephew – and spun it into something beautiful and absorbing. 

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