The New Yorker & Me: July 12 & 19, 2021 Issue

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, July 15, 2021

July 12 & 19, 2021 Issue

My favourite piece in this week’s issue (“The Fiction Issue”) is David Wright Faladé’s “Lone Star,” a spare, lucid recounting of his experience, when he was sixteen, tagging along with his stepfather, a deputy sheriff of a Texas Panhandle town called Borger, on a trip to the state penitentiary in Huntsville. The purpose of the trip is to deliver a prisoner named Walter, who, like Faladé and his stepdad, is Black.

The piece unfolds in five quick scenes: the pick-up of Walter at the Hutchinson County Courthouse; the drive through the early morning darkness; lunch at the Dairy Queen; the last short leg of the journey to Huntsville; and the crucial, clinching last scene at the penitentiary – Walter encircled by white guards, forced to strip and shower.

Faladé’s description of the stop at the Dairy Queen is brilliant:

We ate lunch at the Dairy Queen of some small Texas town not unlike our own. Though we were obviously unknown, the cruiser and the Stetson, the jumpsuit and the shackles made our story plain. I pretended not to notice the stares. Walter himself seemed blissfully unaware, dipping fried steak fingers into a Styrofoam ramekin of cream gravy, jabbering on and tittering.

As is his depiction of the penitentiary scene:

Through the passenger-side window, I watched the guard unshackle Walter and order him to strip, others gathering around. With the white jumpsuit at his feet, he looked even darker and was solid—cut. The guard pointed him toward a line of hanging showerheads, out in the open, along a far wall. Walter covered himself as best he could, standing under the cascading water. The guards encircling him stared.

The meaning that Faladé extracts from this experience is in the anger he expresses in the final paragraph: “On the highway back, a knot deep within me would not release. I felt anger, and something more. Someone had betrayed someone else. I just wasn’t sure who.”