Best of 2019: The Critics

Josh Cochran's illustration for Sarah Larson's "Home on the Range"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Not Waving,” May 27, 2019 (“I was lucky to catch a rehearsal of a performance work by Brendan Fernandes that will take place at scheduled but infrequent times: five ballet dancers in black leotards strike varying poses on an arrangement of skeletal frameworks in black-painted wood. That was dreamy”).

2. James Wood, “Contents Under Pressure,” January 14, 2019 (“It’s a sign of how vital the rest of the book feels that a phrase like ‘caustic speech,’ which would be inoffensive enough in many novels, seems here irradiated with fakery”). 

3. Dan Chiasson’s “Freewriting,” October 14, 2019 (“The black bars of redacted text, which usually suggest narrative withheld, here reveal its true contours”).

4. Anthony Lane's “What If?,” July 8 & 15, 2019 (“Boyle, especially in the early scenes, provides acceleration; at the exact moment when Jack, standing at a bus stop, properly understands what the future holds, the camera hurries toward him like an excited kid”).

5. Alex Ross’s  “The Concerto Challenge,” March 25, 2019 (“The first movement follows the rudiments of sonata form, with the scampering opening material set against a slinky cantabile second theme that has a whiff of old Hollywood about it, as if Bette Davis were sipping a Scotch with the blinds drawn”).

6. Sarah Larson’s “Home on the Range,” February 4, 2019 (“The plot whirls along, heading inevitably toward collaborative writing, drunken mayhem, brandished golf clubs, existential crises, flying toast”).

 7. Alexandra Schwartz's “Painted Love,” July 22, 2019 (“She has the memoirist’s prerogative—this is how I remember it—and Picasso’s tyranny and brilliance are hardly in dispute”).

8. Hilton Als’s “Seen and Heard,” September 23, 2019 (“As in the Williams portrait, whiteness—here the whiteness of Horne’s turban, which sits like a beacon at the top of the image—is used to underline the blackness in the photograph, black skin and black as a color that leads to black feeling and thought”).

9. Janet Malcolm’s “The Unholy Practice,” September 23, 2019 (“The best intentions, however, can be broken on the wheel of skillful (or even inept) interviewing. Discretion so quickly turns into indiscretion under the exciting spell of undivided attention”).

10. Thomas Mallon's “Word for Word,” December 16, 2019 (“These changes alchemize a small piece of gold into a small piece of lead. Lowell slackens Hardwick’s prose into poetry, robs it of precision and pith”).

November 4, 2019 Issue

Is Arthur Krystal’s opposition to death softening? In his great “Death, It’s What Ails You” (Harper’s Magazine, February, 2001; included in his 2002 essay collection Agitations), he writes, “I am appalled at the prospect of my own extinction, outraged at the impending loss of someone I know so well.” Now, in his absorbing “Old News,” in this week’s issue, he appears to have second thoughts. He says,

Yes, we should live as long as possible, barring illness and infirmity, but, when it comes to the depredations of age, let’s not lose candor along with muscle tone. The goal, you could say, is to live long enough to think: I’ve lived long enough.

Krystal no longer rages against the dying of the light. He accepts the idea that “life is slow dying.” He says, “Why rail against the inevitable—what good will it do? None at all.”

It’s quite a turnaround – the scrapper who has “a bone to pick with death – two hundred and six, to be precise, all of which will soon enough be picked clean by time and the elements" becomes a pacifist (“We should all make peace with aging”). 

I agree with what Krystal says in “Old News.” But I miss the spark of his earlier piece.