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The trend holds true: The New Yorker's latest fiction is about adultery ...but against my will, I kind of like this one.
I've decided that the fiction editor of the New Yorker must either be in a long term affair or else had one horrible divorce over adultery because Every. Single. Fiction. Piece. is on that subject and has been for years. There isn't a fiction section; there's a section where every week someone tries to rewrite Madame Bovary. It's quite irritating - surely there are stories out there on different subjects, but you'd never know it from the New Yorker.
If the New Yorker would stop swearing, go back to the old style of Talk of the Town, print fiction that addresses other subjects than the most conventional way to defy convention, and scrubbed all remnants of Tina Brown off its pages, I could subscribe again. I don't have a weekly content magazine anymore since Newsweek turned into Product Placement and Fluffy Science Weekly, so I really would like the New Yorker to be good again.
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I like the New Yorker, my brother got me a gift subscription for Xmas and I've been enjoying it a lot.
But I do agree with you about their fiction, I never read it. Though hadn't noticed that it's about adultery -- my impression was that the stories were all just about unhappiness in general (usually unhappy childhoods or unhappy marriages).
I hate their movie reviews though, they're really arbitrary and pretentious.
But I like everything else (cartoons, articles, and other reviews). There's usually at least one good article in every issue.
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I picked up a collection of John Updike stories from a library sale with pretty much the same problem. The stories and bits of stories that weren't about someone having an affair were really interesting, but then it was like "Oh look, it's yet more adultery." The title story "Licks of Love in the Heart of the Cold War" was an entertaining piece about a bajo player traveling around the USSR as a goodwill ambassador that was pretty much ruined by the strange intrusive focus on the affair the guy had with some college kid before he left the US.
I honestly don't get the appeal of the adultery genre.
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*sigh* I have a love/hate devotion to the New Yorker. For the inspiringly-excellent column, I submit ( ) the profile of J.M. Barrie: The Prisoner of Neverland.
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I don't think there's ever been a magazine that I read whose content I was entirely happy with. The question, for me, was whether the magazine consistently had stuff I enjoyed reading.
I don't really get why you can't just ignore the parts you don't like and subscribe to it for the fact that it consistently has stuff you enjoy reading.
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It's a cost/benefit analysis. The benefit of the occasional fabulous piece and the cartoons is not worth the cost of being irritated by another crappy story every week. Plus, resource allocation. If I subscribe to the New Yorker, it means I can't subscribe to something else.
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Yeah, their fiction is terrible and has been for years. Any time I made the mistake of reading any of their fiction I always regretted it. It usually leaves me wanting to shoot myself. But the medical articles are really good, generally, and I love the cartoons (Roz Chast!) and lots of their other articles and stuff. I don't think I'd pay money for the magazine, though. I see it usually after my sister passes it along to my mom and she gives it to me.
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I am reading a book I found in the shelf (Straight Man, by Richard Russo) about academics and adultery. Why on EARTH??!!!!!!
Why is it that there are so many stories about the same exact thing? I watched about half of We Don't Live Here Anymore a few months ago and walked out of it, and this book is another retread of it. Is it because fiction requires conlict and that's the greatest source? Is it because its linked to sex and thus is a cheap way to get a reaction? Is it because all the New York writers are writing about what they know and no one is able to stay faithful? Or is it (and this is what I suspect), is it because when you have denigrated and mocked everything that is good and shrouded yourself in aloof irony, adultery is the only betrayal still available?
I hate it. I'm quitting the book, and that irritates me because the writing isn't bad. Maybe this is why I love science fiction and fantasy. I'm not fond of elves and swords and space prostitutes, but it increasingly seems as if that is the only place to go to where the conflicts and tension arise from something besides blessed people betraying everything in sight and then sobbing that it didn't turn out well.
As if adultery made someone complex instead of merely pathetic.
[ January 02, 2005, 10:49 AM: Message edited by: The Real Katharina ]
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Adultery is what's left, and maybe I'm biased but small town adultery is at least as kinky and twisted as new york adultery, maybe more so because people are having babies at a younger age. In two years in Minnesota, I saw adultery twist hearts and homes more than I've seen in eight years in northern California. I think it's worse in the small towns because the smaller pool of people make it more intimate.
Starting from a virtuous yearning, then resentment, envy, crime/lie, guilt, then either an understanding acceptance or a glorious redemption depending on your faith. It makes for a good story. It's the same kind of story, but it's a good story.
Tatiana, If you haven't read it in so long, how do you know that it's still terrible? It's not that I've ever been an ardent fan of the New Yorker fiction, I just think it changes to much to pigeon-hole it as terrible.
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I still read the magazine, from time to time, and I occasionally get sucked into reading a fiction piece, if something about it grabs my eye, but if that happens I always regret it. There always seems to be the most cynical and depressing view of life portrayed, and also the unspoken certainty that that's really all there is to life... that nobody else -- least of all the poor hicks who live elsewhere -- could have anything that was actually beautiful and true and good, you know? Like I said, it makes me want to shoot myself.
I remember when they got a new editor, we had brief hopes that they might actually have some good fiction there for a change, but they were quickly dashed. I check it out plenty often enough to know well enough for my own satisfaction that if there are ever any good pieces, they are exceedingly rare.
But I really do love some of their nonfiction articles, particularly the annals of medicine. A lot of good books were first serialized in TNY, including that one about ebola virus, and His Brother's Keeper (written by our very own Honore de Balzac's dad), the book that started the craze about electromagnetic noise from power systems being a cancer risk (which, in fact, was ridiculous -- this lady noticed that every 2 or 3 houses where kids with leukaemia lived happened to have a transformer out front .... but she didn't realize that EVERY two or three houses has a transformer out front).
I can remember being captivated by many of their nonfiction articles over the years. One series called "Playing Doc's Games" gave me an unquenchable urge to learn how to surf. Another about forensic geology told how three fascinating puzzles were solved by tracking down the source of a sample of soil. (One was the assasination of somebody in Mexico, another was the kidnapping of the heir to the Coors fortune, and the third was the source in Japan of the balloons with bombs that were dropped on the west coast of the U.S. during WW2. They located the exact beach in Japan that the sand in the ballast bags came from, and bombed the area to rubble.)
So I do like the New Yorker for those things. It IS pervaded with an attitude that nothing outside New York City could possibly matter at all. <laughs> My sister's Harvard Magazine that we still get has that same underlying assumption, that nobody who didn't go to Harvard could possibly be of interest in any way. <laughs> But it's a good magazine too, when you ignore that.
And the cartoons in TNY are pretty funny sometimes. Roz Chast is my favorite now, but they've had a lot of great cartoonists over the years, including George Booth, Charles Addams, and James Thurber.
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As mistakes go, I don't know if one can cut deeper than adultery. The word means corruption, and there are few things that are more precious and vulnerable than marriage, then you have the fact that it comes down to someone's decision, even better.
It's not the only one, but it's a good one and I don't know how much of the ink spilled on it is wasted, especially considering good people are still whoring around on their spouses.
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Irami, it's not that it's not an okay source of drama; it's that it's often used as an exclusive source of drama.
In fact, there's only one other plotline I can think of that's equally overused in "adult" fiction: cancer.
In an "ideal" adult fiction book, a man would cheat on his wife, she'd die of cancer, and his mistress would develop a drug addiction. I am confident that any story with this plot that pretended to say something useful about the human condition -- i.e. insulted middle America -- would be snapped up by the New Yorker on first sight.
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Cancer and heart disease kill people and adultery breaks up marriage, yet people are still smoking, whoring, and liberal with the red meat and barbeque.
Cancer and adultery are also uncontroversially bad, yet they pervade in our society. They are relatively safe topics and also pertinent. You can talk about something that matters without morally alienating your audience. The issues deal with the repercussions of thoughtful decisions concerning things that matter. The everyday glories of middle America don't always make good copy, and are often oppressively boring, but maybe I haven't been reading the right books.
I'll say that it's a little bit lazy to write on adultery and cancer because they are so safe. But the chances one takes on writing something important on something else are kind of hefty.
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I've kinda got the same thing with the Onion. I got two Onion books this Christmas and I'm beginning to get turned off on all the cynicism... I think in weekly doses it's okay, but when the Onion jumps all over normal life and wallows in disillusioned mediocrity time and time again, it can really trick you into feeling less than positive about yourself, the things you like, and your family.
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