Recently I subscribed to The New Yorker after not having read it for years. Back when I was in my early twenties and not earning a lot of money I wished I could afford to buy it every week but only got an occasional issue as a treat. Unfortunately the year I decided to subscribe to it, The New Yorker hired Tina Brown to "Bring some energy" to the "Tired old magazine." Couldn't they have just started running nudes on the cover? Naturally, I did not renew my subscription after the inundation of pointless color-spreads, and artists influenced by Raw Magazine. If television was ruled by the show about nothing, then The New Yorker became the magazine about nothing. So it was with some trepidation that I awaited my first issue. The results? Better than I had remembered, but not even worth the discounted new subscriber rate. I've received three issues on my new subscription and they all seem to be of equal merit. If consistency is a virtue, then they are a virtuous lot. However, I find The New Yorker to be consistently mediocre. This is especially sad to me because this is The Magazine. If a writer has been published in The New Yorker, he can rightfully say to the world that he has succeeded. The competition to appear in it's pages is intense enough that they discourage submissions. They can afford any writer they choose and they choose to publish some of the tritest language of any "literary" magazine I can think of.
Let's take the latest issue I've received as an example. There are four featured items.
In On Impact Stephen King turns to his life and gives us an account of what it was like to be struck by a van and suffer the pain of rehabilitation. He ends on a note of "Thank God I can still write" I was left with a less charitable thought, "Oh God he can still write." Not to be uncharitable, I am glad he wasn't killed, and for a fellow in his position he is admirably humble and seemingly quite generous, but there was a day when a writer of his kind would not have gotten past the door. In the course of the article I kept finding a trace of spite in his descriptions of the driver that struck him that seemed to me an exercise of the writer's power to destroy an enemy that can't defend himself. I'm sure in a similar situation, I would have no qualms about writing the words "I hate the miserable little S.O.B," but King sticks to a more detached line of description that almost, but not quite, hides the fact that he has an axe to grind. It is a habit of fiction and does not belong in this type of article. It is precisely the sort of junk I can do without.
In the Hay, by Tobias Wolf is a fairly typical coming of age piece that is cliched enough that it requires no further description.
In A Dream of Glorious Return we get precisely the kind of writing and range of topic that The New Yorker was once known for. The guy has axes to grind and comes right out and grinds the heck out of them. I have never cared for his fiction but his prose is immaculate and his is an honest style that doesn't suffer from the shift to non-fiction. His essays are always forthright and clearly stated and if I don't often agree with his literary opinions, he is in an interesting position and experiencing a trip to India from his point of view is fascinating. Coming on the heels of President Clinton's trip to the sub-continent it is also journalism of a sort that is too seldom seen in American letters. This was the one highlight of the magazine.
The Smartest Kid on Earth is billed as a "Sketchbook." It is in fact a four page comic book story. Easily the best artist to appear in the three issues I've so far received, Chris Ware is one of the cartoonists to come to the forefront during the late nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-nineties. Exquisitely rendered, it is four pages of fluff. A simple case of the cartoonist giving the writer half the day off and letting the artist half do all the work. This seems to be typical of The New Yorker's attitude towards what are sometimes referred to as the new cartoonists. They like to find people who have made a name for themselves elsewhere, pay them a lot of money to do whatever they want, act as if they have anointed a new messiah and foist his hackwork as something genuine.
Out of four features one was worth the time I spent reading it. Of course, there's more to The new Yorker than that: There are four hopelessly boring pieces of fiction. There's Goings On About Town, which I might find useful if I ever move to New York. There's The Talk Of The Town, which I wouldn't find interesting even if i did live in New York. There are the reviews that I don't trust. Since the editors are responsible for the junk they publish, how can I trust the opinions of people they hire? There are the "drawings." If the editors are too stuck up to even admit a cartoon is a cartoon maybe they should just stick to reprinting cartoons from the magazines hey-day. After another seventy-five years you can call that a tradition too. And of course there are the poems. In the first place it amazes and appalls me that a magazine of this size and prominence can only find space for two, count 'em, TWO poems per issue, in the second place if you were going to publish only two poems don't you think they ought to be good? In all fairness the poems in this issue are head and shoulders above those in the other two issues I've read, however they are trivial exercises in poetry and not in any way ambitious. I've never read Les Murray before and based on his poem in this issue I could probably take him better in large doses rather than the measly space he was provided here in a magazine that likes to bill itself as a bastion of culture. This issue also contains a poem by a Nobel Prize winner. If it isn't as impressive as some of his other works, he's still a great poet and he deserves as many turns at bat as he can get. Even if it is a measly forty-five lines split unattractively across two pages. They even made the page break in the middle of a stanza. This despite the fact that they could waste the featured space of The Back Page on a piece of fustian entitled, I Married My Dog. Maybe they want to compete with The New York Post.
At this rate I will definitely not renew my subscription this time either.
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