TNY weekend reader
This week’s TNY fiction is available online. (image: carolita johnson)
If you haven’t read anything but the cartoons yet in The New Yorker, there’s some reading to get done this weekend. This week’s fiction, An Afternoon, plays devil’s advocate by exploring the desire of the pedophile’s victim. All Jasmin has is the “love” she imagines she’ll have from a child molester, because her mother is promiscuous and neglectful, and her father is absent. At first I felt disturbingly as if I were being drawn into a voyeuristic cheap thrill against my will. But then I realized, maybe it’s about time someone besides the pedophile became aware of the victim’s desires. The end of the story brought to mind Hans Christian Anderson’s “Little Match Girl,” who sold her “light” so cheaply to strangers that she couldn’t gain what she needed to sustain herself, and ends curled up in the cold, dreaming of love and warmth and Heaven, which she finds only in death.
For something completely different, try Bill Buford’s “Carnal Knowledge” or “How I became a Tuscan butcher.” It begins with him bringing a whole pig home from the market, dripping blood, and causing his neighbor to gag in the elevator. His unalloyed nostalgia for Tuscany and it’s salty characters is entirely sappy but enjoyable, even if I don’t believe for a minute that he actually did any of this. Come on. His wife let him bring a pig home and make 144 meals out of it? Have you ever seen a man prepare dinner? It’s an experience rife with a gazillion opportunities to get either food poisoning or indigestion. Nevertheless, I was willing to suspend my disbelief long enough to enjoy the story.
Ben McGrath’s “Kiss City,” an account of the imfamous Mafia Cops trial is not available online, but worth reading for life-imitating-movies moments like:
After a brief, failed marriage that produced Lou, Jr. in 1969, Eppolito met Frances Todisco, the daughter of an elevator operator in the Bronx. At their wedding, in 1973, Lou requested that the band play the theme from “The Godfather,” and his Uncle Jimmy, a.k.a. Jimmy the Clam, handed him an envelope stuffed with cash.”
And a discussion between Hayes and Cutler, “a pair of high-profile defense-attorney pals, (...) coming and going in complementary fedoras and overcoats,” reflecting on the state of civilisation today:
“The concept of the U.S., what this country was based on, was individual rights,” Hayes said. “It’s a big part of the American myth: cowboys, trial lawyers. You really find a war on that kind of thinking today, the myth of the individual. Thank God the jury can still look you in the eye and say, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ He paused. “This is my idea of happiness.”
While you’re reading, I’ll be drawing more humble portraits in my capacity as a New Yorker cartoonist this weekend, and will duly report on it when I’ve recovered!