Pleasures of the “New” in the Penny Press!

Two highlights this week from the curiously large number of magazines I read whose titles start with “New” (that also starts the name of the region I call home):

In The New Yorker, in addition to some other wonderful stuff (Anthony Lane on “Fast & Furious 6″ is predictably hilarious, for instance), there’s a simple, affecting short story, “We Didn’t Like Him” by Akhil Sharma. It’s set in modern-day India, it seems pretty clearly to be a chunk calved from a longer work, and it has an understated narrative line that’s almost hypnotic:

My parents were polite with Manshu, but periodically they showed that they found him irritating too. Once, my mother told my father that everything Manshu said was probably an echo of something his mother had uttered. Another time, when Manshu passed seventh standard and his mother went around the lane giving out boxes of sweets, my father said, “Surely he must have cheated.”

Sharma is the author of 2001′s much-lauded An Obedient Father (whenever the guy writes something, it wins an award – which should make him irritating, and yet …), and “We Didn’t Like Him” raised my hopes for a sprawling epic of a new novel.

My hopes were also briefly raised by Alec MacGillis’ piece on the NRA in The New Republic, “This is How the NRA Ends.” I briefly hoped he’d done some investigative digging and uncovered secret Federal indictments in the offing, crippling internecine squabbles, anything to offset the sick-at-the-gut feeling so many shooting-traumatized Americans had when they watched the NRA, using its bought-and-paid-for senators, openly and single-handedly block gun control legislation that something like 95% of the country wants (while the rest of the civilized world looked on with disbelief). But no: MacGillis has nothing like that. He’s just certain the NRA will crumble if its bought-and-paid-for senators face backlash from their constituents. MacGillis doesn’t say why he thinks the NRA wouldn’t in that case simply buy new senators.

Fortunately, the same issue also featured a nice meaty review of John Darwin’s Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by the mighty Maya Jasanoff, whose 2011 book Liberty’s Exiles is the best study of American Loyalists (that despised majority who didn’t want the American Revolution) ever written. Jasanoff is a terrifically all-knowing kind of author (we’ve got one of those at Open Letters, and she, too, is an academic – it almost restores my faith in the breed), and when she’s at full steam writing about the nuances of empire, there’s nobody like her:

The wonderful quotable quality of Kipling’s poetry has cursed him to an eternity of misreading. Not many people who talk about “The White Man’s Burden” today know that Kipling addressed that poem in cautionary terms to the United States, which had just acquired overseas colonies of its own. Those who chant, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” rarely go on to cite the reconciliatory lines that follow: “But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,/When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!” It was Kipling who most succinctly captured the fin-de-siecle anxiety about empire in his great Jubilee-year anthem “Recessional,” in which he envisioned a British Empire lying in ruins like those of the Near East; and it was Kipling who wrote the stark, resonant epitaphs for the Imperial War Graves Commission after the Great War, from which the British Empire emerged larger – but weaker – than ever.

Those of you who know me will wonder if perhaps I liked that passage not because it’s by Jasanoff but because its about my beloved Kipling – but no! She’s also excellent on people who aren’t Kipling!