“The Plaza”
by Rebecca Makkai
from the May 8, 2023 issue of The New Yorker
A month or so ago I read and really enjoyed Rebecca Makkai’s latest novel, I Have Some Questions for You. I thought it was great, and I’ve been excited to keep exploring her work, particularly The Great Believers. How nice to have a chance to read something new so soon, though!
Here is how it begins:
In both 1946 and 1947, Margie Bixby was crowned Trout Queen of the Upper Delaware River, an honor she lost in 1948 only because it wouldn’t do for the daughter of the newspaper editor—the editor of the paper that sponsored the pageant—to win three times. Still, she was the undisputed local beauty, a striking girl with a stronger resemblance to the Modiglianis in the library art books than to a dish-soap model. She wasn’t even blond, to the annoyance of those who hopefully lemoned their hair each summer. She had hair like her late mother’s, like dark water you could drown in.
I hope you are starting what will become a beautiful May! Please share your thoughts below!
Loved this, loved discovering the author and her style. I’ll stop there to avoid giving any spoilers ?
Makkai’s writing has a sheen to it, a polish that reminds me a bit of Shipstead.
Is it too box checky? Perhaps. Poor girl rich boy, check. Period details, check (research worn lightly, for the most part; the Belasco Theatre felt Googled). Manipulative PTSD war yarn, check. New Yawk schmancy hotel, check. Topical abortion subplot and tragic gay male bestie, check.
Feels slightly like an exercise, a writer with some success trying on the historical mode. “Beagle-puppy eyes” is simultaneously tryhard and too easy. “Children with ketchup faces, flinging fried trout on the floor.” Better. Paper ring plus close third person, maybe veering a tad too fairy tale before it goes awry and gets spelled out in far too on-the-nose a fashion, a bad decision by Makkai, later on with the Cinderella/Bluebeard thing and the daughter.
Needs to be weirder? Too corporate and compromised? Could ChatGPT have written it? Are the twists too “prestige TV”? My pointer is drifting toward the upper left corner of my Ouija board on these Qs.
The literal silver spoons were a cool choice. The shape of the world/marriage and the straw hair callbacks, not bad. Good pieces of dialogue for Mrs. Webb about smiling babies and stout broads who order the sirloin. The remembrance of the brother as a child with ticklish feet is a strong detail to incept our protagonist’s failed solution. The ending is a bit pat, very The New Yorker-y; I’m not quite sure it’s enough to salvage the whole.
Today’s theme, class? Compromise.
So overall, Gene, is this a likable throwback or a programmatic retread? I’m not strongly one way or the other, Roger, but the paragraph about needing to believe in herself as singular felt unnecessary, or something a better writer would’ve shown in a more interesting way. Again, that lack of weirdness, that’s what condemns it to slightest of thumbs down on my card. Salinger’s stories about a similar class and world are great because of that strangeness, that uniqueness. Makkai’s stories (she published another one in Harper’s in 2021 that I read closely) lack that ingredient.