Two (disappointing) stories in the New Yorker "double issue"

A quick look at two of the stories in the New Yorker so-called “double issue” (love the Nyer, but these “double issues” are just a dodge imposed on subscribers), first, Haruki Murakami’s Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey. HM has been writing about talking animals – birds, cats, monkeys, and others – for 35 years or more now, and the thrill is gone. What once in his work seemed imaginative and mysterious now just seems to be mannered, a tic, a relic. In this piece a young man traveling in a remote area of Japan checks in at a small hotel and, in the evening, strikes up a conversation with a monkey, who tells him he learned language at a young age and is now employed as a servant in the hotel. The monkey “confesses” that he has fallen in love w/ several human women and, unable to strike up any relationship with any of the women, he has stolen part of the woman’s name. In a bit of a twist that differs from his earlier talking-animal stories, here HM’s narrator says that he completely disbelieves this whole episode and thinks he might have been hallucinating or dreaming – until, years later, he meets a woman who has trouble remembering her own name! OK, so where does this leave us? I’d like to say the story is a tribute to the power of imagination, but it feels, at this point in HM’s career, like well-trodden ground. The third story in the magazine (the first was the Hemingway story, which I’d posted on previously) is Emma Cline’s White Noise, a depiction of the Harvey Weinstein on the day before the jury is to begin its deliberations. No doubt Cline is a skilled writer and has her finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist – she seems to have an uncanny knowledge of the lifestyles of the rich and notorious – but what is the point here?? There’s no insight into HW’s perverse character or behavior; we develop neither sympathy, empathy, nor understanding of this man, and we by no means come to feel sorrow and pity for him: We knew he was despicable before reading the story and we still know it at the end; nothing’s been offered to challenge us or change us or inform us. Why would anyone even write this story? He’s a hateful man – and why even think about him unless you can bring some new perspective or insight. The “twist” in the story is HW’s supposition that the man in the house next door is the novelist Don DeLillo; what this is based upon I have no idea, but in this story it feels like pointless name-dropping (you’d have to be really in the know to recobnize the somewhat reclusive DeLillo). HW seems to want to adapt DD’s novel White Noise (the title of this story) into a film; fat chance of that – and btw it would make a lousy film.