May 3, 2010 Issue

By far the most interesting article in this week’s issue is Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia In Forest Hills.” The story’s tagline – “Anatomy of a murder trial” – sums it up all right, but doesn’t really capture the eerie, twisted, deeply unsettling nature of the piece. The message I took from the story is that the American judicial system is rotten to the core and should be avoided at all costs. In other words, unless you want to get burned, stay away from court. Malcolm all but states this explicitly when she analyzes Borukhova’s counterclaim in the divorce action. In the counterclaim, Borukhova demands child support, spousal maintenance, medical insurance, life insurance, occupancy of the marital apartment, return of wedding gifts, etc. Malcolm says, “These demands diminish her; they put her autonomy in question. She was a practicing physician. She could have done what other able-bodied women do who divorce and wish to avoid entanglement with a troublesome mate. They walk away with nothing. But something impelled Borukhova – perhaps her early experience of authoritarianism – to remain in the dangerous game that she could’ve chosen not to play." "The dangerous game” would’ve made a good alternative title for this piece. In fact, at one point, Malcolm goes so far as to equate the American judicial system with “state control as powerful and arbitrary as that of the of the old Soviet regime.” And she makes a powerful case for it, showing the two judges (Judge Sidney Strauss, who presided over the divorce hearing, and Judge Robert Hanophy, who was in charge of the murder trial) to be tyrants, and the lawyers, particularly the crazed David Schnall, who was the court-appointed legal guardian of Borukhova and Mallayev’s young daughter, Michelle, as manipulative, flawed, at times incompetent, individuals. When I say “powerful,” “crazed,” “manipulative,” “flawed,” “incompetent,” obviously I’ve accepted Malcolm’s version of the trial. I would plead guilty to that. I found Malcolm’s piece utterly convincing as a portrait of a nightmarish justice system. I liked her refusal to accept the prosecution’s narrative or any narrative, for that matter. In this, I think she is exceptional. Most court reporters just go with the flow; it’s the easiest thing to do. But Malcolm resists. She is known for her distrust of narrative. “Our lives are not like novels,” she says in her great “Six Roses ou Cirrhose?” (The New Yorker, January 24, 1983). In “Iphigenia In Forest Hills,” she once again demonstrates this fundamental truth.

April 26, 2010 Issue

At first I didn’t think the selection of Saul Bellow’s letters published in this week’s New Yorker would be all that interesting. It wasn’t until after I read Martin Schneider’s post at Emdashes (“Some Quick Hits on a Recent Issue,” April 23, 2010) that I gave them even a second thought. Schneider said, “The letter Saul Bellow wrote to Philip Roth on January 7, 1984 (not available online), is pretty fantastic, even if his appellation for the poor journo who crossed him, ‘crooked little slut,’ is a bit unfortunate.” I decided to check out this letter for myself, and ended up reading the whole damned collection. I enjoyed them, and I learned a few things too. For example, the way Bellow employs both a semi-colon and a question mark in the same sentence (“Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter?”). For the most part, Bellow’s letters are written in short, choppy sentences. There’s little evidence of what Joan Acocella memorably described as “the grand, cascading sentences” of The Adventures of Augie March (see Acocella’s “Finding Augie March,” The New Yorker, October 6, 2003, later reprinted in her great Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints). Yet, the letters contain perceptions that stayed with me after I finished reading them. That observation about the death of a parent, for example: “I found myself saying to her daughter Rosanna that losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces – down to that last glassy splinter.” When I read that, I instantly thought of my own parents, both turning eighty this year. And I remembered that Bellow had opened his wonderful short story “A Silver Dish" (The New Yorker, September 25, 1978) with a question about the death of a father: “What do you do about death – in this case, the death of an old father?” Now, I want to reread that story. In fact, the selection of letters in this week’s issue has whetted my appetite for more Bellow. After all, he is, as James Wood says, “probably the greatest writer of American prose of the twentieth century – where greatest means most abundant, various, precise, rich, lyrical” (see Wood’s “Saul Bellow’s Comic Style” in his collection The Irresponsible Self).

April 19, 2010 Issue

Reading this incredibly rich “Journeys” issue is like gobbling up (say) five bowls of Haagen Dazs dulce de leche ice cream, one right after the other. Three of my favorite writers are present: Alec Wilkinson (“The Ice Balloon”), Peter Hessler (“Go West”), and Burkhard Bilger (“Towheads”). Lauren Collins, who is verging on becoming one of my favorites, is also represented (“Angle of Vision”). Elif Batuman contributes a delightful piece called “The Memory Kitchen.” And there are reviews by Jill Lepore, Dan Chiasson, Lauren Collins (showing signs of Updikean prolificness), and Peter Schjeldahl that I consider to be “must” reads, either because of the writing, as pure writing, or because of the subject matter. But before I discuss any of the foregoing, I’m going to single out some GOAT “details” that I found particularly delectable: Sasha Frere-Jones’s “Snoop’s sense of words landing is unerring”; Andrea Thompson’s “And then, finally, there’s a glimpse of the flirt behind the name: affogato, served ‘adult’”; and this beautifully rhythmed passage from a capsule review of Eileen Quinlan’s photographs – “still-lifes of mirrors and their reflections, mesh representation and abstraction so seamlessly that the distinctions dissolve.” I also like the Demetrios Psillos’s lime-black (with ravishing red dabs) illustration accompanying Hilton Als’s “Critic’s Notebook” column.

Okay! Those were just appetizers. Now for the main course. And what a feast it is! I’ll proceed in the order I followed when I read the magazine. First up is Batuman’s wonderfully titled "The Memory Kitchen." This is my first encounter with Batuman’s writing. Let me say instantly that I loved it – I loved the theme (to quote the tag line: “A chef recovers the foods that Turkey forgot”), I loved the opening lines (“To get to the restaurant Ciya Sofrasi from the old city of Istanbul, you take a twenty-minute ride to the Asian side of the Bosporus. On a cold Monday night last November, a friend persuaded me to make the trip with him”), I loved the visit to the turkey farm in Bozburan. Most of all, I loved the writing – this description of turkeys, for example: “There were seven or eight of them sitting in a row of crates, occasionally nodding their heads and gurgling, like members of a jury.” I confess I worried a bit when early in the story, Batuman says, “Food, I should clarify, has never played a large role in my mental life.” I wondered, what kind of piece is this going to be when the writer does not relate to food sensuously. But it rapidly became apparent that I had nothing to worry about. Batuman’s piece may not get at the taste and texture of food the way (say) M. F. K. Fisher does, but what she lacks in sensuousness, she more than makes up for in her exploration of the workings of what she calls “collective food memory” – her true subject. For example, here’s her description of the mnemonical experience of eating kisir at Musa Dagdeviren’s restaurant Ciya Sofrasi: “The bitter edge of sumac and pomegranate extract, the tang of tomato paste, and the warmth of cumin, which people from the south of Turkey put in everything, recalled to me, with preternatural vividness, the kisir that my aunt used to make.” I could go on and on extolling the virtues of this great article. Suffice it to say, I’m hugely impressed with Batuman’s writing and I look forward to reading lots more of it in the magazine.

Another tremendous piece this week is Lauren Collins’s "Angle of Vision." I’m rapidly becoming a Collins devotee. (See my effusions a few weeks ago regarding her lovely "Check Mate.") What I like about her work is her unhesitating willingness to write in the “I” – to present her stories as personal experiences. “Angle of Vision” is an example par excellence of her subjective approach where she not only profiles paraglider flyer/photographer George Steinmetz; she actually straps on a paraglider (Steinmetz calls it a “flying lawn chair”) and flies it herself, reporting back on what it felt like: “In dreams – mine, at least – flying is like swimming. But the air was crisp and thin, not viscous, as I’d imagined it. I didn’t have to make my way through it; it made its way through me. Being upright in the air feels like being upside down on the ground. My spine stretched. I felt like I’d be an inch taller when I touched down. In twenty seconds, my feet thudded into the valley floor.” “Angle of Vision” is a big, gorgeous multi-paneled mural of a story. Time jumps around. The opening section introduces us to Steinmetz on expedition in southeastern Algeria. Collins is there with him. The next piece describes the paraglider and how Steinmetz uses it to take aerial photographs. The third part (the Sefar flight) cuts back to Algeria and shows us Steinmetz and his crew attempting unsuccessfully to photograph an isolated plateau. The fourth part takes us back to the Sahara and talks about the Tuareg people. The fifth section takes us back to the expedition in Algeria and shows us Steinmetz discovering a prime camera subject – the high dunes of Tin Merzouga. Here’s Collins’s wonderful description of the dunes: “Their parabolic swells and eskered spines, splitting shadow, reminded me of horseshoe crabs. In the fading light, the sand turned from the color of paprika to a blood-orange shade and then to an iridescent purple, like eyeshadow, eventually deepening to a chocolaty brown.” That “eskered spines” is inspired! The sixth part is a biographic sketch of Steinmetz and an overview of his photographic accomplishments. The seventh section takes us to Steinmetz’s home in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, where Collins joins him and they review some of Steinmetz’s photos. Collins’s description of Steinmetz’s aerial shot of the fortified village of Beni Isguen is worth quoting: “Captured at sunrise, in warm light, the houses were the color of seashells. At sunset, they were bleached out, shards of bone. Their roofs, invisible from the street, had been painted in aquas and turquoises, so that from above, they looked like swimming pools.” The eighth and final section of “Angle of Vision” is a mini-history of flying. It concludes memorably with Collins’s own twenty-second paraglider flight.

The foregoing is my separation of Collins’s story into its constituent parts. As she’s written it, there’s no sectioning, no numbering; the whole thing flows seamlessly from the first scene to the last. I’ve taken time to describe its structure because I like how it starts out by plunging us directly into action, into Steinmetz’s desert expedition. Only after we’re caught up in Steinmetz’s struggles in the desert, do we receive the background facts about him, his work, his flying machine, etc. The classic template for this type of narrative structure is, of course, John McPhee’s “Travels in Georgia” (The New Yorker, April 28, 1973). See also McPhee’s great “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977). I wonder if Collins has used this particular structure in any of her previous pieces. I’ll have to check.

And with that, I’m going to have to quit for now. There are so many other aspects of this amazingly good issue that I would like to discuss if time permitted, chief amongst which is Burkhard Bilger’s "Towheads." I will conclude for now by saying that this particular “Journeys” issue is one of the best editions of the magazine I’ve read in a long time. It’s right up there with the September 5, 2005 “The Food Issue” – my all-time favorite New Yorker. That’s the one that contains, among other succulent items, Judith Thurman’s “Night Kitchens,” John Seabrook’s “Renaissance Pears,” and Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men.” Maybe someday, I’ll do a retrospective review of that issue and try to put in words why I think it’s so great.