September 27, 2010 Issue

There are no rules in critical writing, but a useful guideline is the one articulated by Edmund Wilson many years ago: a critic must first describe what he or she is going to criticize. Rebecca Mead, in her interesting piece “Adaptation,” in this week’s issue, does an excellent job describing “Gatz,” a translation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” to the stage by the experimental theatre company Elevator Repair Service. Mead describes “Gatz" 's “dilapidated office” setting. And she describes what happens in that setting: “the text of ‘The Great Gatsby’ is spoken aloud, all forty-nine thousand words of it, and the action unfolds solely within the shabby office space.” She says, “The show lasts for a Wagnerian eight hours, including two short intermissions and a dinner break.” Mead ably fulfills the first part of the Wilsonian precept: she describes “Gatz.” But when it comes time to do the actual critical work, she chickens out. It seems to me anyone reasonably familiar with “The Great Gatsby,” who reads her description of “Gatz” – eight hours in a theatre looking at the same shabby office set, listening to actors (some of them impersonating more than one character) read all fort-nine thousand words of the novel, including, as Mead points out, “every ‘he said’ and ‘she said’” – would have no problem concluding that the production is from beginning to end a wrong-headed, ill-conceived, totally cock-eyed folly. Mead appears to suspend judgment. She says, “What could have been a tiresome gimmick achieves, in the course of the show, a kind of sublimity.” What kind of sublimity might that be? Somnolence? She also says, “Gatz immerses the audience in the beauty of Fitzgerald’s incantatory prose.” “Incantatory” is an odd choice of word to describe Fitzgerald’s writing in “The Great Gatsby.” It seems to suggest that it is the type of writing that is best appreciated when heard read aloud. On the contrary, Fitzgerald’s exquisitely textured writing – in “The Great Gatsby,” at least – is, in my opinion, best appreciated when read on the page. For example, consider this line about Daisy: “A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek.” “Damp,” “streak,” “hair,” “dash,” “blue,” “paint,” “cheek” – these vivid, monosyllabic, consonantal words are themselves like dabs of paint that create an almost cubist picture of Daisy’s face. It’s an astonishing sentence – one among many in Fitzgerald’s great work – and I think the astonishment would be greatly diminished if, instead of reading Fitzgerald’s words, you had them read to you. I think if you simply listen to the words, you lose touch with the writing act, with the writer’s art. And this is one reason why I think Elevator Repair Service’s production of “Gatz,” as described by Rebecca Mead, is so ludicrous – that and the “Wagnerian” eight-hour endurance test. Implicit in the aforementioned quotations from Mead’s piece is that she liked “Gatz.” But she also says, “Everybody in the room, audience and cast alike, experiences ‘Gatz’ as an event – one that is, by turns, thrilling, amusing, and enervating.” Note that last word; she doesn’t say “energizing,” she says “enervating,” as in “causing one to feel drained of energy or vitality.” I think Mead is less enthused about her “Gatz” experience than she lets on. Any “adaptation” of “The Great Gatsby” that leaves you enervated is a dud and should be judged, if the critic is truly exercising her critical powers, as such.

Second Thoughts: On further reflection, I think I may have been too harsh. Mead’s article is more an arts report than it is a review or a critical piece. She is bringing us news of an honorable yet foolhardy theatrical experiment. Wright Morris, in his book “About Fiction” (1975), said that “Few books come into this world with the perfection of a bird’s egg, and this [“The Great Gatsby”] is one of them.” Elevator Repair Service has scooped up this perfect egg and used it to cook what appears to be a rather unpalatable dish.

September 20, 2010 Issue

There are two fascinating profiles in the magazine this week, each describing how an American male became (or is close to becoming) a self-made billionaire. Beyond that they are, in form and matter, very different pieces. Jose Antonio Vargas’s "The Face of Facebook" is about Mark Zuckerberg, the twenty-six year old founder and C.E.O. of Facebook. According to Vargas, Zuckerberg is “a strange mixture of shy and cocky.” Vargas also describes him as “wary and private.” The tag-line of the piece – “Mark Zuckerberg opens up” – strikes me as misleading. It seems to me that Zuckerberg rarely opened up, and that Vargas's portrait of him is somewhat of a feat, constructed from close examination and ingenious interpretation of seemingly low-yield, innocuous evidentiary scintilla. For example, in ordinary circumstances, a host offering his guest a glass of water would be a very minor action that is, you would think, hardly worth reporting; but in “The Face of Facebook,” it forms part of the portrait (“Standing in his kitchen, leaning over a sink, he offered me a glass of water”), and a telling one, too, because it illustrates Zuckerberg’s minimalist approach to life: he didn’t offer wine or juice or even bottled water; he offered tap water – it doesn’t get more basic than that. Another example is Vargas’s observation of Zuckerberg and his girlfriend, Chan, interacting (“She touched his right hand and smiled”). Again, no detail is too small to be grist to Varga’s mill, and he mills very fine in deed. Both the aforementioned quotes come from my favorite section of “The Face of Facebook” – the part that begins, “On a recent Thursday afternoon, Zuckerberg took me for a stroll around the neighborhood in Palo Alto where he both lives and works.” Most of the rest of “The Face of Facebook” is artfully created from secondary sources – Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile, transcripts of Instant Messages from litigation documents, interviews with people who know Zuckerberg, news stories, a phone interview with Zuckerberg, etc. “The Face of Facebook” goes like a streak. I devoured it in twenty minutes. When I was finished, I immediately e-mailed a link to it to four people I know who are Facebook members (there’s an electronic version of the article freely available at the New Yorker website). Vargas writes in plain, point-and-shoot prose. There are no vivid metaphors or similes. As far as I know, this is his first New Yorker piece. It’s difficult to predict whether he will become a regular contributor to the magazine. His writing style may be a bit too spare for a magazine in which the texture and beauty of the writing is as important as the content. But in “The Face of Facebook,” Vargas may have had to pare down his style to accommodate the minimalist lifestyle of his subject. What I like about his writing is his unhesitating use of “I” – a prerequisite, in my opinion, of great literary journalism. Regardless of what Vargas produces in the future, his “Face of Facebook” stands as an inspired model of how to make something savoury out of very few ingredients.

Turning now to the other “billionaire” profile in this week’s issue – Nick Paumgarten’s "The Merchant" – I relish the opportunity it presents to express my appreciation of a master New Yorker writer in full possession of all the requisite journalistic tools, currently writing at the top of his ability. Whereas Vargas, in his piece, was faced with a guarded, reticent subject, Paumgarten, in “The Merchant,” found himself immersed in a superabundance of rich detail. “The Merchant” profiles sixty-six year old Millard Drexler, former C.E.O. of the Gap, and current C.E.O. of J. Crew. Unlike Zuckerberg, Drexler is a talker and, as Paumgarten says, “an avid interviewer.” Paumgarten has a great ear and he catches wonderful swatches of Drexler’s dialogue, pinning it perfectly to his narrative. Here, for example, is Paumgarten describing Drexler talking to a room full of J. Crew’s merchants:

The first hour finalized nothing, however, and was instead a free-ranging discussion, with stretches of soliloquy, that circumscribed a point Drexler wanted to make about the perception of J. Crew, in the room and in the marketplace. "Every day, I feel I can’t keep up," Drexler began. "But then I start to feel, Am I keeping up? Is it important to keep up? I live my life and I can’t read every blog. But, O.K., so I hear about Essie nail polish. How many of you wear Essie nail polish? By the way, I’m supposed to get my first manicure on Saturday." He looked at me with embarrassment. "I don’t know if I’m gonna do it." This led him to asides about the low cost of pedicures and manicures ("the best deal in America"), the fact that other companies were now copying J. Crew’s designs ("It’s O.K., that’s the world"), the implications of the film version of "Freakonomics" ("I thought it was gimmicky"), the integrity of the actress Catherine Keener (a roomful of women exclaiming, "Oh, she’s great!"), and the integrity of J. Crew’s goods ("What the customers are paying for is the perception of value. Stitch by stitch, fabric by fabric, we offer the most value"), all by way of advancing the idea that, as he put it, "our name is worth more than we internally think. Clothes can talk, you know what I mean?"

I like the way the above passage is structured, particularly Paumgarten’s use of parenthesis to contain the samples of quotation. It enables Paumgarten to pick his way through Drexler’s long speech, re-creating its effect, without having to resort to lengthy quotation. “The Merchant” brims with bright, sharp, original description. Examples: “He stepped away for Blackberry hiatuses that were sure to set off recriminating e-mail tangents”; “Sometimes, little brushfires of conversation erupt, and Drexler snaps his fingers and extinguishes them.” And consider this all-most-over-the-top Cormac McCarthy-like zinger: “The ceaseless merchant murmur – the conversation between want and need, aspiration and means, product and price – that runs like a river through the heavily tilled plains and alluvial flats of American commerce pours through the thundering gorge of his mind.” I’ll bet the magazine’s editorial staff, ever watchful for the dreadful sin of overwriting, looked at that last quote long and hard before letting it in. Of course, great writing consists of more than just description. Perception is an ingredient, as well. And Paumgarten is an inspired perceiver. For instance, at one point, he says, “To the extent that any man’s emphasis on his genuinely humble beginnings can acquire a veneer of affectation, you might say that Drexler prizes the signaling implications of the Bronx; his embrace of its lessons and privations, as a basis for his approach to life and business, is as vigorous as his urge to escape them was.” Sometimes Paumgarten’s perceptions are so neatly stated, they have the sparkle of aphorism, e.g., “The top echelon of American business is a Rushmore of unhappy childhoods.” I like the way Paumgarten gets around. He goes to the scene, and he takes his readers with him. In “The Merchant,” he’s in the Manhattan offices of J. Crew; he visits Drexler at his house in Sag Pond; he travels with Drexler and his team on Drexler’s jet; he’s present for an in-store meeting in Minneapolis; he attends a tour of a boot-making shop in Lewiston, Maine. It’s the same with most of his other New Yorker pieces, and I love it. Motion, motion, the Paumgartian narcotic. When he says, in his marvelous "The Mannahatta Project" (The New Yorker, October 1, 2007), “One day, I went to visit Sanderson in the W.C.S. offices, which occupy a cluster of trailers in a parking lot in the Bronx Zoo,” I’m right there with him (vicariously, of course), thrilled to be in on the excursion, avid for the experience. If Paumgarten has a weakness, it’s an overfondness for the affluent crowd. I don’t expect he will ever write a piece like, say, Joseph Mitchell’s great “Professor Seagull” (The New Yorker, December 12, 1942) about the Greenwich Village bohemian and flophouse denizen, Joseph Ferdinand Gould. But you never know with Paumgarten. He’s phenomenally talented; you get the feeling no subject is beyond his reach if he wants to write about it.

September 13, 2010 Issue

Robert Sullivan is in the magazine this week with a Talk of the Town story called “Say Cheese.” Talk stories are like miniature fact pieces or profiles. They’re approximately seven hundred and fifty to a thousand words long, and their subjects are often quirky, appealing characters inhabiting the more amazing strata of New York City society that exist below the so-called upper crust. There’s an art to the Talk story, and Sullivan, even though he contributes only two or three pieces a year, is a master of the form. Over the years he’s written several stories that I would rank right up there among the all-time best of Talk. See, for example, “Super-Soaker” (September 14, 2009), “Rabbit Ears” (February 23, 2009), “Shredding Party” (January 15, 2007), and “The Crossing” (November 8, 2004). This week’s story, “Say Cheese,” is pretty piffly in terms of substance, but since it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than a piffle, it's a very tasty little morsel of writing. I enjoyed it immensely, particularly the simple, catchy opening line, “This is the story of a hundred-and-seventeen-year-old piece of cheese.” The story sketches the travels of a small bit of cheese (“four inches long, one inch high”), starting in present-day Brooklyn, then going back to 1893 Lithuania, where it originated, then coming forward in time through the Boer Wars and the Great Depression and the Holocaust right up to the present time again – all in the space of about eight hundred words. The story has a number of appealing strands. The simplest is the miraculous survival of such a perishable item. It’s not as if this particular piece of cheese had an easy time of it, either. It was caught up in some very turbulent and traumatic historical events. More interesting still is the part about Clare Burson, who currently owns the cheese, and how she seemed to relate to it right from the moment her grandmother first showed it to her in 1999. Burson was so fascinated by the cheese that in 2007 she traveled to Lithuania for the purpose of learning more about its history. I take back what I said about “Say Cheese” being piffly. The more I consider it, the more I think it’s a model Talk story – lightly told, but glinting with meaning. It makes me wish that Sullivan would join The New Yorker full-time so he could write more of these pieces, and maybe even some longer articles, as well. To me, he is the quintessential New Yorker writer.

Postscript: There’s a great Ralph Waldo Emerson quote in Robert Sullivan’s The Thoreau You Don’t Know (2009) that reads as follows: “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.” A hundred-and-seventeen-year-old piece of cheese is not exactly common. But it probably doesn’t look like much. Sullivan says, “A person who comes in contact with it might not recognize it as cheese.” I suspect many people, if they were in Clare Burson’s shoes, would simply have tossed the cheese in the garbage at the earliest opportunity without a second thought. Burson was different; she intuited that the cheese might be a key to the past. She was right. She saw the miraculous in an old, cruddy piece of cheese. This is, as Emerson says, the mark of wisdom. The compliment applies to Sullivan, too. Not every writer sees story possibilities in an old piece of cheese. Sullivan did. His story, “Say Cheese,” is just about perfect. Emerson would’ve loved it.

September 6, 2010 Issue

John McPhee, one of my favorite writers, is in the magazine this week. McPhee’s piece, “Linksland and Bottle,” is about St. Andrews and the 2010 British Open. In the first half of it, McPhee seems overly caught up in the social scene that surrounds the Old Course, what he politely calls “the class stratigraphy,” and what I would less politely call snobbery. For me, the piece doesn’t really take off until, about five thousand words in, McPhee finally leaves St. Rule and the Artisans and all his highfalutin friends with their Ph.D.s and pedigrees behind, and gets down to describing the course and the game being played on it. I can actually pinpoint the exact moment in the story when this happens. McPhee says, “Play had resumed, but the wind had not much subsided,” and his piece finally tees off. As in McPhee’s previous golf piece, “Rip Van Golfer” (The New Yorker, August 6, 2007; included in McPhee’s 2010 collection Silk Parachute), “Linksland and Bottle” is not so much about the golfers or the golf game as it is about the golf course. And this is as it should be because no writer describes landscape more precisely, vividly, and lyrically than John McPhee. For example, from “Linksland and Bottle,” here is McPhee’s description of the Old Course at St. Andrews: “From this same grandstand perch, the eighteenth tee and the great home fairway are right in front of us as well, where the Swilken Burn, straight-sided and in cross-section no less engineered than the Los Angeles River, leaves town in ampersand fashion on its leisurely way across the eighteenth and first to the sea.” Other subjects are also superbly noticed and given their artistic due: Angel Cabrera’s swing (“hay is hanging from his follow-through like Spanish moss”); a difficult Tiger Woods shot (“Woods conjures a high parabola that sits down close to the hole”); seagulls (“If you are in the top row and the wind is coming over your back, seagulls hang motionless and stare into your eyes, a club length from your face”). Is “Linksland and Bottle” as good as “Rip Van Golfer”? I don’t think so, not quite. Why I say this goes back to all that snooty high society stuff at the beginning of “Linksland and Bottle,” which “Rip Van Golfer” is mercifully free of. And in “Rip Van Golfer,” McPhee had the benefit of a number of very funny Bubba Watson one-liners, which he skillfully incorporated into the piece, and which helped keep the game in perspective.

Interesting Emendations: Bill Buford's "The Pasta Station"

Mmm. It’ll soon be time for the appearance of my favorite thematic issue of the magazine – The Food Issue. It usually comes out around this time each year. In anticipation, just to whet my appetite, I went back and reread one of the all-time great "Food Issue” pieces: Bill Buford’s "The Pasta Station" (The New Yorker, September 6, 2004). It’s a funny, wonderful account of Buford’s experience working the pasta station at Mario Batali’s Babbo. One passage I really like contains a beautiful parenthesis. It occurs during Buford’s description of his experience making orecchiette for the first time. Buford says orecchiette “is regarded as one of the easiest pastas to make.” He describes rolling it out by hand “until it looks like a white tube.” He continues:

You then chop the tube into bite-size segments and crush each segment on a ridged piece of wood with your thumb, and, like a child’s magic trick, the pasta changes shape under the pressure: when you remove it, it has ridges underneath and, on top, it’s shaped like an ear (unless it was one that I had to peel off my thumb that first day, in which case the ridges looked like a tic-tac-toe board, because I invariably had to do the thing twice, and wasn’t able to line it up correctly the second time, and the ear was all large and distorted, a floppy flap of dough, more like a cartoon elephant’s ear than a normal ear, because my hands had got so clammy from the anxiety of finally making pasta that it wouldn’t come off my thumb).

Just for the heck of it, I compared this passage with the version Buford included in his book Heat (2006). Here’s the book version:

You then chop the tube into bite-size segments and crush each one on a ridged piece of wood with your thumb. Like a child’s magic trick, the pasta changes shape under the pressure and when it’s removed it has ridges underneath and is shaped like an ear (unless it’s like the one I peeled off my thumb that first day, in which case the ridges looked like a tic-tac-toe board, because I invariably had to do the thing twice, and wasn’t able to line it up correctly the second time, and the ear was all large and distorted, a floppy flap of dough, more like a cartoon elephant’s ear than a normal ear, because my hands were so clammy from the excitement of my finally making pasta that the damn thing wouldn’t come off my thumb).

The two versions are similar, but there are some interesting differences. For example, in the magazine version all the action (chopping, crushing), plus the “child’s magic trick” comparison, together with the long parenthesis illustrating how complicated the seemingly simple orecchiette-making process can be in novice hands, flows together in one sentence; whereas in the book version, the chopping and crushing are situated in a sentence of their own, and a new sentence containing the “child’s magic trick” analogy and the breathless parenthesis has been created. Also, note the change from “each segment” (in the magazine version) to “each one” (in the book version). Note also the change from “you” (“when you remove it”), in the magazine, to “it” (“when it’s removed”), in the book. And note also the additional bit of description “on top,” regarding the location of the ear-shape, in the magazine version. Perhaps the most interesting difference is the change from “clammy from anxiety” (in the magazine) to “clammy from excitement” in the book. Are any of the changes made in the book an improvement on what appeared in The New Yorker? I would have to say no. I like the way the “and” works in the magazine version to enact the magic of the process; it’s like “you crush each segment on a ridged piece of wood with your thumb, and voilà, like a child’s magic trick, the pasta changes shape.” I prefer the use of “segment” rather than “one,” even though it’s a repetition; “segment” sounds more precise than the generic “one.” I prefer the second person “you” to the third person “it”; it seems to me “you” more directly engages the reader. Finally, I think clammy hands are more consistent with anxiety than with excitement, and that the whole passage is funnier when you think of someone suffering anxiety as a result of “finally making pasta.” The Heat version of "The Pasta Station" (included in the chapter called “Line Cook”) differs from the magazine piece in numerous other respects. And in every instance, I find the magazine version preferable. The only way to account for the superiority of The New Yorker piece is, in my opinion, to credit the work of the magazine's editorial staff in helping Buford fine-tune what's turned out to be a Food Issue classic.

August 30, 2010 Issue

Ian Frazier’s incomparable way of describing things - photo-realism with an epiphanic twist - is put to the test in the stark, minimalist setting of “On the Prison Highway,” in this week’s issue of the magazine. In the piece, Frazier describes finding an abandoned Stalin-era prison camp on the prisoner-built Topolinskaya Highway in northern Siberia. He describes the camp in detail – fencing (“plain logs, peeled and smoothed, with narrow boards atop them”), barbed wire (“the ink-black barbed wire, the inch- long barbs shaped liked bayonets”), planks (“planks with the bark still on them had been fitted into the bunks so that the bark side faced down”), plaster (“It seemed to be nothing more than a spackle of mud and river sand”). However, compared to the wrecked-house riches he encountered so often in abandoned places on the plains – junk plaster, broken crockery, cracked linoleum, old wallpaper, etc. – and described in such palpable detail in “Great Plains” (1989), the inside of the barracks of the Siberian prison camp seems stark. Frazier says, “This interior offered little to think about besides the limitless periods of suffering that had been crossed off here, and the unquiet rest these bunks had held.” But as it turns out, it is the very lack of visual prompts within the barracks that shapes Frazier’s ultimate impression of the place:

“What struck me then and still strikes me now was the place’s overwhelming aura of absence. The deserted prison camp just sat there – unexcused, untorndown, unexplained. During its years of operation, it had been a secret, and in some sense it still was. Horrors had happened here, and/or miseries and sufferings and humiliations short of true horrors. ‘No comment,’ the site seemed to say.”

Often in Frazier’s writings, his explorations of absence are a form of meaning-making, whereby the close consideration of something seemingly bleak or stark like an abandoned house or a deserted prison camp yields a beautifully stated truth, an epiphany. For example, in “Great Plains,” Frazier describes an abandoned house near Wellington, Texas, where, according to a roadside marker, on June 10, 1933, a family named Pritchard saw Bonny and Clyde’s car plunge into the Red River. In front of the house is an elm. On the ground under the elm, Frazier spots a “silver-and-purple tube of Wet ’n Wild lipstick.” He writes,

The tube was fresh, the stick still a little ice-cream-coned at the edges, of a shade of reddish-pink which its manufacturer calls Fuschia Pearl. I thought about the kids who dropped it. They probably came here sometimes to park and make out. Bonnie Parker would have been happy to find this lipstick. She would have opened it and sniffed it and tried the color on the back of her hand. As I examined it, my own hand seemed to for a moment as ghostly as hers. I made a mark on a page of my notebook with the lipstick, recapped the tube, and put it back on the ground.

How fine that “a little ice-cream-coned at the edges” is. But the real felicity is in the way Frazier’s imagination moves from the lipstick to the kids who dropped it to Bonnie Parker to a feeling of his own mortality – all of this from the seemingly innocuous discovery of a tube of lipstick in the yard of an abandoned house. Frazier’s “On the Prison Highway” also contains an epiphany – one of the most profound he’s ever written, I believe. After he describes the camp’s “overwhelming aura of absence,” his thoughts turn to Stalin, the man responsible for the existence of the camp “and all the camps along this road, and the road itself.” Frazier says, “The fact that the world has not yet decided what to say about Stalin was the reason these camps were standing with no change or context; the sense of absence here was because of that.” This leads a few paragraphs later to what I call the epiphany: “Now the place existed only nominally in present time and space; the abandoned camp was a single preserved thought in a dead man’s mind.” The camp and Stalin is an obvious linkage, but the representation of the sense of absence that inhabits the camp as a thought locked in Stalin’s dead brain – that is inspired! Abandoned places stimulate Frazier’s descriptive and epiphanic powers; he knows this and that’s why – one of the reasons, anyway, in my opinion - he’s willing to go so far afield to find them.