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.