April 25, 2011 Issue

Amidst all the hectic dunking, fracking, handbag marketing, and neuronal computation going on in this week’s issue, I’d like to pause a moment to celebrate the bonnet-wearing bunny on the delicious pink-yellow-and-white Maira Kalman front cover. Of the many great New Yorker cover illustrators, Kalman is the most brilliant colorist. This week’s cover, titled “Everywhere I Go I See Hats,” is ravishing. Kalman produced my all-time favorite New Yorker cover – the March 14, 2005, “Just Duckie,” showing a blue-billed duck comfortably nesting on a woman’s reed-like green hair. Kalman is a genius – right up there with Matisse, in my humble opinion. I see she currently has a show at the Jewish Museum [“Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World)”]. If I lived in New York, I’d definitely check it out.

Interesting Emendations: Maile Meloy's "Travis, B."

Claudio Cambon, Ghost Horse, Spring Blizzard (2000)

Maile Meloy’s "Travis, B." (The New Yorker, October 28, 2002) is, in my opinion, the finest short story to appear in the magazine in the last ten years. It’s about a twenty-two year old, part-Cheyenne loner named Chet Moran, who works feeding cows on a farm outside Glendive, Montana. Due to polio, contracted before he was two, and to broken bones suffered in horse-riding accidents, he’s physically disabled. He walks “as though turning to himself to ask a question.” He lives in “an insulated room built into the barn.” One winter night, just for something to do, he drives into town. He sees a light on in the school. People are going inside. He decides to join them. He meets Beth Travis, a young lawyer, who is teaching a course on school law. He tries to connect with her. At first Beth seems unresponsive. She seems distracted, preoccupied with her own troubles. The gap between them seems vast. Then something amazing happens. One night, Chet decides to saddle up his horse and ride into town to attend Beth’s course. After class, he offers to take her to the café on his horse. She agrees. “He held her briefcase against the pommel, and she held tightly to his jacket, her legs against his. He couldn’t think of anything except how warm she was, pressed against the base of his spine.” When they arrive at the café, she laughs. “She looked amazed.” It’s an astounding, elating scene; it seems, against all odds, that Chet has made a breakthrough with her. It’s the highpoint of the relationship. That evening, just before they part, Chet kisses her hand and then her cheek: “She didn’t move, not an inch, and he was about to kiss her for real when she seemed to snap out of a trance, and stepped away from him.” It’s the story’s turning point. The next night of class, Beth is absent; there’s a new teacher. Chet walks out of class and impulsively decides to drive the six hundred miles to Missoula, where Beth lives, to see her. It’s a romantic quest and it fails. He finds Beth in Missoula; he says to her, “I just knew that if I didn’t start driving, I wasn’t going to see you again, and I didn’t want that. That’s all.” But Beth doesn’t respond. “He stood there waiting, thinking she might say something, meet him halfway. He wanted to hear her voice again. He wanted to touch her, any part of her, just her arms maybe, just her waist. She stood out of reach, waiting for him to go.” Chet returns to the farm. It seems he still retains hope of seeing her again: “He wondered if maybe he had planted a seed, with Beth Travis, by demonstrating his seriousness to her.” But then he decides that she won’t come looking for him. “That was the thing that made him ache.” The story ends sadly: “He fished her phone number out of his pocket and studied it a while in the moonlight, until he knew it by heart, and wouldn’t forget it. Then he did what he knew he should do, and rolled it into a ball, and threw it away.”

I apologize for the roughness of the foregoing summary; it doesn’t even come close to doing justice to the story’s subtlety and poignancy.

I first read “Travis, B.” back in 2002 when it appeared in The New Yorker. There’s also a version of it in Meloy’s 2009 story collection Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It. Comparing the two versions, I found a number of interesting differences. For example, in the New Yorker version, Meloy describes Chet as follows:

He spent his twenty-first birthday wearing long johns under two flannel shirts, his winter coat, and the rancher’s big oilskin, with his feet on the space heater, warming up soup on the stove. But he got afraid of himself that winter; he sensed something dangerous that would break free if he kept so much alone.

The book version of that passage is sparer:

He spent his twenty-first birthday wearing long johns under two flannel shirts and his winter coat, warming up soup on the stove. He got afraid of himself that winter; he sensed something dangerous that would break free if he kept so much alone.

Another example where the book version suffers loss of detail is a passage describing Chet at work. The magazine version is as follows:

That weekend was the longest one he’d had. He cleaned the tack for the team, and curried the horses until they gleamed and stamped, watching him, suspicious of what he intended. He dosed the calves that needed it with medicine, but mostly they were fine, and went bawling back to their mothers, who waited outside the barn. He wondered if the cows had an idea of their calf, with his habits and smells. Did they worry, or did they just wait for the next thing to happen?

In the book version, that passage is reduced to the following:

That weekend was the longest one he’d had. He fed the cows and cleaned the tack for the team. He curried the horses until they gleamed and stamped, watching him, suspicious of what he intended.

Some readers may prefer the shorter book version of the above-noted passages. But I confess I’m partial to the extra detail (oilskin, space heater, dosing the calves with medicine, etc.) in the New Yorker version.

The differences aren’t just with respect to details. Meloy’s descriptions of Chet’s and Beth’s reactions to each other seem slightly edgier, more intense, in the book version. For example, in the New Yorker story, when Chet offers to show Beth where the café is located, Meloy says:

She looked at him, as if wondering whether she could trust him, and then she nodded. “O.K.,” she said.

In the book version, describing Beth’s reaction to Chet’s offer, Meloy says:

She looked like she was wondering whether to fear him, and then she nodded. “Okay,” she said.

Meloy changed “trust” to “fear.” Why? Maybe to heighten our apprehension of the potential explosiveness of the “something dangerous” that Chet senses within himself. Does the story benefit from such heightening? Not necessarily. Chet’s character is ambiguous. He could be one of those quiet, bottled-up types who one day suddenly goes berserk. Or he could simply be a cowboy embodiment of Gatsby's "romantic readiness." Whatever the case, Chet's profile in the magazine story seems a hint more modulated than it does in the book version. And this seems to work to the story's advantage.

Meloy mentions the fear element again in the following passage, which is the same in both versions, except for the book's addition of “and restless”:

She studied him and seemed to wonder again if she should be afraid. But the room was bright, and he tried to look harmless. He was harmless, he was pretty sure. Being with someone helped – he didn’t feel so wound up and restless.

Chet also experiences fear. In the magazine version, Meloy writes:

He wanted to say that he wasn’t hungry when he was around her, but he feared she might shy away.

In the book version, Chet’s fear that Beth “might shy away” is changed to the more definite “she would shy away.” It’s a subtle change, but it reinforces my impression that Chet’s image in the book version is slightly more dangerous-seeming.

In conclusion, I count at least seventeen compositional differences between the New Yorker “Travis, B.” and the “Travis, B.” of Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It. Granted, most of the changes are minor. However, “Travis, B.” is a masterpiece, and so these variations matter. Overall, I’d say the New Yorker piece is the better version. I wonder why Meloy changed it.

April 18, 2011 Issue

This week’s highlight is Geoff Dyer’s New Yorker debut. His “Poles Apart” is deeply pleasurable. I’ve long been a fan of Dyer’s work. His Out of Sheer Rage was a constant companion during my travels in Nunavut in 2006. The italicized sections of his But Beautiful, describing a Duke Ellington/Harry Carney road trip, are, for me, touchstones of what constitute great writing. My favorite sentence in “Poles Apart”? Well, actually, I have two: “There were amazing photographs of the coils of rock in the variously colored water –reddish, pink, pale blue – and there was the Zapruder-inflected footage of its construction, but the jetty had gone the way of Atlantis, sinking beneath the waveless surface of the Salt Lake.” And, “Most of what there was to see was traffic-related: gas-station logos, trucks the size of freight trains, snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder.” That “snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder” is inspired!

Two other notable pieces this week: Evan Osnos’s “The Grand Tour” (“And yet, behind Berlusconi’s opera buffa and the prosperity gospel about Chinese one-party efficiency, my busmates caught unredacted flickers of insight”) and Keith Gessen’s “Nowheresville” (“Strangest of all was the wind howling through the elevator shafts. 'Whooooo,' it said. 'Whoooo-ooo-ooo' ”).

April 11, 2011 Issue

When was the last time you saw “moviegoers,” “prep,” “colonoscopy,” “woman,” “drinks,” “swears,” and “orgasm” combined in one sentence? I’ll bet never. If you want to read it, turn to Tad Friend’s delightful “Funny Like a Guy,” in this week’s issue, and you’ll find, amidst the rich verbal textures, this miracle of inventive construction: “Studio executives believe that male moviegoers would rather prep for a colonoscopy than experience a woman’s point of view, particularly if that woman drinks or swears or has a great job or an orgasm.” There’s poetry in that! Here’s another example from the same piece: “Though she had arresting cameos in 'Lost in Translation' and 'Brokeback Mountain,' her more usual task in fare like 'The Hot Chick,' has been to perform CPR on such dialogue as 'It’s not every day that your best friend grows a penis' – to be a one-woman rescue team for films that aimed low and crashed before they got there.” That “to perform CPR on such dialogue” is inspired, as is the combination of movie titles, together with the surrealistic quote and “one-woman rescue team.” “Funny Like a Guy” is filled with such assemblages – grammatical equivalents of Joseph Cornell’s miniature boxes of weird, poetic images and oddments. Reading them is bliss!

Pritchett's Precision

In preparation for a post I’m planning called “Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 – 2011,” I’ve been rereading some of V. S. Pritchett’s work. Between 1949 and 1988, he wrote seventy New Yorker book reviews. They are among the glories of the art of book reviewing. I don’t think it’s correct to say, as Roger Angell said, that Pritchett “was not a stylist” (“Marching Life,” The New Yorker, December 22, 1997). I think he was a great stylist. Maybe what Angell meant is that he didn’t write fancily. And that’s true, he didn’t. His style was plain, but it was clear and sharp – “sharp as horseradish,” as he himself said about Chekhov’s humor (in his brilliant essay “A Doctor,” included in his 1979 collection The Myth Makers) – sharp in terms of both precision and pungency. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

On Camus: “His senses responded to the harsh mountain landscape, the stony plateau, and the desert that was another sea; to the clear sunlight, the brassy heat, and the seductive silence of the evenings. The deep sense of “indifference” in him responded to the indifference of nature, but not in a Northern, Wordsworthian way; there was nothing “deeply interfused” here. Each stone or tree was an object: his visual sense of the “things” of landscape is intense in all his writing. Mortality was a presence as unanswerable as a rock.” (“Albert Camus,” The New Yorker, December 20, 1982)

On Tolstoy: “He is the absolute patriarch. He toils as an artist, as a teacher, as a farmer, and in bed. His family toils for him. His wife obeys – and also learns from him the deadly habit of diarizing and counter-diarizing. His intellect growls away, and he exacts as much from himself as he exacts from others.” (“Two Bears in a Den,” The New Yorker, August 21, 1978)

On Byron: “Byron is a good letter writer because whether he is scoffing, arguing, or even conducting his business affairs, he has a half-laughing eye on his correspondent; although he can turn icily formal, he has mainly a talking style of worldly elegance and is spontaneously the half self of the moment, for not only he but everyone else knew the duality of his nature. The whole person can be deduced from what he dashingly offers. His character is a springboard from which he takes a dive into what he has to say about himself for the moment, bringing other people to half life in the splash.” (“Byron,” The New Yorker, June 2, 1980)

On Henry James: “The spell of the letters really lies in their idiosyncrasy. They are communings with himself as much as with friends. They are also talking letters. They are written in his dictating period, and he writes as one listening to his own voice as it leads him on, watching his words float on the air, and delighting in the studied mischief of his hesitations and parentheses. He always evokes the friend to whom he is writing. His enormous privacy flowers. His lonely room fills up with voices; he carries his friends down the happily rambling stream of consciousness.” (“The Last Letters of Henry James,” The New Yorker, August 20, 1984)

Lean, simple sentences composed of concrete, precise words that evoke vivid images and sensations – “stony plateau,” “brassy heat,” “his intellect growls away,” “his enormous privacy flowers,” “icily formal,” etc. - govern the style of the above-quoted passages, and are among the hallmarks of Pritchett’s brilliant way of writing. The sentence “Mortality was a presence as unanswerable as a rock,” in the Camus passage above, is exemplary of that clear, sharp quality I mentioned earlier.

Credit: The above photo of V. S. Pritchett is by Cecil Beaton; it appears in The New Yorker (December 22, 1997) as an illustration for Roger Angell’s “Marching Life."

April 4, 2011 Issue

There’s a terrific GOAT blurb in this week’s issue about Karen Kilimnik’s show at 303 Gallery. It’s so good – where goodness means rich, surprising, delicious, nearly abstract - I’m going to quote it in full:

Like no one except Cady Noland – but with sweetness, rather than menace – Kilimnik decisively altered installational art two decades ago, imbuing it with an emotive, storytelling force. Here an early “scatter” piece, “The Hellfire Club Episode of the Avengers” (1989), is reprised, along with never before seen drawings from the eighties, recent paintings, and some new painting-like photographs (a full moon tangled in branches of nocturnal trees). Photographs, photocopies, props, and velvet drapes – almost entirely of black, white, and gray – elevate fandom for the old Brit spy show to a pitch of soulful delirium. Everything about it is shabby and surprises. The shattery composition amounts to a walk-in-Cubism of achingly various romance.

"The shattery composition amounts to a walk-in-Cubism of achingly various romance" – how fine that is! I wonder who wrote it? My guess is Andrea K. Scott, who writes GOAT’s “Critic’s Notebook” on art. But that “Photographs, photocopies, props, and velvet drapes – almost entirely of black, white, and gray – elevate fandom for the old Brit spy show to a pitch of soulful delirium” is very Schjeldahlesque. The way the verb “elevate” is buried in the middle of the sentence is a hallmark of Schjeldahl’s style. For example, in a piece on Agnes Martin, Schjeldahl writes, “Scored, alternately continuous and broken horizontal lines cut to white gessoed canvas through a white-bordered square mass of tar-black paint” (“Life Work,” The New Yorker, June 7, 2004; included in Schjeldahl’s great 2008 collection Let’s See). So … I think the “Kilimnik” blurb could’ve been written by Schjeldahl. It’s such a delectable piece that it intensified my appreciation of several other GOAT items this week, e.g., the “Joan Mitchell,” which features yet another of those gorgeous “buried verb” sentences - “Counterpoints of piled-up paint and blank surface convey that more is more and that less is heaven.” Now, that just has to be by Schjeldahl, doesn’t it? Either that or his piquant style is rubbing off on GOAT’s writers.

If you’re like me and you enjoy “catalog” sentences – exuberant compendiums of detail that bespeak love of life – you’ll like GOAT’s “Paul Ramirez Jonas” note, which describes the base of an equestrian statue that “doubles as a four-sided bulletin board.” On this board are pinned, “notes, business cards, ticket stubs, money, a dry-cleaning receipt, children’s art, a paper mobile, work-for-hire notices, and the inevitable ephemera of New York: a ‘no menus’ sign and a ‘Dan Smith will teach you guitar’ flyer.” Did I mention that I love lists like this? I devour them. John Updike, in his wonderful essay on Thoreau (in Updike’s 2007 collection Due Considerations), says, “It is the thinginess of Thoreau’s prose that excites us.” It’s the same for me regarding these great GOAT pieces: it’s the thinginess that excites me.

And the excitement continues, because there are at least two more dandy lists in this week’s GOAT: Mike Peed’s inspired “Tables For Two” description of Edi & The Wolf’s interior (“The inside holds what appears to be the hoard of an exuberant and undiscerning band of freegans: old wooden chairs affixed to the walls at curious angles, worn leather boots filled with dead flowers, a forty-foot rope salvaged from a Bed-Stuy belfry strung like crepe paper above the bar”); and a glorious passage in Richard Brody’s mini-review of Yasujiro Ozu’s wonderfully titled 1933 silent film Dragnet Girl – “His gleeful compositions put objects obsessively front and center – a drum kit, a set of dice, a row of Martini glasses, a billiard cue that pokes right at the camera – and presage the deep-focus symphonies of Orson Welles and even the vertiginous enticements of 3-D.” Great writing! I lap it up.

Postscript: Since posting the above, I’ve read Steve Coll’s “The Casbah Coalition” and David Grann’s “A Murder Foretold.” They're both excellent – destined to be classics. I wouldn’t be surprised to see “A Murder Foretold” made into a movie. It’s absolutely gripping.

March 28, 2011 Issue

The best thing in this week’s issue is the color-drenched 1941 photo of Helena Rubinstein, wearing a flame-red dress, dripping with jewels, seated in a sumptuous purple armchair. Unfortunately, the article that accompanies the photo – Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Color of Money” – is a dud. Ostensibly a book review, it’s actually another one of Gladwell’s business morality tales. But in this one, the moral Gladwell teases out of a review of Ruth Brandon’s Ugly Beauty is that “Sometimes beauty is just business.” Thank you, Malcolm, for that illuminating aperçu.

Sometimes baseball is just business, too - most of the time, actually. Which is why I took a pass on reading Ben McGrath’s “King of Walks.” Having absolutely no interest in Spanx, I merely skim-read Alexandra Jacob’s “Smooth Moves.” Then I turned expectantly to Lauren Collins’s “Sole Mate.” I loved Collins’s “Angle of Vision” (The New Yorker, April 19, 2010). Alas, “Sole Mate” is not nearly as good, and I think I know why. Its subject, the shoe designer Christian Louboutin, does not appear to attract Collins’s admiration the way the paraglider/photographer George Steinmetz does in “Angle of Vision.” There’s nothing in “Sole Mate” that even comes close to matching the inspiration of some of the passages in “Angle of Vision.” This one, for example: “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.”

The only other piece in this week’s issue that had potential to be interesting was Evan Osnos’s “Aftershocks.” While it’s gracefully written and contains many absorbing facts about the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan’s northeast coast last month, it fails to put a human face on the victims. Compare it with Jon Lee Anderson’s gritty “Neighbors’ Keeper” (The New Yorker, February 8, 2010), a report on conditions in Haiti six days after it was struck by an earthquake. Anderson places Nadia François, who walks miles from her town in a ravine in search of supplies, at the center of his piece. We see the devastation of the landscape and the suffering of the people at ground level, as Anderson follows François’ desperate quest for aid. Osnos, in his piece, doesn’t get close enough to the trauma. And in fairness to him, there was the risk of radiation exposure if he got too close to the disaster zone. Whatever the reason, his piece feels weirdly detached. I think the problem is that Osnos gives us his Tokyo experience, when what we're expecting is a detailed description of life in the cities and villages hit by the tsunami.

Second Thoughts: I’m feeling guilty. I was too hard on Osnos’s “Aftershocks.” The passage in which Osnos and a friend are driving through Tokyo at night and are stopped at a red light “as an aftershock rippled through the car” is amazing.