Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #7: Joan Acocella's "Piecework"

I like Joan Acocella’s work when it stays close to the writing under review, analyzing the “how” of it. For example, in “Heaven’s Gate” (The New Yorker, September 11, 2006), she says,

A book [Alice McDermott’s After This] so drenched in compassion: how does McDermott keep it this side of sentimentality? Sometimes she doesn’t – one or two scenes hurt your teeth – but mostly she does, in several ways.

And then, in the best paragraphs of the piece, Acocella shows us the “several ways” (e.g., “In After This, she’s back to realism, but her language has changed – it tumbles out, freer, more elliptical”).

In “Finding Augie March” (The New Yorker, October 6, 2003; included in her excellent 2007 collection Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints), a review of the Library of America’s Novels 1944-1953, by Saul Bellow, she follows a quotation from The Adventures of Augie March with this inspired simile:

Such sentences occur on almost every page. They are like hall closets; you open them and everything falls out.

I’m awed by Acocella’s writing purely as writing – the way it blends description and analysis. Here are a couple of examples:

Despite O’Hara’s antimetaphysical bent, many of his poems have a kind of dome of glory that rises up over the minutiae of his days. (“Perfectly Frank,” The New Yorker, July 19, 1993; collected in Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints)

I think she [Paula Fox] needed to be, and that these repellent creatures – the warty snake, the tapeworm coiling to the very rim of the toilet bowl – may be images of how, after becoming the little gray ghost that she learned to be as a child, she finally extruded that, with horror, and moved forward, empty at first, into art. (“From Bad Beginnings,” The New Yorker, May 16, 2011)

My favorite Acocella passage – an analysis of Sybille Bedford’s writing style – occurs in her terrific “Piecework” (The New Yorker, April 18, 2005; included in Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints), a review of Bedford’s memoir Quicksands. Acocella, in the piece’s most interesting passage, looks at Bedford’s 1953 travel classic A Visit to Don Otavio. She says:

All of this is told with a tart, fresh empiricism. Here are the book’s opening sentences:

    The upper part of Grand Central Station is large and splendid like the Baths of Caracalla.
    “Your rooms are on Isabel la Católica,” said Guillermo.
     “How kind of you,” said I.
     “Pensión Hernández.”
     “What is it like?”
     “The manager is very unkind. He would not let me have my clothes when I was arrested. But you will have no trouble.”

We never find out why Guillermo got arrested, or even who he is, but this little exchange is a perfect introduction to Bedford’s style: speed, omission, the sharp bite of event, without the tedious explanation.

It’s a sublime quote, followed by a line of brilliant descriptive analysis. I remember reading it and thinking, Yes! That’s the way to do it, with “speed, omission, the sharp bite of event, without the tedious explanation.” On the basis of Acocella’s wonderful review, I went out and bought a copy of A Visit to Don Otavio. It is a terrific book. I count it among my favorites.

Today, in at least partial payment of my debt to Acocella for bringing Don Otavio to my attention, I'm pleased to name her marvelous “Piecework” to my “Top Ten.”

Credit: The above artwork is by Fido Nesti; it appears in The New Yorker, January 7, 2008, as an “On The Horizon” illustration for the event “Eat, Drink & Be Literary,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #8: John Updike's "Gaiety in the Galleries"

A great book review consists of three main ingredients: description, analysis, and quotation. Of these three, quotation is the most crucial. John Updike, master writer and preeminent New Yorker book reviewer for over forty-five years, was a great quoter. His reviews are like little anthologies. They give us literary sensations in concentrated form. Updike not only quoted from the book under review; if he judged the book deficient, he’d cite a successful example along similar lines, and provide a sample quotation from it for comparison. For example, in his brilliant review of Peter Gay’s Art and Act (“Gaiety in the Galleries,” The New Yorker, February 21, 1977; collected in Updike’s superb 1983 Hugging the Shore), a study of causation in art history, he finds Gay less than satisfactory on the question of why Manet’s painting is historic. To exemplify a more illuminating analysis of Manet’s work, Updike quotes the following passage from André Malraux’s The Voices of Silence:

Manet’s contribution, not superior but radically different, is the green of The Balcony, the pink patch of the wrap in Olympia, the touch of red behind the black bodice in the small Bar des Folies-Bergère…. [They] are obviously color-patches signifying nothing except color. Here the picture, whose background had been hitherto a recession, becomes a surface, and this surface becomes not merely an end itself but the pictures raison d’être. Delacroix’s sketches, even the boldest, never went beyond dramatizations; Manet (in some of his canvases) treats the world as – uniquely – the stuff of pictures.

Updike comments:

Malraux’s point about the patches of color offers a perspective, a thread through the tangle; he performs a historian’s task by locating the historic moment. Manet in 1881, painting a bar girl at the Folies-Bergère, dabs in some red without a representational excuse; Gropius in 1911, designing a shoe-last factory, leaves out a corner support and joins two planes of glass at a right angle; Mondrian around 1914 (it is characteristic of artistic events to be chronologically elusive) covers a canvas with no more than vertical and horizontal lines – such are the “acts” that Mr. Gay promises to distinguish in his title, and that he all but loses within the infinite multiplicity and interrelatedness of historical circumstance.

Malraux’s observation on Manet, when I read it thirty-three years ago in Updike’s review, built itself into my perception. To this day, whenever I see a reproduction of a Manet, I think of what Malraux said about the color-patches. And whenever I think about the historian's task or, for that matter, the critic's task, I think of Updike's astute comment on Malraux's point about the color-patches - how it "offers a perspective, a thread through the tangle."

For Updike, quotation was the artistic aspect of reviewing. As he said in the foreword to Hugging the Shore, “To show, in a series of quotations, the author himself (dead or not) what he has indeed written: this does approach creativity.”

In recognition of the quotational brilliance of Updike’s “Gaiety in the Galleries,” I’m pleased to award it #8 place on my “Top Ten." It's the first of two reviews by John Updike that I've selected for inclusion on the list.

Credit: The above artwork is by Fido Nesti; it appears in The New Yorker, January 7, 2008, as an “On The Horizon” illustration for the event “Eat, Drink & Be Literary,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #9: V. S. Pritchett's "A Form of Conversation"

V. S. Pritchett was a voracious, omnivorous, ingenious book reviewer. From 1952 to 1988, he wrote seventy “Books” pieces for The New Yorker. He reviewed everything – novels, stories, memoirs, diaries, studies, notebooks, travelogues, letters - on and on. I enjoyed his pieces immensely and looked forward to reading them in the magazine. The ones I relished most were his reviews of writers’ letter collections. The deep pleasure he took from exploring a thick volume of, say, Lord Byron’s Letters or Tolstoy’s Letters was readily apparent in the verve and piquancy of his prose. I want to include one of Pritchett’s letters reviews in my “Top Ten,” but I confess I’ve had difficulty choosing from such an embarrassment of riches. There are at least six candidates: “Two Bears in a Den,” a review of Tolstoy’s Letters (The New Yorker, August 21, 1978); “A Form of Conversation,” a review of “The Letters of Evelyn Waugh” (The New Yorker, December 22, 1980); “Turgenev” (The New Yorker, August 8, 1983); “Conrad” (The New Yorker, January 9, 1983); “E. M. Forster” (The New Yorker, April 2, 1984); “The Last Letters of Henry James” (The New Yorker, August 20, 1984). By the way, none of these six excellent reviews is found in Pritchett’s Complete Collected Essays (1991). In fact, of the forty-nine reviews that Pritchett contributed to The New Yorker in the period April 26, 1976 to March 21, 1988, only sixteen are included in the Complete Collected Essays. The Complete Collected Essays’ claim that “Collected here are all the literary essays V. S. Pritchett has written over his long and brilliant career” is incorrect. Pritchett’s Complete Collected Essays is glaringly incomplete.

In the end, I settled on “A Form of Conversation” as the representative Pritchett review on my “Top Ten” list. What decided me is the extraordinary “Easter sense” passage from one of Waugh’s letters that Pritchett quotes in his piece:

One must distinguish between uses of “new.” There is the Easter sense in which all things are made new in the risen Christ. A tiny gleam of this is reflected in all true art. Every work of art is thus something new.

I read that quote (thirty-one years ago!) and it carried straight into my memory. I’m not at all religious, but I’ve never forgotten it. I don’t agree with it. It’s a conservative view, positing that only art that’s continuous with tradition is “true art.” But in its expression – that “Easter sense in which all things are made new” – it’s incredibly beautiful. It’s a wonderful quotation, the clinching detail in a magnificent review.

Credit: The above artwork is by Fido Nesti; it appears in The New Yorker, January 7, 2008, as an “On The Horizon” illustration for the event “Eat, Drink & Be Literary,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #10: Sanford Schwartz's "Georgia O'Keeffe Writes a Book"

For me book reviews are the ultimate brain candy, a delectable dulce de leche mix of description and analysis. From the time I started reading The New Yorker, in 1976, it's been (and continues to be) a prime source of terrific book reviews. Over the years, I’ve devoured hundreds, maybe thousands, of them. To celebrate the magazine’s brilliant book reviewing, I’ve decided to compile a “Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011.” Today, I start with my #10 pick, Sanford Schwartz’s wonderful “Georgia O’Keeffe Writes a Book” (The New Yorker, August 28, 1978; included in Schwartz’s 1982 collection The Art Presence). Over the next few weeks, I’ll continue to build the list, concluding with my #1 choice.

In “Georgia O’Keeffe Writes a Book,” Schwartz reviews O’Keeffe’s memoir, titled simply Georgia O’Keeffe, which Schwartz accurately describes as “a short text that weaves its way through a large, portfolio-size book of color reproductions of her oil paintings, pastels, and watercolors.” His piece brims with inspired writing:

Every sentence seems to have been held up to the light, and tapped for soundness.

Her voice is hauntingly off-key: it is always a shade too remote, too headstrong, or too naïve.

They [O’Keeffe’s paintings] are souvenirs of a way of life that is based on the idea that all experience can be seen aesthetically.

But the passage that really struck me, imprinting itself on my consciousness forevermore (i.e., until Thurber's "claw of the sea-puss" finally gets me), is this one:

If O’Keeffe’s are often the paintings that we are attracted to when we begin our careers as museumgoers, it may be because, especially when we come to them in our adolescence, they are among the first paintings that give us an inkling of what style is – of the way every nuance in a work of art can come back to one conception, and the way you can hold that conception in your head, as if it were a real thing. Hemingway does something similar when we first read him. He takes the anonymity out of language, and shows how personal and three-dimensional the use of words can be, how a sentence can have a profile and be as contoured as a carving.

How a sentence can have a profile and be as contoured as a carving. God, that's a gorgeous line! I read it, reread it, absorbed it, and mentally stored it away as something never to be forgotten. In fact, Schwartz’s review made such an impact on me that I tore it out of the magazine and saved it. I’m looking at its yellowing pages right now as I type this, thirty-three (!) years later.

As a result of reading Schwartz’s “Georgia O’Keeffe Writes a Book,” I went out and bought the large-format Penguin paperback of O’Keeffe’s Georgia O’Keeffe. And when Schwartz’s collection The Art Presence was published in 1982, I went out and bought it, too. To this day I count them both among my favorite books. I’ve never forgotten the great review that led me to them.

Credit: The above artwork is by Fido Nesti; it appears in The New Yorker, January 7, 2008, as an “On The Horizon” illustration for the event “Eat, Drink & Be Literary,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

June 13 & 20, 2011 Issue

I wonder if I’m alone in preferring Vladimir Nabokov’s nonfiction to his fiction? His Lolita and Pale Fire seem like such word games, such tricky artifices. They strike me as semi-real - not so much mimetic as illusionistic. Whereas his autobiography Speak, Memory is amazing in its authenticity, in its effort to pin things down precisely. The same can be said for the selection of letters to his wife Véra that appears in this week’s issue of the magazine. Their sentences brim with glistening thisness:

Couldn’t sleep at all, since at the numerous stations the wild jolts and thunderings of the train cars’ copulations and unlatchings allowed no rest.

I asked, in what seemed a rather pale voice….

He shaved me horribly, leaving my Adam’s apple all bristly….

… and two days ago rode with a woman professor and a group of very black young ladies, very intensely chewing mint gum, in a wooden charabanc-cum-automobile to collect insects about twenty miles from here.

Miss Read, the college head, is very pleasant, round, with a wart by her nostril, but very ideological….

It is very Southern here. I took a walk down the only big street in the velvet of the twilight and the azure of neon lamps, and came back, overcome by a Southern yawn.

I note, in the October 2-3, 1942, letter, written in Hartsville, South Carolina, the occurrence of “bliss” (“It is hard to convey the bliss of roaming through this strange bluish grass …”), a key word in Nabokov’s vast vocabulary, one that is central to the artistic credo that he stated fourteen years later in Lolita’s famous afterword (“For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss…”).

My favorite sentence in the letters is this compressed, slightly surrealistic, three-semicolon beauty:

I’m just back; on the bed; have asked a boy to extract numerous burrs from my pants; I love you very much.

Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams": 3 Reviews

Behold the gorgeous use of “ripple” – one of the English language’s great tactile words - in two recent reviews of Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Julian Bell, in his “Werner Herzog and the World’s Oldest Paintings” (NYR Blog, May 4, 2011) says:

But finally we surrender to the flow of their art, immersed at length in the interplay of torchlight, rippling cave flanks, scorings, charcoalings and red ochre.

That “rippling cave flanks” is superb. The whole sentence is sublime – one of the best sentences that I’ve read in a long time. Amazingly, Anthony Lane, in his “In The Dark” (The New Yorker, May 2, 2011), comes close to topping it. He says:

Above all, we return to the animals, which are sketched with gusto not on flat surfaces but on constant bumps and curves. The effect – perhaps, the original intention, under flickering flame light – is to ripple them into the illusion of perpetual motion.

Lane’s use of “ripple” as a verb is inspired. I need to see this film! A third review – Peter Campbell’s “In The Cave” (London Review of Books, April 28, 2011) provides the clinching description:

Herzog leads you to a place you will never visit and the sense inside the cave that the 3D image produces makes it all the more tantalizing. You want to get your own torch and walk where the film-makers walked.

I’m certainly tantalized. I can hardly wait to feast my eyes on Herzog's film.

Credit: The above artwork is titled "The Panel of the Lions, Chauvet Cave"; it's used to illustrate Julian Bell's "Werner Herzog and the World's Oldest Paintings" (NYR Daily, May 4, 2011).

June 6, 2011 Issue

I feel a tad guilty picking David Denby’s “The Hangover Part II” review for comment when there are several articles on much more serious matters in the magazine this week to choose from. But seriousness is not my ultimate guide, as I navigate my way through the magazine’s riches; pleasure is. And Denby’s review, titled “Where The Boys Are,” is a tremendous source of reading pleasure, in terms of both analysis and description. It’s also illustrated by a terrific, eye-catching, Pepto-Bismol pink artwork by Kirsten Ulve. The first film, The Hangover (2009), received only a brief “Now Playing” blurb in The New Yorker. But the piece, written by Bruce Diones, was enthusiastic: see “Goings On About Town,” The New Yorker, June 22, 2009, in which Diones says, among other things, “what makes this bromance work is the performers’ contagious camaraderie.” Now the sequel has caught Denby’s attention, and he’s written a dandy review. What I like about it is, firstly, that it illuminates The Hangover’s clever structure. Denby says,

Philips and the first set of screenwriters, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, did something brilliant in “The Hangover.” They showed us not the long night of vice but the longer day after it, when the men, stone-cold sober, are forced to realize, with increasing horror what they have done to the world and to themselves in the preceding twelve hours.

Secondly, I like Denby’s humor. For example, he says,

The two movies offer a comedy of types, a kind of Freudian allegory, with Bradley-Cooper enacting the ego, Ed Helms the superego, and Zach Galifianakis the id. Or, to put it more simply, aggression, caution, and stupidity.

And thirdly, I like this description:

“The Hangover” has the physical freedom and the wildness of a great silent comedy, though, heaven knows, none of the innocence.

For all these reasons, David Denby’s “Where The Boys Are” is this week’s Pick Of The Issue.

Credit: The above artwork is by Kirsten Ulve; it appears in The New Yorker, June 6, 2011, as an illustration for David Denby's "Where The Boys Are."

May 30, 2011 Issue

One of the great things about art is the way it can redeem the discarded, the outmoded, the obsolete. Think of Joseph Cornell and the way he made assemblages out of what he called ephemera. As Charles Simic says, in his great essay on Cornell called “The Image Hunter” (The New York Review of Books, October 24, 2002; included in Simic’s 2006 collection Memory Piano):

If he [Cornell] had not eventually figured how to make original twentieth-century art out of his stashes of old movie magazines, moldy engravings, yellowed postcards, maps, guidebooks, film strips, photographs of ballet dancers, and hundreds of other items stored in shoe boxes and scrapbooks in his basement, they would have ended up at a dump or in a flea market.

I thought of Cornell when I was reading Andrea K. Scott’s “Futurism” in this week’s issue of the magazine. It’s about the artist Cory Arcangel, who uses obsolete computer equipment to generate drawings, sculptures, videos, and photographs. Scott says, “Arcangel finds an abject beauty in the way that modern technology is doomed to obsolescence.”

One of Arcangel’s best-known works is his video installation “Super Mario Clouds,” which he created, Scott says, by “taking the code to the classic 1985 Nintendo cartridge and erasing everything but the clouds, which typically drift behind the action.” In “Futurism,” Scott does a good job describing Arcangel’s art. But as I read the piece, I found myself resisting it. Arcangel’s virtual bowlers, pixellated clouds, YouTube clips of cats jumping on pianos, Photoshop-gradient photographs, etc., just don’t work for me. I wonder if they work for Scott. Nowhere in her piece does the word “pleasure” occur, unless you count “gloriously cheesy,” which is her description of a website that Arcangel has developed. As an art critic, Scott is nothing if not sensual. Her “Critic’s Notebook” pieces are filled with sensual, tactile description and expressions of pleasure. That’s what I like about them. I recall her ravishing review of the Lynda Benglis show at New Museum (“Making a Splash,” The New Yorker, February 28, 2011), in which she said, “It was a knotty time to make art, and Bengalis literalized it in tangles of painted and glitter-flecked cotton bunting, which gave way to elegant arabesques of pleated metal and Zen-punk wonders in glass and ceramic.” I devour description like that. “Futurism” is almost completely devoid of it. The reason, I think, is that Arcangel’s work didn’t sufficiently excite Scott’s considerable descriptive power.

Jeffrey Toobin’s “Madoff’s Curveball,” is also in this week’s issue. It’s about New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon and Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. It’s a fascinating story and Toobin tells it very well. One aspect of it troubles me. Toobin shows that the complaint lodged against Wilpon by bankruptcy trustee Irving Picard contains a false accusation. Picard alleges that Wilpon and his partner, Saul Katz, were warned by their financial manager, Peter Stamos, that Madoff was “too good to be true.” But, according to Toobin, Picard knew when he made this allegation that Stamos actually said the opposite. Toobin says:

There is something troubling, however, about the way the Picard complaint portrays Stamos as the Cassandra of the Madoff scandal—the person whose persistent warnings were ignored by Wilpon and Katz. Wilpon’s lawyers at Davis Polk discovered that Stamos had given a deposition during Picard’s investigation, and the transcript gives a very different picture of Stamos’s state of mind from that portrayed in Picard’s complaint. “I’m embarrassed to say that I said to Mr. Katz on a number of occasions that my assumption is that Mr. Madoff is . . . among the most honest and honorable men that we will ever meet,” Stamos testified. “And number two, that he is perhaps one of the—my assumption is he’s perhaps one of the best hedge fund managers in modern times. . . . All the way to the time when the fraud was discovered, I had the same conclusion.” In fact, it appears that no one in the Stamos firm had any words of warning about Madoff’s Ponzi scheme until after his fraud was discovered.

To me this is damning evidence against Picard. He’s making an accusation against Wilpon that he knows is false. It would seem to me to be grounds for dismissal of the complaint against Wilpon and for discipline proceedings against Picard. Curiously – and this is the part that bothers me – Toobin not only shrinks from drawing this conclusion, he also appears to rationalize Picard’s wrongful action. Toobin says:

Complaints in civil cases are designed to be argumentative documents, but Picard’s words about Stamos seem typical of an approach that seems to find malevolent intent in virtually everything Wilpon and Katz did.

But surely Picard’s words are more than just “argumentative”; they’re blatantly false! I find it hard to accept that the court would allow Picard to get away with such an underhanded tactic. I wish that Toobin, instead of trying to excuse Picard’s action as “typical,” had forcefully condemned it. In his failure to do so, he mars what is otherwise a consummate piece of journalism.