July 25, 2011 Issue

Reading Nick Paumgarten’s wonderful “Tables For Two” piece about Danji in this week’s issue of the magazine, I recall with pleasure some of his other great “Tables For Two” columns, e.g., his review of Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden (“Maybe our graveyards should be beer gardens”) (The New Yorker, May 15, 2006), of Max Brenner (“omelettes as big as handbags”) (The New Yorker, December 11, 2006), of Hotel Griffou (“but a few rounds proved that these drinks were not girly”) (The New Yorker, August 31, 2009), and, above all, of Tony Luke’s (“and soon you find yourself pushing the thing into your mouth like a log into a chipper”) (The New Yorker, April 11, 2005). Paumgarten has written fifty-six “Tables For Two” columns since 2001, when he started doing them. They’re all terrific – where “terrific” means sharp, witty, conversational, casually elegant, delicious. His column this week about Danji contains this inspired line: “A spoonful of jjigae, tart and bubbling like some kind of witch’s brew, was accompanied by the sight, out the window, of Hell’s Kitchen flotsam blowing sideways in a squall”). Someday, I hope Paumgarten collects his “Table For Two” pieces in a book. Actually, I’d welcome a collection of all his New Yorker writings. Until that day comes, I’ll continue to make my own collection, clipping the pieces from the magazine, now and then rereading them, savoring the writing, imagining a tasty foot-long Philly cheesesteak disappearing into my chipper.

Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #3: James Wood's "Red Planet"

James Wood has emerged as one of this blog’s major guiding lights. His marvelous definition of “thisness,” as set out in his How Fiction Works (2008), is, for me, a touchstone. “By thisness,” he says, “I mean any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion.” Wood has a jeweler’s eye for thisness. My favorite parts of his reviews are where he picks out descriptive details from the work under consideration and holds them up to the light for a closer look. For example, in his “Asylum” (The New Yorker, June 28, 2010), a review of Adam Foulds’s novel The Quickening Maze, he begins with this magnificent collage of details:

It is a remarkable work, remarkable for the precision and vitality of its perceptions and for the successful intricacy of its prose. Here is a man caught in a coughing fit, whose “eyes thickened in their sockets.” And here is a young woman brushing her hair “until it was glossy and fluent.” And another young woman, also brushing her hair, her face “vacant with concentration.” Here are some patients in a mental asylum, “shuffling, drowsy as smoked bees.” And an old attendant at the asylum: “His face was so detailed, so full of character, that John always found encountering him to be a small event, like eating something.” Mademoiselle Leclair, a French tutor: “She was a dumpy spinster from somewhere in Picardy with a pale extensive face that ran mostly downhill from a long, white nose.” The study of a doctor who runs the asylum: “a private red gloom of papers and piled books.” And the natural world, noticed exactly and reimagined exactly: “The forest made its little sounds.” (Yes, that could very well be how a forest sounds, and I hadn’t known until I read it.) Icicles: “They were smooth at the top and tapered and tapered down with bulges, like a pea pod, to a stopped drop round as a glass bead.” Birds in a tree: “Small birds, titmice, swapped their places, switching back and forth, then flew off together in a pretty wave of panic.” Winter: “She liked the pinch of absence, the hollow air, reminiscent of the real absence.” To be truly alive to winter, as is one of the novel’s characters, is “to feel the sharp winterness of the day.”

Wood is a connoisseur of literary details. But it’s not every detail that satisfies him. He says, in How Fiction Works, “But I choke on too much detail.” [If you want to see him choking (it’s not a pretty sight), check out his “John Updike’s Complacent God” (included in his 1999 collection The Broken Estate).] That’s why “Asylum” and his great “Red Planet” (The New Yorker, July 25, 2005) are key; they show us details that Wood considers satisfying.

In “Red Planet,” a review of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Wood artfully assembles and presents a collection of choice details similar to the one set out in “Asylum,” except that in “Red Planet” his commentary is itself more detailed. Consider the following passage:

He is also a wonderfully delicate noticer of nature. His first novel, “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), has this picture of lightning: “Far back beyond the mountain a thin wire of lightning glowed briefly.” The protagonist of “Child of God” (1973), a psychotic necrophiliac named Lester Ballard, lights a fire in an old grate, and as it races up the disused chimney sees a spider that “descended by a thread and came to rest clutching itself on the ashy floor of the hearth.” How strange and original that “clutching itself” is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shriveling. “Blood Meridian” is a vast and complex sensorium, at times magnificent and at times melodramatic, but nature is almost always precisely caught and weighed: in the desert, the stars “fall all night in bitter arcs,” and the wolves trot “neat of foot” alongside the horsemen, and the lizards, “their leather chins flat to the cooling rocks,” fend off the world “with thin smiles and eyes lack cracked stone plates,” and the grains of sand creep past all night “like armies of lice on the move,” and “the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake.” McCarthy like this last phrase so much that he repeated it, seven years later, in “All the Pretty Horses” (1992): “Where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows.”

In McCarthy, such repetition is a sign not of haste but of a style that has achieved consistency. That curious word “footed” is characteristic of his willingness to stretch the sinew of language with Shakespearean liberality, “Footed to their long shadows” perfectly conveys the sense of a bird that is all foot and leg, and that, moreover, seems fastened by its feet to the ground. (“Footed to” surely suggests “fitted to” or “fastened to,” and for this reason “legged to” wouldn’t work.)

In the above passage, it’s not only the quotations from McCarthy’s work that I enjoy; I also appreciate having the benefit of Wood’s comments. For instance, that wonderful “How strange and original that ‘clutching itself’ is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shrivelling,” is one of my favorite lines in all of Wood’s writings.

Just as “Literature teaches us to notice,” to quote a memorable line from Wood’s How Fiction Works, so, too, do reviews such as “Asylum” and “Red Planet.” In fact, I’d submit that “Asylum” and “Red Planet” are literature. “Red Planet” is slightly richer in commentary. Therefore, I’ve chosen it for 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, #4: Janet Malcolm's "The Purloined Clinic"

I wonder what Janet Malcolm thinks of Geoff Dyer’s recent “An Academic Author’s Unintentional Masterpiece” (The New York Times, July 22, 2011), in which he says that Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008) contains “some of the most self-worshiping – or, more accurately, self-serving – prose ever written.” Malcolm, in her brilliant “The Purloined Clinic” (The New Yorker, October 5, 1987; included in her superb 1992 essay collection The Purloined Clinic), a review of Fried’s Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (1987), praises Fried’s “energy of imagination and complexity of purpose,” and concludes:

Criticism as radical as this is rare, but only when criticism is radical does it stand a chance of being something more than a pale reflection of the work of art that is its subject. By disfiguring the work of art almost beyond recognition, Fried forces us to imagine it anew – not a bad achievement for a critic.

I was all set to name Malcolm’s “The Purloined Clinic” to my “Top Ten” book review list when Dyer’s piece appeared. “The Purloined Clinic” is one of the most memorable reviews I’ve ever read, not only because of that “only when criticism is radical does it stand a chance of being something more than a pale reflection” passage quoted above, but because of its amazing, unforgettable interpretation of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” as an allegory of both psychoanalytic therapy and deconstructive critical theory. Malcolm says:

As the detective Dupin went straight for the most negligently obvious place that the government minister could have selected for the “concealment” of the compromising letter, so do the analyst and the deconstructionist know that the secrets of human nature and of works of art lie on the surface and in the margins, and that the metaphors of depth, delving, unearthing, plumbing, penetrating are irrelevant to their work.

I think Dyer’s critique of Fried would make Malcolm smile. If Dyer thinks his description of Fried’s “recessive deferral” and “cumulative flimflam” is a revelation, he should read “The Purloined Clinic.” Malcolm was twenty-four years ahead of him in her analysis of Fried’s “process.” For example, she says:

The critic of Realism, Writing, Disfiguration is never still; he is like a waiter rushing from table to table, with so much to do, so many orders to fill, that he is barely able to restrain himself from simply dumping food down on the table, instead of abiding by the proper waiter’s stately protocol. But the critic must – and does – restrain himself, because that’s the whole point, that’s what criticism is: a process, a progress over time, not a mere blurting out of conclusions.

In fairness to Dyer, he does acknowledge Fried’s “brilliance.” But for a fuller, much more elegant appreciation of that brilliance, I recommend Malcolm’s great “The Purloined Clinic.”

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, #5: Dan Chiasson's "Fast Company"

My #5 pick is Dan Chiasson’s “Fast Company” (The New Yorker, April 7, 2008), a review of Frank O’Hara: Selected Poems. Two other Chiasson pieces were in the running: “Works On Paper,” a review of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (The New Yorker, November 3, 2008)), and “Man With A Past” (The New Yorker, March 23, 2009), a review of two volumes of C. P. Cavafy’s poetry – C. P. Cavafy: The Collected Poems and C. P. Cavafy: Unfinished Poems. But “Fast Company” contains so many inspired lines that, in the end, it prevailed. What do I mean by “inspired”? It’s hard to pin it down. Markers might be a shimmering detail, an impeccable rhythm or a palpable texture. The only way I can explain it is by adducing examples. Here are five passages from “Fast Company” that I consider inspired:

His poems lacked the formal appliqué of rhyme and meter, and, where most poets deposited words with an eyedropper, O’Hara sprayed them through a fire hose.

The poems keep changing gears, revving and slowing, caught between two values they prize equally, hurry and delay.

You can see O’Hara’s entire oeuvre as an attempt, therefore, to remake identity on terms more durable than the ones to which he had been consigned. It is a giant counter-biography, full of alternative facts: films and paintings and music he loved, friends, lovers, idols.

His poems, so full of names and places and events, are exquisite ledgers for the tallying of reality. They attempt to move the vital but fleeting items in Column A – sandwiches and torsos, lunch hours and late nights – into Column B, where works of art stand, “strong as rocks,” against the ravages of mortality. The attempt to move people from Column A to Column B is called “elegy,” and while every poet tries it, few have done so with the illusion of real-time improvisation that makes O’Hara’s poems so risky and so satisfying.

The key to understanding O’Hara’s “I do this I do that” poems is in sensing the elegiac undertow that checks their forward progress. They’re not hoppers jammed with bright, popping details; they are, like Shakespeare’s sonnets, little contraptions designed to stop, and yet unable to stop, the passing of time.

The whole piece is eminently quotable. Looking it up in my old New Yorker, I see that I underlined almost two-thirds of it.

I remember my first encounter with Chiasson’s critical writing. I was reading the August 14, 2005, New York Times Sunday Book Review, when I came across a review by him titled “The Solemn Art.” It’s a short piece - a review of W. S. Merwin’s Migration: New and Selected Poems – but, man, does it have power! I remember thinking, as I read it, Hey, this is cool, this is good, this is different. I clipped it out and saved it. I’m looking at it now as I write this.

“Fast Company” is my “Top Ten” pick, but either of the other two pieces I mentioned – “Works On Paper” and “Man With A Past” – would’ve served my purpose just as well, which is to celebrate the beauty, intelligence, and originality of Dan Chiasson’s book reviewing. I confess that my choice of “Fast Company” may have been influenced by my admiration for O’Hara’s poetry. I enjoy reading analyses of his work. “Fast Company” is one of the best I’ve read. Chiasson’s “The Tenses of Frank O’Hara,” in his wonderful One Kind of Everything (2007), is also excellent.

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.

The Deconstructionist's Vacation

I want to briefly explore a possible connection between Malcolm’s “J’appelle un Chat un Chat” (The New Yorker, April 20 1987; included in Malcolm’s great 1992 essay collection The Purloined Clinic under the title “Dora”) and her “Iphigenia In Forest Hills” (The New Yorker, May 3, 2010; published this year in slightly expanded book form using the same title). The texts that I’ll refer to in this discussion are “Dora” and Iphigenia in Forest Hills. They’re linked in my mind by their mention of “vacation.” “Dora” is about the literary qualities of three of Freud’s case histories, of Dora, the Rat Man, and the Wolf Man. In its memorable opening line, Malcolm says:

Today, everyone knows – except possibly a few literary theorists – that the chief subject of the psychoanalytic dialogue is not the patient’s repressed memories but the analyst’s vacation.

Iphigenia in Forest Hills is, as its subtitle indicates, an “Anatomy of a Murder Trial.” Chapter 15 begins as follows:

It is time to introduce a subject known as The Judge’s Vacation.

I remember finding both these statements intensely interesting when I first read them. They bring into the open a heretofore hidden element of two supposedly sophisticated, complex processes - psychoanalysis and criminal trials – that is shockingly simplistic and unsophisticated, namely, the vacations of analysts and judges. When I think of psychoanalysis, I think of many things – free association, dream interpretation, transference, etc. One thing I certainly don’t think about is the analyst’s vacation; it just seems too extraneous and mundane to merit consideration. The same goes for the trial process, which I associate with cross-examination, jury selection, final summation, etc. – but certainly not with the judge’s vacation.

But the analyst’s or the judge’s vacation is just the sort of marginal detail that Malcolm delights in seizing on to show, in the case of the analytic encounter, its “absurdity” [“Out of this absurdist collaboration – the tireless joint scrutiny of the patient’s reactions and overreactions to the analyst’s limited repertoire of activity in the sphere of fees, hours, waiting-room etiquette, and, above all, absences – come small, stray self-recognitions that no other human relationship yields, brought forward under conditions of frustration (and gratification) that no other human relationship could survive”], and, in the case of trial work, its “artificiality” and “inhuman character” (“Ezra’s refusal to play – his continued protests against being questioned in a way that people aren’t questioned in life outside the courtroom – brought into sharp relief the artificial and, you might even say, inhuman character of courtroom discourse”).

Using the entirely familiar and understandable notion of vacations as a way of comprehending what transpires in the often bizarre proceedings of courtrooms and analyst’s offices may strike some as gross oversimplification.

But vacations are just one vulnerable node among many that Malcolm prods in her anatomizations. And, in the case of Mazoltuv Borukhova, the matter of the judge’s vacation may actually turn out to be legally significant. Geoffrey O’Brien, in his excellent review of Iphigenia in Forest Hills (“The Trial,” The New York Review of Books, April 28, 2011), says:

The simmering hostility evoked by the judge’s first entrance in these pages persists as part of the book’s permanent atmosphere, flaring up from time to time, and taking on fresh importance when Hanophy, in the closing days of the trial, forces the defense to deliver its summation with very little preparation time in order not to delay his vacation: “This trial is going to be over on March 17th because I’m going to be sipping piña coladas on the beach in St. Martin.” (This and other such remarks have helped form the basis of an appeal to overturn the verdict currently being brought by the lawyer Alan Dershowitz.)

I hope Dershowitz succeeds. Regardless of whether Borukhova is guilty, justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done.

Mid-Year Top Ten (2011)

A dazzling river of New Yorkers flows through this blog – twenty-six so far this year – and since we’re now half way through 2011, it’s as good a time as any to pause, look back, and pluck a few favorites from the magazine’s exhilarating current of prose. Here’s my “Mid-Year Top Ten New Yorker Stories for 2011”:

1. David Grann’s “A Murder Foretold” (April 4, 2011)
2. Elif Batuman’s “The View from the Stands” (March 7, 2011)
3. Philip Gourevitch’s “Climbers” (July 11 & 18, 2011)
4. Ian Frazier’s “Back to the Harbor” (March 21, 2011)
5. Raffi Khatchadourian’s “The Gulf War” (March 14, 2011)
6. Geoff Dyer’s “Poles Apart” (April 18, 2011)
7. Mike Peed’s “We Have No Bananas” (January 10, 2011)
8. Jeffrey Toobin’s “Madoff’s Curveball” (May 30, 2011)
9. Keith Gessen’s “Nowheresville” (April 18, 2011)
10. Gabrielle Hamilton’s “The Lamb Roast” (January 17, 2011)

Credit: The above artwork is by Laurent Cilluffo; it appears in the May 16, 2011 issue of The New Yorker as an illustration for "On The Horizon."

Garner "Hooked" On Kael

This morning, perusing The New York Times Sunday Book Review, I was delighted to find Dwight Garner’s appreciation of Pauline Kael’s 1989 collection Hooked [see “A Great Guide (Apologies to Its Author),” The New York Times, July 14, 2011]. In his piece, Garner says that, “rereading Hooked was a treat, like someone taking me to Grand Central Oyster Bar and saying, ‘Amigo, the check’s on me.’ I can’t imagine a better beach book in 2011.” I agree. Hooked is a wonderful book; all the material in it originally appeared in The New Yorker. I take this opportunity to tip my hat to Garner for writing one of this year’s most memorable reviews, an expert demolition of Annie Proulx’s Bird Cloud (see “A Novelist Wills Her Dream Home Into Being,” The New York Times, January 4, 2011).

Credit: The above photo of Pauline Kael is by Chris Carroll; it appears on the back cover of Kael’s great 5001 Nights at the Movies.

July 11 & 18, 2011 Issue

The articles in this week’s New Yorker that I most enjoyed are Nick Paumgarten’s Talk story, “Big Picture,” and Philip Gourevitch’s “Letter From Rwanda,” titled “Climbers.” The two pieces are totally different from each other in both style and content. “Big Picture” tells about a photographer’s campaign to bring back Polaroid’s old large-format, twenty-by-twenty-four-inch cameras, only five of which were ever built. It contains a funny scene in which Myrna Suárez uses one of these cameras, with its “Dr. Seussian scheme of rollers and pods,” to take Oliver Stone’s picture. Paumgarten has a gift for getting down on the page not only what people say but how they say it. My favorite sentence in “Big Picture” is “He signed the white border with a Sharpie, taking care not to smudge the goop.”

Gourevitch’s “Climbers” is about a Rwandan cycling team. Actually, it’s about a lot more than that. It explores the realities of a “hideously broken country” trying to pull itself together, a country in the grip of a paradox:

The paradox is that in the name of putting the genocide behind them Rwandans have had it held constantly in front of them, as a warning of the perils of divided identity. And for a young generation that is scarred by its historical inheritance, but free from any direct accountability, it is not enough simply to coexist and to bury the memory of the slaughter; there is a need to make the idea of being Rwandan have greater value.

“Climbers” makes this profound paradox visibly concrete – that’s its triumph. Gourevitch shows us the issues through the lens of Team Rwanda. In the course of his narrative, we are made acquainted with many fascinating details, e.g., landscape (“In northwest Rwanda, in the wet, chilly foothills of the Virunga volcanoes, the soil is black from lava, and ideal for growing potatoes”), cycling (“Gasore watched the helmeted racers whiz by, dazzling in their tight Team Rwanda jerseys and shorts – in the national colors of blue, yellow, and green – crouched over the curved handlebars of their slender road bikes, pedaling in close formation”), homes (“There was a tiny mud-floored anteroom, dark and bare except for a pair of shoes that hung, soles out, on a peg beside a bike helmet”). The images that Gourevitch presents are never static; the cycling motif keeps the narrative moving:

In the rough little villages along the road, the crowds were thick and loud, and time and again a look of ecstatic astonishment would ignite a face as someone recognized the Rwandan jersey in the lead. The air got colder as we rode past the volcanoes, and the sky got lower and darker. At midday, the light was black, and the ceiling seemed to hover almost within reach. When it began to drizzle, I thought we were passing through a cloud. Then, just as we began the long final descent to Gisenyi, a drop of three thousand feet in elevation over eighteen and a half miles, the rain crashed down.

“Climbers” is a great piece. And it’s enhanced by the title page, a ravishing Dominic Nahr photo of two Team Rwanda racers biking on a wet road past a line of smiling spectators.













Credit: The above photo is by Dominic Nahr; it appears in the July 11 & 18, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, as an illustration for Philip Gourevitch's "Climbers."

"Midnight in Paris": Goldberger's Gripe

Paul Goldberger, in “What’s Missing from Woody Allen’s Paris” (posted on newyorker.com’s “News Desk” blog, June 24, 2011), says that Allen’s vision of Paris, as presented in Midnight in Paris, is “flat and one-dimensional.” He says Allen’s Paris “isn’t a city, it’s a stage set,” that it’s “all beautiful surface,” and that “There’s no edge to it whatsoever.” Goldberger isn’t the first critic to complain about Allen’s postcard city views. Penelope Gilliatt, in her review of Allen’s Manhattan (“The Black-and-White Apple,” The New Yorker, April 30, 1979; included in Gilliatt’s 1980 collection Three-Quarter Face), wrote:

In the most wry way, to anyone who knows the Manhattan of potholes and poverty and rudeness, the picture is a fable – written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman – about a city of smooth rides and riches and thoughtfulness. The picture gives us a view of New York as from a chauffeur-driven car. Harlem is invisible, as though covered by a carpet from Sotheby Parke Benet.

Pauline Kael, in her evisceration of Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (“Couples,” The New Yorker, February 24, 1986; included in Kael’s 1989 collection Hooked), says:

The willed sterility of his style is terrifying to think about, though; the picture is all tasteful touches. He uses style to blot out the rest of New York City. It’s a form of repression, and from the look of Hannah and Her Sisters, repression is what’s romantic to him. That’s what the press is applauding – the romance of gentrification.

But if you’re writing “a love letter to the city,” which is David Denby’s description of Midnight in Paris (see his excellent review, “The Better Life,” The New Yorker, May 23, 2011), do you include potholes? Do you include high-rises? Do you include “the warts and all,” that Goldberger says makes Paris so much more interesting than “the Paris of Woody Allen’s mind”? Well, you could include these things, I suppose, if they’re part of what you love about the city. That’s what’s great about Paris – it represents a very large number of choices. Not all Allen’s choices are my choices. I prefer peeling walls, elaborate ironwork, impenetrable graffiti – a pungent, textured Paris, in other words. Allen is, as Denby points out, partial to “creamy-walled hotel rooms, restaurants with tall mirrors, gilt molding, and flower-laden tables.” I found Midnight in Paris lacking in the sort of back alley details that I relish. But you know what? Any lacks that Midnight in Paris may have are more than compensated for by the magnificent final scene on the Pont Alexandre III, where Gil unexpectedly meets Gabrielle. What a beautiful bridge! What a beautiful woman! I love that bridge! I love that woman! At that moment, staring up at the screen, I felt the power of Allen’s romanticism concentrating back on me. I left the theatre elated.

Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #6: Whitney Balliett's "Guernsey Gossip"

Whitney Balliett was a great listener, an inspired responder to sound. His jazz pieces are among the very best writings ever to appear in The New Yorker. A hallmark of the fifty book reviews he did for the magazine is his ear for the voice on the page. He was a connoisseur of “ear” writing. In a review titled “Families” (The New Yorker, August 17, 1987), he describes a group of novelists (Berry Morgan, Mary Robison, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Anne Tyler) as “‘ear’ writers” – writers “who can be read aloud with pleasure, and they sometimes set whole books in the vernacular.” It was high praise, indeed, if he said of a writer that he or she has “a good ear.” See, for example, his review of The Collected Short Stories of Eudora Welty (“Making The Jump,” The New Yorker, January 5, 1981), in which he praises Welty’s “fine comic ear.” In “Talking on Paper” (The New Yorker, December 10, 1984), his wonderful review of The Letters of Jean Rhys, he says,

These are, as she told Wyndham, talking-on-paper letters. Her small, tough, courteous, funny, angry, wise voice comes at us from Cornwall gales and Devonshire downpours, from weariness and illness (both frequent), from drink and beleaguerment. It talks and talks, and is an unstoppable human music that declares again and again that, no matter what, she is afloat and on course.

That “unstoppable human music” is very fine.

For #6 place on my “Top Ten,” I’ve chosen Balliett’s memorable ““Guernsey Gossip” (The New Yorker, June 1, 1981), a review of G. B. Edwards’ “nearly flawless” dialect novel The Book of Ebenezer Le Page. It begins with one of those lyrical, luminous figures that Balliett seemed to effortlessly conjure whenever he wanted to:

Fine opening paragraphs are like sunrises: they fill the mind with light and set up an irresistible momentum.

Four remarkable quotations – the first paragraphs of Duke Ellington’s Music Is My Mistress, Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, Peter De Vries’ The Vale of Laughter, and A. J. Liebling’s The Earl of Louisiana – are followed by the opening passage of Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer Le Page:

Guernsey, Guernesey, Garnsai, Sarnia: so they say. Well, I don’t know, I’m sure. The older I get and the more I learn, the more I know I don’t know nothing, me. I am the oldest on the island, I think. Liza Quéripel from Pleinment say she is older; but I reckon she is putting it on. When she was a young woman, she used to have a birthday once every two or three years; but for years now she have been having two or three a year. To tell you the truth, I don’t know how old I am. My mother put it down on the front page of the big Bible; but she put down the day and the month, and forgot to put down the year. I suppose I could find out if I went to the Greffe; but I am not going to bother about that now.

Reading that, we know straight away that The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is apt to be something Balliett is strongly taken with. And we are right. Balliett describes the book as follows:

Ebenezer is literate but unbookish, and rarely puts pen to paper. So the book, like all first-person dialect novels, is an impossibility: it converts a fluid spoken language into a fixed imaginary written one. It makes sound visible.

It makes sound visible – that could stand as Balliett’s artistic credo - because for forty-nine years (1952 – 2001), that’s what he did at The New Yorker. Like all my “Top Ten” critics, Balliett is a great quoter. He introduces one of the best quotes in “Guernsey Gossip” this way: “His account of her [Ebenezer’s mother’s] death shows the cool, sure way this lovely book goes.”

Balliett doesn’t suspend his critical judgment; he never does; he can be biting when he wants to. But regarding The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, he merely says, “Unfortunately, the book goes soft toward the end.” You can tell from his descriptions of it, e.g., “So life churns beneath the book’s calm, circular, gossiping exterior” – that he’s totally smitten. What hooked him is Edwards’ “charming, crabbed, funny, articulate, rude, unerringly intelligent” talking-on-paper.

So far as I know, Balliett’s New Yorker book reviews are uncollected. If a collection came out, I’d snap it up in a flash. Meanwhile, if you want to read the pieces, you can go online to the New Yorker archive, where you’ll find all fifty, a wealth of incomparable book reviewing.

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.

Six New Yorker Writers On The Guardian's "100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books" List

I’m pleased to see that the Guardian’s recent “The 100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books” (see www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/14/100-greatest-non-fiction-books) includes six works originally published in The New Yorker:

1. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (The New Yorker, September 25, October 2, 9, 16, 1965)
2. Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (The New Yorker, December 18, 1995)
3. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (The New Yorker, June 16, 23, 30, 1962)
4. Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (The New Yorker, December 8, 1975)
5. Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (The New Yorker, March 13, 20, 1989)
6. Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak Memory (The New Yorker, January 3, March 27, June 12, July 31, September 18, 1948; January 1, April 9, December 10, 1949; February 11, April 15, June 17, 1950)

Of course, as a long-time New Yorkerphile, I can think of plenty of other New Yorker non-fiction writings worthy of “Top 100” status. For example:

Ian Frazier’s Great Plains
John Updike’s Hugging the Shore
John McPhee’s Coming into the Country
Pauline Kael’s Deeper Into Movies
John Hersey’s Hiroshima
Joseph Mitchell’s Joe Gould’s Secret
A. J. Liebling’s Between Meals
Roger Angell’s The Summer Game
Henry Louis Gates’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man
Anthony Bailey’s Along the Edge of the Forest
Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe
Whitney Balliett’s Ecstasy at the Onion
Kenneth Tynan’s Show People
The Journals of John Cheever
Calvin Trillin's American Stories
Alec Wilkinson's The Riverkeeper

And that’s just for starters. But let’s not worry about who’s not on the list. Six extraordinary New Yorker writers are there, grouped with the likes of Plato, Freud, Darwin, Gandhi, Thoreau, and Twain. It’s a tremendous honor, and is objective proof, if any is needed, of The New Yorker’s greatness. Three cheers for Bettelheim, Capote, Carson, Gourevitch, Malcolm, and Nabokov!

Credit: The above photo of Janet Malcolm is by Kevin Sturman, and appears on the jacket flap of Malcolm’s Iphigenia In Forest Hills.

July 4, 2011 Issue

There is in Raffi Khatchadourian”s glowing Talk piece “Project Neon,” in this week’s New Yorker, a pleasure taken in city-roaming that is akin to what we find in the writings of Joseph Mitchell and Ian Frazier. It’s about an architect named Kirsten Hively, who goes out at night photographing New York’s neon signs. Khatchadourian begins his piece with an inspired description of Hively noticing, while walking on First Avenue, a Cork & Bottle liquor store sign:

The letters were in pink neon – warm, humming, handmade – and they struck her as objects of neglected beauty.

I find that sentence irresistible. Here’s another one:

The bar’s signs flickered in parts, and many tubes were out, but “CAFE” was still visible, fitted to the rounded corner of the building.

The whole ravishing piece is like that. And newyorker.com provides an added source of pleasure – a slideshow of some of Hively’s photos. They’re terrific! But it’s Khatchadourian’s writing that I’m in awe of. His “Project Neon” is one of the best Talk stories of the year.

"Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century"

Even though it’s been over two months since I read Peter Schjeldahl’s stimulating piece on the Met’s “Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century” (“Inside Story,” The New Yorker, May 2, 2011), I find myself still grappling with what he meant by “otherizing” (“It needs only a sense of external reality that is not other to the self but, rather, otherizing”). I see Sanford Schwartz, in his excellent review of the same show (“Looking into the Beyond,” The New York Review of Books, June 9, 2011), agrees with Sabine Rewald’s interpretation of the “open window” pictures. He says, “Sabine Rewald writes that the open window, as Friedrich and some of her other artists saw it, is about ‘yearning’ and ‘unfulfilled longing,’ and surely this is right.” You’ll recall that Schjeldahl held that “the notion of longing reduces the complexity of Friedrich.” Both Schwartz and Schjeldahl hazard other constructions, as well. For example, Schwartz says, “As his window drawings make clear, Friedrich’s deepest subject was not the force and pageant of nature but our response to it – how we literally approach the world from outside ourselves – and it took him years to find a way to express this most fully.” It’s fascinating to read the thoughts of these two great critics as they attempt to tease out the meaning of Friedrich’s window views. Both seem to reach for psychological explanations. But I wonder if the meaning isn’t right there on the surface, in the precision of the drawings, in the depiction of light coming in the windows.

Postscript: Since posting the above, I’ve read Peter Campbell’s excellent “Am I intruding?” (London Review of Books, November 3, 2011), a review of Sabine Rewald’s Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century. Regarding Friedrich’s window pictures, Campbell notes “Friedrich’s cool insistence that you enter his anonymous space and find its unspecified meaning for yourself.” He says, “It isn’t the painting itself but the stage it offers the imagination that is effective.” He talks about “Friedrichian poetics” – the poetry of solitude, of “feelings about being alone in a bare room.” He says, “The exercise Friedrich’s window pictures offer the imagination comes more often with poetry. Most obviously, in the last lines of Larkin’s ‘High Windows’” (“And immediately / Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: / The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless”).

June 27, 2011 Issue

Due to the postal strike, I’m behind in my New Yorker reading. Even though the mail carriers were legislated back to work last week, the magazine’s June 27th issue still hasn’t arrived in my mailbox. Today, I decided to go online and access the electronic version. Reading the magazine on a computer screen is not nearly as enjoyable as reading it in its tactile paper-and-ink form, but it’ll do in a pinch. The article in the June 27th issue that most struck me is Nicholas Lemann’s “Get Out of Town,” a review of a clutch of recent books about cities and urban planning. Reading Lemann’s engrossing piece, I learned a new word to describe what our cities have become – megaburbs. According to Lemann, “In much of the world, it seems pretty clear that most people who have the chance do leave dense inner cities, while staying in metropolitan areas.” Is this a deplorable trend? I recall David Owen saying a few years ago, in his excellent “Green Manhattan” (The New Yorker, October 18,2004), that population-dense centers such as Manhattan are models for how we should address our environmental ills. Owen characterized sprawling suburbs with their lawns, cars, swimming pools, etc. as environmentally unfriendly. He said,

The environmental challenge we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s non-renewable resources, is not how to make our teeming cites more like the pristine countryside. The true challenge is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan.

Nevertheless, Owen’s notion isn't easy to embrace. In the most memorable passage in his piece, Lemann says:

I lived in the suburbs – Pelham, in Westchester County – for twenty-one years, after which my family moved to an apartment in New York City. We’re all intermittently homesick, especially at this time of year, when suburbia feels like the land of fecundity, as green as a jungle, the streets and sidewalks jammed with children playing. Pelham is devoted to a (long) season of life, parenthood. Most people moved there because they couldn’t afford to live decently in the city with children, and, like Frank and April Wheeler in “Revolution Road,” they claimed that they stayed there out of necessity. As time passed, our collective secret became clear. It wasn’t just good public schools and one bedroom per child that kept us in Pelham. We actually liked it – liked the houses, the slower pace, the regular unplanned access to each other. And given the kids, we couldn’t have done all the wondrous things you can do only in cities anyway.

I think the above passage represents how a lot of us feel about life in the city versus life in the suburbs. It helps explain the “megaburbs” phenomenon. I commend Lemann for weaving his personal, suburban slant in with his presentation of the various pro-city theories under review