Franzen's Flaws

Victoria Patterson, in her “Not Pretty” (Los Angeles Review of Books, February 25, 2012), calls Jonathan Franzen’s depiction of Edith Wharton, in his “A Rooting Interest” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2012), “mean-spirited and off-key.” She says Franzen’s piece contains “a strange negative slanting of Wharton’s biography and a peculiarly misplaced concentration on her physical appearance.” Patterson’s critique strikes me as valid. I disliked Franzen’s piece for a slightly different reason. He doesn’t provide any quotations from Wharton’s work. He’s so focused on plot analysis, he omits any examination of her writing as pure writing. He tells us that Wharton’s “a born writer,” but he doesn’t show us her writing. John Updike, in the foreword to his great Picked-Up Pieces (1976), formulated a sort of poetics of book reviewing. One of his “rules” is “Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the reviewer’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.” Franzen might reply that “A Rooting Interest” isn’t a book review; it’s his attempt to answer “What to make of Edith Wharton, on her hundred-and-fiftieth birthday?” But in addressing that question, Franzen summarizes the plots of three of Wharton’s novels (The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence), tracing what he perceives to be her preoccupation with female beauty. In my opinion, he should’ve provided at least a “taste,” as Updike says, of each of these works. His failure to do so is another aspect of his “peculiarly misplaced concentration” (to borrow Patterson’s words) on Wharton’s looks, rather than on her writing.

Credit: The above portrait of Edith Wharton is by Thierry Guitard; it appears in The New Yorker (April 16, 2007) as an illustration for John Updike's "The Changeling."

In Fact

This week, in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Jennifer B. McDonald, reviewing The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal (“In the Details,” February 26, 2012), calls D’Agata’s championing of belief over fact “hogwash.” I totally agree, although I would’ve responded more vehemently and said “bullshit.” I was pleased to see a number of New Yorker writers (John Updike, E. B. White, Katherine Boo, Elif Batuman, Philip Gourevitch, and John McPhee) among the examples McDonald provides in support of her position that “Superb literary artists have managed to do their work while remaining precise about details D’Agata would dismiss as frivolous.” According to McDonald, D’Agata argues that, “His duty is not to accuracy…. His duty is to Truth. And when an artist works in service of Truth, fidelity to fact is irrelevant.” But “truth” is such a weasel word. Consider, for example, James Wood’s concept of “fictional truth”: “Sebald so mixes established fact with unstable invention that the two categories copulate and produce a kind of truth which lies just beyond verification: that is, fictional truth” (“W. G. Sebald’s Uncertainty,” The Broken Estate, 1999). A journalist who toys with facts in the name of Truth is not a journalist; he’s a fictionist. David Remnick, in the preface to his 2006 essay collection The Devil Problem, writes: “In defense of these stories, the reader should know they are true. Or, better to say, factual.” I agree; it’s much better to say “factual.” McDonald’s piece powerfully refutes D’Agata’s outrageous propositions. I wouldn’t change a word of it, except the final line, which reads, “Stay true, young Jim. Stay true.” I would say, “Stay factual, young Jim. Stay factual.”

Credit: The above artwork is by Henrik Kubel; it appears in The New York Times Sunday Book Review (February 26, 2012), as an illustration for Jennifer B. McDonald's "In the Details."

February 13 & 20, 2012 Issue

Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Transfiguration,” in this week’s issue, is extraordinary. In detail after often unimaginable detail, it describes a groundbreaking operation: “a full face transplant, something that had never been done before.” What do I mean by unimaginable? Consider this passage:

Pomahac walked back to the Tupperware container and gently took the transplant out. His movements were clinical and measured, as if he were handling a delicate piece of art. The face was the same color as his surgical gloves: latex beige, pale, glistening with ice water. It was slightly unshaven, as if the beard had grown in transit. The rubbery-looking skin supported an inch or so of cartilage, vessels, fat, and nerves – a red mash of tissue – beneath it. Spread out in Pomahac’s hands, the face was massive, about the circumference of a hubcab.

I confess I read and reread that passage. I find Khatchadourian’s imaging of the face’s color (“latex beige, pale, glistening with ice water”) transfixing. The detail about it being “slightly unshaven” is amazing! Khatchadourian’s description of the whole complex, intense operation, actually consisting of two operations – the removal of the donor’s face is one procedure, and the replacement of the recipient’s face with the donor’s face is a second procedure – which occupies all of Part III, is utterly fascinating. Over the years, I’ve read some great New Yorker action descriptions (e.g., Liebling on boxing, McPhee on canoeing and fishing, Angell on baseball, Buford on cooking, etc.), but this piece on surgery is – I’ll say it again – absolutely extraordinary.

Khatchadourian is a wonderful noticer of details. “Transfiguration” has this picture of Pomahac transferring the face:

Pomahac carefully swiveled from the trolley to the operating table, placing the donor’s face where Wien’s own face had been. “It’s going to go twice around his,” he observed dispassionately. During the dissection, Pomahac had cut the skin far beyond the hairline, to transplant part of the scalp as well. The donor’s hair was slightly lighter than Wiens’s – it had some gray in it – and some of Wiens’s hair poked out from underneath, as if he were wearing an ill-fitting mask.

That detail about “some of Wiens’s hair poked out from underneath, as if he were wearing an ill-fitting mask” is excellent.

It’s not clear whether Khatchadourian actually witnessed the face transplant first hand, or whether his descriptions are reconstructions based on videos, transcripts, interviews, etc., and it doesn’t matter. His account of the operation(s) appears totally authentic, completely accurate, and positively riveting.

Not only is Khatchadourian a great describer; he’s also a brilliant assembler of quotation, as is well known by anyone who’s read his previous pieces about WikiLeaks (“No Secrets,” The New Yorker, June 7, 2010) and the BP oil spill (“The Gulf War,” The New Yorker, March 14, 2011). “Transfiguration” is a rich, beautifully interwoven assemblage of quotation from multiple first and secondary sources. Khatchadourian appears to have sought out and directly talked to most of the people principally involved, including Dallas Wiens, the incredibly brave, resilient, tolerant recipient of the face transplant; Jeffrey Janis, the reconstructive surgeon who oversaw Wiens’s miraculous recovery at Parkland Hospital; Bernard Devauchelle, chief of maxillofacial surgery at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire d’Amiens, who conducted the first face transplant; Bohdan Pomahac, America’s “leading specialist in face transplants,” and leader of the surgical team that performed Wiens’s operation; Elof Eriksson, chief of plastic surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who was a key member of Pomahac’s team; and various members of Wiens’s family.

Khatchadourian’s “No Secrets” and “The Gulf War” are brilliant, but “Transfiguration” is his masterpiece (so far). It’s an unforgettable piece of writing. It moves Khatchadourian to the front rank of New Yorker writers.

February 6, 2012 Issue

Until I read Ian Frazier's great "Out of the Bronx," in this week's issue, the term "private-equity firm" was, for me, just an empty abstraction, like "hedge fund," "leveraged buyout," and all those other financial gimmicks investors use to line their pockets. Frazier's piece turned the abstract into the pungent and the particular. Now I associate "private equity firm" with the destruction of the "warm, gingerbready smell" of fresh-baked cookies. "Out of the Bronx" is about, among other things, the downfall of the Bronx-based Stella D'oro bakery as a result of being taken over by a greedy, ruthless private-equity firm named Brynwood Partners. The piece is noteworthy because many of the crucial details are noticed not by Frazier's eyes, but by his nose. Consider, for example, this amazing description:

The baking cookie smell entered check-cashing places and barbershops and bodegas, it crossed the razor wire into the M.T.A. yards and maintenance sheds west of Broadway, it occupied the loud channel of the Major Deegan Expressway, just to the east; kids dozing in the back seats of their parents' cars sniffed the air and knew they were almost home. The smell competed with the acridity of hot wax and detergent chemicals at Nice Guys Car Wash, just across the street from the factory, and domesticated the beer fumes and late-night atmosphere at Stack's Tavern, a shamrock-bedecked bar between 234th and 236th Streets, where a bartender told me, "Sure, I remember the smell - fresh-baked cookies. Nuttin' wrong with that!"

That "kids dozing in the back seats of their parents' car sniffed the air and knew they were almost home" is inspired! The whole passage is beautifully rhythmed; it reminds me of Joyce's cadences in his great "snow was general all over Ireland" paragraph at the end of "The Dead." Aromatic details are powerfully evocative, yet so few writers include them in their descriptions. Frazier is an excellent "nose" writer. His description, in Travels In Siberia (2010), of the smell of Russia is unforgettable: "I breathed it deeply. Yes, it was all there - the tea bags, the cucumber peels, the wet cement, the chilly air, the currant jam. About the only point of similarity between this smell and the one I'd just left in Nome was the overtone of diesel exhaust."

A different smell - the smell of freshly baked cookies - permeates "Out of the Bronx." I breathed it deeply. Whenever I see or hear "private-equity firm," I'll remember the cookie smell. I'll remember what Brynwood Partners did to Stella D'oro.

Postscript: Another brilliant piece in this week's issue is Jeremy Denk's "Flight of the Concord." Written in the first-person present, it's a miracle of description - miraculous in the sense that it provides a fascinating glimpse of a pianist's inner thoughts, his inscape, as he proceeds, take after take, through innumerable technical and interpretative problems, to record Charles Ives's "Concord" Sonata. Reading it is rapture.

"Drive": Lane v. Brody

It’s interesting to see the various ways New Yorker critics treat movie violence. For example, Anthony Lane appears to have little appetite for graphic, Peckinpah-esque bloodletting. In his review of No Country For Old Men (“Hunting Grounds,” The New Yorker, November 12, 2007), he writes:

Acts of monstrosity are coolly perpetrated throughout, but the resulting film strays beyond cool to the verge of the passionless; if Deakins’s camera leans in close to gaze on damaged flesh (we focus on Chigurh’s leg as he swabs and stitches a gunshot wound), that is not because the Coens harbor any tenderness or pity, still less an urge to lament the legacy of violence. They simply retain a juvenile weakness for gore, challenging us to match their sang-froid and saluting Chigurh himself for showing the way.

Note that “juvenile weakness for gore.” The implication is that a more mature approach would eschew luridness. This matches with what Lane says in his recent review of Drive (“Road Kill,” The New Yorker, September 26, 2011):

When James Stewart was deliberately shot in the hand, from close range, in “The Man from Laramie” (1955), we did not witness the bullet enter his flesh, nor did we need to. The director, Anthony Mann, knew that his proper focus, moral as well as physical, should be on Stewart’s face, which turned into a writhing map of outrage, agony, and shame—a peculiar, emasculated shame, as befitted a cowboy who lived by the sweat of his hands. Compare the sequence, in “Drive,” in which Albert Brooks shakes a man’s hand and, holding tight, slices through the veins in his wrist. Brooks—the most prominent presence in the movie, caustically cast against type—tells his victim not to worry. “It’s over, it’s over,” he says, and the pitiless soothing of his voice, as the man’s lifeblood ebbs away, is unforgettable, but it’s difficult to concentrate, because Refn is far too concerned to show the fountain of that blood, and its ridiculous leap. In grabbing our attention, he diverts it from what matters. The horror lingers and seeps; the feelings are sponged away.

Far too concerned to show the fountain of that blood. This reminds me of what Pauline Kael said about The French Connection (“Urban Gothic,” The New Yorker, October 30, 1971): “The only thing that this movie believes in is giving the audience jolts, and you can feel the raw, primitive response in the theatre.”

Compared to Lane, David Denby and Richard Brody seem far more accepting of screen brutality. They scan the violent imagery for meaning. Denby, in his recent review of Haywire (“Flesh and Fantasy,” The New Yorker, January 30, 2012) writes:

The movie is a divertissement; it’s lightweight and almost meaningless except for the fights, which are exceptionally violent. Soderbergh chops up the chronology and keeps us off balance, so we watch each scene knowing no more than Mallory. We’re with her all the way; she fights in order to learn what traps have been laid. For her, fighting is the only means of discovery.

Brody, in his review of Drive (“Spinning Wheels” (“The Front Row,” newyorker.com, September 19, 2011), interprets the show of violence as “an ultimate proof of self-control.” He writes:

Refn doesn’t seem interested in pain but in its infliction—specifically, how blank-faced, soft-spoken people manage to commit mayhem and, at the moment of violent outburst, stay fixed on their plan and maintain a fearsome calm in the face of disgusting gore.

Fighting as “the only means of discovery,” violence as “an ultimate proof of self-control” – these are interesting interpretations. Denby and Brody test the violence to see if there’s an intelligent point to it. But when they read meaning into movie violence they have to be careful they’re not just rationalizing a hack device for “giving the audience jolts.” I watched Drive last night. I found the violence, particularly the elevator scene, in which the Driver repeatedly stomps on a villain’s head, grossly excessive. I think Lane is right to question it. In his review, he says:

We watch as the Driver stamps, time and again, on the skull of a villain in an elevator; but what exactly are we watching, as the camera rests, for a second, on the mashed-up result? Prosthetics, pixellation, pastry dough? The people around me reacted with the eewrrgh sound that has become de rigueur in the viewing of violence, followed by the traditional hasty giggle to pop the tension; even those moviegoers who revel in such a sight, however, might usefully pause to inspect the kick of pleasure that it provokes. No doubt they will have seen much worse, and they will also know that a bursting brain is no more real than a game of Quidditch, yet what perturbs me about a film as careful and as intelligent as “Drive” is its manifest delusion that, in refusing to look away from the minutiae of nastiness, it is actually drawing us closer to the truth about pain.

I agree. I like Lane’s question: “But what exactly are we watching?” Sometimes, what we’re watching, gruesome as it is, has meaning. As Kael observed in her great “Bonnie and Clyde” (The New Yorker, “October 21, 1967), “The dirty reality of death – not suggestions but blood and holes – is necessary.” But, often as not, the violence is there just to give kicks. One of movie criticism’s purposes is to help us make the distinction.

Credit: The above artwork is by Tes One. It appears in The New Yorker (September 26, 2011) as an illustration for Anthony Lane's "Road Kill."