Interesting Emendations: David Wagoner's "The Death of a Crane Fly"

David Wagoner is a wonderfully delicate noticer of nature. His great one-sentence poem “The Death of a Crane Fly” (The New Yorker, October 13, 1980) describes a water strider carrying a fallen crane fly, “skimming away with it over / Reflections of yellow leaves, / holding one amber / Lace-ribbed, lifeless wing / Aloft (a small sail / Disappearing among the quiet / Inlets of milfoil) / As buoyantly as a lover.” How precise and subtle that “ amber lace-ribbed, lifeless wing” is. Interestingly, in the version of the poem included in Wagoner’s 1981 collection Landfall, the comma separating “lace-ribbed” and “lifeless” is omitted. Also, in the New Yorker version, the crane fly’s body is described as an “arched frail inch”; in the Landfall version, the crane fly’s body is a bit longer (“arched inch-and-a-half”). I think I prefer the New Yorker version. “Lace-ribbed” is such a beautiful description; it deserves the extra half-beat of separation that the comma provides. The slighter, more tightly fitted structure of “arched frail inch” seems more crane fly-like than “arched inch-and-a-half.” But maybe the latter description is more accurate. Both versions are terrific. “The Death of a Crane Fly” is one of my all-time favorite poems.

April 23, 2012 Issue

I crave subjectivity, an element that, until recently, Jill Lepore’s New Yorker writing has lacked. In most of her previous pieces, she’s kept herself in the background. But recently her “I” has begun to emerge and, as a result, her work has gained in interest. Her “Battleground America,” in this week’s issue, is excellent. It’s about the gun debate – the barriers that impede gun control, the fight over the meaning of the Second Amendment, the conservative use of gun-control as a vote-getter, and so on. I support gun regulation. In Canada, where I live, gun control recently suffered a grievous setback when the Harper government abolished the long-gun registry. So, when I read Lepore’s piece, I was hoping it would expose the irrationality of the conservative argument for less, rather than more, gun regulation. And I was also hoping it would be more than just a third-person narrative of American firearms history. I’m pleased to say that “Battleground America” does not disappoint. The piece is grounded in the here-and-now. Its opening section grabbed me with an account of the shootings at Ohio’s Chardon High School on February 27, 2012. Its second section, more typical of Lepore’s usual historical approach, is a statistical overview of the rates of gun ownership in the United States. But the third section is an eye-opener; it’s where, for me, this piece really takes off. I read its opening line (“The day after the shooting in Ohio, I went to a firing range”), and then immediately and pleasurably reread it, savoring the appearance of the “I,” and the impending description of her experience. In we go, Lepore leading the way, inside the American Firearms School. I devour description such as this:

Inside, there’s a shop, a pistol range, a rifle range, a couple of classrooms, a locker room, and a place to clean your gun. The walls are painted police blue up to the wainscoting, and then white to the ceiling, which is painted black. It feels like a clubhouse, except, if you’ve never been to a gun shop before, that part feels not quite licit, like a porn shop. On the floor, there are gun racks, gun cases, holsters, and gun safes. Rifles hang on a wall behind the counter; handguns are under glass. More items, including the rifles, come in black or pink: there are pink handcuffs, a pink pistol grip, a pink gun case, and pink paper targets. Above the pink bull’s-eye, which looks unnervingly like a breast, a line of text reads, “Cancer sucks.”

In “Battleground America,” Lepore remembers her journalistic duty to make us see and feel the reality of things. What’s it like to be inside a shooting range? Lepore’s prose tells us, and a slice of present-day, real-life, gun-obsessed America springs into being. The piece is beautifully structured; passages on the Chardon High School shootings, the Second Amendment, the National Rifle Association, the Trayvon Martin shooting, and the shootings at Oakland’s Oikos University are interleaved with Lepore’s accounts of her shooting lesson at the American Fire Arms School and her attendance at a gun show in West Springfield, Massachusetts. And, in passages such as the following one, it powerfully argues the need for gun control:

Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would habe been better, they suggest, if the faculty of Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

This point seems to me to be irrefutable.

Postscript: I relate to weeds and other humble plants. And I enjoy reading writers who relate to them (e.g., John Updike, Joseph Mitchell, William Carlos Williams, Oliver Sacks). Stephen Burt’s “Flooded Meadow,” in this week’s issue, went straight into my personal anthology of great “weed” writings. It’s a delightful poem, in which weeds connote urban development (“Low dandelion leaves are zoned commercial, / with their promise of puffballs to come”; “Round oniongrass stalks are monuments / to persistence in hard times”). My favorite line in it is “Tall sprigs of goldenrod patrol / the blown-down city line.” I’m a fan of Burt’s critical writing. This is my first encounter with his poetry. In his essay on William Carlos Williams, Burt says that Williams’s “social conscience and his desire to depict new births merged in brilliant, emblematic poems about small, scrappy, flowery things …” ("William Carlos Williams: They Grow Everywhere,” Close Calls with Nonsense, 2009). This helps me understand why I’m drawn to weeds. It’s their scrappy nature I admire. As Burt’s lovely “Flooded Meadow” makes clear, he’s obviously struck by their scrappiness, too.

Roueché's Rhythm

Pikonganna stood on watch at the bow in a shiny translucent raincoat made of walrus intestines. If you find simple, sturdy, gloriously specific sentences like this as delightful as I do, you’ll likely enjoy the work of long-time New Yorker writer, Berton Roueché. He was a master of plain-style writing. William Shawn described his technique as follows: “Certainly his is the art that conceals art. His words are so plain, his sentences so chaste, his rhythms so natural that one can overlook the presence of the writer and see straight through to the matter at hand” (quoted in Whitney Balliett’s obituary of Roueché, The New Yorker, May 16, 1994).

The “matter at hand” was often an intriguing medical case. As Balliett points out in his tribute, “Roueché’s medical pieces became doubly famous: lay readers found them scary and exciting while doctors, impressed by their learning and clarity, used them as medical texts.” By the time of his death in 1994, Roueché had written fifty-eight “Annals of Medicine” stories for The New Yorker. A number of them are collected in his The Medical Detectives (1980).

Roueché also wrote about a wide variety of other matters for the magazine, e.g., a towboat trip down the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers (“The River World,” February 26, 1972), a visit to the Whalers’ Church in Sag Harbor on Long Island (“The Steeple,” March 5, 1949), a canoe trip down the Meramec River (“Countryside,” October 27, 1975), garlic (“A Friend in Disguise,” October 28, 1974), a trip by barge from Lyon to Dijon (“Janine,” October 22, 1984), apples (“One Hundred Thousand Varieties,” August 11, 1975), Appalachian coal miners (“Forty Flights of Steps,” July 16, 1973).

Roueché loved train travel. “I have a fondness for trains,” he says in “Trans Europ Nuit” (The New Yorker, December 28, 1981). In “On the Terrace,” he writes, “A train moved through a different world. It was a world of change and surprise. It was a world of back doors, back roads, back country. It had a backstage intimacy” (The New Yorker, September 15, 1980). In addition to “Trans Europ Nuit” and “On the Terrace,” he wrote three other train pieces – all of them marvelous: “The Best Medicine on the Market” (The New Yorker, January 20, 1962), “Rapido” (The New Yorker, December 29, 1980), and “En Vitesse to Rome” (The New Yorker, February 21, 1983).

My favorite Roueché piece is “First Boat to King Island” (The New Yorker, October 22, 1966), a memorable account of a Bering Sea trip he and two companions made with a group of Inuit in a heavily loaded open boat “made of walrus hide stretched over a wooden frame.” I think it may have been one of Roueché’s favorites, too; he included it in two of his collections: The River World (1978) and Sea To Shining Sea (1985).

Here’s a passage from “First Boat to King Island” that exemplifies the “rhythms so natural” that Shawn mentioned in his description of

Roueché’s style:

The boat edged into the passage. The water was thick with chips and chunks of floating ice. We moved carefully between the embankment of anchored ice and the moving floe on one throttled-down motor. Norbert kept the boat inching along just off the lip of the floe, away from the height and bulk of the ice embankment, but every time I looked, the ice seemed higher and closer. I could already feel the cold of its breath. Kunnuk reached out with an ice lance and jabbed at the edge of the floe. He jabbed again, hard, and a slab of ice came loose and slid slowly into the water. The boy at the stern with Norbert poked it safely past the boat with an oar. It was rotten ice. The whole rim of the floe was rotten ice.

Ten deft, simple, fluid lines – the equivalent of ten short brushstrokes by a master artist (Cézanne, say) – and a dynamic, vivid scene springs to life. Note the economy of his line, the use of compact, tactile words (“thick,” “chips,” “chunks,” “bulk,” “hard,” “slab”), and the brilliant use of repetition (“jabbed at the edge of the floe” / “jabbed again”; “It was rotten ice” / “The whole rim of the floe was rotten ice”). This is quintessential Roueché - plain, simple, direct, evocative. With a moderate number of words, he evokes a world. Don’t let his simplicity fool you. There’s an art to it – selection, shaping, plus that intangible “something” – call it inspiration. Roueché had it. It’s there in his sensual apprehension of the dangerous ice ("I could already feel the cold of its breath").

Credit: The above photo of Berton Roueché is by Nancy Crampton.   

April 16, 2012 Issue

There are four items in this week’s issue that I want to briefly comment on: Julia Ioffe’s “The Borscht Belt,” Basharat Peer’s “Modern Mecca,” Lauren Collins’s “The British Invasion,” and David Wagoner’s “On the Road to Damascus.”

Julia Ioffe’s “The Borscht Belt”

It takes a while for new New Yorker writers to impinge on my consciousness. Even though Julia Ioffe has been contributing to the magazine for a couple of years, “The Borscht Belt” is the first piece by her that I’ve read closely from beginning to end. This article attracted me because it’s about one of my favorite subjects – food. I enjoyed it, particularly the closely observed details about the Golden Rus chefs’ use of a pech, a traditional Russian brick oven (“Still, the oven’s three little compartments provided enough room for frequent rotation of pans and traditional cast-iron pots – fat-bellied, with narrow bottoms – and its warm roof, about a foot below the kitchen’s ceiling, became a favorite for the three young chefs in the kitchen”) and the wonderful description of Syrnikov’s troubles making samogon (Russian moonshine) while being filmed by a Russian television crew. I especially like the subjective note on which this passage concludes: “In the end, Syrnikov made around two litres of samogon, and we drank it all that night. They say that unlike vodka, samogon doesn’t give you a headache the next morning. It’s not true.” I wish “The Borscht Belt” contained more subjectivity. I craved some hint of Ioffe’s presence in the Golden Rus kitchen and during the banquet. I was pleased when, near the end of the piece, she briefly appears, commenting, “The vatrushka, thick with sweetened farmer’s cheese, was the best I’d ever eaten.”

Basharat Peer’s “Modern Mecca”

Curiously, I felt very close to the style of this piece. I say “curiously” because the subject matter – Islamic religion, pilgrimage to Mecca, rituals of the hajj, etc. – is not my cup of tea. But I found Peer’s style – his glorious subjectivity (e.g., “After the final lap, I retreated to the taps, where a Pakistani man passed around recyclable cups of Zamzam water to fellow-pilgrims”), his superb details (“Pilgrims raised smart phones above their heads to record the moment”), and his preference for “flat” description (i.e., plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity) – to be immensely attractive. I see Peer has written a book, Curfewed Night. I think I’ll check it out.

Lauren Collins’s “The British Invasion”

I know I’ve just finished extolling the virtues of plain, simple, orderly, sincere writing. But I also have a love for wild, juicy, labyrinthine sentences, too. Lauren Collins’s “The British Invasion” contains a beauty:

They had been cautioned about nudity (“We hope you have an incredible, stupendous, pant-wettingly, unforgettable week,” but “for heaven’s sake KEEP YOUR CLOTHES ON MAN!!” read a brochure), and about body paint (“The damage caused by body paint numbers into tens of thousands of euros every year”), but the twenty buses – charabancs for social networkers – disgorged swaying centurions, singing pirates, men wearing drinking helmets, men not wearing shirts, a girl with a blow-up doll slung over her shoulder, and a guy wearing something that looked like a diaper.

That “incredible, stupendous, pant-wettingly, unforgettable week” quote is inspired! So is “charabancs for social networkers.” The whole construction is a miniature masterpiece of combinational and syntactical wizardry.

David Wagoner’s “On the Road to Damascus”

Reading David Wagoner’s “On the Road to Damascus” in this week’s issue was like encountering an old friend. His “The Death of a Cranefly” (The New Yorker, October 13, 1980) is one of my all-time favorite New Yorker poems. “On the Road to Damascus” is a different kind of poem; it has a political feel that doesn’t appeal to me. However, the line about the “windowless, riddled, wind-scarred storage sheds” is very fine and shows the master hasn’t lost his touch.

April 9, 2012 Issue

Over the years, The New Yorker has run a number of excellent critical pieces on Albert Camus, including A. J. Liebling’s “The Camus Notebooks” (February 8, 1964), John Updike’s “In Praise of the Blind, Black God” (October 21, 1972), and V. S. Pritchett’s “Albert Camus” (December 20, 1982). Now, Adam Gopnik’s “Facing History,” in this week’s issue, joins the distinguished list. It’s interesting to compare them. Liebling’s review is the most admiring (“He was not only a great writer but a great man, almost before he ceased being a boy”). Updike’s is the most analytical and, to me, the most interesting [“Technically, the third-person method of A Happy Death, frequently an awkward vehicle for alter egos (see the sensitive young man light his cigarette; now let’s eavesdrop on his thoughts), becomes the hypnotic, unabashed first-person voice of The Stranger”]. Pritchett’s piece is the most biting (“He was entangled in the fierce and barren quarrels about political and moral commitment during and after the Second World War, and allowed himself to appear as a hero of the Resistance from the beginning, though in fact he did not join it until eight months before the liberation”). Gopnik’s “Facing History” is the most normalizing (“Responsibility, care, gradualness, humanity – even at a time of jubilation, these are the typical words of Camus”). Gopnik says, “His watchwords were anxiety and responsibility.” Contrast this with Pritchett’s quotation from Patrick McCarthy’s biography Camus: “‘Anonymity’ and ‘amputation’ remain, McCarthy writes, ‘the watchwords of Camus’ art.’” For Updike, Camus’s watchwords were “Love, despair, silence, mother, nature.” I agree with Updike. The silence he refers to links with what Camus described as his “profound indifference.” Both Updike and Pritchett concentrate on Camus's indifference. Curiously, it appears to escape Gopnik’s notice.

Gopnik’s description of Camus as “the Don Draper of existentialism,” contrasts with Pritchett’s observation: “His famous novel L’Étranger (The Outsider) seemed to put the bleak halo of existentialism above his head, although, as he said and Sartre feelingly agreed, he was no existentialist.”

Gopnik appears to downplay Camus’s tuberculosis. He refers to it as merely “a bout of tuberculosis” (“he was a strong swimmer and, until a bout of tuberculosis sidelined him, an even finer football player”). However, Pritchett, in his piece, assigns Camus’s illness major significance. He says, “The tuberculosis seems to have been responsible for his euphoric excesses, his sexual promiscuity, his gallows humour, and his obsession with death.” He further comments: “At the age of sixteen, he had become tubercular. The disease never left him; it is at the heart of his ‘indifference,’ and the almost too vivid sense of the instants of hope.”

I crave stylistic analysis. Unfortunately, except for a brief description of the tone of Camus’s Combat editorials (“He struck a tone not of Voltarean Parisian rancor but of melancholic loft”), Gopnik provides very little of it. He seems much more interested in Camus’s ideas than he is in the way Camus expresses those ideas. But, as Gopnik himself points out, many of the principles that Camus believed in (e.g., liberty, equality, fraternity) weren’t new. It’s Camus’s unique way of expressing them that was new. That’s what I respond to when I read him, and want to understand. What I’m saying isn’t new either. It’s a variation on Alexander Pope’s clear-eyed remark, “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” For example, consider this line from Camus’s beautiful “Summer in Algiers” (1936):

And when, having suddenly interrupted the cadenced beat of the double paddle’s bright colored wings, we glide slowly in the calm water of the inner harbor, how can I fail to feel that I am piloting through the smooth waters a savage cargo of gods in whom I recognize my brothers?”

This is an expression of fraternity with his “brothers,” the Algierian youth, many of them Arab, with whom he grew up. All his life, he felt near them. But what delights me about this sentence is its surprising combination of "cadenced beat," "bright colored wings" and "savage cargo of gods." How did Camus conceive it? Liebling, in his excellent “The Camus Notebooks,” offers a clue. He points out that the spoken language of Camus’s people in Algiers “took over not only words but constructions from Italian and Spanish and, most of all, the colloquial Arabic of North Africa. Liebling says:

Camus savored and cherished this language; “Carnets” is full of examples affectionately jotted down, so the book has almost a bilingual flavor – lost, naturally, when it is turned into English. Camus had from the first – in addition to a remarkably pure, poetic French style, learned at school and from reading – a command of this street language of Algiers, learned in the street. That gave him an arresting change of pace.

I find this fascinating. That Camus's style is at least partially sourced in Algierian street language is a point well worth developing. Perhaps there's a study already in existence. If so, I would appreciate knowing about it.

Knife-Fight / Tire-Change: The Elegiac Impulse in Cormac McCarthy's "Cities of the Plain"

The most memorable scene in Cormac McCarthy’s great Cities of the Plain is, without a doubt, the blood-soaked knife fight between Eduardo and John Grady Cole. Joyce Carol Oates describes it as “a brilliantly choreographed knife-fight sequence … stylized and ritualistic as a Japanese Noh play” (“The Treasure of Comanche Country," The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005). If you choose to understand Cities of the Plain solely in terms of its violence, you’ll likely focus on the knife fight. But if you’re more inclined, as I am, to interpret McCarthy’s novel as an elegy for a vanishing way of life, you may want to consider some of the book’s less dramatic passages.

One such scene is the tire-change: Billy and Troy are in a pick-up, driving through the desert night, heading back to the ranch. They meet “a truckload of Mexicans pulled off onto the grass. They stood almost into the road waving their hats.” Billy drives past them. But then he stops. Against Troy’s objections (“You’re fixin to get us in a jackpot here we won’t get home till daylight”), Billy puts the truck in reverse and backs down the highway to the Mexicans’ location. The Mexicans’ truck has a flat tire. Billy speaks to the Mexicans in Spanish. They need a jack. Billy loans them one from the back of his truck. The Mexicans jack up the front end of their truck. “They had two spares and neither of them would hold air. They spelled each other at the antique tirepump. Finally they raised up and looked at Billy.” Billy gets his tire tools, patch kit, and flashlight from his truck. He removes the inner tube from one of the spares, patches it, puts it back inside the spare, and laboriously pumps it up. When it’s fully inflated, the Mexicans install it on the truck.

My rough summary of the tire-change makes it seem mundane and ordinary – hardly worth bothering with, you’d think. Most writers probably wouldn’t even mention such a routine matter. If they did mention it, they’d likely just sketch it, in a line or two, and quickly move on. But McCarthy lingers over the scene, lavishing more than a thousand exact, luminous words on its description, detailing everything from the inner tube (“The innertube that he snaked out of the tire’s inner cavity was made of red rubber and there was a whole plague of patches upon it”) to the wrench (“made from a socket welded onto a length of heavy pipe”). The precision and vividness of his imagery are amazing! Consider this extraordinary passage, for example:

Billy took the stub of chalk from the patchkit and circled the leaks in the tube and they unscrewed the valvestem from the valve and sat on the tubes and then walked it down till it was dead flat. Then they sat in the road with the white line running past their elbows and the gaudy desert night overhead, the myriad constellations moving upon the blackness subtly as sealife, and they worked with the dull red shape of rubber in their laps, squatting like tailors or menders of nets. They scuffed the rubber with the little tin grater stamped into the lid of the kit and they laid on the patches and fired them with a match one by one till all were fused and all were done. When they had the tube pumped up again they sat in the road in the quiet desert and listened.

That image of the men sitting in the road “with the white line running past their elbows and the gaudy desert night overhead, the myriad constellations moving upon the blackness subtly as sealife” is very fine.

Why does McCarthy concentrate the full force of his immense descriptive power on something as tedious as a tire-change? My theory is that McCarthy deeply admires the craftsmanship of Billy’s work. He wants us to appreciate it, too, because he sees it as an aspect of a way of life that’s rapidly disappearing. That’s why he describes it so precisely, in such scrupulous detail. He sees cowboys like John Grady Cole and Billy Parham as craftsmen and, as such, endangered species that modernization is rapidly wiping out. Note, in the above quotation, McCarthy’s reference to two other types of craftsmen, namely, tailors and menders of nets (“they worked with the dull red shape of rubber in their laps, squatting like tailors or menders of nets”). And note the careful detail of another work-related scene that McCarthy describes later in the novel:

He waited until the calf had bucked itself into a clear space among the creosote and then he put the horse forward at a gallop. He paid the slack rope over the horse’s head and overtook the calf on its off side. The calf went trotting. The rope ran from its neck along the ground on the near side and trailed in a curve behind its legs and ran forward up the off side following the horse. John Grady checked his dally and then stood in one stirrup and cleared his other leg of the trailing rope. When the rope snapped taut it jerked the calf’s head backward and snatched its hind legs from under it. The calf turned endwise in the air and slammed to the ground in a cloud of dust and lay there.

This is skillful, specialized ranch work that’s been closely observed and precisely rendered. The writing enacts the craftsmanship of the work it describes.

My “craftsman” interpretation is one way of considering the tire-change scene, but not the only one. The New Yorker’s brief review of Cities of the Plain suggests another approach. The anonymous reviewer writes:

This tragic last volume of the Border Trilogy sees the American West enter the modern world, as the cowboy John Grady looks down from a rock bluff at the city lights “strewn across the desert floor like a tiara laid out upon a jeweller’s blackcloth.”

McCarthy’s language carries a brooding, evolutionary sense of time and labor – in his hands the changing of a tire on an old truck becomes a mythic deed.

The weight of history rests on the shoulders of John Grady, too, and he’s doomed to learn that “when things are gone they’re gone. They ain’t comin back.” [“Briefly Noted,” The New Yorker, August 10, 1998]

This is an excellent description of Cities of the Plain, distilling the book’s elegiac theme into three swift paragraphs. But I’m perplexed by that second paragraph. In what way is the tire-change mythic? James Wood, in his stimulating “Red Planet” (The New Yorker, July 5, 2005), a review of McCarthy’s work, says that “McCarthy’s novels are deeply engaged with founding American myths, in particular those of regeneration through violence, Southern pastoral, the figure of the sacred hunter, and the frontiersman’s conquest of the endless Western spaces.” None of these myths appear to apply to the tire-changing scene. In my opinion, when McCarthy wrote the scene, he was not mythologizing. He was memorializing an instance of Billy’s craft of experience in action. Joyce Carol Oates, in her “In Rough Country 1: Cormac McCarthy,” says that the Border novels (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain) are “elegies to a vanishing, or vanished frontier world.” I submit that the tire-change scene is best understood as an aspect of that elegiac impulse.

Credit: The above portrait of Cormac McCarthy is by David Levine.

April 2, 2012 Issue

Of the many great writers who have contributed to The New Yorker during its eighty-seven year history, one of the greatest is Robert A. Caro. I base my opinion solely on the eight portions of Caro’s extraordinary biography of Lyndon Johnson that have been published in the magazine. I haven’t read The Power Broker (1974), his Pulitzer Prize-winning book about Robert Moses, which was excerpted in four parts in The New Yorker. This week, Caro’s ninth Johnson piece, “The Transition,” appears in the magazine. It is riveting! It puts the reader directly inside the Vice-Presidential convertible, one car away from the Presidential limousine, at the moment President Kennedy is shot (“The loud, sharp sound, the hand suddenly grabbing his shoulder and pulling him down; now he was on the floor, his face on the floor, with the weight of a big man lying on top of him, pressing him down – Lyndon Johnson would never forget 'his knees in my back and his elbows in my back'"). It puts the reader directly inside the curtained cubicle in Parkland Hospital at the moment Johnson is told that Kennedy is dead (“As he stood in front of that blank wall, the carnation still in his buttonhole, there was a stillness about him, an immobility, a composure that hadn’t been seen very much during the previous three years”). And, unforgettably, it puts the reader directly inside Air Force One as Johnson is sworn in as President (“The Judge held out the missal. He put his left hand up – the hand, mottled and veined, was so large that it all but covered the little book – and raised his right hand, as the Judge said, ‘I do solemnly swear …’”).

I can’t remember when I last read as intensely as I read Caro’s “The Transition.” I devoured it. I wished it wouldn’t end. I didn’t look up from the pages until I finished it. And when I was finished, I felt dazed, almost as if I’d been in Dallas that fateful Friday, November 22, 1963, and experienced firsthand those bewildering, nightmarish events.