Best of 2013

Okay, New Yorkerphiles, here we go. The year is over; the crop is in. What a fabulous, cornucopian, prismatic harvest it is! Now the fun begins – skimming off the crème de la crème. Among 2013’s highlights are: (1) pieces by New Yorker greats Joseph Mitchell (“Street Life,” February 11 & 18), John McPhee (“The Orange Trapper,” July 1), Janet Malcolm (“Nobody’s Looking At You,” September 23), and Calvin Trillin (“Mozzarella Story,” December 2); (2) powerful “Personal History” by Meghan O’Rourke (“What’s Wrong with Me?,” August 26) and Ariel Levy (“Thanksgiving In Mongolia,” November 18); (3) three features (“The Toll,” February 11 & 18; “Form and Fungus,” May 20; and “Hidden City,” October 28) and at least four Talk stories (“Tree Person,” March 4, 2013; “School’s Out,” July 8 & 15, 2013; “By the Numbers,” August 26, 2013; “The Mountain,” December 23 & 30) – all terrific – by my favorite New Yorker writer, Ian Frazier; (4) wonderful pieces by two Nabokovian wizards -  Gary Shteyngart (“O.K., Glass,” August 5) and Nicholson Baker (“A Fourth State of Matter,” July 8 & 15); (5) two extraordinary critical pieces – Anthony Lane’s “Names and Faces” (September 2), a review of the Met’s Julia Margaret Cameron exhibition, and Dan Chiasson’s “All About My Mother” (November 11), a review of a new Marianne Moore biography. I could go on and on.

Compressing these riches into a “Ten Best” list is excruciating. There’s no doubt in my mind as to which piece is my favorite - Ben McGrath’s “The White Wall” (April 22, 2013). This article has it all – action (competitive mushing), vivid description (“The mushers ate like sled dogs, scarfing double and triple helpings of roast moose and potatoes, which they washed down with coffee and Tang - the Gatorade of the Iditarod”), inspired detail (black-bear Stroganoff, dogsled constructed from sawed-off Easton hockey sticks, a finish line marked by Kool-Aid poured over snow, a house insulated with clothes from the Salvation Army, etc.). It’s my #1 pick.

For #2, I’m going with Ian Frazier’s “The Toll.” It contains one of the year’s most haunting lines: “Standing in a soggy no man’s forest near a beach, with invasive Japanese honeysuckle and bittersweet and greenbrier vines dragging down the trees, and shreds of plastic bags in the branches, and a dirty snow of Styrofoam crumbs on the ground, and heaps of hurricane detritus strewn promiscuously, and fierce phragmites reeds springing up all over, I saw the landscape of the new hot world to come.”

My #3 pick is Gary Shteyngart’s superb “O.K., Glass.” This piece has so many great lines – surprising, surrealistic, specific, all at once. Here’s one example: “As the man walks into the frigid subway car, he unexpectedly jerks his head up and down. A pink light comes on above the right lens. He slides his index finger against the right temple of the glasses as if flicking away a fly. The man’s right eyebrow rises and his right eye squints. He appears to be mouthing some words. A lip-reader would come away with the following message: ‘Forever 21 world traveler denim shorts, $22.80. Horoscope: Cooler heads prevail today, helping you strike a compromise in a matter you refused to budge on last week.’ ”

Time to insert a critical piece. I devour critical writing. This year, Dan Chiasson, James Wood, Peter Schjeldahl, Anthony Lane, and David Denby were all at the top of their game. For my #4 pick, I choose Anthony Lane’s absorbing “Names and Faces” (“Though the backdrop may by sepia and moody, the subject is alert in her modernity and ravenous for experience. You could post her on Instagram right now”).

Rounding out my top five is the piece that, for me, contains the year’s most memorable image. No, I’m not referring to Ariel Levy’s heart-breaking depiction of her miscarriage in “Thanksgiving In Mongolia.” Actually, if I could, I’d delete that horrific scene from my memory. The image I have in mind is this one, from Lizzie Widdicombe’s marvelous “The Bad-Boy Brand” (April 8, 2013): “We took a water taxi through the canals, past crumbling buildings and water-stained walls, and arrived at San Marco just as the floodwaters were rising. The area was swarming with tourists, and a narrow pathway of raised wooden planks was threaded precariously through the square. As the waters rose, the tourists crossed the square on the planks, shuffling in a long, two-person-wide line, like animals boarding Noah’s Ark.”

In the #6 slot is John McPhee’s dandy “The Orange Trapper.” This piece shows the Master in excellent form. It brims with bright, original, delightful description (e.g., “This is not on one of my biking routes, but on solo rides I have been there, and returned there, inspired by curiosity and a longing for variety and, not least, the observation that in the thickets and copses and wild thorny bushes on the inside of Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence are golf balls – Big Bank golf balls, Big Pharma golf balls, C-level golf balls (C.E.O., C.O.O., C.F.O. golf balls), lying there abandoned forever by people who are snorkeling in Caneel Bay”). I enjoyed “The Orange Trapper” immensely.

For #7, I think I’ll pick another critical piece - Dan Chiasson’s wonderful “All About My Mother” (November 11, 2013). Sample passage: “These unlikely applications of empathy – to a mussel shell, a fan, a fish condemned to wading through stone – all enter through the unmarked portal of ‘description’; only later do we realize that what has been described is not what Moore saw but what Moore felt on seeing what she saw.”

Room on the list is getting tight; we’re down to my final three choices. There are at least a dozen more pieces deserving inclusion. For my #8, I pick Nicholson Baker’s brilliant “A Fourth State of Matter” (July 8 & 15). Baker’s writing appears so effortless and natural. This piece is a beauty. Sample: “Each glass sheet shuddered slightly as it was turned this way and that, in the impossibly fragile manner of airborne soap bubbles, and my own arms kept going out toward it, as if to save the sheet from crashing to the floor – but, of course, no glass crashed.”

Okay, two to go. #9 has to be Alec Wilkinson’s “Cape Fear” (September 9), doesn’t it? Hard not to include it, containing as it does one of the year’s most interesting characters, Ocearch co-captain Brett McBride, who, at the climax of this exciting piece,

barefoot and in his jeans and a T-shirt, jumped into the water and climbed onto the submerged platform. Pulling hard on the cable, he steered the shark into the cradle. As she arrived, he leaped over a railing like a rodeo clown. When she passed him, he jumped back in and grabbed her tail and turned her on her side so that her glistening white belly appeared again. It was milky white, the color of the moon, with the water rippling off it.

That last line is marvelously fine.

And now here we are at #10, the toughest pick of all because it means excluding all the remaining candidates. After close consideration, I choose Calvin Trillin’s great “Mozzarella Story” (December 2). I’m fond of elegy. This piece rues the closing of Joe’s Dairy, a thirty-five year old cheese shop in Lower Manhattan. The place was a regular stop on what Trillin calls his “noshing strolls.” Of the many pungent details in this great piece, I think my favorite is Ro’s short-order version of Trillin’s request for a smoked mozzarella: “ ‘One smokie,’ Ro, the woman who took care of the counter in recent years, would say, as she went over to a tray to pick one out.”  

And now that I’m finished, I notice there’s only one female on my list. I apologize for that. There could’ve been at least three more, I suppose, in addition to Widdicombe: Meghan O’Rourke (“What’s Wrong with Me?,” August 26), Lauren Collins (“Fire-Eaters,” November 4), and Ariel Levy (“Thanksgiving In Mongolia,” November 18). But when it comes right down to it, I let pleasure be my guide. Accordingly, these are the ten that stick in my mind:

1. Ben McGrath’s “The White Wall” (April 22, 2013) 
2. Ian Frazier’s “The Toll” (February 11 & 18, 2013) 
3. Gary Shteyngart’s “O.K., Glass” (August 5, 2013) 
4. Anthony Lane’s “Names and Faces” (September 2, 2013) 
5. Lizzie Widdicombe’s “The Bad-Boy Brand” (April 8, 2013) 
6. John McPhee’s “The Orange Trapper” (July 1, 2013) 
7. Dan Chiasson’s “All About My Mother” (November 11, 2013) 
8. Nicholson Baker’s “A Fourth State of Matter” (July 8 & 15, 2013)
9. Alec Wilkinson’s “Cape Fear” (September 9, 2013) 
10. Calvin Trillin’s “Mozarrella Story” (December 2, 2013)

What a pleasure it is to look back and savor all these great pieces. Thank you New Yorker for another wonderful year of reading bliss. 

Credit: The above artwork is by Simone Massoni; it appears in The New Yorker (August 26, 2013), as an “On The Horizon” illustration for “Jean Renoir’s French Cancan at MOMA.”

December 23 & 30, 2013 Issue

Adam Gopnik has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. Author of one of this year’s most beautiful pieces, “Bread and Women” (The New Yorker, November 4, 2013), he’s now produced one of its most execrable. The piece, titled “Two Bands,” in this week’s issue, is a review of Terry Teachout’s Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington and Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In. In it, Gopnik calls Ellington a thief. He lists a number of Ellington classics (e.g., “Take the A Train,” “Chelsea Bridge,” “Caravan,” “Mood Indigo,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Prelude to a Kiss,” “In a Sentimental Mood”) and says,

Ellington owned them, but they didn’t start in his head, or take form under his fingers. Teachout says all the right things about how, without Ellington’s ears to hear them and his intelligence to fix and resolve them, these might have been butterflies that lived a day, fluttered, and died. But you sense that he’s shaken by the news. It seems like theft.

Gopnik goes on to say, “Ellington really did take other men’s ideas and act as if they were his own. But he did this because he took other men’s ideas and made them his own. There are artists whose genius lies in exploiting other people’s talent, and we can recognize the exploitation as genius.” Gopnik undercuts Ellington’s status as a brilliant composer, praising instead his managerial skills (“Duke Ellington was a great impresario and bandleader who created the most stylish sound, and brand, in American music, and kept a company of musicians going for half a century”).

In his piece, Gopnik identifies two types of originality – originality of ideas and originality of labor. I have no problem with Gopnik’s equal valuation of these two kinds of originality, but I strongly object to his implication that Ellington’s originality was mainly in labor. It’s a stunted interpretation, emphasizing only part of Ellington’s creative process. Whitney Balliett, in his Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954 – 2000, describes this process as follows:

Ellington composes a number, which may be a blues, a capsule concerto, a ballad, a program piece, a tone poem, a sly bit of portraiture, an up-tempo celebration of nothing in particular, or a reworking of a standard. It is tried out by the band, which makes suggestions, and an arrangement is developed. This arrangement is orchestrated and played over and over and, if it is found not wanting, passes into the band’s repertory. Once there, it is far from static, for each time it is performed it is improvised upon, to different degrees, by both the ensemble and the soloists, among them the composer himself. Finally, a kind of composite rendition emerges, and a “Solitude” or “Mood Indigo” or “Never No Lament” takes permanent, though malleable shape. Thus Ellington is at once a classical and a popular-music composer, an interpretive classical musician, a conductor, and a jazz improviser.

This description is, to my mind, much fairer to Ellington than Gopnik’s “theft” accusation. Gopnik slights Ellington in another way, too. He says Ellington played “no better than O.K. piano.” Anyone who’s ever heard Ellington’s gorgeous “All The Things You Are (take 2),” on his superb Piano In The Foreground knows better than that. Balliett, in his review of a 1967 Ellington stand at the Rainbow Grill, wrote, “And of course there was Ellington, playing first-rate piano” (“Small Band,” Ecstasy at the Onion, 1971).  

James Wolcott's "Critical Mass"

I’m pleased to see that New York Times’ critic Dwight Garner has named James Wolcott’s Critical Mass as one of his ten favorite books of 2013. Garner says, “Mr. Wolcott’s cultural criticism is ecstatic and alive, and this big box of his best stuff is absurdly entertaining — a rolling series of intellectual lightning strikes” (“Dwight Garner’s 10 Favorite Books of 2013,” nytimes.com, December 19, 2013). I agree. Critical Mass is a tremendous source of reading pleasure. I’ve been gobbling it up like a chocolate truffle fiend who’s just been given a basket of Godiva’s finest. I started with one of the richest bonbons in the collection – “Caretaker/Pallbearer,” an incendiary, riotous review (part hand grenade, part hurrah, to borrow from Critical Mass’s subtitle) of John Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick, which I first read in the London Review of Books (January 1, 2009) and have never forgotten. How could you forget a piece that ends “America may have lost its looks and stature, but it was a beauty once, and worth every golden stab of sperm”? God, I love that line – surreal, startling, delightful, all at once. Here’s another inspired passage from the same review:

To stay on her toes, Sukie goes down on her knees. That’s how things are done in the fallen world of geriatric erotica. No Updike novel seems quite complete without a fancy cumshot, as they say in the porn trade, the artistic blowjob in Seek My Face earning a runner-up citation in the 2003 Bad Sex Awards (‘his pale semen inside her mouth, displayed on her arched tongue like a little Tachiste masterpiece’), and his larger body of work garnering him a Lifetime Achievement Award this year. The BJ performed here is a bit less refined than Seek My Face’s nimble juggling feat, but luminous as only an Updike emission can be: ‘Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on the far end of East Beach, within sound of the sea.’ A sloppy facial set to the ‘rhythmic relentless shushing’ of the sea – it may not be the stuff of Gershwin romance, but it’ll do until creaky infirmity takes even Sukie out of commission, round about the year 2016.

Luminous as only an Updike emission can be – how marvelously fine that is! Updike was still alive (for another twenty-six days) when “Caretaker/Pallbearer” appeared. I’ll bet he read it and lapped it up. Quoting and analyzing those BJ descriptions is exactly what he’d do if The Widows of Eastwick was written by someone else and he was reviewing it.

I’m still feasting on Critical Mass. It contains, among other choice items, eight New Yorker pieces. I’ll post a more extensive review of it later. For now, I just want to voice my agreement with Dwight Garner and say that Critical Mass is one of my favorite books of 2013, too. 

December 16, 2013 Issue

Maybe I’m just in a pre-Christmas funk, but I find this week’s New Yorker remarkably uninspiring. Maybe it’s the price of those spicy Red Snappers at The King Cole that turned me off. Sixty dollars for two of them, according to Shauna Lyon’s “Bar Tab.” Obscene! Or maybe it’s the dull prospect of plowing through two pieces on Washington politics (Evan Osnos’s “Strong Vanilla” and “Ryan Lizza’s “State of Deception”). Do I want to read about Cuvier’s proof of extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Lost World, Part One”) or “The mystery surrounding a copy of Galileo’s pivotal treatise” (Nicholas Schmidle’s “A Very Rare Book”) or what happens when God first unleashes Satan on Job (Joan Acocella’s “Misery”) or Britney Spears’s latest career move (Sasha Frere-Jones’s “Brit Pop”)? No, no, no, and definitely no. I’ve got better things to do, like shovel the snow from in front of the woodshed door. But there’s always a bit of nourishment in every New Yorker, no matter how unpromising its contents may first appear. This week, I found it in David Denby’s marvelous “Grand Scam,” a review of David O. Russell’s American Hustler. In a parenthesis worthy of the Master herself (Hail Kael!), Denby writes, “In a dizzying touch, suits hanging on a garment conveyor whirl past them as they kiss.” Ah, the surreal reality of that garment conveyor! I love it. Thank you, Mr. Denby. With one sentence, you breathe life into a moribund New Yorker.  

December 9, 2013 Issue

James Thurber, in his “Preface to a Life” (The Thurber Carnival, 1945), concludes his meditation on autobiography with this memorable reference to death’s inescapability:

It is unfortunate, however, that even a well-ordered life cannot lead anybody safely around the inevitable doom that waits in the skies. As F. Hopkinson-Smith long ago pointed out, the claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end.

James Wood’s absorbing “Why?,” in this week’s New Yorker, conveys a similar message. In his piece, Wood observes, “Fictional form is a kind of death”; it gives us “that formal insight into the shape of someone’s life,” a secular version of the insight that death often affords – “the awful privilege of seeing a life whole.” He proposes what might be called the “instance and form” theory of the novel. He says,

To read the novel is to be constantly moving between the secular and religious modes, between what you could call instance and form. The novel’s secular impulse is toward expanding and extending life; the novel is the great trader in the shares of the ordinary. It expands the instances of our lives into scenes and details; it strives to run these instances at a rhythm close to real time.

On the other hand, he says, the novel’s form, what he calls its religious mode, “reminds us that life is bounded by death, that life is just death-in-waiting.” He observes,

The novel often gives us that formal insight into the shape of someone’s life: we can see the beginning and the end of many fictional lives; their developments and errors; stasis and drift.

That “life is just death-in-waiting” is a neat, hard epigram, almost as catchy as Hopkinson-Smith’s “the claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end.” Wood’s theory is impressive, but his reference to the novel’s form as the “religious mode” is, for me (a nonbeliever), problematic. Wood says, “What makes the mode religious is that it shares the religious tendency to see life as the mere antechamber to the afterlife.” As far as I’m concerned, there’s no afterlife. To quote Philip Larkin’s great “Aubade,” there’s only “The sure extinction that we travel to / And shall be lost in always.”

Postscript: Zadie Smith’s “Man vs. Corpse” (The New York Review of Books, December 5, 2013) begins where Wood’s “Why?” ends. At the conclusion of his piece, Wood refers to Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar and says, “Mr. Palomar would like to learn how to be dead.” In “Man vs. Corpse” ’s first section, Smith invites us to “Imagine being a corpse.” The two pieces converge on another point, as well. Both value immersion. Wood calls it “secular forgetting” – “the novel is so full of its own life that human life seen under the eye of eternity has been carelessly banished.” Note that “carelessly.” Wood is preoccupied with death; anything that diverts us from death’s reality is “profane.” Smith mentions immersion explicitly. Adverting to the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard and Tao Lin, she says,

Both Lin and Knausgaard eschew the solutions of minimalism and abstraction in interesting ways, opting instead for full immersion. Come with me, they seem to say, come into this life. If you can’t beat us, join us, here in the real. It might not be pretty – but this is life.

Smith ends her piece by exhorting us to “switch off our smart phones” and get out there and live, because everybody is really going to die someday, “and be dead forever, and shouldn’t a person live – truly live, a real life – while they’re alive?”

Smith’s conclusion is a powerful memento mori. In response, I’m moved to quickly post this note, shut down my laptop, and get my ass outdoors.