February 25, 2013 Issue

Three pieces are in the running for this week’s Pick of the Issue (POTI): Nick Paumgarten’s "The Hangover," Dexter Filkins’s "After Syria," and Lauren Collins’s "L’Étranger." I’ll use my old touchstone “thisness” to determine the winner. “Thisness,” you’ll recall, is  “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” (James Wood’s brilliant definition). In a way, all three articles are about complex crises – Spain’s economy (“The Hangover”), France’s economy (“L’Étranger”), Lebanon’s politics (“After Syria”) – that the writers attempt to make vivid using specific images and circumstances. In “The Hangover,” the image is a doomed giant construction project called Residencial Francisco Hernando (“For blocks at a time, the ground-floor spaces – would-be storefronts – were cinder-blocked shut, and spray-painted with the phone numbers of leasing brokers”); in “L’Étranger,” the symbol is l’affaire Depardieu - Gerard Depardieu’s decision to relocate to Belgium to escape France’s seventy-five-per-cent “supertax” (“the country’s anxieties about money had coalesced in the person of Depardieu”); in “After Syria,” it’s the memorial service for two young Hezbollah fighters killed “under murky circumstances,” which Filkins investigates (“Back in Beirut, a Hezbollah officer conceded that the explanation for the young martyrs’ death – the explosion at the ammunition depot – had been contrived. They had been killed in Syria, he said: ‘There were lots of bodies coming back’”). All three pieces are impressive in their detail and specificity. All three thrillingly incorporate the writers’ personal experiences as they track down their stories. Sentences such as “I had a beer at an outside table with a high-ranking city official who previously worked in finance” (Paumgarten), “One night, I wound up at a party in the Castellana apartment of a business-woman (half Spanish, half American, reared in Madrid) with fierce Madrileña opinions about what ails Spain” (Paumgarten), “I sneaked into one [a Residencial Francisco Hernando swimming pool]” (Paumgarten), “To better understand the link between Hezbollah and Syria, I paid a dinner visit to the Beirut home of Walid Joumblatt, the leader of a tiny religious group, the Druze, and perhaps Lebanon’s most nimble and sophisticated politician” (Filkins), “A few days later, I drove to the town of Arsal, on the Syrian border” (Filkins), “One day, I went to the U.M.P. headquarters to meet Nadine Morano, who served as Sarkozy’s Minister for Apprenticeship and Professional Formation" (Collins), "A few days before I visited Néchin, his [Depardieu’s] lawyer, Hervé Temime, had received me in a grand office on the Rue de Tivoli” (Collins) clinchingly authenticate the pieces. One such passage in Filkins’s article – the one in which he describes climbing down into a “vast Hezbollah bunker” – has decided me on my POTI award. Filkins writes:

Under a foot of dirt and rubble is a trap door, and a ladder leading down to the main tunnel. Inside, the only sign of life was a colony of black bats, dangling silently from the ceiling. Startled by my entry, they dropped down, then glided up the shaft toward the light.

Filkins’s prose puts me squarely there, inside a Hezbollah bunker. Those bats dropping down, then gliding “up the shaft toward the light” are amazing! Accordingly, on the basis of this inspired detail, POTI goes to Dexter Filkins’s superb “After Syria.” 

February 11 & 18, 2013 Issue

I’m drawn to writers who celebrate everyday life and “give the mundane its beautiful due” (Updike's great credo). This week's issue features three of the best: Joseph Mitchell, Ian Frazier, and Susan Orlean. Mitchell, in his wonderful “Street Life,” celebrates “the common, ordinary city.” Describing the pleasure of aimlessly riding city buses, gazing out the window at “the flowing backdrop of buildings,” he says,

There is no better vantage point from which to look at the common, ordinary city – not the lofty, noble, silvery vertical city, but the vast, spread-out, sooty-gray and sooty-brown and sooty-red and sooty-pink horizontal city, the snarled-up and smoldering city, the old, polluted, betrayed, and sure-to-be-torn-down-any-time-now city.

Mitchell’s piece is remarkable for its long sentences. I don’t associate him with long-line writing. But “Street Life” contains at least three sentences exceeding 140 words. One of them is a gorgeous assemblage that begins, “At any hour of the day or night, I can shut my eyes and visualize in a swarm of detail what is happening on scores of streets …,” and runs for 348 words.

Another writer who seeks his material at street level is Ian Frazier. In his sad, brilliant “The Toll,” he drives and walks the “crumple zone” of Staten Island, noting the debris left by Hurricane Sandy:

A chain-link fence that ran along Bobby Thomson Field nearby had caught the flood’s smaller pieces of debris. Mostly they were grass stems and vine tendrils, combined with plastic shreds, zip ties, coffee stirrers, cup lids, swizzlesticks, plastic cutlery, and plastic drinking straws. In the fence, they glitter like minnows in a net.

Frazier’s eye for bags in trees is as sharp as ever (recall his great “Bags in Trees” series, included in his 2005 collection Gone To New York). In “The Toll,” he writes,

Deep gouges in the banks undercut fences and asphalt biking trails, and the scrubby trees far above the usual high-tide line hunkered down as if some massive creature had slept on them. Shreds of plastic bags hung among the branches everywhere, while the ocean, distant and calm at low tide, offered its quiet wavelets and asked, “Who, me?”

Bags in trees are also an ingredient in “The Toll”’s most inspired sentence:

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.

That “dirty snow of Styrofoam crumbs” is very fine. Of course, Frazier isn’t celebrating storm debris. But he’s an acute noticer of it. His descriptions of it are sublime. See also his description of the waterfront junk pile in Nome (Travels In Siberia, 2010), the trash on the ground around Yellow Bird’s gas and convenience store (On the Rez, 2000), and the contents of abandoned prairie farmhouses (Great Plains, 1989).

Susan Orlean’s marvelous “Walart” profiles artist Brendan O’Connell, who sees art in “eight feet of Cheetos.” O’Connell paints “Walmart paintings” and perceives Walmart stores as the ideal place to study “the practice of everyday life.” Regarding O’Connell’s work, Orlean says, “The paintings are soft and luscious, built out of small brushstrokes, as if Pierre Bonnard had ventured into Supercenter Store No. 5154 with an easel.” “Walart” has a terrific opening line: “Some years back, Brendan O’Connell had a revelation in a Winn-Dixie.” I read that and smiled. It reminded me of another supermarket piece by Orlean – her splendid “All Mixed Up” (The New Yorker, June 22, 1992; included in her My Kind of Place, 2004), about Sunshine Market in Jackson Heights. O’Connell isn’t the only one who makes art out of supermarkets; Orlean turned the trick twenty-one years ago.

The appearance of a new Mitchell, Orlean, or Frazier piece is, for me, an event. In the case of Mitchell, who died seventeen years ago, it’s a miracle! To find three of them in one issue is pure bliss. Thank you very much, New Yorker! 

In Praise of Independent Movies

My pick for Best Movie of 2012 is Robert Guédiguian’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro. I saw it a few days ago and enjoyed it immensely. Richard Brody, in his “Film File” review, aptly describes it as a “richly textured and hearty yet fable-like view of domestic intimacy and social conflict” (newyorker.com). It’s refreshing to see a movie exploring everyday lives lived according to socialist principles. And when it’s –27 degrees outside with the wind chill, the film’s sun-drenched Marseille setting isn’t hard to take either. I suppose I should be grateful for Brody’s capsule review. But I can’t help wishing that The New Yorker had reviewed The Snows of Kilimanjaro in greater depth. In these days of what David Denby aptly calls “conglomerate aesthetics” (see Denby’s excellent “Conglomerate Aesthetics: Notes on the Disentegration of Film Language,” in his 2012 collection Do the Movies Have a Future?), i.e., big digital action movies drained of any meaning other than, in Denby’s words, “superheroes bashing people off walls, cars leapfrogging one another in tunnels, giant toys and mock-dragons smashing through Chicago, and charming teens whooshing around castles,” “independent” films such as The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Kid with a Bike, Monsieur Lazhar, A Separation, and Footnote, to name some wonderful recent productions, need encouragement. Granted, The New Yorker does review them, but not as extensively as it could. The Snows of Kilimanjaro is worthy of more than just a 200-word blurb in Goings On About Town. And attention to embodiments of “conglomerate aesthetics,” such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Last Stand, which received a 750-word mauling (albeit a humorous one) by Anthony Lane in this week’s issue, should be minimized. 

February 4, 2013 Issue

Thomas Mallon’s “Wag the Dog,” in this week’s issue, is a tonic affirmation of nonfiction’s fundamental principle: stick to the facts. This principle is under assault these days by writers who proffer fictional truth as a substitute for the real thing. For example, James Wood appears quite comfortable with essayists who mingle fact and fiction. In his review of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s collection Pulphead, he praises the contemporary essay’s “sly and knowing movement between reality and fictionality” (“Reality Effects,” The New Yorker, December 19 & 26, 2011). Mallon admirably dissents from this slippery approach. In “Wag the Dog,” a review of two books about Richard Nixon – Kevin Mattson’s Just Plain Dick: Richard Nixon’s Checkers Speech and the “Rocking, Socking” Election of 1952 and Jeffrey Frank’s Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage – Mallon laudably upholds the distinction between fact and fiction, emphasizing that it’s not the role of the historian to “novelize.” He says, “Mattson makes clear from the first page of Just Plain Dick that he would really rather be writing a novel.” Regarding Frank’s book, he writes,

Unlike Mattson, Frank does not surrender to any temptation to novelize, even though he is a novelist, the author of a well-regarded “Washington trilogy” that includes The Columnist (2001). Ike and Dick shows how much life remains in artfully straightforward narrative history.

I applaud Mallon’s criticism of Mattson’s novelizing impulse. It upholds factual writing’s core value: accuracy.