May 20, 2013 Issue

When I saw, on newyorker.com, that Ian Frazier had written an article about “mycelium-based packing material,” I thought uh oh, this could be trouble - the first piece by my favorite writer I may not like. I should’ve known better. Frazier is incapable of writing anything – even a story about packing made of fungus – that isn’t vivid, absorbing, and artful. His “Form and Fungus,” in this week’s issue (“The Innovators Issue”), is excellent. It does contain a fair amount of chemistry [e.g., “A polymer is a compound or a combination of compounds consisting of structural units (molecules of styrene, for example) that repeat”]. But this is leavened by Frazier’s humor. At one point, he says, parenthetically, “high-school chemistry, don’t fail me now.” As the chemistry passages piled up, I thought, Wow, Frazier is really getting into this. And then I remembered from reading Frazier’s wonderful Family (1994) that his father was a chemical engineer. Not long after that link occurred to me, Frazier himself says, in “Form and Fungus,” “My father, who was a chemical engineer at a research lab, used to bring home samples of substances never before seen on the planet – strange milky plastics as brittle as ice or as slick and pulpy as squid.” “Form and Fungus” connects with other Frazier works, as well. For example, the reference to the “serious problem” with Styrofoam recalls Frazier’s memorable “Styrofoam” description in “The Toll” (The New Yorker, February 11 & 18, 2013): “Everywhere, like dirty snow, little clumps and crumbs of Styrofoam congregated on the rocks and covered the matted ground.” And, when he says, in “Form and Fungus,” that he told Burt Swersey about his invention of “a device to remove plastic bags from trees,” I smiled because it brought to mind his terrific “Bags In Trees” trilogy (included in his 2005 collection Gone To New York). 

Often in a Frazier piece, a so-called incidental moment generates an inspired description. Such is the case in “Form and Fungus.” On his way to Ecovative’s factory, in Green Island, New York, he stops to take a view of the Mohawk River from an old railway bridge:

Whenever I visit the company, I like to stop first at an abandoned railroad bridge at the north end of Green Island. The branch of the Mohawk that the bridge spans has carved low bluffs from the island’s four-hundred-million-year-old shale. The bluffs resemble stacks of very thin, reddish-black crêpes. All river confluences are glorious. Canoes full of Iroquois Indians travelled past here, and fur traders, and soldiers, and surveyors for the Erie Canal. The canal turned left near this point, followed the Mohawk’s shale valley westward, tapped into the Great Lakes, and made the fortune of New York City. Here, as at all confluences, wildlife congregates. In the early morning, it’s an amphitheatre of birdsong, while Canada geese add their usual commotion. So many crows show up in the evenings that they plague the town of Green Island, and the mayor has to scare them away with a blank pistol.

Frazier is writing a story about the invention of mycelium-based packing material. But he still has time to notice and appreciate an abandoned railway bridge, the Mohawk River, shale, bluffs, birdsong, Canada geese, crows, and a pistol-toting mayor. That’s why I cherish his work.

May 13, 2013 Issue

Raffi Khatchadourian’s “The Chaos of the Dice,” in this week’s issue, features the kind of opening line I devour: “In order to meet Falafel, the highest ranked backgammon player in the world, I took a Greyhound bus to Atlantic City, and then hopped a jitney to the Borgata Hotel.” I read it and immediately think Hey, this sounds cool. I’m with you. Let’s go! What makes it even more delectable is that it’s a significant departure from Khatchadourian’s essentially “objective” style, in which “I” rarely appears. There’ve been exceptions, most notably the wonderful “The Plume Hunter” section of his great “The Gulf War” (The New Yorker, March 14, 2011), which begins, “A hundred and fifty miles southwest of the wellhead, the Pisces, a NOAA research vessel, was searching for under-sea plumes of oil. It was late on a September night, and in the darkness I climbed up to the bridge.” I find it thrilling when the writer steps into the narrative frame like that. It authenticates the experience being described.

“The Chaos of the Dice,” a profile of a backgammon hustler named Falafel, contains several sharp descriptions (e.g., “He moved his checkers in abrupt jabs, then touched the pieces as if to confirm their solidity”). But, as a whole, it isn’t as satisfying as Khatchadourian’s intricate, woven, tapestry-like “Reporter At Large” pieces - “The Gulf War,” “No Secrets” (June 7, 2010), and the masterly “Transfiguration” (February 13, 2012). I find characters with names like Falafel, The Bone, Genius, Sweet Pea, Elementary, The Terminator, Russian Paul, and Fat Nick a bit too Runyonesque to be totally credible. I’m sure they exist - I’m not questioning the piece’s accuracy. But, like Liebling’s Jollity Building gang (in his 1942 The Telephone Booth Indian), their raffishness seems a tad too cute. I prefer the intense factuality of Khatchadourian's incomparable Reporter-At-Large style, with a few pinches of first-person observation thrown in for added piquancy.

Postscript: Debra Nystrom’s poem “Pronghorn,” in this week’s issue, is a vivid piece of nature description (“bleached grass bending east in wind, lifting up / sometimes then bending again like the fur / of bigger animals a hand might’ve just passed over”). I enjoyed it immensely.    

May 6, 2013 Issue

I want to compare Ben McGrath’s “Oddball,” in this week’s issue, with his earlier “Project Knuckleball” (The New Yorker, May 17, 2004). Both pieces are about that “rare specialist,” the knuckleballer. “Project Knuckleball” is a group portrait of “the knuckleball bunch” – the relatively few pitchers over the years “who have entrusted their livelihoods, at one point or another, to the vagaries of the knuckleball.” The heart of the piece is McGrath’s depiction of Tim Wakefield (“Tim Wakefield was not supposed to be a major-league pitcher”). McGrath vividly describes how Wakefield salvaged his career by learning to throw the knuckler. One of the piece’s major themes is the knuckleball’s career-saving aspect. Regarding knuckler Charlie Zink, McGrath writes, “Zink’s reincarnation story, set in the summer of 2002, is similar to Wakefield’s, only more vivid.”

“Oddball” is also a “reincarnation story.” It’s a profile of the ace knuckler, R. A. Dickey. McGrath calls Dickey’s story a “redemption narrative.” But unlike “Project Knuckleball,” which is totally admiring of the knucklers it describes, “Oddball” seems edgier. The piece’s tagline sets the tone: “Is R. A. Dickey too good to be true?” McGrath seems to subtly suggest he is. For example, early in the piece, he says, “Conspicuous cosmopolitanism can be its own form of vanity, especially in a sport with a culture as lethargic as baseball’s.” Later, he describes this moment:

While riding in the car with Dickey, I picked up what looked like an ordinary baseball card that was resting on the console of the transmission. The name and picture on the front of the card were unfamiliar to me. “Oh, man, that’s a story,” Dickey began, and flicked his wrist against my arm, commanding my full attention.

That “and flicked his wrist against my arm, commanding my full attention” is brilliant. The card leads to a story, told by Dickey, about God saying to him that he should attend the wake of the man depicted on the card. Dickey attends the wake. He says, “And when I stepped in there, and it registered with the wife and aunt and uncle who I was, they just started, like, bawling, weeping, and I was just in a place where I felt this need to console her.” That’s when I wrote in the margin, “Bit much.” It’s not that the story is unbelievable. It’s that Dickey appears to be trying to manipulate McGrath’s impression of him. But, to his credit, McGrath is writing his own story, and Dickey’s saintly posing is part of it. Darren Oliver’s pithy “Look at him, trying to be all serious,” in the piece’s penultimate paragraph, says it all. “Oddball” is an excellent illustration of one of journalism’s fundamental principles: the writer, not the subject, shapes the narrative.

I prefer “Project Knuckleball.” The part describing McGrath’s experience catching knuckleballs is inspired! 

April 29, 2013 Issue

One of the most intimidating observations I’ve ever read about writing is John Updike’s theory “that if a short story doesn’t pour smooth from the start, it never will” (Foreword to The Early Stories, 2003). Nothing I’ve ever written, including this blog, has ever “poured smooth.” For me, writing is struggle. This is one of the reasons I enjoy reading John McPhee’s pieces on “The Writing Life.” They show a master writer flat on his back on a picnic table, “staring up into branches and leaves, fighting fear and panic, because I had no idea where or how to begin a piece of writing for The New Yorker” (“Structure,” The New Yorker, January 14, 2013). His absorbing and entertaining “Draft No. 4,” in the magazine’s current issue, contains this solacing revelation: “Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall.” This from the creator of such consummately crafted pieces as “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977), “Atchafalaya” (The New Yorker, February 23, 1987), and “Season on the Chalk” (The New Yorker, March 12, 2007). “To feel doubt is part of the picture,” McPhee says. This is reassuring to hear; I frequently feel doubt about my writing ability. It’s comforting to hear a gifted writer like McPhee candidly describe his own struggles. Other pieces in his “The Writing Life” series are “Progression” (The New Yorker, November 14, 2011) and “Editors & Publisher” (The New Yorker, July 2, 2012).

April 22, 2013 Issue

Burkhard Bilger’s “The Martian Chronicles” and Ben McGrath’s “The White Wall,” both in this week’s terrific Journeys Issue, translate epic journeys into vivid prose. It’s interesting to compare their approaches. Bilger’s piece is about the landing of NASA spacecraft, Curiosity, on Mars. McGrath’s article chronicles the running of the 2013 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Both are descriptive marvels. For example, in “The Martian Chronicles,” Bilger describes Curiosity’s landing system, known as the Sky Crane, as follows:

The Sky Crane was a splayed, skeletal thing, with rocket thrusters for legs and cables spooling out of its belly. It looked like a robotic spider. The rover was more of a camel, with a knobby-kneed chassis and a long, many-jointed neck, surmounted by a binocular head. It was powered by a nuclear generator and bristled with lasers, scoops, cameras, and mechanical claw.

And here, in “The White Wall,” is McGrath’s depiction of musher Lance Mackey:

He had the lean face of a hound, a long braided ponytail, and kinetic energy that was almost feral. His neck, so taut that it resembled a system of ropes and pulleys, had an imprinted circle on its right side, as though he’d swallowed a key ring – the result of surgery, ten years ago, to remove a softball-size cancerous growth.

Both pieces are suspenseful: Will Curiosity’s newfangled Sky Crane (“‘A cockamamie device,’ one NASA researcher called it”) work? Will veteran musher Mitch Seavey (“a bit of a prickly character”) win the race? (I was rooting for him.) Of course, “The Martian Chronicles” contains more science (e.g., “Biologists now believe that cyanobacteria, which produce oxygen through photosynthesis, probably first appeared around 2.7 billion years ago, but the Great Oxygenation didn’t begin for nearly half a billion years”). But “The White Wall” has its complexity, too, comprehending a world of sled-dog racing detail (e.g., “Sled dogs consume as many as fourteen thousand calories a day while racing, but the abnormal weather had been threatening to wreak havoc with the athletes’ metabolisms. Into the soup went kibble, psyllium (for stool-strengthening), and a multivitamin, for the dogs fur”).

Both pieces are classic examples of New Yorker first-person reportage, in which the writer is a participant observer, e.g., “Late in the fall, during a rare lull in his work on the Mars program, Grotzinger and I took a drive to Death Valley – due east from his house in lush San Marino, across the front range of the San Gabriels, past Apple Valley and Barstow, and down into the great basin of the Mojave” (“The Martian Chronicles”); “Late in the morning, I had my first interaction with the kind of Iditarod fan who might fit the broader demographic that Dallas Seavey and Jim Keller were hoping to capture in their mainstreaming pursuit” (“The White Wall”).

Like some of John McPhee’s great pieces, “The White Wall” begins in medias res, on the third day of the race, with Dallas Seavey riding into Takotna on his sled. In contrast, the opening section of “The Martian Chronicles” (“There once were two planets …”) is statelier, more traditional, like the prologue of an epic narrative.

Which article contains the most inspired sentence? In terms of artful figuration, I like “On either side of the road, along the jagged crease of the San Andreas, the land rose and fell like crumpled butcher paper,” in “The Martian Chronicles.” But on the basis of capacity to surprise and delight, this combination from “The White Wall” is hard to beat: “‘I’ve never sunbathed on the Iditarod Trail before!’ a vet from New Zealand exclaimed, after stripping to her sports bra on the tarmac as she waited for a planeload of dropped dogs.”

Both pieces are extraordinary. I enjoyed them immensely. 

April 15, 2013 Issue

Is Terrance Malick’s The Tree of Life a great movie? David Denby thinks so. In his “Terrance Malick’s Insufferable Masterpiece” (included in his 2012 collection Do the Movies Have a Future?), he says,

Interminable, madly repetitive, vague, grandiose; an art-history Summa Theologica crossed with a summer camp documentary on the wonders of the universe; sexless yet sexist, embracing of everything in the world but humour (and is wit not as essential to our existence as air?) – Terrance Malick’s The Tree of Life is insufferable. It is also, astoundingly, one of the great lyric achievements of the screen in recent years and a considerable enlargement of the rhetoric of cinema – a change in technique which is also a change in consciousness. An insufferable masterpiece, then; a film to be endured in a state of enraged awe.

“Great” and “insufferable” strike me as contradictory. I agree with the “insufferable” part. This week, in the magazine, in a review of Malick’s latest vacuity, To the Wonder, Denby repeats his ambivalent verdict regarding The Tree of Life. He says, “The movie could be unbearable at times, but the center held. It’s a great film.” But he goes on to pan To the Wonder in terms that are, it seems to me, applicable to The Tree of Life. For example, he says, “A Malick sequence has now become a collection of semi-disconnected shots, individually ravishing but bound together by what feels like the trivial narcissism of Carribbean-travel ads on TV.” This perfectly expresses my opinion of The Tree of Life, except I would change “has now become” to “is.” Similarly, Denby’s “And someone might tell Malick that beauty isn’t enough” gets at the core of what is “insufferable” about Malick’s movies: their unrelenting, dreamy-soft pictorialism. In “Terrance Malick’s Insufferable Masterpiece,” Denby touches on this point when he asks, “Hasn’t he [Malick] narrowed life down only to those elements that can be etherealized?” More than the lack of dialogue, more even than the absence of humour, it’s this ethereal quality that saps Malick’s films of life’s juice and constitutes their most serious flaw. Pauline Kael was onto this thirty-nine years ago when she said of the protagonists of Malick’s first film, Badlands, “Kit and Holly are kept at a distance, doing things for no explained purpose; it’s as if the director had taped gauze over their characters, so that we wouldn’t be able to take a reading on them” (“Sugarland and Badlands,” The New Yorker, March 18, 1974; included in Kael’s brilliant 1976 collection Reeling).