Cynthia Zarin's "An Enlarged Heart"

Cynthia Zarin finds meaning in patterns; the pieces collected in her recent An Enlarged Heart are retrospective exercises in patterning. Some of them are quite beautiful; others seem artificial. One piece, the title essay, which originally appeared in The New Yorker (August 18 & 23, 2003), is extraordinary. It’s about her three-year-old daughter’s battle with Kawasaki disease. A crisis memoir, it tracks the disease’s intensification, beginning with a cough, which, within a day, worsens (“That night, she wakes up every hour, coughing. The cough catches her throat, grips it, then lets go”). The next night, she begins to vomit (“She vomits again and again into the bucket, taking rasping breaths”). She’s taken to a health clinic in Provincetown. The doctor is perplexed. He prescribes Tylenol and Motrin. Her fever disappears. But next morning, she starts vomiting again (“On her back there are a few scattered red marks, as if a bird had walked along the short length of her spine”). Back at the clinic, “Her breathing is shallow, and she is whimpering.” A blood test shows nothing. “The rash on her back has spread to her stomach: small red dots just under her skin, from sternum to groin.” A massive shot of antibiotic is prescribed. Her rash worsens. By ambulance, she goes to the Provincetown hospital. The ER doctor makes a diagnosis: she has Kawasaki disease (“This disease, he says, is the primary cause of acquired, potentially fatal, coronary aneurysms in young children”). The treatment is a massive dose of intravenous immunoglobulin. She’s taken by ambulance to the Children’s Hospital in Boston. “Her hand is hot, her fingers like burning twigs. I hold on to it. I think, If this child dies, I will go mad.” The hospital’s “Kawasaki team” arrives and orders the dose. “The immunoglobulin drips into her arm. Her temperature drops, and for a few hours she responds. The fog lifts, and in those minutes we can see her, we get our child back.” But three hours later, her fever returns. The Kawasaki team prescribes a second dose. Zarin asks the doctor what happens if the fever doesn’t abate this time. “The answer is nothing. There will be nothing to do.” But the second treatment works. Her fever stays down. She recovers (“Her left aortic root may be slightly enlarged, but she’s fine”).

“An Enlarged Heart” is riveting. My coarse summary of it fails to convey Zarin’s racing thoughts and feelings, which she doesn’t shrink from nakedly expressing, even when some of them are irrational (“I think of a woman who wishes me ill, and I think, If something happens to this child, I will kill her”) and selfish (“I am ashamed of myself even as I think it that I am angry we are missing our time at the beach”). It gains immediacy from its adept use of present tense laced with flashes of hindsight (“Later, I will think, How did we know?”). It’s a re-living of the past as the present. That’s one of its most artful aspects – the way the past is grasped as the present. It’s also more linear than the other pieces in Zarin’s collection, which are written in a flickering then-and-now time-weave. But in her brilliant “An Enlarged Heart,” then becomes now. It’s an amazing piece. 

September 23, 2013 Issue

The New Yorker’s new look, unveiled this week, consists of, among other stylistic changes, a revamped Table of Contents (the writers’ names are now in bold, black, sanserif script; the titles of their pieces are in a thinner, bold, black sanserif; and the departmental names, e.g., Profiles, The Wayward Press, The World of Fashion, are omitted), a new “Goings On About Town” title page (gone are the notes about upcoming events; the all-most full-page photo dominates; at the foot of the page there’s a tiny sanserif-printed note related to the event that’s illustrated by the photo; and in the lower left and right corners there are clasping, jaw-like heavy bars of black ink in the shape of right-angles), “Night Life”’s “Critic’s Notebook” now receives full page treatment (with “Night Life” events printed on the next page in tiny, black serif script that lacks the grace of the old “Night Life” typeface), capsule reviews of movies are now crammed into three columns per page instead of two (and are printed in the same ugly script as the “Night Life” notes), Richard Brody’s “Critic’s Notebook” is reduced to a lower-left corner blurb printed in a thin, anemic-looking sanserif font, “Dance” also has one of those pointless Art-Deco-ish black right-angle decorations (like a piece of swastika) and is printed minutely in a dumbed-down version of The New Yorker’s classic serif typeface, “Tables For Two” is now allotted almost a full page (and there’s a new column called “Food & Drink, printed in tiny, thin sanserif), Andrea K. Scott’s “Critic’s Notebook” is expanded to a full page (including illustration), the art gallery notes are, like the movie notes, squished three abreast down the page (titled in soulless, bolded sanserif), ditto re the “Theatre” notes, Alex Ross’s “Critic’s Notebook” on classical musical is expanded to a full page (plus illustration), and “Above and Beyond” receives, in place of an illustration, one of those hideous, useless black corner brackets. The overall effect of these changes is that the magazine looks a little less like its old self and a bit more like Vanity Fair.

Fortunately the content is as rich and stimulating as ever, and continues to be printed in The New Yorker’s elegant, textured serif font. Pick of the Issue this week is Janet Malcolm’s terrific “Nobody’s Looking At You,” a profile of clothing designer, Eileen Fisher. I particularly enjoyed Malcolm’s parenthetical observation about women wearing scarves: “Eileen knows how to wear scarves the way women in Paris know how to wear them and American women almost touchingly don’t.” That “almost touchingly” is pure Malcolm. 

Second Thoughts: Let’s begin again. Rereading my above rant on The New Yorker’s “new look,” I’m struck (and embarrassed) by its petulance. I’ll not delete it just yet; let it stand as evidence of my first reaction to the magazine’s attempt at stylistic refreshment. But now that I’ve had a few days to think about it, I want to post a cooler appraisal. I applaud the expansion of two of my favorite “Goings On About Town” columns: “Tables For Two” and “Art.” I’m a fan of Andrea K. Scott’s writing, and I welcome her increased presence in the magazine. I’m only lukewarm about the print reduction of “Art” and “Movies” capsule reviews. I find the tiny, pinched typeface off-putting. It reminds me of the small print of The New York Review of Books’ “Galleries and Museums,” which, I think, repels reading. Design shouldn’t get between the reader and the magazine. This leads me to my main complaint: the erosion of The New Yorker’s classic, elegant, easily readable serif typeface. I’m not talking about the Rea Irvin-designed font. I like it, too. I’m referring to the wonderful serif letterform that the entire magazine (with the exception of illustration and photo credits) was heretofore printed in. Maybe sanserif is considered more legible on the computer screen. But on paper, whether in magazines or books, serif strikes me as more textured, more readable, more beautiful than sanserif, and I much prefer it. I detect in The New Yorker’s new look a move away from serif typeface. This is regrettable. I realize that stylistic changes are part of The New Yorker’s vibrant history. But certain changes strike at the heart of the magazine’s identity. The shift from serif to sans is one of them.

September 16, 2013 Issue

Writing this blog, tracking my New Yorker reading experience, my effort is mainly one of appreciation. Even on those rare occasions when the magazine seems, at first glance, totally uninteresting, which is the case this week, I find there’s always something – a line, a detail, a note – that attracts my attention. In this week’s “Goings On About Town,” for instance, I saw, under “Jazz and Standards,” that “the whip-smart pianist Frank Kimbrough released a fine trio album recorded at this night spot [Jazz at Kitano].” I love piano jazz. I wasn’t aware of this particular Kimbrough album. I went online to iTunes and purchased several tracks, including Duke Ellington’s great “Single Petal of a Rose.” Kimbrough plays it exquisitely. It went straight onto my “Best of Piano Jazz” playlist. 

September 9, 2013 Issue

Alec Wilkinson is a superb noticer. He seems particularly sharp-eyed when he’s in a commercial fishing environment. His early masterpiece, “The Blessing of the Fleet” (The New Yorker, June 9, 1986), is an accretion of innumerable fine details, e.g., the description of a priest (“He held a plate with both hands in front of his chest. It made a circle of white against his black suit, and he tapped his fingers on the bottom of it”), fish cullers (“The fish cullers stand up to go, and often slip on the fish scales while they are crossing to the door. The stairs leading to the office are steep and shallow and slick as grease”), windows (“The windows of the living room face the street but are high above it, so that a person sitting on the couch does not see it, only hears it. In many of the windows on the first and second floors, there are statues of fishermen”). His excellent “The Lobsterman” (The New Yorker, July 31, 2006), a profile of lobsterman and historical ecologist Ted Ames, contains several vivid descriptions of lobster fishing. For example:

When I went out with him one day last fall, it took us about ten minutes to reach the first of his traps. Traps are attached to a line of rope held to the surface by a buoy; the arrangement is called a string. When Ames drops a string, he enters its location on a computer. The traps and the route among them show up on the screen in a curving purple line like a kite tail. “You can see how powerful the technology is,” he said. “You don’t need a plan anymore. You just need to be able to play a computer game.” He collected the string with a gaff. Then he wrapped it around the rim of a turning wheel the size of a hubcap which was mounted on the cabin wall. The wheel was attached to a winch. Most lobstermen raise the trap quickly, which leaves rope piled at their feet. Ames has learned that if he raises the trap slowly, the line comes off the wheel in a neat circle.

Wilkinson’s depictions of lobster fishing are marvelously fine, but they pale in comparison to his kinetic descriptions of white-shark fishing in his terrific “Cape Fear,” in this week’s issue. Consider this passage:

On the third pass, McBride, 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 to 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 slowly 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. McBride yelled for the cradle to be raised. When it was out of the water, someone threw him a towel, and he placed it over the shark’s eyes. She grew still. Others jumped on the cradle with the hoses. Someone lifted her snout, and McBride removed the hook, which was lodged in her jaw, while the hoses were put in her mouth. Water began pouring from her gills. Twice, her tail flipped up ponderously in an arc, and McBride stepped back.

That “It was milky white, the color of the moon, with the water rippling off it” is inspired! And so is this description of taking samples of the shark’s blood: “On the shark’s side, Skomal had left a handprint, in her blood, while stitching the incision. The wind began to dry her skin.” “Cape Fear,” particularly its final two sections, is exhilarating. I enjoyed it immensely. 

September 2, 2013 Issue

“The thing itself,” as Edward Weston called the object of his quest for realism, is what I seek when I look at photographs. Before I read Janet Malcolm’s great “The Genius of the Glass House” (in her recent collection Forty-five False Starts) I didn’t see it in Julia Margaret Cameron’s work, at least not in her posed costume dramas, what she called her “fancy subject pictures.” They seemed to me to be as artificial as fashion photos. But Malcolm’s piece showed me the way. In “The Genius of the Glass House,” she says,

But it is precisely the camera’s realism – its stubborn obsession with the surface of things – that has given Cameron’s theatricality and artificiality its atmosphere of truth. It is the truth of the sitting, rather than the fiction that all the dressing up was in aid of, that wafts out of these wonderful and strange, not-quite-in-focus photographs. They are what they are: pictures of housemaids and nieces and husbands and village children who are dressed up as Madonnas and infant Jesuses and John the Baptists and Lancelots and Guineveres and trying desperately hard to sit still.

How I love that steely “They are what they are.” Malcolm scans Cameron’s “fancy subject pictures” searching for hard reality. She excepts one picture from her reality test: Cameron’s The Passing of Arthur, of which she says,

Yes, the broomsticks and the muslim curtains are there, but they are insignificant. For once, the homely truth of the sitting gives right of place to the romantic fantasy of its director. The picture, a night scene, is magical and mysterious.

I thought of Malcolm’s reading of The Passing of Arthur as I read Anthony Lane’s wonderful “Names and Faces,” in this week’s New Yorker. It’s a review of the Met’s Julia Margaret Cameron exhibition. His response to Cameron’s work differs from Malcolm’s. He doesn’t look for the “reality” traces. He doesn’t notice the misery of the costumed sitters “trying desperately hard to sit still.” He does see the romance and the comedy. He says her “concocted scenes of myth and legend” are “suffused with sincerity and play alike.” Lane himself is a playful critic, more so than Malcolm is. He appears to approach Cameron on her own terms and to submit to whatever spell she’s trying to cast. Regarding her King Lear Alotting His Kingdom to his Three Daughters, he says,

Charles, complete with coronet, is in position, keeping a laudably straight face and grasping what is meant to be a regal scepter, or staff, but may well be the fireplace poker. The outcome, despite everything, is not wholly absurd; there is a distracted magic to its air of ceremony.

I enjoyed Lane’s piece immensely. His description of Cameron’s 1867 masterpiece, Julia Jackson, is inspired (and witty): “Though the backdrop may be sepia and moody, the subject is alert in her modernity and ravenous for experience. You could post her on Instagram right now.”

And yet … “they are what they are.” Reality is the base. I find Malcolm’s realist approach persuasive. Both pieces are brilliant; both expand our appreciation of Cameron’s intriguing art.