October 28, 2013 Issue

Ian Frazier has a great egalitarian eye for what James Agee, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, called “human actuality.” In his brilliant “Hidden City,” in this week’s issue, Frazier notices, among other specific details, “two young men, one in a hoodie despite the heat and the other in a clean, tight white T-shirt and a black do-rag, with the tie ends dangling;” “a single key, unattached to any chain, key ring or other keys;” floors “like the insides of old suitcases”; “bent window blinds”; “tragic, drooping, bright-green shower curtain”; “ivory polish on her fingernails and toenails”; strollers (“Plastic bags of possessions drape the stroller handles, sippy cups of juice fill the cup-holders, Burger King paper crowns ride in the carrying racks beneath”); smell (“Breakfast had just ended and a smell of syrup lingered in the air); Saratoga Family Inn homeless shelter (“Fencing topped with barbed wire surrounds the building on several sides, and large banners advertising a slip-and-fall attorney and an auto-leasing place hang from its windowless six-story front”); sound (“constantly you hear the tires bumping on an approach ramp to the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge above it”); clothing (“He was wearing a pair of trousers that appeared to be riding very low, as the style now has it, but actually they were an optical illusion. The boxer shorts at the top of the trousers were a part of the garment itself”); an East Harlem street (“Cardboard lay scattered here and there and some ring-billed gulls were picking up French fries”); more sound (“In the warm Saturday-night air the city was hivelike, humming, fabulously lit, and rocking with low, thrilling, Daisy Buchanan-like laughter”); the homeless (“In this restlessness, the homeless remind me of the ghostly streaks on photos of the city from long ago, where the camera’s slow shutter speed could capture only a person’s blurry passing”).

These are particulars that not everyone sees, perhaps because they have no interest in seeing them. “We notice what we notice in accordance with who we are,” Robert Coles says in Doing Documentary Work (1997). Frazier is an egalitarian; he looks neither up nor down at his subjects. “Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody,” the title of his wonderful profile of the household hint columnist Poncé Cruse Evans (The New Yorker, February 21, 1983), could stand as his motto – a democratic way of seeing (and writing) that “Hidden City” magnificently embodies from beginning to end.  

October 21, 2013 Issue

Louis Menand, in his “The Norman Invasion,” in this week’s issue, says of Norman Mailer, “His most interesting innovation as a journalist was the reporter as character, the practice of treating himself as a participant in the events he was covering.” Well, there were lots of journalists before Mailer who, writing in the first person, inserted themselves as participants in their stories (e.g., George Orwell, John Reed, James Agee, A. J. Liebling). The innovation that Menand must be referring to is Mailer’s odd habit of writing about himself in the third person. See, for example, “Miami and the Siege of Chicago” (“His first afternoon in Miami Beach was spent by the reporter in Convention Hall. He stepped up on the speaker’s podium to see how it might feel, nosed into the jerrybuilt back room back of the podium where speakers would wait, and Press be excluded, once the convention was begun”); The Armies of the Night (“Mailer looked him over covertly to see what he could try if the Marshall went to work on him. All reports: negative. He would not stand a chance with this Marshall – there seemed no place to hit him where he’d be vulnerable; stone larynx, leather testicles, ice cubes for eyes”). In “St. George and the Godfather,” he calls himself Aquarius (“Interviewing Eagleton on the afternoon of the morning of his resignation as Vice-Presidential candidate, Aquarius finds him changed from the diffident politician who perspired before the television cameras on the night of his nomination and looked too furtive, too nervous, too quick-tongued, too bright, too unsure of himself and finally too modest to be Vice-President”).

I confess that even though I love these works, I find Mailer’s objectification of himself artificial. I wish he’d used the “I” point of view, as he did in his great “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” an account of the first Patterson-Liston fight (“Naturally I got into a debate with Cus D’Amato and a young gentleman named Jacobs, Jim Jacobs as I remember, who was built like a track man and had an expression which was very single-minded”).

Few writers have pondered the use of point of view more than Mailer. In his “The Last Draft of The Deer Park,” he says, “The most powerful leverage in fiction is point of view.” Mailer was partial to the third-person perspective. Why? Because, as he points out in the Preface to Some Honorable Men (1976), a collection of his political convention pieces, there’s advantage to observing the observer: “So our best chance of improving those private charts of our own most complicated lives, our unadmitted maps of reality, our very comprehension, if you will, of the way existence works – seems to profit most if we can have some little idea, at least, of the warp of the observer who passes on the experience.”

Mailer’s innovation was his insertion of himself, not as “I,” but as “He,” “Mailer,” “Aquarius” – a third-person observer-participant – in his reportage. It’s an approach that’s ultra-objective. Mailer splits himself – there’s Mailer, the narrator, and “Mailer,” the character. I keep wondering as I read his “third-person” pieces, why not just drop the objective pose and speak naturally in the “I”? I’m aware of Janet Malcolm’s contention that “the ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention” (The Journalist and the Murderer, 1990). But I submit that it’s less an invention than Mailer’s “Mailer.”

October 14, 2013 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue that I enjoyed most is Nathan Heller’s “Bay Watched.” It took me a few minutes to warm to it. I’m not much interested in tech business. But Heller’s experiential, subjective approach – his liberal use of “I” (“One day, I took Highway 1 from San Francisco down along the beaches and the eucalyptus forests to meet Timothy C. Draper, a fifty-something third-generation venture capitalist, at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay”) – drew me in. He writes lovely, rhythmical, textured lines (“Passing down Cole Street and Irving Street and through the weft of avenues out to the park, I used to watch the urban landscape changing: five-and-dimes would become food shops; restaurants and cafés stood where bakeries and fabric stores had been. By night, candles flickered on the tables of big-windowed wine bars. Men in bright sneakers and women in boots spilled into the fog. A swell of humming conversation, wine, perfume, and roasting garlic trailed them through the open doors. If promises were made to those of us who started to grow up then, I thought, they came from the glow and freedom of those boom-time nights.”). And his syntax is succulent (“‘So the cost to build and launch a product went from five million’ – his marker skidded across the white board – ‘to one million’ – more arrows – ‘to five hundred thousand’ – he made a circle – ‘and it’s now to fifty thousand.’”). Even though his material – entrepreneurial culture – is exceedingly denatured, he still takes time to notice fog (“It was the kind of day that kicks aside the quilt of summer fog, and every detail of a northern coast of the bay showed clearly in the late afternoon light”) and shade (“It was breezy, and it smelled of jasmine, and the movement of palm leaves overhead stippled everything with small feathers of shade”). Heller is a wonderfully sensual writer. There’s a line in his “Semi-Charmed Life” (The New Yorker, January 14, 2013) - “The skin above her collarbone had the clean, smoky, late-October smell of candle wax” – that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker sentences. I’m pleased to see he’s joined the magazine as a staff writer. I look forward to more of his delicious writing. 

Alice Munro's Great "The Turkey Season" (Contra James Wood)

In celebration of Alice Munro’s great Nobel Prize win, I want to express my admiration for her wonderful "The Turkey Season" (The New Yorker, December 29, 1980; included in her 1982 collection, The Moons of Jupiter). I also want to take issue with a comment that James Wood made about this story in his review of Munro’s Selected Stories.

“The Turkey Season” is a form of fictional memoir. But it’s written so realistically that you’d wonder what aspect of it is fiction. In its use of “I” and its straightforward timeline (no flashbacks), it’s more like one of Munro’s personal history pieces (e.g., “Dear Life” and “Lying Under the Apple Tree”) than it is one of her short stories, which are often complexly structured (e.g., “The Love of a Good Woman,” “Carried Away,” and “The Albanian Virgin”). Its unnamed narrator looks back on her experience, when she was fourteen, working for the Christmas season as a turkey gutter. There’s a touch of drama at the story’s center – one of the workers commits a lewd act, the exact nature of which is unclear (“All I ever found out was that Brian had either done something or shown something to Gladys as she came out of the washroom and she had started screaming and having hysterics”) - that scandalizes a co-worker and ignites an uproar in the turkey barn. But, for me, this is a minor aspect of the story. What I like most is the description of turkey barn reality. For example, here is barn foreman, Herb Abbott, one of the story’s key figures, instructing the narrator on how to gut a turkey:

“All right. Work your fingers around and get the guts loose. Easy. Easy. Keep your fingers together. Keep the palm inwards. Feel the ribs with the back of your hand. Feel the guts fit into your palm. Feel that? Keep going. Break the strings – as many as you can. Keep going. Feel a hard lump? That’s the gizzard. Feel a soft lump? That’s the heart. O.K.? O.K. Get your fingers around the gizzard. Easy. Start pulling this way. That’s right. That’s right. Start to pull her out.”

It was not easy at all. I wasn’t even sure what I had was the gizzard. My hand was full of cold pulp.

“Pull,” he said, and I brought out a glistening, liverish mass.

“Got it. There’s the lights. You know what they are. Lungs. There’s the heart. There’s the gizzard. There’s the gall. Now, you don’t ever want to break that gall inside or it will taste the entire turkey.” Tactfully, he scraped out what I had missed, including the testicles, which were like a pair of white grapes.

“Nice pair of earings,” Herb said.

That use of “taste” seems so odd, and yet so right. The whole passage is both lyrical and humorous. It’s the expressive, shorthand way that experienced workers often speak. To write how people talk, one must know how they think. Munro seems to know how turkey gutters think. She writes from inside their world, as if she’s one of them. The specificity of her descriptions is almost surreal. Lily and Marjorie, two expert turkey gutters, sing while they work and talk “abusively and intimately” to the turkey carcasses (“Don’t you nick me, you old bugger!” “Aren’t you the old crap factory!”). Another worker, Gladys, running cold water on her hands (“The hands of all us were red and sore-looking from the work”), says, “I can’t use that soap. If I use it, I break out in a rash. If I bring my own soap in here, I can’t afford to have other people using it, because I pay a lot for it – it’s a special anti-allergy soap.” This, to my ear, sounds absolutely authentic. Rarely do we see the manual laborer’s world so empathetically evoked as it is in “The Turkey Season.” It’s this aspect of the story that James Wood fails to appreciate.

Wood, in his review of Munro’s Selected Stories (1996), says,

Often, her stories move around the disruption brought to a community by an exotic outsider. At such moments, the exoticism or danger of the interloper can seem unconvincing or uninteresting, because Munro appears to have loaded the dice by making the invaded community so unexotic to begin with. In ‘The Turkey Season’, for instance, she colours in the tiny world of a turkey-plucking barn, and its bleak personnel – an old man, some collapsed women, a little schoolgirl (who narrates the tale). A handsome young man arrives at work. He flaunts his sexual superiority, and harasses one of the women. But we are not sure how: ‘All I ever found out was that Brian had either done something or shown something to Gladys as she came out of the washroom and she had started screaming and having hysterics.’ Brian’s naughtiness is not important enough to hang the story on. And his behaviour seems trivial not only because it is opaquely rendered, but because the world he disrupts seems too ready to have been disrupted by precisely Brian’s kind of danger. The story is written from within the community; it has a complacency. ["Things happen all the time," London Review of Books, May 8, 1997]

Wood finds Munro’s turkey barn “unexotic.” I disagree. Turkeys “hanging upside down, plucked and stiffened, pale and cold, with the heads and necks limp, the eyes and nostrils clotted with dark blood”; turkey gutters in their “bloody smocks and heavy sweaters,” working “knee-deep in the feathers” – I find the place utterly strange and fascinating. What’s most fascinating of all is seeing the gutters and pluckers carrying on, talking about permanents, periods, marriage, and family, all the while reaching inside turkeys’ cold interiors and pulling out their guts as if it was the most normal thing in the world to do.

Wood says of “The Turkey Season,” “The story is written from within the community; it has a complacency.” “The Turkey Season” is Munro’s attempt to represent the surreal reality of the turkey gutter. There’s nothing complacent about it. I suspect Wood finds it complacent because he finds turkey-gutting an unworthy subject; he’s disdainful of it because it's working-class. (In “George Orwell's Revolutions,” he snobbishly asks, “Why would anyone want to resemble the working classes, least of all the working classes themselves?”) To criticize Munro for writing “from within the community” is to miss the very quality – the narrator’s firsthand physical experience of life in the turkey barn – that grounds her story in the real. In his review, Wood calls Munro “a great realist.” He’s right. “The Turkey Season” is a prime example of her realism.

Credit: The above photograph of Alice Munro is by Paul Hawthorne.

October 7, 2013 Issue

Claudia Roth Pierpont, in her absorbing “The Bookof Laughter,” in this week’s issue, says, “Updike was a painter of words.” She likens him to Matisse (“Updike would be Matisse: the color, the sensuality”). Reading this, I thought, Yes, Matisse, and maybe a touch of Cézanne. Elizabeth Tallent, in her brilliant Married Men and Magic Tricks: John Updike’s Erotic Heroes (1982), commenting on Updike’s Couples, writes, “That Cézanne-like tactic of grappling after ‘shade and shape,’ characteristic of The Centaur, the Olinger Stories, and Rabbit Run is less in evidence here, although it never quite vanishes altogether.” This stems from an observation that Updike himself made in his brief, wonderful essay “Accuracy” (Picked-Up Pieces, 1976): “Language approximates phenomena through a series of hesitations and qualifications; I miss, in much contemporary writing, this sense of self-qualification, the kind of timid reverence toward what exists that Cézanne shows when he grapples for the shape and shade of a fruit through a mist of delicate stabs.”

George Packer's "Washington Man" Revisited

What to make of George Packer’s “Washington Man”? I first read it when it appeared in The New Yorker (October 29 & November 5, 2012). I remember finding it both admirable and repellant: “admirable” in that it excoriates the Obama administration for missing a tremendous opportunity to reform Wall Street; “repellant” because it too closely identifies with its subject, wealthy lobbyist and “professional Democrat” Jeff Connaughton. Now, reading it again, in its expanded form, in Packer’s The Unwinding, I find I still can’t resolve my feelings about it. What it comes down to, I think, is that I’m a fan of Packer’s writing. And in his “Jeff Connaughton” piece, Packer’s voice on the page blends with Connaughton’s. In fiction writing, this is called “free indirect style.” You rarely see it used in fact pieces. Tom Wolfe uses it. He’s the only journalist I can think of who writes free indirect style. It’s very close writing – too close for journalism, in my opinion. For example, in “Washington Man,” when Packer writes,

One day in August, he [Connaughton] was channel-flipping when Glenn Beck came on, telling an immense crowd on the Mall that change didn’t come from Washington; it came from real people in real places around the country. Beck was an asshole, but Arianna Huffington wrote the same thing in a column two days later. They were right. [Interestingly, the book version of this passage concludes with an additional line: “Connaughton felt a sneaking sympathy with the Tea Party.”]

I wonder, Who is talking here – Packer, Connaughton or both? It’s likely Connaughton’s thoughts that are being conveyed. Obviously Packer sympathizes with them. They’re his thoughts, too. That’s basically his theory in a nutshell: change no longer comes from Washington; it’s part of the unwinding – Washington, as Packer/Connaughton says later, “had been captured by the money power.” But it’s not like Packer to concede his perspective to his subject, especially when his subject has shown himself to be an immensely adept opportunist. Maybe, at bottom, that’s what disturbs me about “Washington Man” – the spectacle of a great subjective journalist allowing an “unwinding winner” speak for him. I yearn for the old Packer, the Packer who writes in the “I,” who wrote (say) “A Boulangerie in Lagos” (in The Village of Waiting, 1988), in which his material is sourced in his personal experience:

I’d arrived in time for dinner. I sat with Marcel – I on the couch, he on a Nido can – while Papa fried up the eggs and potatoes. Papa looked about sixty and had a long Gallic face, lined and weathered, all ears and nose. His French came out hoarse from the throat, nearly incomprehensible after years of Africa and Scotch. His hands moved like a short-order cook’s between the pan, the utensils, and his glass of White Horse; he’d been in the food business in Africa for a quarter century. In the refrigerator I saw fresh butter and slabs of frozen steak, hidden luxuries. Marcel put on a tape of King Sunny Ade and the African beats; it was a good machine and the room filled with the sound of juju music, like a fly buzzing near the ear then flitting off.

That “His French came out hoarse from the throat, nearly incomprehensible after years of Africa and Scotch” is very fine – finer than anything in “Washington Man.” I’m talking about the writing as pure writing. Papa is infinitely more interesting than any of the characters in “Washington Man.” He seems rooted in reality – real reality, not like in Washington where fat-cat lobbyists moan about the decline of their investments and the prospect of purchasing a hot dog from a vendor on C Street is considered “dismal.”