Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

April 28, 2014 Issue


Is Adam Begley’s Updike worth reading? That was the question on my mind as I began reading Louis Menand’s "Imitation of Life," a review of Begley’s book, in this week’s issue. The answer appears to be yes. Menand says, “Writing was what the man was about, and the writing is what Begley focuses on. Updike is a highly literate illumination of a supremely literate human being.”

Updike was a “supremely literate human being” who disliked literary biographies. Some of his severest criticism is found in his reviews of biographies of Eliot, Fitzgerald, Cheever, Graham Greene, and Dorothy Parker, among others. His view was that writers’ lives are “poured into books, not deeds” (“This Side of Coherence,” More Matter, 1999). He deplored biographies that dish “the dirt, the lowdown” (“This Side of Coherence”).

The one exception he made is for biographies that enable us “to partake again, from another angle, of the joys we have experienced within the author’s oeuvre, in the presence of a voice and mind we have come to love” (“On Literary Biography,” Due Considerations, 2007). The supreme example of this kind of biography is George D. Painter’s Marcel Proust (1959). Updike admired Painter’s book enormously. In “On Literary Biography,” he wrote, “Lovers of Proust will be inevitably drawn to Painter because it is more of the same, mirrored back into reality.”

Based on my reading of Menand’s “Imitation of Life,” I’d say that Adam Begley’s Updike sounds like it’s mostly in the Painter category. Menand says that Begley’s Updike “is essentially an extended essay in biographical criticism, an insight into the man through the work and the work through the man.”

I wish Menand had provided at least one extended quotation from Begley’s Updike so that I could form my own impression of Begley’s writing. But he says enough to persuade me that Begley’s book is worth a look.

Postscript: Pick of the Issue this week is Justin Quinn’s delightful "Recession Song," celebrating the medicinal and spiritual benefits of sage (“Sage is just the thing / for snakebite, bee sting / and keeping the bad at bay”). It’s a classic poem, beautifully rhymed, artfully lineated, specific, vital, and complete. It went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker poems. 

Friday, April 25, 2014

April 21, 2014 Issue


“The Journeys Issue” is here and it contains pieces by two of my favorite writers – Burkhard Bilger and Geoff Dyer. Bilger’s “In Deep” is about an attempt to map a passage in the Chevé system, potentially the world’s deepest cave, located in Oaxaca, Mexico. The project is, in Bilger’s words, “a kind of Everest expedition turned upside down.” The expedition’s leader, Bill Stone, a sixty-year-old veteran deep caver, with a Ph.D. in structural engineering, “has an engineer’s methodical mind and an explorer’s heroic self-image. He’s pragmatic about details and romantic about goals.” Bilger made me smile when he says of Stone, “He had the whiskered weather-beaten look of an old lobsterman.” Two other key figures in the expedition are master cave divers Marcin Gala and Phil Short. They feature in “In Deep” ’s most dramatic sections – the exploration of the J2 system beyond Camp Four.

Of the pieces many pleasures – the fascinating cave diver details (“Underwear is worn for weeks on end, the bacteria kept back by antibiotic silver and copper threads”), its astute assessment of cave diver character (“But, looking at all the gleaming eyes around the fire, I was mostly reminded of the Island of Lost Boys. Beneath all the mud and gloom and dire admonitions, there burned an ember of self-satisfaction – of pride in their wretched circumstances and willingness to endure it”) – the most piquant, for me, are the cave descriptions (“endless mud-dimmed labyrinth,” “terminal sumps,” “a musty fungal scent drifts up from the cave’s throat,” “a small dark pool under a dome of sulfurous flowstone,” “glistening caverns and plummeting boreholes, stalagmites tall as organ pipes and great galleries draped in flowstone,” “a great chamber filled with mist and spray, its floor split by a yawning chasm,” a huge borehole stretched into the darkness,” “As for the river, it had found a long crack in the floor less than an inch wide, and spooled through it like an endless bolt of turquoise cloth”).

“In Deep” puts you squarely there, in the dark tunnels and frigid pools with Gala and Short. When I finished reading it and looked up from the page, my eyes felt as “owl-wide and dilated” as Gala’s and Short’s when they finally emerged from J2’s “rocky clutch.”

Burkhard Bilger has written many great New Yorker pieces. “In Deep” is one of his best. I enjoyed it immensely.

Another excellent piece in this week’s “The Journeys Issue” is Geoff Dyer’s “Shipmates,” an account of Dyer’s two-week stay aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. George H. W. Bush. Dyer is known for what James Wood calls his “loitering investigation, somehow intense and slackerish, the author not quite pursuing his subject but hanging around it, like a clever aimless boy on a street corner” (“From Venice to Varanasi,” The New Yorker, April 20, 2009). Well, there aren’t any street corners on the George H. W. Bush. Its flight deck isn’t a good place to hang around, not unless you want to get sucked into the intake of a jet engine. Regarding the flight deck, Dyer says, “There was no room for anything even slightly ambiguous.” The idea of a slackerish guy like Dyer placing himself in such a rigidly organized, ultra-efficient, high-risk environment is amusing. He even has to keep his head up (actually down) when he’s below deck. He writes, “I walked the walkways and stoop-ducked through hatches, always focused on a single ambition: not to smash my head, even though there was an opportunity to do so every couple of seconds.”

As Wood has noted, Dyer has “deep descriptive talents.” In “Shipmates,” they’re applied to depict a highly specialized, dangerous world of arresting wires, catapults, F-18 jets, jet blast deflectors, etc. Here, for example, is Dyer’s description of the catapult in action:

The plane is flung forward by a catapult and quickly curves away from the end of the carrier, over the sea. In its wake, there is a wash of steam from the catapult tracks, which are built into the flight deck. After a few moments, the catapult shuttle – a large piston attached through the tracks to the landing gear – comes back like a singed hare at a greyhound race. A minute later, another plane, from a neighboring catapult, blasts into the sky.

“Shipmates” is closer to being straight factual reporting than anything else Dyer has written. But it still has Dyer’s inimitable “I” perspective, which I relish. My favorite scene in “Shipmates” is Dyer’s evening talk with the aircraft’s captain and two other officers:

One night, I met Captain Luther and two fellow-officers as they sat in fold-up chairs on a starboard-side catwalk, smoking cigars in the dark. The sea was nothing but shadow. I couldn’t see the faces, just the red orbs of the cigars’ tips. Then a crew member rigged up a line of blue fairy lights. It was still hard to see, but in a soft romantic way.

I laughed when I read that. Who else but Dyer, in that macho setting, sitting with the commanding officers of perhaps the world’s most powerful warship, would be struck by the lights’ “soft, romantic” effect. He’s subjective to the bone, and that’s what I love about his writing.

A third piece in this week’s issue that must be given its due is Laura Miller’s wonderful “Romancing the Stones.” It’s about her winter solstice visit to Stonehenge in the company of a flock of modern-day Druids. Miller’s description of the Druids gives the piece a surreal specificity. For example:

As I drifted through the crowd, I spotted a plump woman in a tiger-striped catsuit dancing to the beat of a drum circle, a tall man in white robes with a mask made of leaves, and a hobbity fellow in a brown woolly sweater telling an interviewer, “I’m a pagan and I’ve come here to exercise my religious rights.” Someone had made a sign that began with the line “Hello, I am an Earthian,” and surely nobody read past that point. A man in a green Inverness coat and a wide-brimmed felt hat was blowing mightily on a three-foot trumpet made from ox horn. He told me he was the Summoner of the Hearth of the Turning Wheel and urged me to have a go at the instrument. I couldn’t even get it to squeak. Behind a trilithon, people rubbed the padded heads of mallets over gongs, producing a groaning and swelling tone that seemed just right.

That last sentence is very fine! Miller’s previous New Yorker writings didn’t resonate with me. But her lovely “Romancing the Stones” is a revelation. I look forward to seeing more of her work in the magazine.

Friday, April 18, 2014

April 14, 2014 Issue


Last year’s New Yorker produced so many wonderful pieces that when this year began, I figured there was no way the magazine could match it. Then along came David Remnick’s "Going the Distance," Tad Friend’s "Thicker Than Water," Raffi Khatchadourian’s "A Star in a Bottle," Nick Paumgarten’s "Berlin Nights," and all of a sudden 2014 has the potential to be the best year yet. Now, Ian Frazier’s extraordinary "Blue Bloods," in this week’s issue, adds to the momentum. It’s about the decline of one of the earth’s oldest living creatures – the horseshoe crab. “Horseshoe crabs saw the aeons come and go,” Frazier says. But now the Asiatic species are in severe decline and Atlantic numbers are dropping, too. One reason is that people eat them. Another is habitat loss. One of the strongest images in “Blue Blood” is the sight of “throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs” on the riprap wall near the Dover Air Force Base fuel dock on Delaware Bay. Frazier reports,

The carnage stretched into the distance and had a major-battlefield air, reminiscent of the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg. Some of the horseshoe crabs seemed to be moving feebly. The ones on the road had evidently managed to make it past the rocks.

“Blue Bloods” comprehends horseshoe-crab places (Fire Island, Plumb Beach, Mispillion Harbor, Little Creek, Delaware Bay, Big Egg Marsh), horseshoe-crab people (Diane SanRomán, John Rowden, John Tanacredi, Matthew Sclafani, Glenn Gauvry),  and tons of horseshoe-crab facts (“ ‘Never pick up a horseshoe crab by the telson,’ she cautioned”; “The earliest known horseshoe-crab fossils are four hundred and eight-five million years old”; horseshoe crabs survived “at least a dozen extinctions”; “Horseshoe crabs have been around at least two hundred times as long as human beings”; “Horseshoe-crab blood is blue”; “Horseshoe-crab blood is said to be worth fifteen thousand dollars a quart”; “In 2012, the [biomedical] industry bled about half a million horseshoe crabs”).

It also includes such felicitous, Frazierian details as the smell of Russian fishermen’s beach fires (“They had lit fires of damp straw to keep the bugs away; the sharp-smelling smoke coiled around”); the sound of birders’ cellphones (“When the other bird-watchers called back, the ring tones were birdcalls”; and a beautiful description of Guyanese fishing nets (“Their seine nets, blue and white and orange, flared against the bridge’s tan concrete like sudden spills of paint when they cast them”).

Also, if you appreciate, as I do, Frazier’s marvelous authenticating lists (the one that springs instantly to mind is his amazing inventory of the contents of the Angler’s Roost, in his classic “An Angler at Heart,” The New Yorker, April 19, 1982), you’ll relish this dandy in “Blue Bloods”:

Wandering along trails in the shoreline reeds, I found horseshoe-crab fragments by the thousands, among paint buckets, tires, condom wrappers, bricks, Clorox bottles, bushel baskets, six-pack yokes, Sierra Mist cans, tampon dispensers, tail-light fragments, shot-gun shell casings, butterfly-shaped Mylar balloons, and two-by-fours. Next to the carapace of a large horseshoe crab someone had set a battered yellow hard hat, perhaps as visual commentary.

“Blue Bloods” is a great piece – where greatness means absorbing, various, precise, vivid, lyrical. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Monday, April 14, 2014

Ruskin's Rehabilitation


John Ruskin, Self-portrait, in Blue Neckcloth (1873)
Anthony Lane, in his “Art For Love’s Sake” (The New Yorker, August 14, 2000; included in his excellent 2002 collection Nobody’s Perfect), asks, “Which is worse: to be Humbert Humbert who seduces an underage female, with or without her consent, but who at least comprehends what he has done; or to be a John Ruskin, who is guilty of no rape or ravishment, but who hardly begins to know his own depravity?” Lane’s judgment of Ruskin’s infatuation with girls has always struck me as unduly harsh. Recently, I was pleased to see Garry Wills express an alternative view. In his absorbing “Ruskin: The Great Artist Emerges” (The New York Review of Books, April 3, 2014), Wills writes,

It is true that Ruskin’s heated religious upbringing made him inhibited and guilty about sex. It is also true that he had the Victorian desire to see women as angels, and to focus on little girls as more angelic than others – a trait shared by American Victorians like Henry Adams and Mark Twain. This form of nympholepsy did not make these men pedophiles. Rose was Ruskin’s Beatrice or Laura, not his preyed-upon Lolita.

Does it matter if John Ruskin was a pervert? It matters to me. I relish his writing. I want to be able to enjoy it without the guilt that I’m enjoying the work of a pedophile.