June 22, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Nick Paumgarten’s "Hut!" is one of this year’s best Talk stories. It describes a recent evening excursion in New York Harbor carried out by members of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. Traveling in two Hawaiian-style canoes, “forty-five feet long and made of fibreglass, with outriggers (ama) connected by spars (iako),” they’re looking for possible moorings for the Hokule’a, “a working replica of a traditional Polynesian sailing vessel” that will be visiting New York City next summer. I like “Hut!” ’s brisk, vivid notation: “The boats skimmed out into the current”; “The harbor was a bedlam of gulls and boats”; “Unmenacing flotsam drifted past. Foam baseball bat, soccer ball, scrunchie”; “They flew on the tide, the city sparkling by.” The piece brims with open air immediacy. I enjoyed it immensely.

2. I devoured Calvin Tomkins’s "What Else Can Art Do?." It’s a profile of Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford. I relished its description of Bradford’s process:

He starts with a stretched canvas and builds up its surface with ten or fifteen layers of paper—white paper, colored paper, newsprint, reproductions, photographs, printed texts—fixing each layer with a coat of clear shellac. Sometimes he embeds lengths of string or caulking to form linear elements in the palimpsest. When the buildup reaches a certain density, he attacks it with power sanders and other tools, exposing earlier layers, flashes of color, and unexpected juxtapositions. Not until the first sanding does he begin to see where the painting is going. He works like an archeologist, rediscovering the past. The method seems haphazard, but it’s not, and the results can take your breath away.

And I enjoyed Tomkins’s personal perspective – the way he participates in his report, e.g., “It was nearly eight in the evening, time for dinner. Bradford locked up the studio, and we got into his silver Range Rover—he bought it last year, after sitting in a lot of other cars and deciding that it had the most headroom—and drove for fifteen minutes to a restaurant in another part of South Los Angeles, called Leimert Park”; “Bradford had recently installed a major sculpture at the Los Angeles International Airport, and we went to see it the next morning.” Tomkins has changed his style since his The Bride and the Bachelors days. Back then he wrote mostly in the third person major. I find his subjective, first-person approach, as exemplified in “What Else Can Art Do?” and last year’s superb "Into the Unknown," much more engaging, immediate, and satisfying.

3. I’m pleased to see that James Wood hasn’t lost his edge. I enjoy his appreciative reviews, but I like it when, every now and then, he takes the gloves off. His excellent "Story of My Life," in this week’s issue, is an assessment of Alejandro Zambra’s new story collection My Documents. In it, Wood takes aim at “self-reflexive fictionality.” Regarding Zambra’s story “The Private Life of Trees,” he says,

Julian, the protagonist of “The Private Lives of Trees,” described as “a professor, and a writer on Sundays,” waits up one evening for his wife, Veronica, to return home. To pass the time, and to keep his young stepdaughter distracted, he tells her a story that he has been improvising at bedtime, which he calls “The Private Lives of Trees.” But Julian is also writing a real book, which sounds a lot like Zambra’s own first novel—it’s “about a young man tending a bonsai.” This level of self-reflexivity can sometimes seem about as resonant as the prospect of repeatedly having to smell one’s own breath, and perhaps Zambra is knowingly protecting himself from such criticism when he has one of Julian’s friends complain to him that he’s been reading “too much Paul Auster.”

That “This level of self-reflexivity can sometimes seem about as resonant as the prospect of repeatedly having to smell one’s own breath” made me smile. It put me in mind of other Wood zappers, like the one in his piece on Sheila Heti, where he says of a passage in Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, “If I wanted to hear that, I could settle in at a Starbucks and wait for the schoolkids to get out at three o’clock.” Whoa! Watch out for Wood. He can dance, but he can also sting. It’s what gives his criticism its delicious acerbity.  

James Wood's "The Nearest Thing to Life"

What does criticism gain by being personal? By “personal” I don’t mean ad hominem. I mean autobiographical. What is a critic aiming to accomplish when he includes a chunk of his own personal experience in his writing? In his new collection, The Nearest Thing to Life, James Wood serves up four essays, each of which contains a personal component. This is a departure for Wood. Most of his work consists of reviews – among the best in the business. He’s also written at least two personal essays – “The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon” and “Packing My Father-In-Law’s Library” – both collected in his great The Fun Stuff (2012). The pieces in The Nearest Thing To Life weave together personal history and literary commentary. They’re more ruminative than analytical. They’re like autobiography set to literary theory. For example, the first essay in the book, titled “Why?” (originally published in the December 9, 2013 New Yorker) is a meditation on death and fictional form. It begins with an account of a memorial service that Wood attended and ends with an examination of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. In between, it discusses death, religion, Wood’s strict religious upbringing, his discovery of fiction’s freedom (“I still remember that adolescent thrill, that sublime discovery of the novel and short story as an utterly free space, where anything might be thought, anything uttered”), and propounds a theory – “To read the novel is to be constantly moving between secular and religious modes, between what could be called instance and form.” The piece is a shade heavy on religion for my taste, but in light of Wood’s upbringing (“The scriptures saturated everything”), that’s forgivable. The real question is whether this form of essay is preferable to Wood’s essay-reviews. Before I answer, let’s briefly consider the other three pieces in The Nearest Thing to Life.

The second piece is “Serious Noticing” – my favorite of the four. It extends and amplifies Wood’s splendid philosophy of “detail.” In his How Fiction Works (2008), he says, “In life as in literature, we navigate via the stars of detail.” Wood has a jeweler’s eye for detail. He distinguishes between real and literary detail, relevant and irrelevant detail, “off-duty” and “on-duty” detail. In “Serious Noticing,” his consideration of Chekhov’s “The Kiss” (“The details are the stories; stories in miniature. As we get older, some of those details fade, and others, paradoxically, become more vivid. We are, in a way, all internal fiction writers and poets, rewriting our memories”) leads to a reminiscence about growing up in the northern English town of Durham (there’s a wonderful line describing coal pouring down a chute into the basement of his family’s house – “I vividly remember the volcanic sound, as it tumbled into the cellar, and the drifting, bluish coal-dust, and the dark, small men who carried those sacks on their backs, with tough leather pads on their shoulders”). The piece advances a theory of “life-surplus” (“the life-surplus of a story lies in its details”); talks about “serious noticing” (serious noticing is a way of “rescuing the life of things from their death”); and concludes by observing, “We can bring the dead back by applying the same attentiveness to their shades as we apply to the world around us – by looking harder: by transfiguring the object.” I question that last bit about “transfiguring the object.” It connects with an observation that Wood makes earlier in the piece: “Just as great writing asks us to look more closely, it asks us to participate in the transformation of the subject through metaphor and imagery.” So when Wood says, “by looking harder: by transfiguring the object,” he seems to be saying “looking harder” means looking at something in terms of its potential for metaphor and imagery. I disagree. For me, “looking harder” means seeing things exactly as they are. C. K. Williams, in his On Whitman (2010), says,

As for the body of the world, of existence – Whitman isn’t trying to raise reality through his poetry to another level of being, another realm of possibility: his poetry embodies rather the gigantic illuminations that are evident in perception. Unlike Rilke’s earth that desires only to be transformed; unlike Traherne’s “The corn was orient and immortal wheat,” Whitman’s vegetation is itself, his poems don’t need or want a mode of existence that depends on transformation: his metaphoric stuff is inherent in his perceptions; rather than using mind to alter reality, he finds ways to enlarge the underused senses of the mind, to fling the eyes and ears open wider, to make more sensitive the endings of the nerves.

Wood’s theory of transformation aside, his philosophy of detail, as expressed in How Fiction Works, and elaborated in “Serious Noticing,” seems to me one of the most useful, beautiful ideas in all of literary criticism. His love of detail is palpable. When he says, in “Serious Noticing,” “I think of details as nothing less than bits of life sticking out of the frieze of form, imploring us to touch them,” I feel his passion. I want to touch them, too.

The Nearest Thing to Life’s third essay is called “Using Everything.” It’s about the practice of literary criticism. It contains a few surprises. One of them is Wood’s revelation that “A lot of the criticism I most admire is not especially analytical but is really a kind of passionate rediscription.” He explains that by “passionate rediscription” he means “an act of critique that is at the same time a revoicing.” I like this idea of the critic as sort of jazz singer – the critic jazzing his subject text. But my first love is analysis. It’s why I read criticism. It’s why I devour Wood. He’s an excellent analyst of style, of structure and language. Here’s a quick example. In his How Fiction Works (2008), he quotes this long, remarkable sentence from Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre –

Lately, when Sabbath suckled at Drenk’s uberous breasts – uberous, the root word of exuberant, which is itself ex plus uberare, to be fruitful, to overflow like Juno lying prone in Tintoretto’s painting where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit – suckled with an unrelenting frenzy that caused Drenka to roll her head ecstatically back and to groan (as Juno herself may once groaned), “I feel it deep down in my cunt,” he was pierced by the sharpest longings for his late little mother.

 – and says,

This is an amazingly blasphemous little mélange. This sentence is really dirty, and partly because it conforms to the well-known definition of dirt – matter out of place, which is itself a definition of high and low dictions. But why would Roth engage in such baroque deferrals and shifts. Why write it so complicatedly? If you render the simple matter of his sentence and keep everything in place – i.e., remove the jostle of registers – you see why. A simple version would go like this: “Lately, when Sabbath sucked Drenka’s breasts, he was pierced by the sharpest longing for his mother.” It is still funny, because of the slide from lover to mother, but it is not exuberant. So the first thing the complexity achieves is to enact the exuberance, the hasty joy and chaotic desire, of sex. Second, the long, mock-pedantic, suspended subclause about the Latin origin of “uberous” and Tintoretto’s painting of Juno works, in proper music-hall fashion, to delay the punchline of “he was pieced by the sharpest of longings for his late little mother.” (It also delays, and makes more shocking and unexpected, the entrance of “cunt.”) Third, since the comedy of the subject matter of the sentence involves moving from one register to another – from a lover’s breast to a mother’s – it is fitting that the style of the sentence mimics this scandalous shift, by engaging in its own stylistic shifts, going up and down like a manic EKG: so we have “suckled” (high diction), “breasts” (medium), “uberare” (high), “Tintoretto’s painting” (high), “where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit” (low), “unrelenting frenzy” (high, rather formal diction), “as Juno herself may have once groaned” (still quite high), “cunt” (very low), “pierced by the sharpest of longings” (high, formal diction again). By insisting on equalizing all these different levels of diction, the style of the sentence works as style should, to incarnate the meaning, and the meaning itself, of course, is all about the scandal of equalizing different registers.

Wood’s criticism abounds with such analysis or redescription or descriptive analysis. Wood can call it whatever he wants so long as he keeps writing it. I can’t get enough of it.

Another surprise in “Serious Noticing” is Wood’s view of criticism as a form of storytelling. He says, “The good critic has an awareness that criticism means, in part, telling a story about the story you are reading.” Really? What I like about criticism, in general, and Wood’s reviews, in particular, is that they aren’t stories. They’re description; they’re analysis; they’re argument. “Give me some straight talk. Give me a little humor. Give me something real. Above all, give me an argument,” Dwight Garner says, in “A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical” (The New York Times Magazine, August 15, 2012). I agree.

The great value of “Serious Noticing,” as far as I’m concerned, lies in its appreciation of criticism as literature. The best critics, Wood says, “speak to literature in its own language.” This is a refreshing corrective to the dismal views expressed by Adam Gopnik (“Criticism serves a lower end than art does, and has little effect on it”: see “Postscript:Robert Hughes,” newyorker.com, August 7, 2012) and Richard Brody (“Criticism is a parasitical operation”: see “How To Be A Critic,” newyorker.com, August 22, 2012). For me, criticism – “writerly criticism,” as Wood calls it – is one of the most stimulating, satisfying, nourishing sources of reading pleasure. Janet Malcolm’s deconstruction of Sylvia Plath biographies (The Silent Woman), Richard Ellmann’s tracing of the sources of Joyce’s “The Dead” (James Joyce), Helen Vendler’s analysis of the grammatical shifts in Seamus Heaney’s style (The Breaking of Style), Michael Fried’s analysis of the structures of Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (Realism, Writing, Disfiguration), Svetlana Alpers’s argument for the importance of the distinction between description and narration (The Art of Describing) – I could go on and on – are every bit as artful and creative as the great works they take as their subjects. They are literature. I value them immensely.

The fourth essay in The Nearest Thing to Life is “Secular Homelessness.” I praised it when it originally appeared in the London Review of Books (February 20, 2014) under the title “On Not Going Home” (see my comment here). But rereading it in The Nearest Thing to Life, I’ve had second thoughts. It is a great essay – I’m still convinced of that – the verbal equivalent of a Rauschenberg combine, in which materials as diverse as Thomas Tallis’s “O Nata Lux,” Durham Cathedral, the Hudson River, Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile,” a Green Card, a bumper sticker, Boar’s Head trucks, Deltic diesels, W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants are conjoined to make an arresting meditation on homelessness. But Wood’s mirroring off exilic literature strikes me as a bit much. His life is not in the least comparable to Said’s and Sebald’s tragic exiles, refugees, expatriates, and émigrés. And his statement that after eighteen years living in the U.S., he looks down his Boston Street and “feels nothing” is hard to comprehend. Compare it with Aleksandar Hemon’s immigrant experience, as described in his superb "Mapping Home" (The New Yorker, December 5, 2011). In March, 1992, Hemon, a Bosnian citizen, arrived in Chicago on a cultural exchange. He planned to stay only a month. But in April, the Bosnian War began and Hemon decided to stay in Chicago. To get to know the place better, he did a lot of walking. He says, “I wanted from Chicago what I’d got from Sarajevo: a geography of the soul.” Eventually, he settled into the Chicago neighborhood of Edgewater. “Little by little,” he writes,

people in Edgewater began to recognize me; I started greeting them on the street. Overtime, I acquired a barber and a butcher and a coffee shop with a steady set of colorful characters – which were, as I’d learned in Sarajevo, the necessary knots in my personal urban network. I discovered that the process of transforming an American city into a space you could call your own required starting in a particular neighborhood. Soon I began to claim Edgewater as mine; I became a local.

This is quite a different story from Wood’s. My point is that not all immigrants feel homeless. It’s possible to make a home in a new place. But you have to want to; like Hemon, you have to want “a geography of the soul.” I suspect that the only place in which Wood truly feels at home is his books. This would be the case even if he'd stayed in England.

And now to return to my initial question: Are the hybrid essays in The Nearest Thing to Life preferable to Wood’s reviews? The answer is no they aren’t. I relish the descriptive analysis of his reviews. They are a form of art. Long may he keep writing them.

June 8 & 15, 2015 Issue

James Wood, in his great The Nearest Thing to Life, says, “The real, in fiction, is always a matter of belief – it is up to us as readers to validate and confirm.” I confess I’m a nonbeliever. For whatever reason – lack of imagination, skepticism, a Heaney-like desire to see things plain (“things founded clean on their own shapes”) – I’m unable to suspend my disbelief. And so, when The New Yorker’s Summer Fiction Issue appears, as it has this week, I gravitate toward what seem to me to be the least fictional pieces. For example, Thomas McGuane’s "Fall River," in this week’s issue, appears to be mostly personal history. It contains a wonderful line that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker sentences:

I also have a deck of playing cards with bathing beauties in arousing costumes to distract me, as well as match rockets, which I light in the basement until I’m rebuked for trying to burn the house down, baseball in North Park, daring trips to the third floor’s sagging porch, which is about to fall into Brownell Street and has been declared out of bounds, and rides with my Uncle Frank in his “foreign” car, a Ford (he calls it foreign because “it is entirely foreign to me”).

That “daring trips to the third floor’s sagging porch, which is about to fall into Brownell Street” is inspired!

June 1, 2015 Issue

Pleasures abound in this week’s issue – Richard Brody on Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (“Fuller’s pugnacious direction and his gutter-up view of city life romanticize both the criminal code of honor and the jangling paranoia of global plots; his hard-edged long takes depict underworld cruelty with reportorial wonder as well as moralistic dread”), Emma Allen on a cocktail called What the Doctor Ordered (“The rum made it taste like a mind-bending root beer”), Lizzie Widdicombe on Uber for helicopters (“The helicopter made its shuddering descent. Legs shook; sippy cups spilled. Marcy said, ‘Wow! I love this part!’ The pilot yelled, ‘Touchdown!’ ”), Nick Paumgarten on the end of Vin Scelsa’s “Idiots Delight” (“After ‘Goodnight Ladies,’ Scelsa signed off: ‘Thanks for your ears. I love you all’ ”) – but for me its most piquant delight is Dan Chiasson’s review of John Ashbery’s Breezeway (“These poems conjure a massive mental errata slip made up of what they almost say and nearly mean”). Chiasson is on a roll: four reviews this year, so far – all brilliant!

It would be perverse to say that I enjoyed Michael Specter’s "Extreme City," an account of a recent visit he made to Luanda. The inequality it describes is appalling. But I do relish it as writing. I like going (vicariously) where Specter goes. He’s always out and about, nosing around, seeing what’s to be seen. He says, “One afternoon, I visited Tako Koning, a Canadian petroleum geologist, who lives on the seventh floor of an older building in the center of Luanda,” and I’m right there with him. He says, “One day, I had lunch at Oon.dah, on the first floor of the Escom Center,” and I’m happy to tag along. Specter’s pieces afford the experience of first-person access. The payoff is readerly bliss.

May 25, 2015 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is David Owen’s masterly "Where the River Runs Dry." I say “masterly” because the piece shows a superb journalist at the top of his form, deploying his formidable descriptive and analytical gifts to depict a great river, the Colorado, in crisis. The Colorado, which supplies water to approximately thirty-six million people, irrigates close to six million acres of farmland, and powers the hydroelectric plants at the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams, is over-used, over-allocated, and environmentally degraded. Owen says, “The Colorado’s flow is so altered and controlled that in some ways the river functions more like a fourteen-hundred-mile-long canal.” The piece comprehends hydrology, geography, climate change, agriculture, environmental science, and law. Yet it’s immensely readable, structured as a road trip (“Not long ago, I travelled as much of the Colorado’s length as can be followed in a car. I began near the headwaters, put three thousand miles on three rental cars, and ended, eventually, in northern Mexico, where the Colorado simply runs out”). Along the way, Owen visits farmers, scientists, environmentalists, a manager of a pumping station, an owner of a marina, a lawyer specializing in water law. They talk about the Colorado in terms of “paper water,” “wet water,” “over-allocation,” “beneficial use,” “prior appropriation,” “the Law of the River,” “acre-foot,” “the non-consumed fraction,” “water-banking strategies,” “spreading basins,” “indirect recharge,” “pulse flow” – language that gets at the stark reality of what this once mighty river has become, not really a river at all, but a “dispersed and brachiating resource-distribution system.” “Where the River Runs Dry” is absorbing, memorable, beautifully composed– one of this year's best pieces.

Postscript: This issue is a loaded, layered honeycomb of succulent writing. In addition to Owen’s superb “Where the River Runs Dry,” there’s James Wood’s "All Her Children" (“This is storytelling, with the blood-pulse of lived gossip, that little run-on final sentence bearing witness to its coursing unstoppability”), Peter Schjeldahl’s "Native Soil" (“Her touch delivers the key drama of her art: living in sensuous and suffering flesh”), Anthony Lane’s "High Gear" (“You could tattoo the entirety of Max’s dialogue onto his biceps”), and Ian Frazier’s "Lack of Center" (“London plane trees leaned toward one another over the streets, vying for the light”). Also, check out Ian Allen’s “Goings On About Town” photo of Chastity Belt – it’s a beauty!

May 18, 2015 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue that most absorbed me is Joshua Rothman’s "Anatomy of Error." It’s a review of neurosurgeon Henry Marsh’s memoir, Do No Harm. Medical writing is, for me, a relatively new interest. I trace my appetite for it to a quartet of elegant Jerome Groopman pieces that appeared last year: “How Memory Works” (The New York Review of Books, May 22, 2014); “The Transformation” (The New Yorker, September 15, 2014); “When Doctors Admit They Went Wrong” (The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2014); “Print Thyself” (The New Yorker, November 24, 2014). Groopman writes a graceful, plain-English-style prose. Judging from the quotations in Rothman’s piece, it seems that Marsh’s style is similar – plainspoken, eloquent. Rothman calls Marsh “the Knausgaard of neurosurgery: he writes about his errors because he wants to confess them, and because he’s interested in his inner life and how it’s been changed, over time, by the making of mistakes.” I find Marsh’s willingness to confess and explore his errors fascinating. I applaud his factuality. Groopman, in his excellent “When Doctors Admit They Went Wrong,” a review of Terrence Holt’s Internal Medicine: A Doctor’s Stories, criticizes Holt for not recounting recollections of exact events. Holt offered “parables,” i.e., “assemblages drawn from a variety of sources, compiled from multiple cases, transformed according to the logic not of journalism but of parable, seeking to capture the essence of something too complex to be understood any other way” (Holt’s words). Groopman says,

I was taken aback by Holt’s assertion that only the form of parable can “capture the essence to something too complex to be understood any other way.” Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych” is an illuminating parable, as are the medical tales of Chekhov, Turgenev, and Kafka. But the nonfiction stories of Oliver Sacks, Robert Coles, Richard Selzer, and Sherwin Nuland, as well as potent new voices of young doctors like Danielle Ofri, Leah Kaminsky, and Christine Montross, certainly capture the essence and complexity of the clinical world.

Add Henry Marsh to the list. Rothman says, “Do No Harm is an act of atonement, an anatomy of error, and an attempt to answer, from the inside, a startling question: How can someone spend decades cutting into people’s brains and emerge whole?”