February 22, 2016 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Jill Lepore’s "The Party Crashers," a sharp, sparkling report on the New Hampshire primary. Can political journalism sparkle? Yes, when it contains vivid imagery like this:

The clock on the wall in the cafeteria at Winnacunnet High School, in Hampton, New Hampshire, is mounted behind a wire cage that protects its face from the likeliest weapons (French fries, foam balls) deployed in the uprisings of adolescents (food fights, dodgeball). Or maybe that was to prepare it for politics. Two weeks ago, the day after the Iowa caucuses and one week before the New Hampshire primary, a makeshift stage had been built at the far end of the cafeteria, catercornered from the caged clock. Its backdrop was an American flag; a campaign poster, an “H” with an arrow running through it; and three rows of Granite State citizens, a political Greek chorus positioned behind the lectern, awaiting the candidate. Minutes passed. The slender black hand of the clock ticked and twitched, like an old man tapping and jerking his cane. Hillary Rodham Clinton was running late.

And this:

The instant Clinton began speaking, dozens of arms reached high into the air, all across the room, wielding smartphones. It was like watching a flock of ostriches awaken, the arms their necks, the phones their heads, the red recording buttons their wide, blinking eyes.

And especially this:

I watched Wednesday night’s Democratic Town Hall from inside the Halligan Tavern, an Irish pub housed in an old brick fire station across the street from the Derry Opera House. CNN had reserved the entire restaurant for the press, since there was no room inside the dollhouse-size opera house. CNN played on screens above the bar and on the walls. More than a hundred reporters huddled with their laptops at tables, upstairs and down. A few people followed the response on #DemTownHall. On side tables, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and potato skins were served from platters warmed by cans of Sterno, their blue flames flickering. Power strips rested on every table, like so many centerpieces. The coffee was free. So was the Wi-Fi. The password was the date, 02032016.

Lepore might’ve written that she watched Wednesday night’s Democratic Town Hall from inside the Halligan Tavern and left it at that, but she didn’t. She evokes the bar’s interior with life-giving specificity, and uses it to illustrate her point – the Internet has revolutionized our politics.
  

Other highlights in this week’s issue: Emma Allen’s inspired “The prodigiously bearded artist Gregory (Stovetop) McKighan dispensed Franzia boxed wine, beer, and soju-based cocktails (there’s a church next door, so no liquor) and the kind of snacks you wish you’d bought at Trader Joe’s (hummus bagel, cheddar pretzels) beneath TVs playing ‘Inland Empire’ and the ‘Cremaster’ cycle,” in her "Bar Tab: Flowers for All Occasions"; and the sublime closing paragraph of Alex Ross’s "Stars and Snow":

At the end, the music seems on the verge of resolving to G major, but an apparent transitional chord proves to be the last, its notes dropping out one by one. Underneath is the noise of paper being scraped on a bass drum—“like walking in the snow,” the composer says. At Carnegie, there was a profound silence, and then the ovation began.

Janet Malcolm on Ted Hughes: Defending the Indefensible?

Ted Hughes, 1978 (Photo by Bill Brandt)

The case for literary criticism as art is easy to make. Simply adduce Janet Malcolm’s brilliant The Silent Woman (1993), a mesmerizing exploration of “the labyrinth of the Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes story,” and rest your case. No further submissions are necessary. The Silent Woman originally appeared in The New Yorker (August 23, 1993). One of my favorite lines in it is “When Bitter Fame appeared, and raised the stakes of the game, I decided to become a player.” Twenty-three years later, Malcolm is back at the table with her " 'A Very Sadistic Man' " (The New York Review of Books, February 11, 2016), a scathing review of Jonathan Bate’s Ted Hughes: The Unauthorized Life. She says of Bate’s book,

Bate’s malice is the glue that holds his incoherent book together—malice directed at other peripheral characters but chiefly directed at its subject. Bate wants to cut Hughes down to size and does so, interestingly, by blowing him up into a kind of extra-large sex maniac.

Malcolm is a staunch defender of Hughes. Her support is based largely on his letters, which she admires immensely. In The Silent Woman, she says, “The letters from Hughes immediately drew me, as if they were the electrically attractive man himself,” and “Reading the letter giving Hughes’s response to the chapters Anne had sent him of her short biography, I felt my identification with its typing swell into a feeling of intense sympathy and affection for the writer.”

In “ ‘A Very Sadistic Man,’ ” she writes,

He emerges from his letters as a man blessed with a brilliant mind and a warm and open nature, who seemed to take a deeper interest in other people’s feelings and wishes than the rest of us are able to do and who never said anything trite or obvious or pious or self-serving. Of course, this is Hughes’s epistolary persona, the persona he created the way novelists create characters. The question of what he was “really” like remains unanswered, as it should. If anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self. Biographers, in their pride, think otherwise. Readers, in their curiosity, encourage them in their impertinence. Surely Hughes’s family, if not his shade, deserve better than Bate’s squalid findings about Hughes’s sex life and priggish theories about his psychology.

Is that why we read literary biographies – to see what writers are “really” like? Maybe. The literary biographies I most enjoy explore the relationship between the life and the work. Perhaps the greatest of them is George D. Painter’s Marcel Proust. A recent example is Adam Begley’s excellent Updike. Bate’s book is not that kind of biography. It dishes the dirt. Malcolm rightly dismisses it. But it seems to me her defense of Hughes has at least one hole in it. It fails to adequately explain his destruction of Plath’s last journal, the one she wrote during the months leading up to her suicide when she was composing her great Ariel poems. That action strikes me as seriously self-incriminating. It puts Hughes’s character in issue.

February 8 & 15, 2016 Issue

James Wood, in his "Unsuitable Boys," in this week’s issue, says we live in “an age of the sentence fetish.” Well, as the bartender in Ian Frazier’s "Out of the Bronx" says, “Nuttin’ wrong with that!” I relish sentence rhythm, texture, and structure. If that makes me a fetishist, so be it. It makes Wood one, too – he’s the Casanova of sentence fetishists. “First, there is a simple joy to be had from reading the sentences,” he says in “Saul Bellow’s Comic Style.” In "Red Planet," he says,  “His [Cormac McCarthy’s] sentences are commaless convoys.” In "Late and Soon," he says, “His [Per Petterson’s] sentences yearn to fly away into poetry.” In "No Time For Lies," he says, “Her [Elizabeth Harrower’s] sentences, which have an unsettling candor, launch a curling assault on the reader, often twisting in unexpected ways.” I could list dozens of examples of Wood’s intense preoccupation with sentences. I savor them all.

“Diary of a New Yorker Sentence Fetishist” would make a good tagline for this blog. As proof, here are seven sentences from the current issue that I enjoyed immensely:

1. The El Chapo doesn’t feel particularly louche, except that it’s basically a goblet of tequila, with a hint of pisco and citrus (“Very spirit forward,” the server offered optimistically); the Flying Purple Pisco, with purple-potato purée and frothed egg whites, is like a tiny lavender-hued soufflé. [Shauna Lyon, "Tables For Two: Llama Inn"]

2. At the bottom of the stairs, in a barrel-vaulted watering hole, long lines of people waited for the bathroom from whence burst ebullient gaggles of young women and a madly coughing guy in a Thrasher hat. [Nicolas Niarchos, ”Bar Tab: Berlin"]

3. The proprietor of the café—belly, suspenders, glasses on a cord—sidled up to the table. [Lauren Collins, "Dog's Dinner"]

4. Somehow—Jay’s biography, though it comes as close as any source to explaining the how of how, still leaves a reader at the intersection of belief and disbelief—he did magic (specialty: cups-and-balls), played several instruments (dulcimer, trumpet, flute), trick-shot with pistols, demonstrated exquisite ball control at skittles, danced the hornpipe on his leather-encased stumps, married four times, and sired fourteen children (proof, as Jay noted in “Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women,” of “one fully operative appendage”). [Mark Singer, "Sleight of No Hands"]

5. On the advice of sleep doctors, fatigue-management specialists, and know-it-alls on wellness blogs, these tossers and turners drink cherry juice, eat Atlantic perch, set the bedroom thermostat between sixty-seven and seventy degrees, put magnets under the pillow, curl their toes, uncurl their toes, and kick their partners out of bed, usually to little avail. [Patricia Marx, "In Search of Forty Winks"]

6. Sentences expand, even at the cost of some strain, in order to absorb as much of Berlin as possible: “I had no trouble seeing the justice of Manfred’s criticisms when we discussed Rosen-Montag over cigarettes by the Hansa warehouse slated to become a children’s clinic.” [James Wood, "Unsuitable Boys"]

7. Seidel’s elegy has some of the plastered sweetness of a woozy toast. [Dan Chiasson, "Luxe et Veritas"]

What makes these sentences special is that even though they were created to be part of a larger unit of composition, they are beautiful in their own right as stand-alone constructions – the brilliant verbal equivalents of Rauschenberg combines, Cornell boxes, and Calder mobiles.

February 1, 2016 Issue

What do Allen Ginsberg, Rudyard Kipling, Marie Antoinette, Gloria Steinem, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Jacques Derrida, James Joyce, Lewis Mumford, Fiorello LaGuardia, Marcel Proust, Walter Kirn, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Steve Carell have in common? Answer: they all appear in Nathan Heller’s dazzling essay "Air Head," in this week’s issue. 

“Air Head” is a delicious inflight cocktail of ideas – a review of Christopher Schaberg’s The End of Airports (“a wandering but well-fuelled study of air travel’s fading profile in our digitally transported age”), an epistemological argument (“The battle between jet planes and smart phones isn’t about speed or glamour. It’s about ways of knowing”), a social theory (“The airborne class and those who brushed against it came to represent what we might call 'encounter thought': a way of processing the world which grew from easy geographic leaps and happenstantial connections”), a literary theory (“what made the New Journalism new was its vigor as a literary life-style movement, based largely on the idea that professional process—the getting there, the rips between the coasts—was part of the essential story, too”), and two potent shots of personal history, the second of which begins, “The worst air logistics I’ve ever encountered were en route to a reporting assignment in Monaco—a destination with a gloss of antiquated glamour foreign to me, and a project that suggested I’d been dropped into another traveller’s life,” and ends nineteen lines later with this gorgeous passage:

To our right, the hills fell away, revealing a full moon. The Mediterranean gaped beneath it, wide and textured like the skin of an old person’s cheek. I rolled the window down, certain that I was watching something people were not supposed to see: the world undressing itself, changing color, wiping off its makeup with a moonlight-hued layer of cream. A breeze came up, jasmine and silk trees, and we followed it down toward the water. Every switchback offered a new view. I arrived at my destination and reported my piece, but, when I think of that week, what’s sharpest in my memory is the slow sunset descent to Portugal, the woman cradling a baby whom she did not know, the brightness of the moon on the sea long past midnight. Anyway, it was better than the fast flight home. 

That “I rolled the window down, certain that I was watching something people were not supposed to see: the world undressing itself, changing color, wiping off its makeup with a moonlight-hued layer of cream” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired. I enjoyed it immensely.

Ian Frazier's Bronx Trilogy

I see Amazon is announcing that Ian Frazier’s new collection, Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces, will be released June 7, 2016. This, for me, will be one of the major publishing events of the year, maybe the decade. I want to start the celebration now by considering three Frazier pieces that constitute what I call his Bronx Trilogy: "Utopia, the Bronx" (The New Yorker, June 26, 2006); "Out of the Bronx" (The New Yorker, February 6, 2012); "Bronx Dreams" (The New Yorker, December 7, 2015). The first two of these pieces are, I think, strong candidates for inclusion in Hogs Wild. The third, “Bronx Dreams,” which appeared just a couple of months ago, might be too recent to be collected. All three are set in the Bronx, but each is different in its own way. It’s interesting to compare them.

“Utopia, the Bronx”

I first read this great piece when it appeared in the June 26, 2006 New Yorker. What impressed me about it at that time (and still does) is the way it evolves from a description of a chunk of urban nature (the grounds of Co-op City, in the Bronx), including its aboriginal history (there’s a wonderful passage listing the contents of Indian middens found there), to a fascinating account of a rent strike in 1975-76. Frazier’s masterly "Canal Street" (The New Yorker, April 30, 1990) and "Route 3" (The New Yorker, February 16 & 23, 2004) move in a similar way – from immediate experience of a locale to a specific story embedded in the locale’s history.

Rereading “Utopia, the Bronx” today, I noticed things I’d missed the first time, e.g., the Russian references (“If you’ve seen Soviet-era apartment complexes in Russia or Eastern Europe, Co-op City looks like them. They have the same stark, modernist architecture, the same lonesome open spaces between the buildings, same walkways, same benches”), and the hint of anti-capitalism (“Like the Soviet high-rise projects, Co-op City is a survival from a more collectivist age into today’s world of every-man-for-himself”) that is more pronounced in the later “Out of the Bronx.”

The core of “Utopia, the Bronx” is the rent strike. Frazier writes,

Cornered into a fight, the residents of Co-op City ended up waging a minor revolution for self-determination – against the project’s creator and management, against the powers of the city and the state, and against generally unsympathetic public opinion – that deserves a modest statue of its own.

In a way, “Utopia, the Bronx” is that statue – an eloquent tribute to the ordinary working people who “had taken weakness – their lack of resources, shortage of options, the fact that many of them were elderly – and converted it to strength.”

“Out of the Bronx”

This piece is also about a strike – the 2008 Stella D’oro Biscuit Company workers’ strike. Normally, Frazier isn’t political. But in “Out of the Bronx,” his disgust at the gross inequality caused by Wall Street greed is palpable. He says,

In the second week of October, just days after the factory closed, Goldman Sachs announced that it would pay out twenty-three billion dollars in holiday bonuses to its executives and staff. The amount was the largest bonus pool in the hundred-and-forty-year history of Goldman Sachs. At the highest average salary Brynwood had offered—about seven hundred and eighty dollars a week—the hundred and thirty-four Stella D’oro workers together would have had to work forty-hour weeks for about forty-two hundred years to earn twenty-three billion dollars.

But reading “Out of the Bronx” solely as a political argument is not adequate to its art. It contains a paragraph – the description of the “baking-cookie smell” that used to come from the Stella D’oro Biscuit factory, in the Bronx, before it was closed – that went straight into my anthology of favorite Frazier passages:

The baking-cookie smell entered check-cashing places and barbershops and bodegas, it crossed the razor wire into the M.T.A. yards and maintenance sheds west of Broadway, it occupied the loud channel of the Major Deegan Expressway, just to the east; kids dozing in the back seats of their parents’ cars sniffed the air and knew they were almost home. The smell competed with the acridity of hot wax and detergent chemicals at Nice Guys Car Wash, just across the street from the factory, and domesticated the beer fumes and late-night atmosphere at Stack’s Tavern, a shamrock-bedecked bar between 234th and 236th Streets, where a bartender told me, “Sure, I remember the smell—fresh-baked cookies. Nuttin’ wrong with that!”

That “kids dozing in the back seats of their parents’ cars sniffed the air and knew they were almost home” is inspired! There are lots of eye and ear writers. Frazier is one of the few who are also nose writers. Recall the “Russia-smell” (“There's a lot of diesel fuel in it, and cucumber peels, and old tea bags, and sour milk, and a sweetness - currant jam, or mulberries crushed into the waffle treads of heavy boots - and fresh wet mud, and a lot of wet cement”) in his superb Travels in Siberia.

In a brilliant move near the end of “Out of the Bronx,” Frazier goes in search of the cookie smell in Ashland, Ohio, where the Archway-Stella D’oro factory is located. After driving all around the place, he finally finds it, carried by the wind into a forest of locust trees and pin oaks. He walks into the woods and inhales:

The warm, gingerbready smell was still strong here. To find that old Kingsbridge aroma adrift in an Ohio woods seemed strange. At the far edge of the woods was the lawn of a low-slung office building. The lawn had just been mowed, and there the cookie smell mingled suburbanly with the fragrances of wet earth and cut grass.

Ravishing!

“Bronx Dreams”

This is the most recent of Frazier’s Bronx pieces. I praised it when it appeared in the December 7, 2015 New Yorker (see here). It’s about an amazing community organization called DreamYard, “the largest arts organization in the Bronx,” that uses art, theatre, and dance to inspire kids to pursue an education. Frazier reports,

Of the kids who participate long-term in the center’s on-site programs, ninety-eight per cent graduate from high school and go on to college—an achievement, considering that the over-all rate of high-school graduation in the Bronx is just above fifty per cent.

My favorite part of “Bronx Dreams” is Frazier’s delightful description of the final night of the Bronx Arts Festival at Lehman College:

On the final night, in the college’s steeply pitched five-hundred-seat theatre, the audience seemed to loom around the kids onstage, applauding and giving shout-outs. Fifty kids in zombie makeup zombied to “Thriller,” two middle-school actors did the scene in which Othello strangles Desdemona, a girl named Massire Camara recited a poem about the death of her uncle that is now on YouTube, and a stage full of elementary-age students in a step-dance group called the Bengal Tigers, from P.S. 55, did a routine with stomping, clapping, and chanting that bounced the audience out of its seats. In mid-show, the whole place stood and sang the national anthem, a cappella.

In my opinion, Frazier is The New Yorker’s greatest writer – where greatness means specific, original, attentive, factual, subjective, empathetic, lyrical. I avidly look forward to his new collection Hogs Wild.

Credit: The above illustration by Laura Carlin is from Ian Frazier's "Out of the Bronx" (The New Yorker, February 6, 2012).