June 27, 2016 Issue

There’s a “Night Life” note in this week’s issue that caught my eye. Titled "Special Piano Extravaganza," it says,

This multi-generational meeting of piano luminaries brings together three exceptional stylists: Frank Kimbrough, George Cables, and Don Friedman. United in their authority of the post-bop idiom, each has a wholly distinctive approach to the genre—consider this evening a master class in keyboard expertise.

This event took place last night at Jazz at Kitano in New York City. I wish I could’ve been there. I’m a fan of all three pianists – Kimbrough, Cables, and Friedman. They truly are, as “Night Life” notes, “exceptional stylists.” I’m listening to Cables’ great 2015 album In Good Company as I write this. If Whitney Balliett were alive, he would’ve covered this gig. And he would’ve written it up in The New Yorker so that readers could imagine they were there, too. He loved piano jazz. He referred to it as a “pianistic river that flows through New York” (Night Creature, 1981). It appears that river is still flowing.

Becky Cooper's Ravishing "Tables For Two: Bar Omar"

Photo by Christaan Felber

Last year, in a memorable piece titled "Sacred Carnality" (newyorker.com, October 11, 2015), Mary Karr praised what she called “carnal writing.” “Every memoir should brim over with the physical experiences that once streamed in—the smell of garlicky gumbo, your hand in an animal’s fur, the ocean’s phosphor lighting up bodies underwater all acid green,” she said. I agree. The New Yorker’s “Tables For Two” is a tremendous source of carnal writing. A prime example is Becky Cooper’s ravishing Bar Omar review in this week’s issue. Of Bar Omar’s tagine, she writes,

But the tagine (lamb, chicken, or kefta) is the showstopper. Portioned for two, it arrives in a tall clay vessel, clutched between napkins. The waiter pauses for dramatic effect before rolling off the lid, letting steam billow out. If you ordered the lamb, swollen prunes, fat apricots, and egg-shaped potatoes hug two giant shanks sunk in a still-bubbling broth; the prunes collapse into a sweet, jammy mess the second they’re touched. Shovel some of the fruit over meat pulled clean from the bone, add slivered almonds for crunch, and it’s a perfect bite.

Mmm, so good! And Cooper’s description of desert is even better:

Ending your meal with dessert is a must, and the crème brûlée is irreproachably classic. Shatter the shell of blistered sugar into pieces that look like stained glass and try not to smile.

Who is The New Yorker’s leading carnal writer? I vote for Becky Cooper. 

June 20, 2016 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Raffi Khatchadourian’s brilliant "The Unseen," an “Annals of Science” piece about microbiology. I almost passed it up. I’m not crazy about science writing. But Katchadourian has written some of the best New Yorker pieces of the last five years. Recall his extraordinary "Transfiguration" (February 13 & 20, 2012), for example. So I decided to plunge in, and was immediately caught up in the description of 1960s Soviet Moscow – the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy, the Cosmos Pavilion, the Monument to the Conquerors of Space, Vostok rockets, and Soyuz orbiters. On one level, “The Unseen” is a dual profile of microbiologists Slava Epstein and Kim Lewis. On another, it’s a fascinating account of Epstein and Lewis’s discovery of a powerful new antibiotic. And on a third, it’s an alarming report on a potential end-of-the-road for antibiotics. Along the way, Katchadourian explores, among other things, the Great Oxygenation Event, the Age of Microbes, and the Great Plate Count Anomaly. There are no flashy sentences in “The Unseen”; it’s built solidly of fact (e.g., “More than half the cells in the human body are microbial”; “That our atmosphere is twenty-one percent oxygen is a bacterial fact”; “Already there are strains of tuberculosis and gonorrhea, among other pathogens, that are resistant to virtually every drug in the medical arsenal”). But it's the exotic blend of samizdat and petri dish, refuseniks and microbial weeds, Sakharov and lantern-eye fish that appealed to me. “The Unseen” is a curious, distinctive literary brew. I enjoyed it immensely.

Notes on Ian Frazier's "Hogs Wild" - Part I

I’m still making my way through Ian Frazier’s great new reporting collection Hogs Wild, savoring each piece, trying to get at the ingredients that make Frazier’s writing such a pleasure for me. I’m reading the pieces in the order they appear in the book. I’ve just finished “On Impact,” which is approximately midway. I suppose I could wait and post my impressions of Hogs Wild after I’ve finished it. But I find the urge to post a few preliminary notes irresistible. Here then, in no particular order, are some of my early responses to this rich wonderful book.

1. In “Hungry Minds,” Frazier says of the Church of the Holy Apostles soup kitchen,

I know about the soup kitchen because I am one of the teachers of a writers’ workshop that meets there after lunch on Wednesdays in the spring. I started the workshop fourteen years ago, with the help of a grant. I wanted to do something with the soup kitchen because I admired the people there and the way it is run and the whole idea of it. There are so many hungers out there; the soup kitchen deals, efficiently and satisfyingly, with the most basic kind. I consider it, in its own fashion, a work of art.

I consider it, in its own fashion, a work of art. Right there, I think, is a glimpse of Frazier’s distinctive way of seeing. How many of us would approach a soup kitchen as a work of art? Probably not many. It seems to me that this is the way Frazier views many of the wildly differing organizations and events that he covers in Hogs Wild, whether it's a Big Read on Staten Island billed as “Race Issues in Mark Twain: A Community Dialogue on Language & Dialect in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn” (“Word”), a seal-watching cruise in New York City harbor (“Back to the Harbor”), Burt Swersey’s Inventor’s Studio class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (“Form and Fungus”), the Ocmulgee Wild Hog Festival in Abbeville, Georgia (“Hogs Wild”), or the Nageswarans’ “meteorite” exhibit at Rutgers University Geology Museum (“On Inpact”).

That doesn’t mean that Frazier aestheticizes or dramatizes or, in any sense, transforms these events. His art is painstakingly factual. He reports what he sees (“Their bundles are tied together with yellow nylon rope, cinched with bungee cords, taped with silver duct tape, or packed loose in double or triple plastic shopping bags”), smells (“The smell of that room leans you back against a hayrick on an autumn afternoon”), hears (“That part of Staten Island is a New World symphony, though, with the bridge humming above, and the tall towers holding up their roadway span like a great gate, and tanker ships anchored at different angles in the Harbor, and the tidal currents colliding”), and imagines (“I imagined a dotted line extending from the shattered tile on the floor and through the hole, out the roof, across the blank blue vista in the skylight, and onward and outward, incalculably far”).

Frazier’s approach is intensely personal. John Updike’s brilliant phrase “subjective specifics” comes to mind. Updike was describing Czeslaw Milosz’s essays (see "Survivor/Believer," The New Yorker, December 24, 2001). I think the phrase applies to Frazier’s writing, too.

2. Rivers are among the many reasons I read Frazier. Recall his magnificent list of rivers in Great Plains (“Among the rivers of the Great Plains are the Cimaron, the Red, the Brazos, the Purgatoire, the Trinity, the Big Sandy, the Canadian, the Smoky Hill, the Soloman, the Republican, the Arikaree, the Frenchman, the Little Blue, the Big Blue, the South Platte, the North Palatte, the Laramie, the Loup, the Niobrara, the White Earth, the Cheyenne, the Owl, the Grand, the Cannonball, the Heart, the Knife, the Little Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Powder, the Tongue, the Bighorn, the Musselshell, the Judith, the Marias, the Milk, the Missouri”). In the first fourteen pieces of Hogs Wild, at least fifteen rivers are mentioned: the Flathead, the Deschutes, the Hudson, the Mohawk, the Savannah, the Ocmulgee, the Illinois, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Tennessee, the Ohio, the Des Moines, the Wabash, the Pere Marquette, and the Manistee.

In one of the most memorable lines in Hogs Wild, Frazier says of the Deschutes, “So much of the world is bullshit. This river is not” (“The One That Got Away”).

My favorite Hogs Wild river reference occurs in “Form and Fungus,” a fascinating story about the invention of an all-natural substitute for Styrofoam. Near the end of the piece, Frazier writes,

Whenever I visit the company, I like to stop first at an abandoned railroad bridge at the north end of Green Island. The branch of the Mohawk that the bridge spans has carved low bluffs from the island’s four-hundred-million-year-old shale. The bluffs resemble stacks of very thin, reddish-black crêpes. All river confluences are glorious. Canoes full of Iroquois Indians travelled past here, and fur traders, and soldiers, and surveyors for the Erie Canal. The canal turned left near this point, followed the Mohawk’s shale valley westward, tapped into the Great Lakes, and made the fortune of New York City. Here, as at all confluences, wildlife congregates. In the early morning, it’s an amphitheatre of birdsong, while Canada geese add their usual commotion. So many crows show up in the evenings that they plague the town of Green Island, and the mayor has to scare them away with a blank pistol.

I love that passage. The stop at an abandoned railroad bridge, the reference to the canoes full of Iroquois, the “amphitheatre of birdsong,” the mayor scaring away the crows with a blank pistol, and that fervent assertion, “All river confluences are glorious” – it’s quintessential Frazier! I eat it up.

3. Hogs Wild teems with interesting people. They divide into two broad categories – experts and officials that Frazier interviews and ordinary folks that he encounters in the course of his explorations. There are no celebrities, powerbrokers, or oligarchs. This is one of the many reasons I admire Frazier’s writing.

Here are the names of some of the people who populate the first half of Hogs Wild: Bob Blaisdell, Susan Shapiro, Foster Thayer, Father Rand Frew, William Greenlaw, Wendy Shepherd, Clyde Kuemmerle, Harold McKnight, Prince McKnight, Jacqueline McKnight, Rodney Williams, Olimpo Tlatelpa, Linda Adams, Joe Randolph (“Stealhead Joe”), John Hazel, Diane Daviscourt, Alex Gonsiewski, Marianne Kent-Stoll, Beth Gorrie, Virginia Allen, Carolyn Daley, Millissa Myers, Paul Sieswerda, William Zantzinger, Hattie Carroll, Reverend Dr. Theodore C. Jackson, Jr., Dorothy Johnson, Mildred Jessup, Bobby Phelps, Gavin McIntyre, Eben Bayer, Burt Swersey, Sue Van Hook, Henry Shrapnel, Shelley Stiaes, Joe Corn, John J. Mayer, Robbie Edalgo, Bob Addison, Srini Nageswaran, Lieutenant Robert A. Brightman, Louis Detofsky, Jeremy Delaney, Gary Weinstein, and Joe Boesenberg.

Frazier’s descriptions of some of these people make me smile. For example, in “Hogs Wild,” he says of Joe Corn, a senior wildlife biologist who has trapped and studied thousands of wild hogs,

Joe Corn is tall and lean, in his late forties, with curly dark hair and blue eyes that sometimes betray an unscientific amusement at the hogginess of wild hogs. For example, he was describing a type of wire pen used in trapping hogs, and he said that the pen had no ceiling and was of a height that one could lean over and look down at the hogs; but, he added, one should never do that. I asked why, and he said, “Because they’ll jump up and bite your face.” And that look—amusement combined with a sort of admiration—lit his eyes.

Now I’m going to say something here that I hope doesn’t sound too cornball. I believe that Frazier, in naming as many people as he does in his pieces, is consciously rescuing them from oblivion – the oblivion that surely awaits us all. As a master writer, a writer of works that will endure so long as there are eyes to read them, he has the power to do that. My belief is based on the slenderest evidence. In “A Lonesome Death Remembered,” an exploration of the sources of Bob Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” Frazier writes, “Dylan’s poetry has caused Hattie Carroll’s name, and the sorrow and true lonesomeness of her death, to stick in people’s minds.” And at the end of the piece, he says, “And if it weren’t for Dylan, nothing more would have been said about Hattie Carroll.” Frazier is aware of art’s preservative effect. Thanks to Frazier’s art, Joe Corn, Virginia Allen, Burt Swersey, Sue Van Hook, Stealhead Joe, et al. won’t disappear; they’ll live on in his splendid reporting pieces.

Gone to Montreal and Toronto

Lachine Canal

Tomorrow, I depart for Montreal and Toronto for a one-week visit. While in Montreal, I plan to cycle the Lachine Canal Bike Path. I’m taking Ian Frazier’s Hogs Wild with me. I’ll post my review when I return, June 20^th. Salut!

Credit: The above photo of the Lachine Canal, by tango7174, is from Wikimedia Commons.

June 6 & 13, 2016 Issue

This week’s New Yorker is a fabulous treat, not because it’s the Fiction Issue, but because it contains four delectable critical pieces – James Wood’s "Making the Cut," Anthony Lane’s "In the Picture," Alex Ross’s "Cello Nation," and Peter Schjeldahl’s "The Future Looked Bright."

Wood’s “Making the Cut,” is a review of Emma Cline’s novel The Girls. To my knowledge, it’s the first piece in which Wood criticizes use of sentence fragments. First, he praises such usage. He says, “Generally, Cline favors sentence fragments, sharp scintillae of impressions, and by and large these ably forward her project: Evie, unmoored, lost, greedily swallows the world, in bright pieces.” But later, he comments,

One strength of the novel gradually becomes a vulnerability. Cline loves phrasal fragments: “The dark maritime cypress packed tight outside the window, the twitch of salt air.” Or this, near the end of the book, as the victims are herded into Mitch’s living room: “Linda in her underpants, her big T-shirt—she must have thought that as long as she was quiet and polite, she’d be fine. Trying to reassure Christopher with her eyes. The chub of his hand in hers, his untrimmed fingernails.” This is a metonymic style, in which the zealously chosen detail (those untrimmed fingernails) stands in for a larger set of facts. It looks like tidied-up Joyce (a version of stream of consciousness), but it is really broken-up Flaubert: heavily visual, it fetishizes detail and the rendering of detail.

And, in his concluding paragraph, he says,

The sentence fragment is suddenly everywhere in fiction today, and increasingly seems an emblematic unit of the literary age. It is vivid and provisional, inhabits the vital moment, and renders the world in a cascade of tiled perceptions. But it also tends to restrict a novel’s ability to make large connections, larger coherences, the expansion and deepening of its themes.

This is a variation on Wood’s case against Flaubert and the “cult of the detail” (How Fiction Works). A sentence fragment is almost pure detail. It’s a form of description. I relish it. Consider the following passage from Iain Sinclair’s superb Ghost Milk:

Studying the Ordinance Survey Map for the Thames Estuary, I saw no good reason why I couldn’t walk the shore from the village of Grain, along Cockleshell Beach to the London Stone; or, failing that, down a track past Rose Court Farm to Grain Marsh. But maps are deceptive: they entice you with pure white space, little blue rivulets, a church with a tower, the promise of a shell-hunting foreshore; and then they hit you with tank traps, warning notices. Military firing range keep out. Rusting metal poles looped with fresh barbed wire. A pebble shore protected by a sharp-angled Vorticist alphabet of obstructions, concrete blocks crusted with orange lichen. Wrecked cars turned on their backs and absorbed into nature. Footpaths doubling back into aggregate dunes, darkly shadowed lakes and refuse dumps. Cattle, on strips of land between tricky creeks, might be part of a real farm or target practice. Across the marshes, the smokestacks of constantly belching power stations. When the coastal path failed, I tried the quiet back road: running up against ponds reserved for the angling club of Marconi Electronic Systems, the privileged fishermen of BAE Systems. A huddle of police cottages monitored access to North Level Marsh and the London Stone. Private MOD road. Residents and visitors to police cottages only. I backtracked, walked for hours – and eventually found myself, once more, on the wrong side of the Yantlet, near the colony of huts and holiday homes where my original walk started. The only stones to be found were a blunt obelisk commemorating the “completion of the Raising of the Thames Flood Defences between 1975-85” and a compacted cairn, like the remains of a fireplace after a bomb blast, from which the plaque had been removed.

This passage is substantially built of sentence fragments. It’s a typical Sinclair construction. What would Wood make of it? Would he choke on it? In How Fiction Works, he says, “But I choke on too much detail.” Is this description of the Thames Estuary too much? Do its nine sentence fragments restrict its meaning? Yes, it’s heavily visual. Does it fetishize detail or does it vigorously and vividly evoke a walk along an industrial river, put us squarely there with Sinclair as he searches for the London Stone? Wood’s view on sentence fragments raises interesting questions. I hope he elaborates on it in future pieces.

Anthony Lane’s “In the Picture,” a review of Arthur Lubow’s Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, is a positive delight, as are all his photography pieces. I wish he’d collect them in a book. There are at least ten (counting the Arbus piece) that I know of – “A Balzac of the Camera” (Eugène Atget) “The Eye of the Land” (Walker Evans), “The Shutterbug” (William Klein), “Faces in the Crowd” (August Sander), “Road Show” (Robert Frank), “Candid Camera” (on the Leica camera), “Some Bodies” (Irving Penn), “Head On” (Richard Avedon), and “Shadows and Fog” (Edward Steichen). The first three are included in Lane’s Nobody’s Perfect, but the rest are uncollected.

“In the Picture” contains several wonderful epigrammatic lines:

Freaks may abound in her art, but not once do they freak her out.

It was as if “Leaves of Grass,” in need of an update, had been handed to Sylvia Plath.

All creatures great and small: nothing was foreign to Arbus, as she roamed the human zoo.

Even her most outlandish pictures come to seem like self-portraits: windows transmuted into mirrors.

Imprecision, like mercy, did not make them less true.

My favorite line in “In the Picture” is Lane’s reaction to Lubow’s description of a mosquito biting Arbus’s breast:

When a mosquito lands on his subject, Lubow is right there: “Changing its strategy, the insect whined upward and then landed on the nipple of her right breast. This time, it sank its feeder deep into her flesh and drank.” Even Boswell never got that close.

Alex Ross’s “Cello Nation” reviews Los Angeles’s Piatigorsky International Cello Festival. I’m not a cello fan. But I read Ross’s piece anyway because I savor his writing. “Cello Nation” 's last paragraph is a beauty. Ross writes,

The performance that will stay longest in my mind, though, was of the Elgar concerto, with the Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk. No player at the festival produced a handsomer tone: Mørk had the benefit of a magnificent instrument, a 1723 Domenico Montagnana, and he made it sing with unforced splendor, his expansive, Russian-inflected bowing and vibrato insuring that quiet passages floated into the far reaches of the hall. As an interpreter, Mørk avoided the noble-minded protocol—the high-school-graduation tread—that is too common in Elgar. Unmannered rubato gave a sense of moment-to-moment improvisation, of a halting search for honest expression. What emerged was a monologue set against a landscape of shadows: the cellist as Shakespearean actor, uneasy with the crown of power.

That “he made it sing with unforced splendor, his expansive, Russian-inflected bowing and vibrato insuring that quiet passages floated into the far reaches of the hall” is inspired!

Peter Schjeldahl’s “The Future Looked Bright,” a review of the Guggenheim Museum’s Moholy-Nagy retrospective, brought me news of an exquisite artwork that I was unaware of – László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage (1930). Schjeldahl describes it as “a sleek, motorized medley of finely machined rods, screens, perforated disks, and springs in metal, glass, wood, and plastic, set in a box with a circular cut in one side. The gleaming parts—a sort of industrialized synthesis of Cubist and Constructivist styles—reflect a play of colored electric lights inside the box.” He says, “Its rhapsodic inventiveness—there had never been anything like it before—puts it in a class of twentieth-century utopian icons.” A gorgeous photo of this “one-of-a-kind gizmo” illustrates the piece.

Other pleasures in this week’s issue: Bendik Kaltenborn’s "Thundercat" illustration for Matthew Trammell’s "Night Life: Rock Bottom"; Trammell’s “If Bruner’s lifelong craft as a bassist buries him in the low end, his voice beams goldenrod from a crack in the ceiling”; GOAT’s "Art: Mark Lyon" [“Lyon photographs landscapes in upstate New York while standing inside the bays of self-service car washes, boxlike spaces that supply the images with ready-made frames (graced by the occasional hose). The views—gas-station pumps, strip malls, a swatch of unnaturally green lawn—are transformed by Lyon’s keen eye. He works in daylight and darkness alike, regardless of weather, as fog, rain, and falling snow turn the everyday oddly magical”]; Jiayang Fan’s “The joy of Korean barbecue lies in part in its performance: watching ruby-red curls of brisket caramelize while translucent slices of Pringle-shaped tongue sizzle, crisp-edged and glinting” ("Tables For Two: Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong"); and Becky Cooper’s terrific "Bar Tab: Yours Sincerely," which I’m tempted to quote in full (it’s so damn good), but instead will simply highlight this superb detail: “The taps are porcelain doll heads, which stare like angelic witnesses to the evening’s festivities.” Check out the newyorker.com version of Cooper’s column; it features a wonderful Julia Rothman illustration. 

Ian Frazier's "Hogs Wild"

This is just a quick note to say that my copy of Ian Frazier’s new collection, Hogs Wild, arrived yesterday from Indigo. I’d pre-ordered it several months ago. Perusing the Table of Contents, I see many old friends  (e.g., “Hungry Minds,” “Back to the Harbor,” “Form and Fungus,” “Hogs Wild,” “On Impact,” “The March of the Strandbeests,” “The Toll,” “Hidden City,” and “Blue Bloods”). These wonderful pieces afforded me immense pleasure when they originally appeared in The New Yorker. It’s great to see them preserved between hard covers. I look forward to revisiting them. Hogs Wild also contains some writings that are new to me (e.g., “The One That Got Away,” “Desert Hideaway,” “The Unsettling Legacy of General Shrapnel”). The book is a rich feast. It’s tempting to devour it in a day. But I’m going to try to pace myself, savoring each piece, posting my responses here. Hogs Wild's publication is, for me, a major literary event. I hope I can do it justice.  

Samanth Subramanian's "Following Fish"

I see Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish is mentioned in Simon Winchester’s excellent travel book "roundup," in this week’s New York Times Sunday Book Review. Subramanian is an occasional New Yorker contributor. See, for example, his terrific "The Agitator" (The New Yorker, September 2, 2013). Following Fish is one of my favorite books. Last year, I posted a review of it here. I also recommend Subramanian’s "Breach Candy" (Granta, Winter 2015), about an old colonial Mumbai club and a legal challenge to its “arch commandment” that only Europeans are allowed to be trust members. Here’s a taste:

He [Gerry Shirley, one of the litigants] remained alert even through the otherwise slackening texture of a day in court: the buzz of the first hour, then the settled keenness, the post-lunch torpor, the gradual straying of eyes to clocks, the dense energy of a system at work dissipating through the afternoon.

Anyone who’s spent a day in court will relate to that “gradual straying of eyes to clocks.”

May 30, 2016 Issue

Is Brian De Palma a great director? Richard Brody, in his "Blood Relatives," a review of De Palma’s 1973 thriller, Sisters, in this week’s issue, thinks so. He writes, “No great director has built a career with as overt and obsessive a relation to a cinematic forebear as Brian De Palma has in regard to Alfred Hitchcock.” But in his "The Brian De Palma Conundrum," posted two days ago on newyorker.com, he appears to have reconsidered his position, saying, “I think that he’s a director who’s more often fascinating than great.”

Pauline Kael was a fan of De Palma’s work. His movies are the subject of some of her most brilliant reviews, e.g., “The Curse” (The New Yorker, November 23, 1976), “Shivers” (The New Yorker, March 20, 1978), “Master Spy, Master Seducer” (The New Yorker, August 4, 1980), and “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gadgeteer” (The New Yorker, July 27, 1981) – all of which are included in her superb 1994 collection For Keeps. My favorite is “Master Spy, Master Seducer,” a review of Dressed to Kill, containing a detailed description of that film’s bravura Metropolitan Museum sequence, in which the camera darts from gallery to gallery following the Angie Dickinson character and the man-with-her-glove in a whirling cat-and-mouse courtship game. Kael writes, “With almost no words, this loveplay edged by the man’s contemptuous assurance goes through so many permutations that it suggests a speeded-up seduction out of Les Liaisons Dangereuses – a hundred pages turned into a visual scherzo.”

In his “Blood Relatives,” Brody stresses De Palma’s “cinephilic devotion” to Hitchcock and others (such as Stanley Kubrick and Michelangelo Antonioni). In “The Brian De Palma Conundrum,” he criticizes such devotion, asserting that “De Palma’s peculiar fealty to the history of cinema—his overt dependence upon the films of Alfred Hitchcock and his plethora of references to other classic filmmakers (from Howard Hawks and Stanley Kubrick to Michelangelo Antonioni and Sergei Eisenstein)—results in zombie-like movies.” He says, “De Palma is the creator of a mortuary cinema, in which the dead forms of classic Hollywood are brought back to life through his exertion of an amazingly exacting talent—yet at the cost of his personality.” Kael has a different take. In “Master Spy, Master Seducer,” she writes,

Over the years, De Palma has developed as an artist by moving further into his material, getting to deeper levels of erotic comedy and funnier levels of violation. If he has learned a great deal from Hitchcock (and Welles and Godard and Polanski and Scorsese and many others), he has altered its nature with a funky sensuousness all his own.

Interestingly, Kael panned Sisters (“The crudeness of this movie – its zero on atmosphere –  obviously works for some people, but you probably have to be highly impressionable, with a very active, very gaudy fantasy life, to fall for it,” she says in Reeling). Brody calls it “exemplary.” He writes,

Though De Palma’s own images can’t rival Hitchcock’s in shot-by-shot psychological power, the intricate multiple-perspective split-screen sequences of “Sisters” offer a dense and elaborate counterpoint that conjures a sense of psychological dislocation and information overload belonging to De Palma’s own generation and times.

Brody’s descriptions of Sisters don’t make it sound crude – quite the opposite. So who’s right – Kael or Brody? I suspect Brody is overpraising this film. But I’ll withhold final judgment until I see Sisters myself.