October 23, 2017 Issue

The article in this week’s issue I enjoyed most is Jonathan Franzen’s "Under Construction," a brief “Personal History” piece about the 1981 summer he spent in Manhattan, helping his brother renovate a loft. Franzen writes interesting sentences. I gobble them up. What makes them interesting is their specificity:

We arrived in June with a fifth of Tanqueray, a carton of Marlboro Lights, and Marcella Hazan’s Italian cookbook.

Our friend Jon Justice, who that summer had Thomas Pynchon’s “V.” stuffed into the back pocket of his corduroys, was mugged at Grant’s Tomb, where he shouldn’t have been.

I spent long afternoons in a cloud of acetone fumes, cleaning rubber cement off the laminate, while Tom, in another room, cursed the raised dots.

On the Fourth of July weekend, V and Jon Justice and I got up onto the old West Side Elevated Highway (closed but not yet demolished) and went walking past the new World Trade Center towers (brutalist but not yet tragic) and didn’t see another person in any direction.

He also had a willowy and dumbstrikingly beautiful wife, Pru, who came from Australia and wore airy white summer dresses that made me think of Daisy Buchanan.

The money seemed of no consequence to Bob’s father-in-law, but we noticed that one of the mother-in-law’s shoes was held together with electrical tape.

That last one made me smile. Tanqueray, Marlboro Lights, Marcella Hazen, Thomas Pynchon, corduroys, Grant’s Tomb, acetone fumes, white summer dresses, Daisy Buchanan, Fourth of July, West Side Elevated Highway, World Trade Center, mother-in-law’s shoes, electrical tape – just some of the variegated ingredients of this delightful, highly particularized memory piece. I enjoyed it immensely.

October 16, 2017 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Joshua Yaffa’s absorbing “House of Shadows,” an exploration of the rich, tragic history of an old Moscow apartment building called the House on the Embankment. Yaffa writes, “No other address in the city offers such a compelling portal into the world of Soviet-era bureaucratic privilege, and the horror and murder to which this privilege often led.” The House on the Embankment is massive, “a self-contained world the size of several city blocks.” Yaffa describes it as “a mishmash of the blocky geometry of Constructivism and the soaring pomposity of neoclassicism.” Yaffa speaks from personal knowledge of the place; he lives there. In his piece, he describes his apartment (“Successive renovations had left the place without much of the original architectural detail, but as a result it was airy and open: less apparatchik, more IKEA. Tall windows in the living room looked out over the imperious spires of the Kremlin”), talks to friends and neighbors (“We spoke about the atmosphere in the building back then, what Tolya’s grandparents must have been thinking as the bright and just world they thought they had built began to cannibalize itself”), and recounts the building’s nightmarish history:

Volin, I learned, kept a suitcase packed with warm clothes behind the couch, ready in case of arrest and sentence to the Gulag. His wife burned an archive of papers dating from his time as a Bolshevik emissary in Paris, fearing that the work would brand him a foreign spy. They gave their daughter, Tolya’s mother, a peculiar set of instructions. Every day after school, she was to take the elevator to the ninth floor—not the eighth, where the family lived—and look down the stairwell. If she saw an N.K.V.D. agent outside the apartment, she was supposed to get back on the elevator, go downstairs, and run to a friend’s house.

Interestingly, even though Yaffa lives in the House on the Embankment and is intensely aware of its traumatic history, he’s not weighed down by it. When a former tenant says to him that the building “stands on mournful ground, and its residents are doomed to carry a very difficult sorrow,” he writes,

I, like many of my acquaintances in the building, don’t necessarily feel the burden of such heavy symbolism. A friend of mine, Nina Zavrieva, a consultant and tech entrepreneur, grew up in an apartment that first belonged to her grandfather, a lawyer who worked in the Politburo secretariat. Nina, who is thirty, told me that from a young age she was familiar with the building’s rich history. “I knew all this in theory, but I never really felt it,” she said. “I never internalized it.” I asked her if anything about the building felt different after all these years. She said that she wasn’t sure, then remembered something: the color of the façade had changed. “At some point, it was pink, then it became bright gray, but really I don’t think I notice anymore.”

I never really felt it. I find this detachment from the traumatic history of the building they live in fascinating. Unlike, say, W. G. Sebald, in The Rings of Saturn, immersed in melancholy contemplation of the past (“Everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life,” etc.), Yaffa and his friend Nina show a tonic pragmatism. The House on the Embankment isn’t a ruin; it’s a functioning apartment building. Life goes on.

October 9, 2017 Issue

Janet Malcolm’s “The Storyteller,” a profile of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, in this week’s issue, contains a delightful surprise. In the penultimate section, a vivid character from one of her earliest New Yorker pieces suddenly reappears. Here are the words that usher him in:

“Does the name Ben Maddow mean anything to you?” Maddow asked during one of our early interviews. “Yes, it does,” I said. In the early eighties, I had read a brilliant book—an illustrated biography of the photographer Edward Weston—by a man of that name.

The book is Edward Weston: Fifty Years. Malcolm not only read it; she favorably reviewed it in a piece titled “Two Photographers” (The New Yorker, November 18, 1974; re-titled “East and West” in her superb 1980 collection, Diana & Nikon), praising it for, among other things, its “enormous, almost novelistic, interest,” and concluding that it will “outlast many of Weston’s photographs.”

This is high praise, indeed, from a critic known for her disdain for biography: see, for example, her great The Silent Woman (1994) (“Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world”). Maddow’s Edward Weston: Fifty Years is one of the few biographies she’s admired. (Another is Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf: see “A House of One’s Own,” The New Yorker, June 5, 1995.)

Malcolm’s “East and West” imprinted Ben Maddow’s name in my memory. The passage in “The Storyteller,” beginning with the words “Does the name Ben Maddow mean anything to you?,” made me smile. Here is Malcolm, forty-three years after “East and West,” writing about Maddow again. Nothing in those intervening decades has changed her opinion of his book. She calls it “brilliant.”

Bill Charlap's Sparkling "Uptown, Downtown"

September was a banner month. Two of my heroes produced new works. John McPhee published Draft No. 4. And Bill Charlap released Uptown, Downtown. I’ve already posted my response to McPhee’s superb book (see here, here, and here). Today, I want to comment on Charlap’s brilliant album. The choice of material is inspired – Gerry Mulligan’s “Curtains,” Tommy Wolf and Fran Landesman’s “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” Stephen Sondheim’s “Uptown, Downtown,” Isham Jones and Gus Kahn’s “The One I Love Belongs to Someone Else,” Michael Leonard and Herbert Martin’s “I’m All Smiles,” Rodgers and Hart’s “There’s a Small Hotel,” Gigi Gryce’s “Satellite,” Jim Hall’s “Bon Ami,” and Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady.” Each number is stocked with surprising notes and rich melodic imaginings. Charlap’s playing is fresh, sparkling, and perfect. He’s an improviser of the greatest subtlety and invention. His sidemen – bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington – are excellent. My favorite cut is “Curtains,” a gorgeous, swinging, shimmering thing that went straight into my personal anthology of great piano jazz.

October 2, 2017 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Alex Ross’s charming “Cather People,” an account of his recent trip to Red Cloud, Nebraska, to attend the opening of the National Willa Cather Center. He stays at a bed-and-breakfast, roams the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie (“When I was last there, in June, the sky was a blaring blue and the hills were a murmur of greens. The air was hot and heavy enough that thoughts evaporated from my mind. I lay under a cottonwood tree and listened to leaves and grass swaying”), talks about Cather’s letters (“The letters echo her voice—‘confident, elegant, detailed, openhearted,’ as Jewell and Stout describe it”), speaks with Cather scholars, and recalls visits he made a few years ago to places in New Mexico that figure in Cather’s novels. One such place is Acoma. Ross writes,

The vistas around that shiver-inducing place, which a small group of Acoma still inhabit, have hardly changed since Cather saw them almost a century ago, and, as usual, her description is definitive: “This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape.”

“Cather People” is a delightful blend of travelogue and literary criticism. I enjoyed it immensely.