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.