Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Friday, November 24, 2017

November 20, 2017 Issue


It’s great to see Leo Robson back in the magazine. His last piece was “Doings and Undoings,” October 17, 2016 (on Henry Green), and the one before that was “Delusions of Candor,” October 26, 2015 (on Gore Vidal) – both excellent. His “The Mariner’s Prayer,” in this week’s issue, is a review of two books on Joseph Conrad: Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World and J. Hillis Miller’s Reading Conrad. He calls Jasanoff’s book “a special case of privileged-access criticism,” i.e., criticism that draws on Conrad’s life to illuminate his work. This contrasts with “Miller’s favored critical mode,” which Robson describes as deconstructionist. Still, he says, The Dawn Watch and Reading Conrad, “have one area of overlap – an almost complete indifference to everything that Conrad published after 1910.” Robson writes,

It’s surprising that neither gives more space to “Under Western Eyes,” a novel crowded with enigmas and transmuted personal history. But to ignore “ Chance” (1914) is to miss a crucial clue about Conrad’s sensibility—and his aversion to what he saw as the sea stigma.

Reading Robson’s absorbing piece, I recalled George Steiner’s “An Old Man and the Sea” (The New Yorker, April 23, 1979), in which Steiner rips Frederick R. Karl’s Joseph Conrad: Three Lives, calling it, among other things, a “turgid leviathan,” “composed in a style of the texture of ageing jello.” Steiner refers to Conrad’s “veiled, implicit way of conveying physical action.” This gets at what is, for me, a major stylistic weakness of Conrad’s writing – his oblique, muffled tone. Robson, in his piece, doesn’t touch on Conrad’s muted style, except to note his use of “philosophical digression” and his preferred method of transforming material “from particular to general.”   

Robson describes Saul Bellow as “the most Conradian novelist in recent American literature.” I disagree. Bellow’s writing brims with exuberant specificity. It’s the exact opposite of Conrad’s foggy obliqueness.  

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