2017 Year in Review

Vincent Mahé, “The Tank” (2017)

There are highlights aplenty. But before we get started, let’s have a drink – something strong and refreshing. How about a Jonn the Beachcomber? Remember that one? McKenna Stayner described it as “slurpy and delicious, with three types of rum, allspice, grenadine, pineapple, lime, and crushed ice in a goblet the size of a fishbowl, topped with fruit salad and studded with heart-shaped straws” (“Bar Tab: Super Power,” February 27, 2017).  Yes, I’ll have one of those, please.

While we’re on the subject of drinks, I just want to say that this year’s “Bar Tab” and “Tables For Two” columns were terrific – tremendous sources of delicious sensual description. My favorite “Tables For Two” was Becky Cooper’s “Mermaid Spa” (March 6, 2017). It’s so good, I’m going to quote it in full:

The smell of chlorine emanating from the concrete building is the first hint that Mermaid Spa, in Coney Island, isn’t Spa Castle. There are no crystal rooms, no “color therapy” experiences, and, thankfully, no uniforms reminiscent of a totalitarian regime. This is a Ukrainian-Russian community center, a blustery twenty-minute walk from the subway, as traditional as banyas get in New York City, with a clientele that takes its sweating very seriously. There is, happily, also a restaurant, which serves some solid Russian classics.

The dining room, guarded by golden mermaids, is built around a hot tub. There are older men in groups; younger, shiny men in groups; and fit couples throwing back plastic pints of beer. Everyone is wearing towels, and most are in felt hats that, counterintuitively, help with the heat. Claim a table—it’s yours for the day—and head into the sauna. Sweat until you can’t stand it, and escape to the cold shower. Pull the chain and a torrent of ice water rushes over you. Then go to the steam room and get lost in the fog, before plunging into the ice pools. Jump out, gasp for breath, and feel your head pound with shock and relief. Repeat until you’re jelly, and then it’s time to eat.

Many tables stick with giant bottles of water and platters of fresh fruit. But you came for the food, so go for it. The large meat dishes—lamb leg, beef stroganoff, chicken tabaka—are hefty in a way that seems ill-advised in the setting. The hot appetizers are a better idea. The borscht is rich and thick. The garlicky French fries, piled on a sizzling iron skillet, though not exactly what you’d picture eating in a bathing suit, are a banya staple. Even more traditional are the pelmeni, filled with beef, lamb, and veal, and topped with mushroom gravy, which are addictive until they congeal at room temperature. Luckily, the dish is too good to leave for long. The best, though, are the cold appetizers, especially the pickled herring or, if you dare, the salo—raw pig lard, frozen and sliced thin. The procedure is half the fun: Layer it over some brown bread. Salt it. Pick up a raw garlic clove. Salt that. Bite one, then the other. The sharp fire of the raw garlic gives way to the sweetness of the bread, and to the soothing fat as it melts. It’s more bracing than the ice pools.

On the way out, do yourself a favor and stop by the beach, whose winter charm doesn’t get enough credit. The steam rises off your skin. The coastline extends as far as you can see, populated by no one.

That is tremendously alive, and it's the knowing sensual instructions (“Sweat until you can’t stand it,” “Pull the chain,” “Repeat until you’re jelly,” “Salt it,” “Pick up a raw garlic clove,” “Bite one, then the other”) that make it so.

For me, the best fact piece of the year was Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul” (February 6, 2017), a brilliant, brutal, immersive account of Mogelson’s experience traveling with an Iraqi SWAT team as it fights to liberate Mosul from ISIS occupation. Here’s a sample:

The snipers eventually quit for the night, but they resumed with gusto in the morning. The SWAT-team members who were not stationed on the roof went to the road behind the house. Bullets zinged up the alley leading to the cemetery. Every now and then, the men backed a Humvee into the alley and aimed a few bursts from the Dushka at Al Quds; they also launched grenades from a turret-mounted MK19. The moment the Humvee pulled back behind cover, more bullets hit the house and the houses around it. They kicked up dirt and slapped against walls. They pierced an empty fuel tanker. They shook the branches of a tree and cut down leaves. They ricocheted off power-line poles, ringing them like bells.

“The Avengers of Mosul” is an extraordinary piece of writing, one of the best I’ve read in a long time. I relish the way it unfolds sequentially without flashbacks. I relish its factual style. I relish its focus on the SWAT-team members. Most of all, I relish its details, e.g., a Humvee’s interior (“I crammed into Mezher’s vehicle, sharing a seat with a corporal in a black balaclava. We were wedged in amid ammo boxes, ammo belts, and the feet of another policeman, who stood in the turret behind a Dushka, a Russian heavy machine gun”); a medic’s cigarette ash (“He spoke excellent English, and worked with calm efficiency, often while smoking a cigarette, the ash falling on his patients”); the SWAT team’s deputy commander sitting on the edge of a bed “casually flipping a hand grenade around his finger”; inside a new aid station (“The fake-gold pages of a Koran, draped with a garland of plastic roses, were mounted on the wall, above bags of saline hanging from protruding screws”); the way a soldier puts his foot on a prisoner’s head (“The soldier in the cap twisted his boot back and forth, as if putting out a cigarette”); the ringtone of the Swat-team commander’s phone (“His phone kept ringing: the tone was the theme song from the movie ‘Halloween’ ”); a woman suturing a boy’s face with needle and thread (“It looked as if she’d dipped her hands in a bucket of red paint. I cut the thread and tried to shoo her off. A minute later, while attending to the wounds on the man’s legs, I looked up and saw that she was stitching him again”).

Mogelson’s follow-up piece, “Dark Victory,” (November 6, 2017), on the battle to expel ISIS from Raqqa, is pretty damn good, too. It features stunning color photos by Mauricio Lima, at least two of which will be on my “Best of 2017: Photography” list, which I’ll be posting in the next few days.

Mauricio Lima, "Female Fighters for the Syrian Democratic Forces" (2017)

My favorite New Yorker writer, Ian Frazier, had a great year, producing three excellent pieces: “High-Rise Greens” (January 9, 2017), “Drive Time” (August 28, 2017), and “Clear Passage” (November 13, 2017). “Drive Time,” a personal history piece on the pleasure Frazier gets from driving in New York City, contains a wonderful description of an early-morning drive he takes from his New Jersey home, across the George Washington Bridge, into the Bronx (“The slanted early-morning sun amid the pillars colors the sides of bread trucks moving slowly on their deliveries”), across the Harlem River on the Madison Avenue Bridge, into Manhattan on the F.D.R. Drive (“cruising by the high-rises and the hospitals of the Upper East Side and under the tower of the United Nations”), across the Brooklyn Bridge (“maybe the most glorious bridge in the world, its cables radiating from their junction points at the top of its towers like beams of light”), into Brooklyn, up the ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, onto the Belt Parkway to J.F.K. Airport, then, via the Belt Parkway, back to Brooklyn, up the ramp to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, across the bridge, onto the Staten Island Expressway, then across the Goethals Bridge and onto the New Jersey Turnpike, at which point, Frazier writes,

Here is the best part of the route, because when the landing patterns at Newark Airport are configured in a certain way the planes coming in fly parallel to the turnpike and directly above it. If everything is in synch, I can be motoring up the highway among lanes of cars and trucks (the turnpike is busy at any hour) with the freight-train tracks on the right and all the earthbound vectors lining up as an incoming jet roars overhead, outdistances everybody, diverges to the left, and sets down on a shimmery runway. The music on the radio can be helpful here; I’ve found that a big, anthemic prog-rock song makes a good accompaniment. Every tristate-area driver should experience this cool convergence once in a while.

After that, Frazier takes the I-78 west, Garden State Parkway north to Exit 151, then west on Watchung Avenue, south on Grove Street, and he’s home—“five boroughs, four major bridges, two airports, two states, and back in time for breakfast.”

Quite a trip! I enjoyed it immensely.

Three other reporting pieces that afforded me enormous pleasure: Gary Shteyngart’s “Time Out” (March 20, 2017), Nick Paumgarten’s “Singer of Secrets” (August 28, 2017), and Burkhard Bilger’s “Feathered Glory” (September 25, 2017). It was great to see Bilger back in the magazine after a lengthy absence.

Speaking of absences, where is Ben McGrath? His last New Yorker piece was the extraordinary “The Wayfarer” (December 14, 2015), which was #1 on my “Best of 2015” list. And his superb “The White Wall” (April 22, 2013) was #1 on my “Best of 2013.” I miss his work.

My favorite book reviewer, James Wood, didn’t appear in the magazine until June. I was worried he’d quit or been let go. But when he did finally show up, he delivered a masterpiece – “The Other Side of Silence” (June 5 & 12, 2017), a review of W. G. Sebald’s fiction. It contains a fascinating discussion of the way Sebald uses photographs in his novels. Wood says,

Few writers have used photographs in quite the way Sebald does, scattering them, without captions, throughout the text, so that the reader can’t be sure, exactly, how the writing and the photographs relate to each other, or, indeed, whether the photographs disclose what they purport to.

Brilliantly, Wood connects Sebald’s Austerlitz photos with what he says is Austerlitz’s central theme – retrieval. He writes that the effort of retrieval can be felt “whenever we stare at one of Sebald’s dusky, uncaptioned photographs, and it is not coincidental that photography plays the largest role in the two Sebald books that deal centrally with the Holocaust, The Emigrants and Austerlitz.”  

Referring to Austerlitz, Wood writes,

What does it mean to stare at a photograph of a little boy who is “supposed” to be Jacques Austerlitz, when “Jacques Austerlitz” is nothing more than a fictional character invented by W. G. Sebald? Who is the actual boy who stares at us from the cover of this novel? We will probably never know. It is indeed an eerie photograph, and Sebald makes Austerlitz say of it:

I have studied the photograph many times since, the bare, level field where I am standing, although I cannot think where it was. . . . I examined every detail under a magnifying glass without once finding the slightest clue. And in doing so I always felt the piercing, inquiring gaze of the page boy who had come to demand his dues, who was waiting in the gray light of dawn on the empty field for me to accept the challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him.

The boy does seem to be demanding something from us, and I imagine that this is why, when Sebald came across the photograph, he chose it. Presumably, he found it in a box of old postcards and snapshots, in one of the antique shops he enjoyed rummaging through. In 2011, while working on an introduction to “Austerlitz,” I had a chance to examine the Sebald archive—manuscripts, old photographs, letters, and the like—at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, in Marbach am Neckar, and there I found the postcard that bears the boy’s image. Eager for a “clue,” I turned it over. On the reverse side, there was nothing more than the name of an English town and a price, written in ink: “Stockport: 30p.”

Amazing! The origin of Austerlitz is sourced in the image on this found postcard. In the novel, Jacques Austerlitz is rescued by the Kindertransport; he averts the misfortune lying ahead of him. Of Sebald’s writing, Wood says, “What animates his project is the task of saving the dead, retrieving them through representation.”

Another critical piece from 2017 that sticks in my memory is Alex Ross’s reverberant “Tank Music” (July 24, 2017), in which Ross attends a concert at the Tank in Rangely, Colorado. The Tank is just that – a sixty-five-foot-tall water tank that sound artist Bruce Odland has converted into a performance venue and recording studio. Ross describes the unique sound it makes:

When my eyes had adjusted to the gloom—a few portals in the roof provide shafts of light during the day—I picked up a rubber-coated hammer and banged a pipe. The sound rang on and on: the reverberation in the space lasts up to forty seconds. But it’s not a cathedral-style resonance, which dissipates in space as it travels. Instead, sound seems to hang in the air, at once diffused and enriched. The combination of a parabolic floor, a high concave roof, and cylindrical walls elicits a dense mass of overtones from even a footfall or a cough. I softly hummed a note and heard pure harmonics spiralling around me, as if I had multiplied into several people who could sing.

Ross is inside the Tank listening to the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth perform a piece by Judah Adashi when a storm breaks:

Gusts buffeting the exterior created an apocalyptic bass rumble; lashes of rain sounded like a hundred snare drums. The voices bobbed on the welter of noise, sometimes disappearing into it and sometimes riding above. As Adashi’s music subsided, the storm subsided in turn. In my experience, music has never seemed closer to nature.

That “Gusts buffeting the exterior created an apocalyptic bass rumble; lashes of rain sounded like a hundred snare drums” is very beautiful – one of my favorite sentences of 2017.

One more highlight of 2017: John Kinsella’s unforgettable “Milking the Tiger Snake” (January 9, 2017). Here it is in full:

Fangs through a balloon, an orange balloon

stretched over a jam-jar mouth scrubbed-up

bush standard—fangs dripping what looks

like semen, which is venom, one of the most

deadly, down grooves and splish splash

onto the lens of the distorting glass-bottom

boat we look up into, head of tiger

snake pressed flat with the bushman’s

thumb—his scungy hat that did Vietnam,

a bandolier across his matted chest

chocked with cartridges—pistoleer

who takes out ferals with secretive

patriotic agendas. And we kids watch

him draw the head of the fierce snake,

its black body striped yellow. “It will rear

up like a cobra if cornered, and attack,

attack!” he stresses as another couple

of droplets form and plummet. And when

we say, “Mum joked leave them alone

and they’ll go home,” he retorts, “Typical

bloody woman, first to moan if she’s bit,

first to want a taste of the anti-venom

that comes of my rooting these black

bastards out, milking them dry, down

to the last drop.” Tiger snake’s eyes

peer out crazily targeting the neck

of the old coot with his dirty mouth,

its nicotine garland. He from whom

we learn, who shows us porno

and tells us what’s what. Or tiger snake

out of the wetlands, whip-cracked

by the whip of itself until its back is broke.

My god, that’s a great poem! What makes it great is Kinsella’s use of words I can see (“fangs through a balloon, an orange balloon,” “stretched over a jam-jar mouth,” “fangs dripping what looks / like semen, which is venom,” “down grooves and splish splash / onto the lens of the distorting glass-bottom / boat,” “head of tiger / snake pressed flat with the bushman’s / thumb,” “scungy hat that did Vietnam,” “a bandolier across his matted chest / chocked with cartridges,” “the fierce snake, / its black body striped yellow,” “droplets form and plummet,” “the old coot with his dirty mouth, / its nicotine garland,” “tiger snake / out of the wetlands, whip-cracked / by the whip of itself until its back is broke”). These words jump to life as I read them. And I love the poem’s spontaneity; it has the feel of actual encounter, naked experience, quickly sketched as it’s happening, or immediately afterwards, while the details are still fresh.

And now, with the few drops of Jonn the Beachcomber still left in my goblet, I want to propose a toast: Here’s to the greatest magazine in the world! New Yorker without end, amen!