Sven Birkerts' Inane "The McPhee Method"

I’ve just finished reading Sven Birkerts’ “The McPhee Method” (Los Angeles Review of Books, November 20, 2017). What a tepid, piffling, silly, cockeyed, vacuous review. The piece is riddled with inanities. For example:

1. Birkerts’ comparison of McPhee’s writing with “mansplaining” (“But there is this one all-important difference between the mansplainer and John McPhee”). According to Birkerts, that “one all-important difference,” is that the mansplainer imposes his explanations, whereas McPhee “deploys his wiles of craft to have the reader not looking to escape, but rather to have her be saying, ‘Really? Tell me more.’ ”  But for that one difference – the ability to hook the reader’s attention – McPhee would be a mansplainer, as would, apparently, every journalist, male or female, who sets out to report on a particular subject. As I understand the term, “mansplaining” means explaining something to someone, characteristically by a man to a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing. It’s totally inapplicable to McPhee’s innovative factual reporting, which David Remnick describes as “the best of what has been in The New Yorker” (“Notes From Underground,” The New York Review of Books, March 2, 1995).

2. Birkerts’ obsessive use of “context” to define McPhee’s compositional process. He uses it six times: “Context creates interest; the right disposition of detail creates context. The McPhee method”; “And each subject receives his best attention. It has been given deep establishing context, and then strategically staged for us”; “but possibly because it is self-reflexive, as opposed to outwardly directed, it lacks the slow and purposeful accretion of context which has always been McPhee’s greatest strength”; “His impulse to elaborate detail is as strong as ever, but for some reason the vital accompanying context has lost its vitality”; “Even the most gifted maker of contexts and supplier of explanations, the most cunning of raconteurs, must push hard against the universal distraction”; “We come back to interest and attention, to the idea that the interesting is what stands out, and that the art is to make the subject stand out — to create the context that will allow the particulars to connect in a provocative way.” “Context” is Birkerts’ word, not McPhee’s. It’s opaque, abstract, inert; it doesn’t illuminate the writing process the way, say, “structure” does. “Structure” is McPhee’s touchstone – his organizing principle. Here, from McPhee’s Draft No. 4, is one of my favorite passages from his description (with accompanying diagrams) of the structure of his great “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977):

One dividend of this structure is that the grizzly encounter occurs about three-fifths of the way along, a natural place for a high moment in any dramatic structure. And it also occurs just where and when it happened on the trip. You’re a nonfiction writer. You can’t move that bear around like a king’s pawn or a queen’s bishop. But you can, to an important and effective extent, arrange a structure that is completely faithful to fact.

3. Birkerts’ opinion that McPhee’s structural analyses are “tedious” (“Still, if McPhee is instructive on the more generalized aspects of structure, he gets tedious, when he starts to offer up examples from his own work”). This is not a fan’s response. If you’re a fan of McPhee’s work, as I am, you’ll find his notes on how he worked out the structures of some of his greatest pieces exhilarating. Birkerts’ jaded response makes me wonder why he chose to review McPhee’s Draft No. 4 in the first place.

4. Birkerts erroneous statement that one of McPhee’s subjects is weightlifting (“He has taken on: oranges, Bill Bradley, the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, Alaska, Russian art, canoes, weight lifting, nuclear engineering, the geological history of our continent — have I missed anything?”). This is a major gaffe, in my opinion, showing Birkerts has no clue what he’s talking about.

For a warmer, much more appreciative and accurate review of John McPhee’s Draft No. 4, see Parul Sehgal’s “The Gloom, Doom and Occasional Joy of the Writing Life” (The New York Times, September 13, 2017).