February 5, 2018 Issue

This week’s issue contains four excellent pieces: Michael Chabon’s “The Recipe for Life,” Ian Frazier’s “Airborne,” Peter Schjeldahl’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and Thomas Mallon’s “House Style.”

Chabon’s “The Recipe for Life” is a vivid exploration of his memories as a kid tagging along with his father, a doctor, on his evening visits to people’s homes to conduct insurance physicals. The piece is marvelously specific. Here, for example, is Chabon comparing his toy doctor bag, which he brings with him on these outings, with his father’s real one:

My black bag is plastic, too, a flimsy, lightweight affair with none of the pachyderm heft and dignity of my father’s. The mouth of my father’s bag opens and closes smoothly on the hinges of a secret armature, clasped by a heavy brass tongue that slides home with a satisfying click. Mine pops open when you flip a plastic tab that has begun to shear loose and will soon snap off. A vial of candy “pills” was the sole advantage that my black bag possessed over my father’s, but I have long since prescribed and administered them to myself. The empty vial rolls around at the bottom of the bag.

That “clasped by a heavy brass tongue that slides home with a satisfying click” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired! It ends beautifully with Chabon lying beside his frail father, both of them watching Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on TV (“We lie there for a long time, contemplating Lang’s quaint dystopia as it silently unravels”). Chabon has an epiphany:

And then, equally unbidden, comes a thought: This is how it will be when he is gone. I will be lying on a bed somewhere, watching “Citizen Kane,” or “A Night at the Opera,” or “The Man with the X-Ray Eyes,” or some other film that became beloved to me through my father’s own loving intervention, and, even though he won’t be there anymore, I will still be watching it with him. I will hear his voice then the way I am hearing it now, in my head, this instrument that was tuned to my father’s signal long ago, angled to catch the flow of his information, his opinions, all the million great and minor things he knows. After he’s gone into that all too imaginable darkness—soon enough now—I will find another purpose for the superpower that my father discovered in me, one evening half a century ago, riding the solitary rails of my imagination into our mutual story, into the future we envisioned and the history we actually accumulated; into the vanished world that he once inhabited. 

Chabon wrings deep meditated meaning from those long ago father-and-son house calls. “The Recipe for Life” is a “Personal History” masterpiece.

Ian Frazier’s “Airborne” is about (to quote the story’s tagline) “the rise of drone racing and its elite pilots.” Normally, I’d take a pass on such a subject. I’m just not interested in electronic games. But this is a Frazier piece, and Frazier is my idol. So I reluctantly plunged in. The first paragraph grabbed me:

In a canyon in the Rocky Mountain Front above Fort Collins, Colorado, a young man named Jordan Temkin is flying his drone. He wears goggles that show him a video feed from a camera built into the drone, and he holds a console with twin joysticks that control the direction, angle, pitch, yaw, and speed of the flight. He sets the drone on the gravel at his feet. Just downhill is the Cache la Poudre River. The canyon rises to maybe three hundred feet above. He gives a command and the drone leaps to the top of the canyon in an instant. Then it is soaring over the highest places, looking down on Temkin, a small figure sitting on the tailgate of his car. At eighty miles an hour, the shadow of the drone flashes across the face of the rocks. Then Temkin swoops it down to the surface of the river, where it zips a few feet above the water. Because of where the sun is, the river is a blast of silver light. Temkin takes the drone upward again and veers into an intersecting canyon.

I relished Frazier’s use of the present tense, and that “Because of where the sun is, the river is a blast of silver light” is wonderful. I continued reading, savoring the Frazierian touches, e.g., his finding a small drone caught in a tree (“I examined it in wonder, as if I were Stone Age Man”), his visit to the home of two ace drone pilots in Fort Collins, Colorado (“I was amazed to find their domestic arrangements so orderly, and not like the chaos I inhabited when I was twenty-six”), and, most enjoyable, his inventory of the stuff in the pilots’ basement:

Soldering equipment, extension cords, boxes upon boxes of batteries in various states of freshness, quad motors, control consoles, F.P.V. goggles with the name Fat Shark (the main goggle manufacturer) prominently displayed, quads of many sizes—down to the pocket-size minis that the pilots use to make insect-eye-view videos of their living room and kitchen, flying the little drones between chair legs and couch sections and around the peanut-butter jar on the counter—such a profusion of gear gave the basement a sorcerer’s-workshop richness. 

Frazier’s delightful piece proves the old saw that almost any subject can be interesting if you write about it well enough.

Peter Schjeldahl’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a review of the Morgan Library & Museum’s exhibition of photographs by Peter Hujar. Schjeldahl writes,

Each photograph shoulders aside its neighbors and stops you dead: a glittering nocturnal view of a West Side high-rise above a soulfully trusting Italian donkey, a naked young man and an expanse of unquiet Hudson River waters, William S. Burroughs being typically saturnine and a young man placidly sucking on his own big toe, a suavely pensive older man and a pair of high heels found amid trash in Newark, a dead seagull on a beach and a Hujar self-portrait. The works have in common less a visual vocabulary than a uniform intensity and practically a smell, as of smoldering electrical wires. 

In “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Schjeldahl eschews stylistic analysis in favor of sensual response. That “The works have in common less a visual vocabulary than a uniform intensity and practically a smell, as of smoldering electrical wires” is brilliant.

Thomas Mallon’s absorbing “House Style” is a review of Martin Amis’s new essay collection The Rub of Time. Mallon says,

Amis’s efforts toward precision and freshness—an explicator’s attempt to “make it new” whenever he can—are everywhere apparent. He may, like most writers, aspire to aphorism (“envy being best understood as empathy gone wrong”), but, by the nature of its brevity, aphorism is evidence-free, and what Amis enjoys most—outside those priestly moments of Bellow recitation—is offering the proof of things: opening up the patient, putting the organs on the table, and taking a poke at the evidence. 

I agree. Amis is a great literary critic, right up there with John Updike and James Wood. What they have in common is a love of quotation – “offering the proof of things,” as Mallon puts it.

Mallon himself has written some memorable reviews. My favorite is “The Norman Context” (In Fact, 2001), which begins,

Howard Norman’s four works of fiction amount to only about a thousand pages and seem somehow less like an oeuvre than an eccentric stash, similar to the cryptic paintings and antique radios and wooden bird decoys that line the pages of the books themselves. And yet, for all their humble clutter, they prove exquisite, like pieces of folk art whose simplicity postpones a sly impact.

Mallon's “House Style,” in this week’s issue, is one of his best.