The New York Times' "100 Notable Books of 2018": Two Serious Omissions

I’m pleased to see that one of my favorite books of 2018 – Zadie Smith’s essay collection Feel Free – made The New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2018.” Smith’s book includes four New Yorker pieces: “Brother from Another Mother” (February 23, 2015); “Some Notes on Attunement” (December 17, 2012); “Crazy They Call Me” (March 6, 2017); and “A Bird of Few Words” (June 19, 2017).

But I’m puzzled that an equally delectable essay collection, Lorrie Moore’s See What Can Be Done (2018), is omitted. Moore’s book contains, among many excellent pieces, five New Yorker articles: “Legal Aide” (April 23 & 30, 2001); “Bioperversity” (May 19, 2003); “Wizards” (September 12, 2011); “Lena Dunham: Unwatchable in the Best Way” (March 17, 2012); and “Canada Dry” (May 21, 2012).

And I’m shocked that Geoff Dyer’s brilliant The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand (2018) didn’t make the list. The Times’ own reviewer, Jennifer Szalai, called it “visually sumptuous” and “enormously ambitious” (“Geoff Dyer Takes to the Streets with Garry Winogrand,” March 28, 2018). Dyer’s splendid opus is, for me, the best book of 2018. I’ll post my review of it in the next few weeks.   

"New Yorker" Portrait Photos and the Problem of the Pose

Zora J. Murff, "Clarissa Glenn and Ben Baker"

I like portraits that look me straight in the eye. They seem more natural. They confront the problem of the pose (what Michael Fried, in his Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, calls its “inherent theatricality”) head-on. Lately, New Yorker photography has favored averted eyes. Portrait subjects look down; they look away; they don’t look at the camera. For example: 

Krista Schlueter’s “David Hockney” (from Françoise Mouly’s “Cover Story: David Hockney’s ‘The Road,’ ” newyorker.com, April 16, 2018)

 

Anne Golaz’s “Poul Andrias Ziska” (from the newyorker.com version of Rebecca Mead’s “Meal Ticket,” June 18, 2018)

Gillian Laub’s “Alex Katz” (from Calvin Tomkins’s “Painterly Virtues,” August 27, 2018)

Pari Dukovic’s “Martin Amis” (from Thomas Mallon’s “House Style,” February 5, 2018)

Jamie Campbell’s “Sheila Heti” (from Alexandra Schwartz’s “To Have and to Do,” May 7, 2018)

Ilona Szwarc’s “Bo Burnham” (from Michael Schulman’s “The Awkward Age,” July 2, 2018)

Irina Rozovsky’s “Courtney Barnett,” (from Amanda Petrusich’s “Wry Wonder,” May 21, 2018)

These are all gorgeous portraits. But, to me, there’s an element of fiction in them: the subject knows he or she is being photographed, yet pretends otherwise. I prefer the classic pose in which the subject looks directly at the camera. Here are five of my all-time favorites:

1. Davide Monteleone’s "Su Xiaolan" (from “Portfolio: A New Silk Road,” January 8, 2018)

2. Benjamin Lowy’s “Latham Smith” (from Burkhard Bilger’s “Towheads,” April 19, 2010)

3. Nadine Ijewere’s "Lynette Yiadom-Boakye" (from Zadie Smith’s “A Bird of Few Words,” June 19, 2017)

4. Dan Winters’ "Pardis Sabeti and Stephen Gire" (from Richard Preston’s “The Ebola Wars,” October 27, 2014)

5. Thomas Prior’s "Irad and Jose Ortiz” (from John Seabrook’s “Top Jocks,” December 4, 2017)

Credit: The above photo by Zora J. Murff is from Jennifer Gonnerman's "Framed" (The New Yorker, May 28, 2018).

November 12, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Amy Goldwasser’s wonderful “Wet Ink,” a Talk story about ink foraging in Central Park. It begins,

On a recent drizzly Tuesday morning, a small group of ink enthusiasts—already rain-slicked, under umbrellas and ponchos—stood on Gapstow Bridge, in Central Park, admiring a brilliant-pink pokeweed bush.

I read that and just kept going, devouring the piece in one delicious gulp. The group’s leader is Jason Logan, founder of the Toronto Ink Company. Goldwasser says of him, “Logan speaks like a laid-back chemist, using words like “petrichor,” the earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil. He carried a backpack filled with ink pots and collection bags.”

The piece glints with beautiful natural colors: “fuchsia stems,” “scarlet berries,” “red cardinal,” “goldenrod.” My favourite passage describes a batch of ink made from “five varieties of acorn boiled with rust from various sources—nuts and bolts, wire, brackets—and a drop of gum arabic. It came out a complicated silver-gray.”

Goldwasser enacts the foraging she describes, creating a colourful prose poem from found materials. The result is pure readerly bliss.    

November 5, 2018 Issue

For me, the two most absorbing pieces in this week’s issue are Ian Frazier’s “The Day the Great Plains Burned” and Dan Chiasson’s “ ‘The Girl That Things Happen To.’ ”

Frazier’s piece reports the devastation wreaked by the Northwest Complex Fire (also known as the Starbuck Fire) that, in 2017, burned almost two million acres of the south-central Great Plains. Frazier’s descriptions of the fire are superb. For example:

Now, to the southwest, the gray and black smoke was boiling up toward altitudes where airplanes are tiny white X shapes with pipe-cleaner contrails. The smoke mounted in gray cumulus-like eruptions or redacted everything above the horizon line to black, while the underside of the billows glowed orange from the flames. Embers flew through the air, and the fierce heat added its own force to the wind, which blew with such a noise that people standing four feet apart had to shout to talk.

And:

Burning tumbleweeds flew forty feet above the ground, and the red cedars in the hollows roared as their resinous boughs ignited like kerosene. The wind swept up the dry grass until the air itself was on fire. 

And:

Bumping over rough ground, the trucks threw the firemen around, banging them up and bruising them as burning sparks went down their necks. Several times, the fire’s front line jumped over the trucks, and the firemen kept from burning by spraying a mist around themselves.

The first half of “The Day the Great Plains Burned” is written in the third person, an unusual form for Frazier, who is a master first-person stylist. Reading it, I found myself missing his inimitable “I.” But then, at the start of section five, there it was: “One afternoon last summer, I talked with Bernnie Smith in the shade behind the Englewood firehouse.” I read that and smiled: Frazier is back! The rest of the piece, written in the first person, is a joy. I should clarify that. Frazier’s writing is a joy; the message it conveys is dire. The Starbuck Fire is not a singular occurrence. As the globe heats up, there’s going to be more of them. 

Dan Chiasson’s “ ‘The Girl That Things Happen To’ ” reviews a new book of Sylvia Plath’s letters that includes fourteen letters Plath wrote to her close friend and former psychiatrist, Ruth Beuscher, between February 18, 1960 and February 4, 1963, a week before Plath committed suicide. Chiasson says of the Beuscher letters,

They are among the most revealing pieces of prose that Plath ever wrote, in any genre. In them, she alleges that Hughes “beat me up physically” a couple of days before a miscarriage, “seems to want to kill me,” and “told me openly he wished me dead.”

Chiasson is mindful that “a letter tells only one side of the story.” “But,” he says,

their transparency is arresting; these are the only letters in the book where Plath sets aside the kaleidoscopic genius of her style in favor of the plainest possible account. And it is fully consistent with what has long been suspected about Hughes and Plath’s relationship that he might have assaulted her.

The appearance of these new letters adds another plot twist to the Plath-Hughes saga. But, as Chiasson points out, their real value is in the way they deepen our appreciation of Plath’s poetry. Thanks to these letters, we now know the “emergency conditions” (Chiasson’s words) in which she wrote her greatest poems.

Retrospective Review: Ian Frazier's "Route 3"

In this second post in my series “Retrospective Reviews: New Yorker Pieces Remembered With Pleasure,” I want to explore Ian Frazier’s brilliant “Route 3” (The New Yorker, February 16 & 23, 2004; included in his great 2005 collection Gone to New York). I’ll use the same “Retrospective” format I used previously, structuring my review around the following four questions:

1. What is “Route 3”?

2. How is it constructed?

3. What is its governing aesthetic?

4. Why do I like it so much?

1. What is “Route 3”?

Ian Frazier’s “Route 3” is an account of a five-hour walk that he took one fall afternoon, in 2003, along a busy twelve-mile stretch of New Jersey highway (Route 3) between Montclair and Weehawken. It’s approximately 5,200 words long, divided into five sections. Here’s a brief summary of each section:

Section 1 – Describes Route 3 (“traffic-packed, unalluring, grimly life-like”; “road’s shoulders glitter with a boa of trash”); emphasizes its ordinariness (“Along much of the road on either side, the landscape is as ordinary as ordinary America can be: conventioneers’ hotels and discount stores and fast-food restaurants and office complexes and Home Depot and Best Buy and Ethan Allen, most of the buildings long and low, distributed in the spread-out style of American highway architecture”); tells about traveling the route by bus (“Brake lights on vehicles ahead reflect on the bus ceiling and tint people’s faces”) and his enjoyment of the ride (“If this were a ride in an amusement park, I would pay to go on it”); mentions various places along the route (Royal Motel, Tick Tock Diner, Hoffman-La Roche Pharmaceuticals, Holy Face Monastery), and tells brief, interesting stories about each of them [e.g., “When Sean J. Richard, a labor racketeer associated with New Jersey’s DeCavalcante family, heard a while back that he was to meet with a capo (allegedly) from New York’s Lucchese family named Dominic Truscello in a van outside the Tick Tock Diner, Mr. Richard became so frightened that he soon decided to turn state’s evidence”].

Section 2 – Describes suburban New Jersey (“a bunch of different stuff mixed up like a garage sale”); again emphasizes the landscape’s ordinariness (“From a car on a highway, though, suburban New Jersey looks so nondescript and ordinary as to be invisible”); refers to the New Jersey landscape paintings of George Innes, which “show the land before it was developed and paved”; mentions a bus driver named Sal (“Sal is the only bus driver I know of who seems to notice what’s along the road”).

Section 3 – Describes New Jersey traffic (“After the relatively easygoing traffic of Montana, New Jersey driving had a predatory fierceness I wasn’t ready for”).

Section 4 – Tells about Frazier’s walk from Montclair to Weehawken along Route 3 (“I put on broken-in shoes and brought a map, in case I had to detour. At about noon of a mild day in late fall, I set out”); describes the earth beside the highway (“Neither cultivated nor natural, it’s beside-the-point, completely unnoticed, and slightly blurred from being passed so often and so fast. And yet plants still grow in it, luxuriantly—ailanthus, and sumac, and milkweed, and lots of others that know how to accommodate themselves to us”); describes the trash (“I saw broken CDs, hubcaps, coils of wire, patient-consent forms for various acupuncture procedures, pieces of aluminum siding, fragments of chrome, shards of safety glass, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, condom wrappers, knocked-over road signs, burned-out highway flares, a highlighter pen, a surgical glove, nameless pieces of discarded rusty machinery, a yellow rain slicker with “Macy’s Studio” on the back . . . Scattered through the grass and weeds for miles were large, bright-colored plastic sequins”); describes crossing the Hackensack River via the westbound bridge (“Walking on the curb ledge required a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other gait as the trucks and cars went by at sixty-five m.p.h. an arm’s length away. I held the gritty railing with my right hand. Below, the brown Hackensack swirled around the wooden pilings of a former bridge. In these narrow confines, the traffic noise was a top-volume roar. After a long several minutes, I made it to the other side”); describes taking the ferry to the pier at Thirty-eighth Street; tells about his bus trip back to Montclair (“The back seat, and the whole bus, with its closed-in, comfortably crowded atmosphere of people going home, seemed without any connection at all to the highway howling inaudibly just outside”). 

Section 5 – Describes his search for the site in Weehawken where Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton fought their famous duel (“Now the place is a construction side lot for the Lincoln Tunnel. There’s an office trailer, a heap of pipe lengths, a portable john, some road-building stone, a chain-link fence, weeds, little orange plastic flags warning of buried cable. The long-ago life-and-death dramas I’d been picturing could not fit here; enterprise and time had painted out the past”). 

The above outline doesn’t come close to doing justice to “Route 3” ’s enjoyable narrative. And it omits my favourite moment when Frazier dons the Macy’s Studio slicker he finds on the side of the road. (I’ll talk about this inspired incident in more detail below.) What it does convey, I hope, is “Route 3” ’s marvellous attentiveness to places and things that are often overlooked and disregarded.

2. How is it constructed?

“Route 3” unfolds in steps, each step advancing the piece’s main theme: the revelation of the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary. The first three sections describe the highway’s apparent ordinariness. Frazier observes that even its traffic seems ordinary (“To further add to Route 3’s averageness, the traffic on it is not much different from traffic anywhere else”). But then, in section 4, when Frazier actually enters Route 3’s reality and walks along its shoulder, that traffic, along with everything else about the road, becomes amazingly and exhilaratingly specific. We even hear “the dull rubber thumps of tires hitting pavement seams.” The piece ends in epiphany. In Weehawken, Frazier searches for the famous duelling grounds and learns they no longer exist. He writes,

Now the place is a construction side lot for the Lincoln Tunnel. There’s an office trailer, a heap of pipe lengths, a portable john, some road-building stone, a chain-link fence, weeds, little orange plastic flags warning of buried cable. The long-ago life-and-death dramas I’d been picturing could not fit here; enterprise and time had painted out the past.

And then comes his epiphany:

Then I looked across the river. You would have sat in the boat with your second, your pistols in their case on his lap, while someone rowed. For the twenty minutes or half an hour the journey took, you would have wondered, or tried not to wonder, about the condition in which you might come back. The far shore would grow closer, New York would diminish behind. The great city, the river in between, and this shore of scary possibility haven’t changed. For questions of honor that we would find trivial or hard to understand, the touchy white men who founded our country sometimes shot each other to death within a thousand feet or so of where the Lincoln Tunnel toll booths are now.

“Route 3” ’s structure, condensed to its bones, looks like this: ordinary > extraordinary > epiphany. 

3. What is its governing aesthetic?

In “Route 3,” Frazier says of Sal, he’s “the only bus driver I know of who seems to notice what’s along the road.” Noticing what’s along the road is what “Route 3” is about. It’s a superb act of attention. When the piece appeared in The New Yorker, its tagline was “What I saw on the road through New Jersey.” Frazier specializes in noticing stuff that’s often overlooked. In “Route 3,” he shows that even a seemingly banal stretch of New Jersey highway rewards close observation. His ability to make art from what is most ordinary, commonplace, and disregarded reminds me of the work of Edward Hopper. Peter Schjeldahl said of Hopper, “He gets at slight but profound epiphanies of ordinary life.” That’s what Frazier gets at in “Route 3,” too. That’s its governing aesthetic.

4. Why do I like it so much?

I remember when I first read “Route 3” being so delighted by the part where Frazier puts on the yellow Macy’s Studio raincoat he finds on the side of the road that I laughed out loud. He does it, he says, to increase his visibility as he walks across the westbound bridge. It’s an inspired moment: Frazier so identifies with this no-account landscape that he wears a piece of it on his back. 

October 29, 2018 Issue

A few years ago, Janet Malcolm wrote a short essay titled “Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography” (included in her 2013 collection Forty-one False Starts), in which she expresses frustration with her inability to write interestingly about herself. She says,

I have been aware, as I write this autobiography, of a feeling of boredom with the project. My efforts to make what I write interesting seem pitiful. My hands are tied, I feel. I cannot write about myself as I write about the people I have written about as a journalist. To these people I have been a kind of amanuensis: they have posed for me and I have drawn their portraits. No one is dictating to me or posing now.

Well, since writing the above, she appears to have found a way that satisfies her. That way is through old family photos. She uses them as aides-memoire. Her personal history piece, “Six Glimpses of the Past,” in this week’s issue, is pure delight. And what is delightful are the many Malcolmian touches: the analysis of photos (“I suspect that the exciting, Arbus-like picture of the grotesque Slečna was one that she would have preferred not to have taken”), the literary references (“I imagined my father’s life in the village as something out of late Tolstoy: a peasant culture of want, harshness, and discomfort; sledges chased by wolves through the snow, not enough to eat, everything scratchy and uncouth, nothing easy, nothing pretty”), her interest in interior design (“As a child, I played with doll houses that were orange crates furnished with chairs and tables and beds contrived out of this and that piece of wood or metal or cloth scavenged from around the house”), her epigrammatic observations (“Autobiography is a misnamed genre; memory speaks only some of its lines”), her distrust of narrative (“My mind is filled with lovely plotless memories of him. The memories with a plot are, of course, the ones that commit the original sin of autobiography and give it its vitality if not its raison d’être. They are the memories of conflict, resentment, blame, self-justification—and it is wrong, unfair, inexcusable to publish them”). There’s even mention of a pomegranate: “One day, a pair of twins named Janice and Rose brought in a pomegranate split in half and dispensed seeds to a favored few. I was not among them.” I’ve written about the subtle pomegranate pattern running through Malcolm’s work (see here). “Six Glimpses of the Past” continues the motif.

Malcolm doesn’t animate her photos; she uses them to kindle her memories. Sometimes her method works, sometimes it doesn’t. For me, the most interesting passages in her piece describe her method when it fails. For example, writing about her grandfather, she says, 

I see some resemblance to myself in pictures of him. That’s all I can say about Oskar. If I had known I was going to write about him, I would have asked my mother questions. But now I am like a reporter with an empty notebook. Oskar is out of reach.

Oskar is out of reach. It’s a chilling, memorable line. Oskar can’t be rescued from oblivion.