January 14, 2019 Issue

I love those collages of quotations that James Wood creates in his reviews. There’s a beauty in his “Contents Under Pressure,” an assessment of Guy Gunaratne’s novel In Our Mad and Furious City, in this week’s issue. Wood writes,

It’s a sign of how vital the rest of the book feels that a phrase like “caustic speech,” which would be inoffensive enough in many novels, seems here irradiated with fakery. “Caustic speech” is how a reviewer writes. Gunaratne’s characters are alive because they speak caustically—“I draw the morning snot up my nose.” Here is Caroline, originally from Belfast, sizing up the public-housing estate where she lives: “The grounds are empty except for the carping birds and trees.” And here is her son, Ardan, who dreams of making it as a rapper. In the mornings and evenings, he says, even this grim council estate can seem almost romantic, like something out of the Bronx or Brooklyn (as he imagines those boroughs): “Rest of the day is bleak as fuck tho, standard.” On his way to play soccer with his friends, Yusuf stops at Ray’s Chicken Paradise for chicken and chips—“a proper English breakfast.” He’s served by a man known as Freshie Dave: “His name tag said something like Devshi Rajagopalan. To save expense us youngers would just call him Freshie Dave. He spoke in a clipped Indian accent—fresh off the boat. I guess the name stuck, ennet.” Yusuf reflects on how recent immigrants like Freshie Dave are now on the front line; they have to bear all the racist jokes from their stupid white customers. “They had come here on student visas with their silly smiles and were now serving up fried fat to sons of England.” Serving up fried fat to sons of England—those caustic words capture an entire sad world.

No other critic does that. Wood relishes quotation, and so do I. What better way to showcase the merits of a particular writing style? My favourite Wood assemblage is one of his earliest – the list of Cormac McCarthy nature descriptions in his brilliant “Red Planet” (The New Yorker, July 25, 2005):

He is also a wonderfully delicate noticer of nature. His first novel, “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), has this picture of lightning: “Far back beyond the mountain a thin wire of lightning glowed briefly.” The protagonist of “Child of God” (1973), a psychotic necrophiliac named Lester Ballard, lights a fire in an old grate, and as it races up the disused chimney sees a spider that “descended by a thread and came to rest clutching itself on the ashy floor of the hearth.” How strange and original that “clutching itself” is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shrivelling. “Blood Meridian” is a vast and complex sensorium, at times magnificent and at times melodramatic, but nature is almost always precisely caught and weighed: in the desert, the stars “fall all night in bitter arcs,” and the wolves trot “neat of foot” alongside the horsemen, and the lizards, “their leather chins flat to the cooling rocks,” fend off the world “with thin smiles and eyes like cracked stone plates,” and the grains of sand creep past all night “like armies of lice on the move,” and “the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake.” McCarthy liked this last phrase so much that he repeated it, seven years later, in “All the Pretty Horses” (1992): “Where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows.”

That “How strange and original that 'clutching itself' is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shrivelling” is one of my all-time favourite New Yorker sentences.