Becky Cooper's "We Keep the Dead Close"

I see Becky Cooper has a book out. It’s titled We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence. Joyce Carol Oates gives it a positive review in this month’s New York Review of Books. She says,

We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper is a brilliantly idiosyncratic variant of generic true crime, rather more a memoir than a conventional work of reportage, so structured that the revelation of the murderer is not the conclusion or even the most important feature of the book. Instead, the journey to the revelation – “the absence of mystery, of narrative echo, of symmetry or rhyme or sense” – becomes the memoirist’s subject.

Cooper used to write for The New Yorker. Her “Tables For Two: Mermaid Spa” is one of my all-time favorite “Goings On About Town” pieces. Here it is 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. What a gift the quiet is. 

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.

Cooper’s new book sounds intriguing. I think I’ll check it out. 

February 15 & 22, 2021 Issue

One of my favorite New Yorker writers is Rivka Galchen. She first caught my attention in 2014 with her wonderful “Medical Meals,” containing a passage on hospital vending machines that went straight into my personal anthology of great descriptive writing:

The cafeteria would be closed, leaving only a corridor of six or seven vending machines. On illuminated display were pretzels, and chocolate bars, and potato chips that were baked, and potato chips that were made from superior root vegetables, and potato chips that were actually corn chips coated with a supernatural orange powder. There were bright-colored drinks full of “essential electrolytes,” which medical professionals knew basically just meant sugar and salt, but still. One machine was different. It hid its wares. Nothing was on display but a closed freezer unit and artistic renderings of ice-cream bars. The drawings recalled ice-cream trucks from a childhood before mine, with almond-like objects matted onto a chocolate-like substance, with a vanilla-like substance inside. The bars were a dollar and twenty-five cents, I believe, payable in quarters. Mike and I would listen to each coin fall. Then came a whirring sound as the freezer chest opened slowly, like a vampire’s coffin. A robot arm descended, suctioned up glycerides on a wooden stick, then released the treasure into the dispensing slot of the machine. “I’m so glad I’m here,” Mike would say. 

That “Then came a whirring sound as the freezer chest opened slowly, like a vampire’s coffin” is inspired.  

Other excellent pieces by Galchen include “Weather Underground,” “The Teaching Moment,” “Mum’s the Word,” and “The Eighth Continent.” That last piece contains this superb description of a rocket taking off:

One of the newer ones, the Xodiac, looks like two golden balloons mounted on a metal skeleton. A kite tail of fire shoots out as the Xodiac launches straight up; at its apex, it has the ability to tilt and float down at an angle, as casually as a leaf. When Xodiac nears its designated landing spot, it abruptly slows, aligns, seems to hesitate, lands. It’s eerie—at that moment, the rocket seems sentient, intentional.

And now, in this week’s issue, another marvellous Galchen piece – “Better Than a Balloon,” a tribute to the rough New York City neighbourhood she lives in. She says, “Though there are many, many people here, the neighborhood is not a people place. It is better suited to the picking up and dropping off of large pallets.” But Galchen likes it there, and finds many things to appreciate. For example, Two Bros pizza place: 

The Two Bros pizza at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street sells a fresh, hot slice of cheese pizza for a dollar. There are other Two Bros in the city—there are other Two Bros in the neighborhood—but this one is the best. It is nearly always busy, and it has a fast-moving and efficient line. I fell in love with Two Bros when I was pregnant. I would sometimes step out to have a slice there an hour or two after dinner. You could eat the slice at a table in the back and feel companioned and alone at once. The lighting is like that of a surgical theatre. The Mexican pop music is a reliable endorphin generator. And though the ingredients that go into a dollar slice of pizza do not come from a family farm in the Hudson Valley, these slices are supreme. The clientele, those evenings, was a mix of transgender prostitutes, thin young men, and quiet immigrant families, often with suitcases, headed I have no idea where.

And Esposito’s butcher shop:

When my yearning for a sense of softness and sanity in the neighborhood really soars, I go to Esposito’s butcher shop on Thirty-eighth Street. A handful of businesses have been in this neighborhood for decades, and the butcher shop has been here since 1932. When I go in there, the staff ask me about my kids. They ask everyone about their kids, or their dogs, or their parents, or whatever there is to ask about. In the ten years I’ve lived here, the owner has been there every operating day, six days a week, working alongside his staff. One of the butchers is strikingly handsome. He always smiles and says it’s nice to see me. He says that to everyone and gives everyone that smile. Still, it retains its power. It took me years to realize that the floor on the butchers’ side of the glass display case is elevated by about six inches; the butchers look like gods on that side.

And the ginkgo trees along the sidewalk that runs past the Emerald Green apartment building:

The trees were thin and pathetic and nearly leafless at first. In winter, the building’s staff lit up the trunks of the trees by wrapping them with white Christmas lights. In summer, they planted tulips in the enclosures in front of the entrance. As it grew cold, they planted some sort of hearty kale. We don’t need this! I remember thinking. This is even less charming than the lack of charm! Now I worship that building. My daughter and I both wait with anticipation for the November day when they wrap the ginkgo trees in those white lights. In fall, the ginkgo leaves tumble down as elegant yellow fans. The Emerald Green employee who hoses down the sidewalks every single morning, always pausing as we approach—he has my heart.

My favourite sentence in “Better Than a Balloon” is this description of a store called Pacific Trimming:

And Pacific Trimming had recently remodelled, so that if you walked by on Thirty-ninth Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, even the least crafty among us might be filled with a desire for rickrack, for zippers in thirty-six colors, for shank buttons. 

What a delightful, original assemblage that is! The whole piece is like that. I enjoyed it immensely.

February 8, 2021 Issue

Adam Gopnik, in his absorbing “The Human Clay,” in this week’s issue, seems preoccupied with Lucian Freud’s “fat” paintings. He calls Freud “the British painter of fat people who own their fat—who maintain an ungrumbling harmony with their own imperfection so complete that it becomes a kind of perfection.” I’m not a fan of Freud’s “fat” paintings; I find them repulsive. But I love his Two Japanese Wrestlers by a Sink (1983/87). For me, that’s the work that best represents his extraordinary realist art. Why? How long have you got? Because, one, almost everything that exists deserves reverence and can be the subject of art, and this crazy-good painting of a sink, faucets, and running water proves it. Two, if you test an image by its reality, as I do, this one by Freud easily passes; you can almost hear that water as it flows from the brass taps down into the sink, into the silver drain. Three, my eyes devour the rich, gorgeous, luscious painterliness of it, each tile a miniature abstract masterpiece, the sink a blend of whites – ivory, cream, bone, porcelain – with subtle hints of beige, blue, gray, and mauve; the brass taps the essence of brassiness; the water like a braid of liquid crystal. A most original and striking picture. 

Lucian Freud, Two Japanese Wrestlers by a Sink (1983/87)

February 1, 2021 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rachel Syme’s “On the Nose,” a delightful review of two recent books on scent: Harold McGee’s Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells and Robert Muchembled’s Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times. Syme’s opening paragraph is a beauty:

My obsession with perfume began when I was around ten years old, spritzing on layer after layer of my mother’s Anaïs Anaïs and Poison, until I reeked of a duty-free store. It continued through my mall-rat teen-age years, when I blew through my babysitting tips at Bath & Body Works, convinced that I could amplify my personality with a generous dose of Sun-Ripened Raspberry. Throughout my twenties, I collected hundreds of fragrance samples, bought for less than five dollars apiece from Web sites with names like the Perfumed Court and Surrender to Chance. Tiny glass vials of liquid tuberose regularly spilled out of my coat pockets. So when an editor at a newspaper for which I occasionally wrote about hair and beauty trends asked me if I had anything to say about perfume, I told her I did. I assumed that the main requisite for the task was personal experience, not technical expertise; surely I already had the vocabulary for detailing the scentscapes I’d been wandering for years. I knew I loved the smell of violets—their chalky, chocolate undertones. Or I thought I knew. Sitting down at my keyboard, I began to waver. Was it more like talcum powder and linden honey? Or like a Barbie-doll head sprinkled with lemonade?

I’d rate that the best opener of 2021 so far. I love carnal language; Syme’s piece brims with it. For example: “The olfactory world is more private than we may think: even when we share space, such as a particularly ripe subway car, one commuter may describe eau d’armpit as sweet Gorgonzola cheese, another will detect rotting pumpkin, and a third a barnyardy, cayenne tang.”

Syme’s “On the Nose” is a sensuous plunge into the scentosphere. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: Reading Syme’s review, I recalled another great New Yorker "nose" piece – Chandler Burr’s “The Scent of the Nile” (March 14, 2005), a profile of French perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena. Here’s a whiff:

Ellena’s best-known fragrances are Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert, for Bulgari, and First, for Van Cleef & Arpels. Just before joining Hermès, he had created L’Eau d’Hiver for Frédéric Malle’s élite collection, Éditions de Parfums. The scent was inspired by an aspect of the great 1906 Guerlain perfume Après l’Ondée. He said, “The problem—well, you can’t say there’s a problem with Après l’Ondée—but, bon, voilà, it is too opulent. Guerlain is baroque: put this in, and this, and this.” On the other hand, he said admiringly, the Guerlain scent had a marvellous sillage—the olfactory wake that trails behind a wearer of perfume. Someone once defined sillage to me, rather metaphysically, as the sense of a person being present in the room after she has left. Creating a sillage that is potent but not overpowering is tricky. With L’Eau d’Hiver, Ellena said, he wanted to pay homage to the Guerlain scent’s sillage—“but in enlightened form.” He selected elements from Après l’Ondée that were “soft, comfortable, light.” One of these was the natural essence of hay. He took some aubépine, an olfactory blend of finger paint and the wax used to clean linoleum floors, and added it to methyl ionone, a synthetic whose smell suggests iris. He then added a few more ingredients, including a natural distillation of honey. It took him two years to perfect his formula, which in the end contained twenty ingredients—very few, for a perfume. L’Eau d’Hiver smells, delightfully, of ground white pepper and cold seawater, with a touch of fresh crab. And it has a sillage worthy of Guerlain.

If you enjoy ravishing descriptions of scent, as I do, you’ll love Chandler Burr’s exquisite “The Scent of the Nile.” 

January 25, 2021 Issue

Opening this week’s New Yorker, I was delighted to find a painting by Jane Freilicher, a beautiful red, pink, and green work called Untitled (Still Life with Large Plant and Cityscape), c.1990, illustrating Andrea K. Scott’s absorbing capsule review of Kasmin Gallery’s new exhibition “Jane Freilicher: Parts of a World.” Freilicher’s The Painting Table (1954) is one of this blog’s touchstones (see here). Scott writes,

For more than fifty years, as Abstract Expressionism gave way to Pop, then to Minimalism, and on to Neo-Expressionism, until art’s isms exhausted themselves, Freilicher devoted herself to painting “eternally fixed afternoons,” to borrow a phrase from Frank O’Hara’s 1957 poem “Chez Jane.” (In addition to being a phenomenal artist, Freilicher was a muse of the New York School.) In the attentive tradition of Pierre Bonnard—and with a similar passion for color—Freilicher, who died in 2014, at the age of ninety, found beauty at home, whether in her Greenwich Village apartment or at her house on the East End of Long Island. The best of these luminous views unify inside and outside—and still-life and landscape. The fifteen works in the exhibition “Jane Freilicher: Parts of a World,” at the Kasmin gallery, lean into the artist’s interior side.

That nails it: “attentive tradition of Pierre Bonnard”; “passion for color”; “found beauty at home.” Let’s give a huzzah for Freilicher’s distinctive, delectable art.

Jane Freilicher, Untitled (Still Life with Large Plant and Cityscape) (c.1990)

3 for the Road: John McPhee's "Coming into the Country"

This is the second in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Coming into the Country.

John McPhee’s Coming into the Country chronicles his travels in Alaska in the 1970s. It consists of three separately structured compositions. The first, titled “The Encircled River,” describes a canoe-and-kayak trip he took with a five-man study team down the Salmon River of the Brooks Range. The team is trying to determine whether the Salmon should be part of the wild-river proposal before Congress, a proposal that would set aside the area as unalterable wild terrain. McPhee says of the Salmon, “In a lifetime of descending rivers, this was the clearest and the wildest river.” He writes,

Paddling again, we move down long pools separated by short white pitches, looking to see whatever might appear in the low hills, in the cottonwood, in the white and black spruce – and in the river, too. Its bed is as distinct as if the water were not there. Everywhere, in fleets, are the oval shapes of salmon. They have moved the gravel and made redds, spawning craters, feet in diameter. They ignore the boats, but at times, and without apparent reason, they turn and shoot downriver, as if they have felt panic and have lost their resolve to get on with their loving and their dying. Some, already dead, lie whitening, grotesque, on the bottom, their bodies disassembling in the current. In a short time, not much will be left but the hooking jaws. Through the surface, meanwhile, the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air – then fall to slap the water, to resume formation in the river, noses north, into the current. Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins.

The strangeness and beauty of that last sentence verge on the surreal. McPhee’s images often have surreal elements. Later in the same piece, describing the team’s camp grub, he writes,

Breakfast in the frying pan – freeze-dried eggs. If we were Kobuk people, one of us might go off into the watery tundra and find fresh eggs. Someone else might peel the bark from a willow. The bark would be soaked and formed into a tube with the eggs inside, and the tube would be placed in the fire. But this is not a group of forest Eskimos. These are legionaires from another world, talking “scenic values” and “interpretation.” These are Romans inspecting Transalpine Gaul. Nobody’s skin is going to turn brown on those eggs – or on cinnamon-apple-flavored Instant Quaker Oatmeal, or Tang, or Swiss Miss, or on cold pink-icinged Pop-Tarts with raspberry filling. For those who do not believe what they have just read, allow me to confirm it: in Pourchot’s breakfast bag are pink-icinged Pop-Tarts with raspberry filling. Lacking a toaster, and not caring much anyway, we eat them cold. They invite a question. To a palate without bias – the palate of an open-minded Berber, the travelling Martian – which would be the more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye?

That passage makes me smile every time I read it. Who besides McPhee would think to combine freeze-dried eggs, Pop-Tarts, forest Eskimos, Romans, Transalpine Gaul, Berber, travelling Martian, and “the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye” in one paragraph? No one. He’s one of the most imaginative factual writers in all of literature. “The Encircled River” is one of his masterpieces. I’ll have more to say about its artistry in future posts.

The second section of Coming Into the Country is called “What They Were Hunting For.” It’s about the search for a new capital of Alaska. The primary means of travel in this piece is by plane and helicopter. McPhee describes wonderful aerial views of Alaskan landscape. This one, for example:

The truly immense glaciers might be down in the southeast, but the glacier that was off to our right just now was in no sense modest. The helicopter had crossed Shulin Lake, and had circled it, tilting far over so the committee members could hang by their seat belts for a plan view, its big rotor blades biting the air with the sound of a working axe. Level again, it was proceeding west toward the Kahiltna River, the source of which, off to the north, was almost as preëminent as the mountains above. It came down out of the Alaska Range like a great white tongue. It came – the Kahiltna Glacier – from eleven thousand feet, from a high saddle between the peaks of Foraker and McKinley. And two, three, four miles wide all the way, it flowed fifty miles south into the valley, where it finally turned into a river at an altitude of scarcely a thousand feet. This was the big glacier the climbers land on – and the fact that they land at the seven-thousand foot contour has nothing to do with the strategies of the sport. They do so because airplanes are not permitted to land in Mount McKinley National Park, and the park boundary happens to cross the glacier at that level. The river below us was the product of the sun, and even in autumn and from the helicopter’s high perspective it was awesome to see. Most fast rivers are white, smooth, white, smooth – alternating pools and rapids. This one was white all the way, bank to bank, tumultuous, torrential, great rushing outwash of the Alaska Range. With so many standing waves, so much white water, it appeared to be filled with running sheep. The color of the water, where it was flat enough to show, was actually greenish-gray, and its clarity was nil. It carried so much of what had been mountains. Glacier milk, as it is called, contains a high proportion of powdered rock, from pieces broken off and then ground by the ice. The colors of the outwash rivers are determined by the diets of the glaciers – schist, gneiss, limestone, shale. 

Of the many pleasures of that passage – the definite, specific, concrete language, the originality of the figuration (“With so many standing waves, so much white water, it appeared to be filled with running sheep”), the interesting facts (“Glacier milk, as it is called, contains a high proportion of powdered rock, from pieces broken off and then ground by the ice”) – the most piquant, for me, is the sonic description of the helicopter (“its big rotor blades biting the air with the sound of a working axe”).

The book’s third section, “Coming into the Country,” is its longest, and perhaps its richest. It describes the people and terrain of Eastern Alaska, principally around the tiny bush community of Eagle, on the upper Yukon River. For example, here’s McPhee’s sketch of trapper Dick Cook:

Cook is somewhat below the threshold of slender. He is fatless. His figure is a little stooped, unprepossessing, but his legs and arms are strong beyond the mere requirements of the athlete. He looks like a scarecrow made of cables. All his features are feral – his chin, his nose, his dark eyes. His hair, which is nearly black, has gone far from his forehead. His scalp is bare all the way back to, more or less, his north pole. The growth beyond – dense, streaked with gray – cantilevers to the sides in unbarbered profusion, so that his own hair appears to be a parka ruff. His voice is soft, gentle – his words polite. When he is being pedagogical, the voice goes up several registers, and becomes hortative and sharp. He is not infrequently pedagogical.

And here’s McPhee’s description of the Yukon River, as he personally experienced it, canoeing the hundred-and-sixty-mile stretch between Eagle and Circle:

From the hull, meanwhile, came the steady sound of sandpaper, of sliding stones, of rain on a metal roof – the sound of the rock in the river, put there by alpine glaciers. Dip a cupful of water and the powdered rock settled quickly to the bottom. At the height of the melting season, something near two hundred tons of solid material will flow past a given point on the riverbank in one minute. Bubbling boils, like the tops of high fountains, bloomed everywhere on the surface but did not rough it up enough to make any sort of threat to the canoe. They stemmed from the crash of fast water on boulders and ledges far below. Bend to bend, the river presented itself in large segments – two, three, six miles at a stretch, now smooth, now capped white under the nervously changeable sky. We picked our way through flights of wooded islands. We shivered in the deep shadows of bluffs a thousand feet high – Calico Bluff, Montauk Bluff, Biederman Bluff, Takoma Bluff – which day after day intermittently walled the river. Between them – in downpourings of sunshine, as often as not – long vistas reached back across spruce-forested hills to the rough gray faces and freshly whitened summits of mountains. Some of the walls of the bluffs were of dark igneous rock that had cracked into bricks and appeared to have been set there by masons. Calico Bluff – a sedimentary fudge, folded, convoluted in whorls and ampersands – was black and white and yellow-tan. Up close it smelled of oil. It was sombre as we passed it, standing in its own shadow. Peregrine falcons nest there, and – fantastic fliers – will come over the Yukon at ballistic speed, clench their talons, tuck them in, and strike a flying duck hard enough (in the neck) to kill it in midair. End over end the duck falls, and the falcon catches it before it hits the river. As we passed the mouth of the Tatonduk, fifteen ducks flew directly over us. Brad Snow reached for his shotgun, and quickly fired twice. Fifteen ducks went up the Tatonduk. Above the Nation, steep burgundy mountainsides reached up from the bright-green edges of the river, then fell away before tiers of higher mountains, dark with spruce and pale with aspen, quilted with sunlight and shadow. Ahead, long points of land and descending ridgelines reached toward one another into the immensity of the river, roughed now under a stiff wind. Filmy downspouts dropped from the clouds. Behind the next bend, five miles away, a mountain was partly covered with sliding mist. The scene resembled Lake Maggiore and might have been the Hardanger Fjord, but it was just a fragment of this river, an emphatic implication of all two thousand miles, and of the dozens of tributaries that in themselves were major rivers – proof and reminder that with its rampart bluffs and circumvallate mountains it was not only a great river of the far northwestern continent but a river of preëminence among the rivers of the world. The ring of its name gave nothing away to the name of any river. Sunlight was bright on the mountains to both sides, and a driving summer rain came up the middle. The wind tore up the waves and flung pieces of them through the air. It was not wind, though, but the river itself that took the breath away.

So many brilliant, artful touches here – the evocation of the sound of the river against the canoe’s hull (“sound of sandpaper, of sliding stones, of rain on a metal roof”), the precise naming of the bluffs (“Calico Bluff, Montauk Bluff, Biederman Bluff, Takoma Bluff”), vivid description (“sedimentary fudge, folded, convoluted in whorls and ampersands”), capture of light, color, wind, rain, geography, geology, wildlife – all in dynamic interplay with the action of the canoe moving down the river. Coming into the Country brims with such passages. I enjoy it immensely. 

Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss various aspects of Coming into the Country – its action, structure, imagery, point of view, sense of place, use of figuration – in more detail. But first I want to introduce the third book in my trio – Ian Frazier’s superb Great Plains. That’ll be the subject of my next post in this series.