The New Yorker & Me: December 26, 2022 Issue

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Friday, December 23, 2022

December 26, 2022 Issue

A long time ago, I tried reading Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. I didn’t make it very far. I found myself put off by the use of “fug” for “fuck.” What kind of war novelist shrinks from using the ultimate war word? "Fug" isn't real. It seems prudish. It smacks of censorship. It's a major false note marring the book's attempt to represent war as it actually is. It's not as if "fuck" had never appeared in print before. Henry Miller used it in Tropic of Cancer in 1934. That's fourteen years before Mailer's book. Now I see there's a new edition of The Naked and the Dead, published by Library of America. David Denby reviews it in this week’s issue. Is “fug” out and “fuck” in? Denby doesn’t say. He does mention that "The coarseness of the soldiers’ thoughts and speech shocked some readers in 1948, though now it seems to us the way men in combat have always talked." Men in combat don't say "fug." Maybe the book has been coarsened, and Denby assumes it was always this way? Otherwise I don't understand what the hell he's talking about.

But don't get me wrong. Some of Mailer's writing I love. His boxing pieces are splendid! Recall the brilliant climax of The Fight (1975):

Vertigo took George Foreman and revolved him. Still bowing from the waist in this uncomprehending position, eyes on Muhammad Ali all the way, he started to tumble and topple and fall even as he did not wish to go down. His mind was held with magnets high as his championship and his body was seeking the ground. He went over like a six-foot sixty-year-old butler who has just heard tragic news, yes, fell over all of a long collapsing two seconds, down came the Champion in sections and Ali revolved with him in a close circle, hand primed to hit him one more time, and never the need, a wholly intimate escort to the floor.