The New Yorker & Me: Style, Structure, and John McPhee

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.

Thursday, July 27, 2023

Style, Structure, and John McPhee

Diagram of "Travels in Georgia," from John McPhee's "Structure"

Is structure an element of style? Not usually, says Terry Eagleton, in his recent review of Ludovico Silva’s Marx’s Literary Style. Eagleton writes,

Yet the concept of style stretches to more than imagery, and Silva’s book is largely silent about these other aspects: tone, rhythm, pace, pitch, mood, syntax, texture and so on. Instead, it turns its attention to the formal structure of Marx’s texts, though one wouldn’t usually include structure under the heading of style. [“Be like the Silkworm,” London Review of Books, June 29, 2023]

It’s an interesting question. John McPhee, in his Draft No. 4 (2017), says, “To some extent, the structure of a composition dictates itself, and to some extent it does not. Where you have a free hand, you can make interesting choices.” Where you have a free hand - right there, I think, is where style comes in.

Structure is one of McPhee’s stylistic resources: see, for example, his artful use of flashback in “Travels in Georgia” and “The Encircled River," among other great pieces. William L. Howarth, in his excellent Introduction to The John McPhee Reader (1991), says, “Structural order is not just a means of self-discipline for McPhee the writer; it is the main ingredient in his work that attracts his reader.” I agree. To me, structure is an essential aspect of McPhee’s extraordinary style.