December 25, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Ed Caesar’s “Speed,” an exploration of the fascinating world of hypercars – limited-edition vehicles that go or even exceed 300 m.p.h. and cost millions of dollars. Caesar attends a hypercar jamboree at a resort near Málaga, in southern Spain. He rides in a purple Koenigsegg Regera (“The car’s five-litre engine, along with three electric motors, resulted in instant, unyielding torque—the rotational force that translates into acceleration. When the car sped up, I felt as if I’d been suctioned to the seat by a giant vacuum cleaner”). He visits the Koenigsegg factory in Ängelholm, Sweden (“One car on display is a Gemera, the world’s first four-seater hypercar. The Gemera, a phev—plug-in-hybrid electric vehicle—with a maximum twenty-three hundred horsepower, can accelerate from zero to sixty in less than two seconds”). He visits the headquarters of another hypercar manufacturer, Hennessey, in Texas, where he rides in a deep-blue Venom F5 Coupe:

We did a warmup lap in Sports Mode—or Baby Mode, as Roys called it—hitting 155 m.p.h. Then he switched to something called F5 Mode. Before the final, short straightaway, he asked me if I was ready. When he hit the accelerator, it was like being strapped to a surface-to-air missile. Each gear change provoked the car to ever more noise and aggression. We hit 170 m.p.h., then braked to make the final turn. I stifled the urge to scream, but not to curse.

Caesar talks with hypercar test-pilot Andy Wallace. Wallace tells him about driving Bugatti’s Chiron Super Sport 304.8 m.p.h. on a test track in Germany (“ ‘It seemed a shame to lift off the accelerator, but then you see the wall coming,’ Wallace said”). Caesar, accompanied by former Le Mans winner Pierre-Henri Raphanel, takes a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport for a spin. He writes,

Raphanel reminded me to trust him. The next time, when he said, “Full power”—adding, “Full, full, full!”—I did as told. Other cars flew past the passenger window like blown leaves. My focus narrowed on the lane before me. The speedometer showed an alarmingly high number before Raphanel told me to brake. Evidently, I didn’t brake hard enough: he physically depressed my leg. As we decelerated, the car never veered from a straight line. 

The piece ends vividly. Caesar visits the Rimac Group headquarters outside Zagreb, Croatia. Rimac makes electric hypercars, e.g., the Nevera. Rimac’s chief test-driver, Miro Zrnčević, shows him some of the Nevera’s qualities. Caesar writes,

It accelerates faster than any road car ever made: zero to 60 m.p.h. in 1.74 seconds, and zero to a hundred in 3.21 seconds. By now, I was used to the power of hypercars, but it was my first time experiencing such power so noiselessly. When Zrnčević accelerated from a standing start, my brain struggled to align the speed we accumulated with the near-silence around us. I nearly threw up.

“Speed” is a wonderful tour of an incredibly exotic corner of the car world. I enjoyed it immensely.

December 18, 2023 issue

I applaud the creation of the new Hannah Goldfield column “On and Off the Menu,” in the “Critics” section of the magazine. Goldfield is one of my favorite writers. Her “Tokyo Story,” in this week’s issue, is excellent. It’s a review of several Japanese restaurants in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood. One of them is Uzuki. Goldfield writes,

If there is one Japanese restaurant in Greenpoint that best embodies understated luxury, it’s Uzuki, a recently opened temple to soba, also known as buckwheat, that humblest of crops. The chef, Shuichi Kotani, is a master of noodles, which he makes daily from one-hundred-per-cent-buckwheat flour. (Packaged versions are usually cut with wheat.) Firm, slippery, and ever so slightly grainy, they’re served warm—in a glistening hot dashi made with duck bones and topped with medallions of roast duck—or cold, in chilled dashi, layered with thin sheets of raw salmon, pearls of salmon roe, shiso leaves, and daikon radish. Every bowl is finished with a sprinkling of pale buckwheat kernels, simmered until glossy and chewy.

Ravishing!

Postscript: There seems to be a rivalry shaping up between Goldfield and Helen Rosner as to who can write most carnally about food. Rosner takes the contest to a new level this week in her delectable “Tables For Two: Foul Witch.” She writes,

Often, when restaurants are called “sexy,” that means sleek-lined and hard-edged; the food at Foul Witch is sexy, not in the way of a fast car or a low-slung couch but like actual sex: a physical indulgence, a sinking in, an embodied experience of pleasure.

Top that, Goldfield!

On the Horizon: Top Ten "New Yorker & Me"

Photo by John MacDougall

The New Yorker & Me has been around nearly fourteen years. Hard to believe. During that time, I've posted 1,433 notes – over a million words. Blogging is an ephemeral business. Roger Angell compared it to launching paper airplanes from an upstairs window. But thanks to blogspot.com’s archive, all my posts still exist. How long they’ll last is anyone’s guess. Some are better than others. Some were easy to write; others more difficult. I hope it doesn’t seem too self-indulgent if I look back and pick ten favorites. A new series then – “Top Ten New Yorker & Me” – one per month, for the next ten months, starting January 15, 2024. 

December 11, 2023 Issue

What to make of Parul Sehgal’s “Turning the Page,” in this week’s issue? It’s a survey of several recent memoirs by or about critics, including Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet (on life with her father, Peter Schjeldahl), and Robert Boyers’ Maestros & Monsters (on his long association with Susan Sontag and George Steiner). I’m a fan of the work of Schjeldahl, Sontag, and Steiner. The key word here is “work.” I don’t give a damn about their personal lives. Whether they were rotten parents or fickle friends is immaterial to me. It’s their work that matters. That was Flaubert’s belief; it’s mine, too. Occasionally, a memoir appears that is itself a work of art. Paul Theroux’s Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998), on his friendship with V. S. Naipaul, is an example that immediately comes to mind. Are Calhoun’s and Boyers’ books in that league? Sehgal doesn’t say. She doesn’t comment; she doesn’t quote. She’s flying at a ridiculously high altitude. Come down to the ground, Sehgal. Get some ink on your hands.

Postscript: As for Sehgal’s notion that the work of critics like Kael, Schjeldahl, and Sontag is a form of “unselfing” – “the ability to channel someone else” – that’s just crazy! Kael would hoot if she read that. She didn’t channel anyone but herself. Same for Schjeldahl and Sontag. That’s what made them such great stylists. To paraphrase Kael, unselfing is for sapheads. 

December 4, 2023 Issue

Funny, I was thinking of April Bloomfield earlier this week as I considered launching a new series on my blog called “Top Ten New Yorker Food Pieces.” One of the pieces I was thinking of including is Lauren Collins’ brilliant “Burger Queen” (November 22, 2010). It’s a profile of Bloomfield when she was chef at the Michelin-starred New York restaurant Spotted Pig. And now this week’s New Yorker arrives, containing Helen Rosner’s delectable “Tables for Two” review of Sailor, a new Fort Greene restaurant. Who is Sailor’s chef? None other than the great April Bloomfield. It appears she hasn’t lost her touch. Rosner describes Bloomfield’s stuffed radicchio:

Slicing into the sphere of wrapped radicchio leaves, I discovered an interior of fragrant rice studded with firm, creamy borlotti beans. Taking a bite of this mixture, bathed in a wine sauce—which was rich and emulsified and, I learned later, vegan—was like sinking into a quicksand of warmth and flavor. The leaves of the radicchio imparted a lingering hint of bitterness, a scalpel through the savory roundness of everything else. This is the dish, I thought to myself—the dish of the restaurant, perhaps the dish of the year.

That’s from the newyorker.com version of Rosner’s review. If radicchio isn’t your thing, try Bloomfield’s roasted chicken:

The roasted chicken for two is excellent, with burnished skin and tender, herb-infused flesh. It is served directly on top of a pile of Parmesan-roasted potatoes and garlicky braised chard, which absorb all the golden drippings and nearly eclipse the pleasures of the bird itself. 

Mm, I’ll have that, please. 

On the Horizon: 3 for the River

I enjoyed doing “3 for the Road,” 3 for the Sea,” and “3 More for the Road” so much that I’ve decided to pick three more of my favorite travelogues – R. M. Patterson’s Dangerous River (1953), Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), and Tim Butcher’s Blood River (2007) – and revisit them, blogging about it as I go. A new series then – “3 for the River” – starting January 1, 2024.  

James Wood's Puzzling Use of "Re-description"

James Wood (Photo by David Levenson)

What does James Wood mean by “re-description”? He mentions it at least six times in the Introduction to his Serious Noticing (2019):

1. “After all, the review-essay involves not just pointing at something, but pointing at it while re-describing it.”

2. “But quotation and re-description are at the heart of the book review and at the heart of that experience that Cavell calls ‘creative.’ ”

3. “This passionate re-description is, in fact, pedagogical in nature. It happens in classrooms whenever the teacher stops to read out, to re-voice, the passage under scrutiny.”

4. “All the critic can hope to do is, by drawing attention to certain elements of the artwork – by re-describing that artwork – induce in his or her audience a similar view of that work.”

5. “It is all here, in this beautiful passage: criticism as passionate ‘creation’ (‘as if for the first time’); criticism as modesty, as the mind putting the ‘understanding’ into abeyance (‘he was baffled’); criticism as simplicity and near-silence (‘It went, he said, far beyond any analysis of which he was capable’); criticism as sameness of vision and re-description (‘was convinced, and convinced others, that what he saw was there’).”

6. "And let Brendel’s performance on the piano, his inability to quote without also recreating, stand for the kind of criticism that is writing through a text, the kind of criticism that is at once critique and re-description: sameness.” 

Why is the “re” necessary? Why not just “description”? “Re-description” implies do-over – rewriting a previous description. But that isn’t what Wood does in his own work. Take, for example, his review of Tan Twan Eng’s novel The House of Doors, in this week’s New Yorker. He calls it “an assemblage, a house of curiosities.” He refers to its “manner of layering the narratives.” He says,

Eng can write with lyrical generosity and beautiful tact: moths are seen at night “flaking around the lamps”; elsewhere, also at nighttime, “a weak spill of light drew me to the sitting room.” Shadowy emotions are delicately figured: “His eyes, so blue and penetrating, were dusked by some emotion I could not decipher.” Lesley’s account of her affair with Arthur has a lovely, drifting, dreamlike quality—the adulterers almost afloat on their new passion, watched over by the hanging painted doors of Arthur’s house on Armenian Street.

That’s primary description, is it not? Nothing is being re-described or re-voiced. Maybe Wood considers use of quotation a form of re-description. But that doesn’t make sense. Pointing out felicitous passages in a work is a form of descriptive analysis, is it not? How is it re-description? It seems to me Wood’s “re” is redundant. Earlier in his Introduction to Serious Noticing, he does omit the “re”: “Describing one’s experience of art is itself a form of art; the burden of describing it is like the burden of producing it” (my emphasis). Maybe he sees the book as description, and his review of it as a form of re-description. In his essay on Virginia Woolf (included in Serious Noticing), he comes close to saying that. He writes, “If the artwork describes itself, then criticism’s purpose is to re-describe the artwork in its own, different language.” That’s a big “if.” Helen Vendler, in the concluding paragraph of her “The Function of Criticism” (collected in her The Music of What Happens, 1988), says, “No art work describes itself.” I agree. 

Description or re-description – does it matter? Yes, absolutely. It goes to criticism’s purpose. Vendler, in the Introduction to The Music of What Happens, writes,

The aim of an aesthetic criticism is to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique confirmation.

Wood might find that statement too simplistic. But, for me, it’s a touchstone. In comparison, Wood’s notion of re-description seems vague. 

November 27, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rachel Aviv’s “Personal Statement,” a profile of writer Joyce Carol Oates. This piece differs from most New Yorker literary profiles. It has a clear, strong theme, captured in its tagline: “Joyce Carol Oates’s relentless search for self.” Okay, sign me up, I’ll read that. How we become who we are is, for me, one of life’s central mysteries. Aviv does an excellent job exploring it in this piece. It’s fascinating to read about an eighty-five-year-old writer, author of “sixty-three novels, forty-seven collections of short stories, and numerous plays, librettos, children’s novels, and books of poetry” and see how insecure she is about her own identity. Aviv writes,

Many authors grapple with a central preoccupation in the course of a career, until the mystery eventually loses its pull, but Oates, who has long been concerned with the question of personality and says she doubts whether she actually has one, has never exhausted her curiosity. There are only so many ways to dramatize the problem of being a self, one might think, but Oates keeps coming back to it, as if there is something she still needs to figure out.

I confess I haven’t read any of Oates’s fiction. But I devour her book reviews, a number of which have appeared in The New Yorker: see, for example, “Earthly Delights” (February 5, 2001); “Love Crazy” (March 3, 2003); “Rack and Ruin” (April 30, 2007); “The Death Factory” (September 29, 2014); and “Ocular Proof” (February 26, 2018). My favorite Oates reviews are “The Treasure of Comanche Country” (on Cormac McCarthy) and “In Rough Country” (on Annie Proulx), included in her great 2010 essay collection In Rough Country. Oates is an excellent critic – descriptive and analytical. If she’s insecure in her identity, I don’t detect it in her reviews. She appears completely self-assured.

Not that I’m questioning Aviv’s assessment. Her “quest for identity” theme threads her piece from beginning to end: “The persona was perhaps no more real than the ladylike role she inhabited at parties”; “Her short stories from the time, many of which revolve around romantic betrayals, are so precise about the impossibility of trying to cohere as a personality in the world”; “The work had piled up, giving form to aspects of her identity that she couldn’t otherwise see, but the process didn’t seem to have really changed her.” 

My favorite line in “Personal Statement” is “She seemed uniquely incurious when I read her lines from her journal.” That “uniquely incurious” made me smile. In Aviv’s piece, a savvy journalist-detective comes up against a foxy, guarded genius. 

3 More for the Road: Conclusion

This is the last in a series of twelve monthly posts on three of my favourite travelogues – Anthony Bailey's Along the Edge of the Forest (1983), Robert Sullivan’s Cross Country (2006), and Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia (2010). Today, I’ll try to sum up my reading experience.

Reading these three great books, I felt I was actually making the journeys they describe. That’s the highest compliment I can pay a piece of writing. Reading them was an immersive experience. Bailey put me right there with him as he drove along the Iron Curtain from Travemünde, on the Baltic Sea, to Trieste, on the Adriatic. Same with Sullivan, as he and his family traveled across the U.S. from Portland, Oregon, to New York City. Same with Frazier, as he and his two Russian guides traversed Siberia from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. 

The books are similar in several ways. For one, they’re all epic road trips. For another, all three are chronologically structured. They read like journals, which is really what they are – wonderful day-by-day journals that tell us what their authors saw, felt, and experienced in detail after vivid detail. It’s my favorite form of writing. A third similarity is that all three exude a deep love of geography. Cities, towns, rivers, lakes, valleys, mountains – everything is noted, named, and particularized. I love rivers; these books brim with them: in Along the Edge of the Forest, the Trave, the Elbe, the Havel, the Spree, the Ecker, the Werra, the Saale, the Regen, the Danube, the Vltava, the Inn; in Cross Country, the Willamette, the Columbia, the Snake, the Clark Fork, the Yellowstone, the Missouri, the Red, the Mississippi, the Fawn, the Maumee, the Black, the Cuyahoga, the Musconetcong, the Passaic, the Hudson; in Travels in Siberia, the Neva, the Barguzin, the Maksimikha, the Severnaya Dvina, the Irtysh, the Ob, the Chulym, the Yenisei, the Mana, the Esaulovka, the Angara, the Ingoda, the Zeya, the Amur, the Bureya, the Khor, the Arseneveka, the Avvakumovo, the Lena, the Aldan, the Olchan. 

Another similarity is that all three books are about incredible man-made phenomena: the Iron Curtain (Along the Edge of the Forest), the interstate highway system (Cross Country), the Toplinskaya Highway (Travels in Siberia: “If most Russian construction looks handmade, this r0ad appeared to have been beaten into the earth by hands, feet, and bodies”). 

The brutality of the Soviet Union figures in two of them. In Along the Edge of the Forest, Bailey writes about the Iron Curtain – not as history, but as a real, existing, visible fact of life (barbed wire, land mines, watch towers, machine guns, guard dogs) that many border people he talked with considered an ineradicable fixture forever dividing East and West. In Travels in Siberia, Frazier visits an abandoned Soviet prison camp, which he describes in unforgettable detail right down to the nails, boards, logs, and barbed wire. 

 

But these books differ substantially from each other, too. For instance, Along the Edge of the Forest is about one journey. Cross Country is also about a single journey, but it includes flashbacks of other trips, most memorably “The Worst Cross-Country Trip Ever.” Travels in Siberia consists of five separate Siberian trips, plus several Alaskan ones. Also, Along the Edge of the Forest is a solo trip. Cross Country is a family trip. Travels in Siberia features a trio of travelers – Frazier and his two Russian guides.

Another difference between these books is their writing styles. The prose in Along the Edge of the Forest is sparer and plainer than it is in Cross Country and Travels in Siberia. This isn’t a criticism. I relish this form of writing. It’s the equivalent of using a great point-and-shoot camera. Sullivan and Frazier are more descriptive than Bailey is. Sullivan creates fascinating compound adjectives, e.g., “in that decent-but-not-great, stereo-in-a-rental car kind of way,” “a smile breaks out across my sunburned-even-through-the-windshield face,” “the more-expensive-than-a-motel-but-not-outrageously-priced Saint Paul Hotel.” Frazier is a master metaphorist (“To me St. Petersburg seems more like a hole in the corner of a sealed-tight packing crate that Peter crowbarred open violently from inside. Once the breach was made the light flowed in, and it continues to flow”). All three writers are great company, where "great" means curious, observant, humorous, perceptive. This, in the end, is what counts most for me. I love spending time with them. 

Now, to conclude, I want to imagine a collage that captures the essence of these three splendid books. I picture it like this: a 1981 map of Europe, showing Bailey’s route along the Iron Curtain from Travemünde to Trieste; East German watchtower; 1973 Saab station wagon; concrete post painted in chevron stripes of black, red, and gold; metal fence with SM-70 automatic sentry guns mounted on it; a makeshift balloon basket and hot-air heating burner; barbed wire; Soviet radar station (antennae, towers, domes); glass of beer; apple; nylon knapsack; a 2004 map of the U.S. showing Sullivan’s route from Portland, Oregon, to New York City; 2004 Impala sedan with rooftop pack; Lewis and Clark signpost; take-out cup of Kum & Go coffee with plastic lid; squeegee; parrot; Holiday Inn Express sign; tumbleweed; enMotion towel dispenser; a 2001 map showing Frazier’s route across Siberia from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok; Renault step van; mosquitos; satellite phone; fishing rod; crows; birch trees; watermelon; abandoned Soviet prison camp. Overlap these maps and images; paste them at crazy angles to each other; and randomly across the surface paint three black stripes representing the Iron Curtain, Interstate-90, and the Sibirskii Trakt. I call my collage “Sulbaizier.”