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.

Wednesday, May 22, 2024

May 20, 2024 Issue

John McPhee, at age ninety-two, still has his stuff. His subjects have changed – he’s no longer writing about trips down wild rivers or encounters with bears – but his extraordinary style hasn’t. He still crafts unique sentences. His brilliant “Tabula Rasa, Vol. 4,” in this week’s issue, brims with them. For example:

I work with words, I am paid by the word, I majored in English, and today I major in Wordle.

Vowels grease the skids, so a useful second guess will include other vowels. 

You go off into a confidence-rattling realm of digraphs and rogue “y”s. 

Typographical errors are more elusive than cougars.

If a rule is probed, as in “the exception that probes the rule,” stet “probes.”

Like a driver reactor, you have to drip it out.

After six, for humanitarian reasons, I stopped asking for hands.

The elusive eleventh was Sarah’s first umble.

Out of context, these lines are surreal. That’s what I like about them. But they do have meaning. In order to grasp it, you have to read the piece. 

Postscript: The literary will that McPhee sets out in “Tabula Rasa 4” contains this curious directive: “In the title piece of 'Giving Good Weight,' the rationale with respect to italics was more complex. Please carefully follow the original text in FSG editions.” What’s that about? Italics are not a major feature of that piece. There are only six instances of it: “ ‘Look at him. He has clean fingernails’ ”; “ ‘Did you ever see ketchup before it went into a bottle?’ ”; “Each of the six grossed as much as the roadside stand for that day – and four people were working the stand”; “The door (it was not the outside one but the door on their side of the truck) was left unlocked for perhaps fifteen minutes”; “ ‘Forty thousand chickens?’ ”; “ ‘That’s a seven?’ ” What’s so complex about that? I don’t get it. 

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