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.