Mid-Year Top Ten 2024

Photo by Landon Nordeman, from Gary Shteyngart's "A Martini Tour of New York City"

Time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

1. Gary Shteyngart, “A Martini Tour of New York City,” April 24, 2024 (“The highlight of Tigre’s Martini menu is the vodka-based Cigarette, which Platty immediately qualified as ‘smoky as fuck’ ”). 

2. Luke Mogelson, “The Assault,” April 15, 2024 (“In the operations center, Perun yelled into the radio, ‘No! Don’t cross in front of the entrance!’ But Wolf couldn’t hear him. He kept walking until he reached the open door. For several long seconds, everyone in the operations center watched as he stood there, motionless. Then he crumpled”). 

3. Leslie Jamison, “A New Life,” January 22, 2024 (“The baby and I arrived at our sublet with garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers, sleeves of instant oatmeal, zippered pajamas with little dangling feet. At a certain point, I’d run out of suitcases”).

4. William Finnegan, “The Long Ride,” June 10, 2024 ("Dropping in to the heaviest waves, he would fade and stall, casually timing his bottom turn to set up the deepest possible barrel. He would disappear into the roaring darkness, then reappear, usually, going very fast, with that little grin").

5. Alex Ross, “Thoroughly Modern,” June 3, 2024 (“Wang lingered over the passage with unaffected tenderness, giving just a twinge of emphasis to its bittersweet chromaticism”).

6. D. T. Max, “Design for Living,” May 6, 2024 (“He happily spends hours poring over blueprints, dividing former fields of cubicles into small but clever residences and reconceiving onetime copy-machine nooks as mini laundry rooms or skinny kitchens”).

7. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Vol. 4,” May 20, 2024 (“I work with words, I am paid by the word, I majored in English, and today I major in Wordle”).

8. Eric Lach, “Trash, Trash Revolution,” April 15, 2024 (“Some of the trash bags have burst open, but others are curiously intact, and you can still make out a few pieces of furniture that never got a chance to be fully digested”).

9. Ian Parker, "His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy," June 17, 2024 ("In an empty house with no windows, the sound of the ocean filled every room. Underfoot, the original tiles had been hammered out, and so had the cables and pipes that were once embedded beneath. The floor was now rough concrete, covered in cavities and trenches, like a road that had been chewed up by a milling machine ahead of a resurfacing"). 

10. Paige Williams, "Ghosts on the Water," June 24, 2024 ("The pour revealed sea lice, krill, a needlefish, and a bunch of twitchy sticklebacks, as silver as store-bought fishing lures—bycatch, all of which gets returned to the river. Cupping the net from the bottom, the patriarch teased the few glass eels into view and plucked them out, the way you’d pick lint off a sweater").

Best Cover

Klaas Verplancke, “On the Grid” (March 25, 2024)

Best "Talk of the Town" Story

Robert Sullivan, “Find a Grave,” April 8, 2024 (“Instruments came out of the car, Morrow starting off with a reel called ‘Sligo Maid.’ Suddenly, his fiddle popped its tuning peg. ‘That’s Coleman!’ Kelly said”).

Best Illustration

Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli, for Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best "Goings On" Note

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Le B,” March 4, 2024 (“Nearly every dish incorporates luxury ingredients, though they generally show up as supporting players: foie-gras drippings in a creamy onion dip, or an earthy whiff of white truffle in a garlic-cream soup. At times, this can feel a bit like opulence theatre, rather than actual opulence—a black-truffle-flecked gelée, draped over a devilled egg en chemise, tasted like nothing much at all, least of all truffles—but when it works, my God, it works”).

Best Photo

Photo by Bobby Beasley, for David Means’ “Chance the Cat” (January 22, 2024)

Best newyorker.com Post

Nathan Heller, “Helen Vendler’s Generous Mind,” April 30, 2024 (“What she had was an almost tactile understanding of the ancient practice of creating poems as art, and—running her hands like a dressmaker along the back of their stitching, watching the way they draped and moved and caught the light—she could see not only what poets did but how they did it”).

Best Sentence

Austria’s Truman vodka is shot into flaming orbit by an inventive liquor made by Empirical, the Danish distillery, and named after Stephen King’s pyrokinetic character Charlene McGee, which presents on the tongue as a flavorful burst of smoked juniper, hence the feeling that a draw of nicotine and tar can’t be far. – Gary Shteyngart, “A Martini Tour of New York City” (April 24, 2024)

Best Paragraph

In restaurants all across the country, I shoved food into my mouth above her fuzzy head as she slept in her carrier beneath my chin. The receipts were headed to my publisher, and I was determined to eat everything: trumpet mushrooms slick with pepper jam, gnocchi gritty with crumbs of corn bread that fell onto her little closed eyes, her head tipped back against my chest. I was flustered and feral, my teeth flecked with pesto and furred with sugar. Then I pulled down my shirt and gave these meals to her. In Los Angeles, I nursed in the attic office above a bookstore lobby. In Portland, I nursed among cardboard boxes in a stockroom. In Cambridge, I nursed in a basement kitchenette beneath the public library. – Leslie Jamison, “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best Detail

Khan recorded voice memos of her attempts to perfect the landings on “tree” and “understand.” She touched her nose as she sang, as though she could hear through it. – Nick Paumgarten, “Misty in Manhattan” (February 26, 2024)

Best Description

Of course I got the soup. Plenty of ink has already been spilled over the titillating Soup No. 5, a small tureen of thick brown broth, heavily spiced with sibot (a smoky-tangy blend of Chinese herbs), in which float bits of bull testicles and penis. A bowl is salty and savory, warming and rich; the soup is traditionally consumed as a hangover cure, perhaps owing to the virility of its star ingredients. (One is spongy, the other chewy; I won’t spoil which is which.) I’m not sure if I’d order it on a return visit, though—I’ll save room, instead, for grilled morsels of pork jowl brushed with glossy-sweet barbecue sauce made with banana ketchup, or sticky skewers of eel glazed in lemon-lime soda and ginger. The K.F.C. (Kanto fried chicken), little popcorn nuggets of tender dark meat, arrives with a bowl of dipping sauce that’s so fiery hot, so puckery with fish sauce, that it made me feel wildly alive. – Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Naks” (February 5, 2024)

3 for the River: People

This is the seventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favourite riverine travelogues – R. M. Patterson’s Dangerous River (1953), Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), and Tim Butcher’s Blood River (2007) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their sense of people.

There aren’t many people in Patterson’s Dangerous River. The Nahanni River, when he went up it, in 1927, and again in 1928-29, was remote, wild territory, pretty much empty of humans, except for Indians. On his first trip, he encounters a man named Albert Faille, who is traveling up the Nahanni as far as Flat River. He makes friends with Faille. They camp together. He helps Faille build a log cabin on the Flat. He says of Faille, 

The Nahanni has probably never seen a finer canoeman, and to watch Faille search out the weak spot in a riffle and plant his canoe’s nose exactly there, and neither to the right nor the left by even a hand’s breadth, is like watching a fine swordsman seeking for an opening, feeling out his adversary.

Other people met by Patterson on that first trip are Arthur George, a fur trapper who has a cabin on the Liard River, where Patterson stays overnight on his way back out; Father Gouet, an old priest in Fort Liard; Archie Gardiner, a Fort Nelson guide; Corporal Barber, of the British Columbia Police, stationed in Fort Nelson; and Harry Weaver, captain of the freighter that takes Patterson down the Peace River.  

On his second trip up the Nahanni, Patterson is accompanied by his friend Gordon Matthews. They make a good team – capable, practical, adventurous. Substantial chunks of Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are written in the “we”:

We left la Flair’s post next morning at 5:30 and thrummed up the quiet reaches of the river, almost to the foot of the Splits, without incident. 

In the morning we redistributed the heavy load between the two canoes and poled on into the Canyon.

We started early up the two big riffles. 

We dried the outfit and patched and mended the old freight canoe.

Two or three days later we were poling up a quiet, dreamy snye of the right bank, somewhere above the mouth of the Meilleur River.

There was no sense in going further – and so we made a camp and cooked supper and sat on the soft cushion of the dryas, eating and watching the red light of the sunset on the on the face of the Second Canyon Mountains.

And there was game: in the first hour, as we unloaded the canoes, we saw five moose either swimming or coming down to drink, and in the afternoon, two more. 

A week’s work followed, during which we cleared and levelled a site for a cabin, cut spruce for building timber, taking the trees from the south to let in the sunlight, and painted the canoes.

Two days later we roasted a haunch of that bear, spinning it suspended on a wire from an overhanging branch above a slow fire.

We got the sheep meat down to the canoe in one load, carrying all we could manage ourselves and packing the dogs with the rest; and very disgusted they looked, staggering along each with a heavy load of meat in his little canvas panniers.

They take turns hunting and exploring. One goes out for two or three days, sometimes a week or more; the other stays behind, tending camp. Patterson says of these periods of separation,

I don’t think that either Gordon or myself ever felt lonely in the generally accepted sense of the word, though we were often alone and far apart: there was so much to see and do in this strange new country that we were always far too much occupied and interested to have time for any mawkish feelings of loneliness. Neither of us had any brothers or sisters and that may have had something to do with it – we had never been accustomed to rely on the support of others. But there was also this, that we both took a certain pride in our ability to travel alone into places where most men would hesitate to go in couples.

That “there was so much to see and do in this strange new country” could be this great book’s tagline. There’s activity on every page – climbing mountains, hauling canoes up rapids, portaging, hunting, backpacking in the bush, packing meat into camp, building a log cabin. Patterson evokes Matthews’ vigorous character by describing his action. For example:

Gordon had been busy. The walls of the cabin were partly up and the rest of the logs were cut and lying in the bush; any trees that threatened the safety of the cache and cabin had been cut down, and all the tops and useless timber had been sawed up and split and now made the foundation of our winter wood pile. The clearing was a more open and orderly place than when I had last seen it – and, in addition to this, a lot of trapline had been cut out.

Other people encountered by Patterson on his second trip: Jack la Flair, who runs a trading post at the foot of Nahanni Butte; Albert Faille, who camps with Patterson and Matthews for a few days; Starke and Stevens, who are trying to drive a power scow up the Nahanni; Greathouse, Southard, and Quinlan, who have a cabin on the Nahanni; Ole Lindberg and his wife, who have a cabin on the Liard River; Joseph Marie Cote, who has a cabin on the Liard; Carolus, the young Indian man who guides Patterson through fierce wind and snow on the trail to Fort Simpson; the group of nine Indians who visit Patterson at his cabin, drink a bucket of tea, and give him a present of moose meat. 

Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory teems with people – people in bars; people on the street; people on the river; people in restaurants and hotels; churchgoers; people at a Knights of Columbus picnic; taxi drivers; squirrel hunters; people at the Falling Rocks Walleye Club Annual Pig Roast; people in poolrooms; students at Bellevue’s Lincoln Junior High School; raccoon hunters; workers on strike at the Oscar Mayer Packing Company in Davenport; a gang of Hell’s Angels at a bar in Buffalo; people attending Sunday morning service at the Community Baptist Church in Andalusia; people at a housewarming party in Muscatine; duck hunters; lockmasters; tour guides; waitresses; radio station receptionists; towboat captains; bootleggers; bartenders; on and on.

Some folks are identified, some aren’t. Among the identified are: Herb Heichert, owner of the Minneapolis boatyard where Raban buys his boat; Jim Curdue, who takes Raban fishing for walleyes on Lake Pepin; John Dunlevy, owner of Lansing’s local newspaper, the Allamakee News; Rex Kaber, owner of Kaber’s Supper Club, in Prairie du Chien; Jerry Eiben, Dubuque taxidermist; R. C. Wahlert, owner of the Dubuque Packing Company; Harvey Schwartz, worker at the Oscar Mayer Packing Company, Davenport, who takes Raban with him on a coffee run; Ross Frick, owner of Frick’s bar, in Davenport; Brad Funk, public relations officer at the Grain Processing Corporation, Muscatine, who takes Raban on a tour of the plant; Wayne Oakman, Dallas City fisherman, who lets Raban sleep overnight in his trailer home; Betty Asquith, formerly of England, now living in Hannibal; Rush Limbaugh, “oldest practicing attorney” in Cape Girardeau; P. T. Ferry, who drives Raban into Tiptonville; Reverend Judge Otis Higgs, candidate for mayor of Memphis; Shouphie Habeeb, president of the First Federal Savings & Loan Bank, in Vicksburg; Willy Jefferson, owner of Jefferson Funeral Home, Vicksburg; Bob “Boom-Boom” Kelley, captain of the towboat Jimmie L. that takes Raban from Natchez to New Orleans.

Raban sizes everyone up, sometimes not too charitably. Of the occupants of a St. Paul bar, he says, “My fellow drinkers looked as if they had been purchased in bulk along with the plastic library walls.” Of a woman he meets in Winona: “She looked like a retired lady wrestler. Slack-jawed, her eyes hidden behind the thick lenses of her glasses, she filled her outsize stretch pants to the last stitch.” Of the guys in a club bar in Moline: “These aging jocks with their acrimonious divorces, their giant powerboats and their glowering paranoia.”  

The people he likes best are river people. Of Wayne Oakman, a commercial fisherman and junk collector, he says,

I had never yet met anyone whose obsession with the river so far exceeded mine. Wayne Oakman was an enslaved courtier of the Mississippi. The front of his spruce frame house was a long window, so that the water seemed to fill the rooms and color the walls. You could hear it lapping on the beach under our feet. Wayne’s old basket chair was placed next to the glass so that he could watch the current uncoiling downstream on another westward dogleg. He was inseparable from the water.

In Tim Butcher’s Blood River, people are key to the success of his journey across the Congo. They include: Tom Nyamwaya, the International Care worker who provides Butcher with motorbikes through Katanga; Benoit Bangana and Odimba – the two International Care workers who drive the motorbikes; Georges Mbuya, the pygmy rights advocate, who accompanies Butcher part way to Kasongo; Masimango Katanda, the Anglican archbishop who puts Butcher up while he’s in Kindu; Lieutenant Commander Jorge Wilson, head of MONUC’s Kindu unit, who allows Butcher to hitch a ride on a UN river patrol boat down the Congo as far as the village of Lowa; Malike Bade, leader of the crew of pirogue paddlers that take Butcher down the Congo from Lowa to Ubundu; Adalbert Mwehu Nzuzi, the priest who puts Butcher up while he’s in Ubundu; Michel Kombozi, driver of the motorbike that Butcher rides to Kisangani; Oggi Saidi, Wagenia fisherman who helps Butcher search for a river boat heading downstream from Kisangani; Robert Powell, UN transport boss for Kasangani, who authorizes Butcher’s passage aboard the UN pusher Nganing that takes him to Mbandaka; Mohammed Yusoff Sazali, senior MONUC officer on board the Nganing; Jean Paul Mbuta Monshengo, captain of the Nganing; Pascal Manday Mbueta, the Nganing’s Congolese bowman; Maurice, the Kinshasa representative of Butcher’s cobalt-mining contact, who arranges for Butcher’s stay in Kinshasa and his two-day drive to Boma.

In addition, Butcher meets many interesting people along the way – old Belgian colonists, bicycle haulers, village chiefs, missionaries, priests, river pilots, pirogue paddlers, local historians. Butcher talks to them all, weaving a vivid narrative of the Congo’s human suffering. 

One of Blood River’s most memorable scenes is Butcher’s farewell to his Kisangani contact Oggi Saidi. Butcher is leaving Kisangani. He meets with Oggi to say goodbye. They’re in the bar of the Palm Beach Hotel. After a few beers, Oggi makes a heartbreaking request. Here’s the scene:

Oggi’s fluent English was entirely self-taught. He was tough – he had lost count of the malaria episodes he had survived. And he was resourceful – somehow he fed his family and kept them clothed without any meaningful income. But just like Georges, Benoit and many other Congolese I had met, all his energies, skills and talents were spent on the daily struggle to survive. The failure of the Congo is so complete that its silent majority – tens of millions of people with no connections to the gangster government or the corrupt state machinery – are trapped in a fight to stay where they are and not become worse off. Thoughts of development, advancement or improvement are irrelevant when the fabric of your country is slipping backwards around you.

After enough Primus to make his eyes rheumy, Oggi found the inner strength he had been looking for. He put his hand on my forearm, leaned forward and made the most wretched of pleas.“Please, Mr. Tim. I have a huge favour to ask. My son, my fourteen-year-old, has no future here. There is nothing for him in Kisangani. I know way this city is going. Please will you take him with you to South Africa and give him a new life.”

There was no way I could smuggle a child onto the UN boat with me. I felt wretched having to turn Oggi down. But I felt more wretched that he had to resort to asking me, someone he had known for only a few days, to save his child from the Congo.

People in these three great books can be divided into flat or round. All the people I’ve mentioned so far are flat. They’re quickly sketched, sometimes in a mere sentence or two. To call them “flat” is not meant to be pejorative. They’re flat like photos. Rarely does the travel writer stop long enough to get to know anyone in depth. But each of these books contains at least one "round" person, namely, the writer himself. Everything is processed through his consciousness. His “I” is on almost every page. Are these books self-portraits? That’s the subject of my next post in this series.