3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Point of View

This is the eighth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their point of view.

The point of view in The Meadowlands and On the Rez is first person major. The books are like personal journals: 

One day I drove across the Meadowlands to Newark to find Seth Boyden’s grave.

One spring, I flew to Newark, rented a car, and checked into a hotel with the idea of touring around and just seeing where events would lead me.

One afternoon I drove back through a field of abandoned cars and walked along the edge of a garbage hill, a forty-foot drumlin of compacted trash that owed its topography to the waste of Newark.

I was on the road by 6:45 in the morning. 

As I approached the reservation, I imagined I could feel the life expectancy drop, as palpable as a sudden drop in temperature.

At dawn, I took a back road from Hermosa to the reservation.

I went into the powwow grounds, passing through a gate in the chain-link fence that surrounded it.

A while ago I visited the site on Interstate 80 where SuAnne and Chick’s car accident occurred.

I relish sentences like these. Active, personal, experiential – they keep me reading. 

McPhee’s The Pine Barrens has its share of such sentences, but not as many as in the other two books. It’s written in the first person minor. There are stretches when McPhee’s “I” doesn’t appear – when he’s telling the history of industry in the pines, for example, and when he's telling its history of fire. It's all interesting, but my favorite parts are when his “I” is present, e.g., his visit to Chatsworth General Store:

When I first stopped in there, I noticed on its shelves the usual run of cold cuts, canned foods, soft drinks, crackers, cookies, cereals, and sardines, and also Remington twelve-gauge shotgun shells, Slipknot friction tape, Varsity gasket cement, Railroad Mills sweet snuff, and State-Wide well restorer. Wrapping string unwound from a spool on a wall shelf and ran through eyelets across the ceiling and down to a wooden counter. A glass counter top next to the wooden one had been rubbed cloudy by hundreds of thousands of coins and pop bottles, and in the case beneath it were twenty-two rectangular glass dishes, each holding a different kind of penny candy. Beside the candy case was a radiator covered with an oak plank.

We notice in accordance with who we are. McPhee notices the wrapping string running “through eyelets across the ceiling.” He’s amazingly observant. He notices things that other writers (lesser writers) overlook or disregard. Frazier and Sullivan are gifted observers, too. In my next post, I’ll highlight some of their most inspired details.