In Praise of Rebecca Clarke's Portraits

Rebecca Clarke, Patricia Lockwood

A shoutout to Rebecca Clarke for her wonderful color portraits of writers that now and again appear in The New York Times Book Review. There’s one of Patricia Lockwood in last week’s issue: see above. I collect these portraits. Here are two of my favorites:

Rebecca Clarke, Brenda Wineapple

Rebecca Clarke, Joy Williams

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #8

Frank Auerbach, Primrose Hill (1971)

This is the eighth post in my monthly series “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style,” a consideration of what makes Clark’s writing so distinctive and delectable. Each month I choose a favorite passage from his work and analyze its ingredients. Today’s pick is from his brilliant “Frank Auerbach’s London” (London Review of Books, September 10, 2015; included in Frank Auerbach, edited by Catherine Lampert, 2015). It’s a descriptive analysis of Auerbach’s Primrose Hill (1971): 

The wonderful sky in the 1971 Primrose Hill is pictorial, even picturesque. That doesn’t mean I disapprove of it, any more than I do of the pulled purple-brown strokes sealing in and stamping down the picture’s bottom-right corner. But the sky and corner are stratagems, moves in a game. They’re easily recognised as such. Now turn to the red-brown furrows scraped across the picture’s midground, or the two slivers of yellow locking the red-brown in place, or the slab of deep green laid on top of the trees at right like the lid of a coffin ... about these I’m much less certain. The white sky and the purple-brown field are maybe there essentially to release these episodes – so that the painting moves up, where it matters, from the realm of illusion to that of presence. ‘Something’, in the red and yellow, takes hold of the painting process and accelerates it almost to breaking point. Whatever that something is – ‘seeing’, ‘totality’, ‘the thing itself’ – the oil paint is twisted and scarified by it. Space begins to elude us. The ground hardens. The trees are full of camouflaged guns.

Clark is an ingenious interpreter of paint strokes: “the pulled purple-brown strokes sealing in and stamping down the picture’s bottom-right corner”; “the red-brown furrows scraped across the picture’s midground”; the two slivers of yellow locking the red-brown in place”; “the slab of deep green laid on top of the trees at right like the lid of a coffin.” He focuses on the yellow and red: “ ‘Something’, in the red and yellow, takes hold of the painting process and accelerates it almost to breaking point. Whatever that something is – ‘seeing’, ‘totality’, ‘the thing itself’ – the oil paint is twisted and scarified by it.” And then it’s almost as if he enters the painting: “Space begins to elude us. The ground hardens. The trees are full of camouflaged guns.” What? That last line is electrifying. So unexpected – shocking, even. Guns in the trees of Primrose Hill? Can it be true? Yes, look again. I see them now, thanks to Clark’s inspired guidance. This is no peaceful walk in a park. This is an ambush!  

September 15, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. No regard for due process – that’s my takeaway from Jonathan Blitzer’s disturbing “Enemies of the State.” It documents the alarming abuse of power of ICE, Border Patrol, and other U.S. officers who are carrying out Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. It’s going to be up to human rights advocates and the courts to stop the abuse. Otherwise, the U.S. is headed the way of Nazi Germany. 

2. I enjoyed Ben McGrath’s Talk story “Dumpster Diving,” especially his description of the plan on how to move the “giant cherry-colored armoire”: 

Their attention turned to a giant cherry-colored armoire that had belonged to a professor now on sabbatical in Malaysia. How to get it to Bay Ridge? Ching had an idea. He could have it trucked with the weekly deliveries to Tandon, which is in downtown Brooklyn. “Then, there is a wonderful Home Depot probably less than a mile away,” he said. “You can rent a U-Haul for nineteen dollars, and it’s good for ninety minutes. So, if you time it just right, early in the morning . . .”

3. Hannah Goldfield’s “Take Me Back,” an account of her visit to this year’s Minnesota State Fair, contains this delicious description:

Many of the most beloved food venders sell a single, time-honored classic: bubbling-hot, batter-fried cheese curds, as sparkly as nuggets of gold, from a stall called the Mouth Trap; the Corn Roast’s deeply burnished cobs, dunked in melted butter; crispy, wispy sweet-onion rings at Danielson’s & Daughters.

September 1 & 8, 2025

Pick of the Issue this week is Alexandra Schwartz’s “Going Viral.” It’s a profile of writer Patricia Lockwood. I’m a fan of Lockwood’s literary criticism. Her “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019), an evisceration of John Updike, is one of my all-time favorite reviews, not because I enjoy seeing Updike shredded, but because Lockwood’s voice in that piece is so brilliantly original and compelling. Schwartz describes Lockwood’s style superbly. She says, “Across genres, her calling card is her unmistakable voice, which sasses and seduces with quick wit and cheerful perversity, pressing the reader close to her comic, confiding ‘I.’ ” She also says, in a line that made me smile, that Lockwood “writes with the impish verve and provocative guilelessness of a peeing cupid.” 

Schwartz delves into Lockwood’s personal life – her battle with Covid (“Her memory had crumbled; she could barely read”), her father (“a guitar-shredding, action-movie-obsessed Midwestern Catholic priest”), her “adolescent misery,” her husband (“forty-four, bald and athletic, with the calm, capable demeanor of Mr. Clean’s laid-back little brother”), her Savannah apartment (“The apartment was in a state of dorm-room disorder: dishes scattered on the kitchen island, books stacked on the coffee table and crammed together on trinket-laden shelves”), her fascination with stones and gems ("She owns three different kinds of blowtorches"), her dosing herself with a quadruple espresso every morning before she starts writing, and so on. Do I need to know all this stuff in order to appreciate Lockwood’s writing? No. But it’s all interesting. I like the ending with Lockwood on the beach, flashing her breasts at two men flying overhead in a helicopter. 

Reading Schwartz’s absorbing piece, I thought of the theory recently espoused by the critic Merve Emre that the writer’s “I” is fiction. In “Going Viral,” Schwartz shows a writer who is, in person, every bit as wild, idiosyncratic, and complex as she is on the page. Schwartz authenticates Lockwood's “I.” 

10 Best Personal History Pieces: #2 Anne Boyer's "The Undying"

Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli, from Anne Boyer's "The Undying"

The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces appear there. Over the next ten months, I’ll choose ten of my favorites (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Anne Boyer’s “The Undying” (April 15, 2019)

This great piece is a deeply personal take on the ravages of cancer treatment. In 2014, Boyer was diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent four rounds of intensive chemotherapy, followed by a double mastectomy. She describes the process as “semi-annihilation.” She describes her suffering in detail after excruciating detail:

Blood from chemotherapy-induced nosebleeds drips on the sheets, the paperwork, the CVS receipts, the library books. We emit foul odors. We throw up. We have poisonous vaginas and poisoned sperm. Because our urine is full of toxins, the signs in the bathroom instruct patients to flush twice.

Once my hair is gone, once I can no longer taste my food, once I have passed out while shopping for a bread knife in IKEA, once the ex-lovers have all visited to make one last attempt to get me in bed, once the generous humiliations of crowdsourced charity have assured me months of organic produce, I have become a patient. The old ways are through. Any horizon is made of medicine. Any markers of specific identity beyond “the sick” and “the healthy” come from another era.

Every movie I watch now is a movie about an entire cast of people who seem not to have cancer, or, at least, this seems to me to be the plot. Any crowd not in the clinic is a crowd that feels curated by alienation, all the people everywhere looking robust and eyelashed and as if they have appetites for dinner and solid plans for retirement. I am marked by cancer, and I can’t quite remember what the markers are that mark us as who we are when we are not being marked by something else.

A nurse inserts a large needle into my subdermal port. First, things are drawn from me, then things are flushed in and out of me, then things drip into me. For each of these things that drip into me, I must say my name and when I was born. Of the many drugs that I am infused with, some have familiar, clear-cut effects: Benadryl, steroids, Ativan. I should know how these feel, but in this context they never feel like themselves. Instead, they combine with the chemotherapy drugs to create a new feeling, a unique mush of lack of clarity.

After the infusion is done, I sit up until I fall over. I don’t give up until I give up. I try to win all the board games, remember all the books any of us have read, stay up late. Terrible things are happening in my body. Sometimes I will say it to my companions: “Terrible things are happening inside of me.” Finally, forty or forty-eight or sixty hours later, I can’t move and there is nothing to take for the pain, but, trying to be obedient to medicine and polite to my friends, I take something for the pain.

Boyer puts us there – in the cancer pavilion, the infusion room, the recovery room. She says of the cancer pavilion:

The cancer pavilion is a cruel democracy of appearance: the same bald heads, the same devastated complexions, the same steroid-swollen faces, the same plastic ports visible as lumps under the skin. The old seem infantile, the young act senile, the middle-aged find that all that is middle-aged about them disappears. The boundaries of our bodies break. Everything we were supposed to keep inside us now seems to fall out.

Boyer doesn’t pretend to be heroic. She cries, rants, and rages her way through her treatment. In one of my favorite passages, she writes,

We are supposed to be legible as patients while navigating hospitals and getting treatment, and illegible as our actual, sick selves while going to work and taking care of others. Our actual selves must now wear the false heroics of disease: every patient a celebrity survivor, smiling before the surgery and smiling after it, too. We are supposed to be feisty, sexy, snarky women, or girls, or ladies, or whatever. Also, as the T-shirts for sale on Amazon suggest, we are always supposed to be able to tell cancer that “you messed with the wrong bitch!” In my case, however, cancer messed with the right bitch.

But she does have a desire to live. As bitter and negative as she sometimes is, she’s still on the side of life. She says it expressly (“During treatment, you must have a desire to live”) and she says it implicitly in her vivid, spirited, perceptual style. This, for example:

I try to be the best-dressed person in the infusion room. I wrap myself up in thrift-store luxury and pin it together with a large gold brooch in the shape of a horseshoe. The nurses always praise the way I dress. I need that. Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins.

And this:

My cancer was not just a set of sensations or lessons in interpretation or a problem for art, although it was all of these things. My cancer was a captive fear that I would die and leave my daughter in a hard world with no resources, a fear, too, that I had devoted my life to writing and sacrificed all I had and never come to its reward. It was a terror that all I’d ever written would sit data-mined but not read in Google’s servers until even Google’s servers were made of dust, and in the meantime I would become that unspeaking thing, a dead person, leaving too soon everyone and everything I loved the most.

In the end, Boyer’s body bore the unbearable. She survived the treatment. Her cancer was eradicated. She’s written an unforgettable account of her ordeal. 

Taking a Break

Photo by John MacDougall

This evening, Lorna, our grandson, Will, and I fly to the Netherlands to do some cycling. We’ll be gone two weeks. I’m taking Ian Frazier's The Fish's Eye (2002) with me. I’ll post my review when I return. The New Yorker & Me will resume on or about September 20th. 

August 25, 2025 Issue

I’m enjoying The New Yorker’s “Takes” series immensely. In this week’s installment, Adam Gopnik revisits Joseph Mitchell’s “Joe Gould’s Secret” (September 19 and 24, 1964). He writes,

On the surface, Mitchell’s prose style derived from the economical newspaper writing he learned at the New York World. But his real heroes were the Joyce of “Dubliners” and the great Russian stylists—Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov. 

This is perceptive. In his best pieces – “Joe Gould’s Secret,” “Up in the Old Hotel,” “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” “The Rivermen” – Mitchell’s approach is Joycean. He seeks not just meaning; he seeks epiphany.

Reading Gopnik’s absorbing piece, I recalled three other wonderful appreciations of Mitchell’s work: William Maxwell’s Introduction to the 1999 Vintage paperback Joe Gould’s Secret; Mark Singer’s “Joe Mitchell’s Secret” (The New Yorker, February 22 & March 1, 1999; included in his 2005 collection Character Studies); and Janet Malcolm’s “The Master Writer of the City” (The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015; included in her 2019 collection Nobody’s Looking).

Mitchell, in his superb “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” wrote one of my favorite opening sentences: “When things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries down there.”

Joseph Mitchell is one of The New Yorker’s greatest writers. A shout-out to Adam Gopnik for honoring him in “Takes.”  

Eddy van Wessel's Ukraine War Photos

Photo by Eddy van Wessel, from his Ukraine (2025)

I’ve just finished reading Joshua Yaffa’s absorbing “At the Edge of Life and Death in Ukraine” (newyorker.com, August 2, 2025. It’s a review of a new photo book by Eddy van Wessel called Ukraine. Yaffa writes, “Most of the photographs in Ukraine were taken on the edges of violence; they are not gory and never prurient but instead are laced with a sense of what van Wessel called ‘the place where life and death touch each other.’ ” 

Yaffa’s piece is illustrated by fourteen photos from van Wessel’s book. They are compelling documents, records of human tragedy and atrocity. Are they more than that? Are they art? Is that a perverse question? They are superb photos. By that I mean they’re beautifully composed, sharply focused, richly detailed. And yet, I feel guilty responding to them this way. Who looks at war photos and sees beauty? I can’t find any precedents. 

Teju Cole touches on the issue in his “A Photograph Never Stands Still” (The New York Times Magazine, March 14, 2017), in which he analyzes his response to Danny Lyon’s “The Cotton Pickers.” He writes,

I hate “The Cotton Pickers.” It’s unpleasant to be confronted with the abasement of these men in the form of a photograph. But I love the photograph for its compositional harmony, which is like the harmony of a chain gang’s song, or like the paradoxical pleasure Northup took in the sight of a cotton field in bloom.

A photograph can’t help taming what it shows. We are accustomed to speaking about photographs as though they were identical to their subject matter. But photographs are also pictures — organized forms on a two-dimensional surface — and they are part of the history of pictures. A picture of something terrible will always be caught between two worlds: the world of “something terrible,” which might shock us or move us to a moral response, and the world of “a picture,” which generates an aesthetic response. The dazzle of art and the bitterness of life are yoked to each other. There is no escape.

Cole supports a binocular response to photos that show “something terrible.” We can be both morally outraged and aesthetically dazzled, he says. I take comfort from his words. They describe my own response to van Wessel’s arresting photos. 

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Details

This is the ninth 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 unique details.

These books are made of inspired details: 

The wallpaper in Fred Brown’s house (“The wall itself was papered in a flower pattern, and the wallpaper continued out across the ceiling and down the three other walls, lending the room something of the appearance of the inside of a gift box”); 

The speed-walking woman in East Rutherford (“After that, I drove west down a road bordered by factories and warehouses and ten-foot-tall reeds and only once saw a human: a speed-walking woman with kinky, orangish hair and a deep salon tan who was wearing wraparound mirrored sunglasses and neon-colored Nikes and a bright pink suit that stood out like the plumage of a tropical songbird as it swished past the monochromatic weeds”); 

The painting of an eagle covering an entire wall of Le War Lance’s Washington Heights apartment (“It was done in sketchy strokes of brown on the wall itself, and one of the legs in particular was so detailed and eagle-like, with careful feathering and sickle-shaped claws, that I thought it possible he had gotten as close to a real eagle leg as he said he had”); 

The way Fred Brown sipped whiskey (“Every so often, Fred would reach into his pocket and touch up his day with a minimal sip from a half pint of whiskey. He merely touched the bottle to his lips, then put it away. He did this at irregular intervals, and one day, when he had a new half pint, he took more than five hours to reduce the level of the whiskey from the neck to the shoulder of the bottle”); 

The carp in the marsh off the New Jersey Turnpike (“Thrashing around in the foul-smelling muck, the carp, each approximately two feet long, did not seem at all out of place beneath the New Jersey Turnpike; the scales on their backs were gross and coarse in the pattern of worn-down radial tires”); 

The star quilt that Florence Cross Dog made for Frazier (“The quilt was like a map of the reservation, with the gravel roads and dirt lanes and one-water-tower towns and little houses in the middle of nowhere stitched together and made shiningly whole”); 

The catalpa trees of Martha Furnace (“The streets are bestrewn with green and blue glittering slag, but they are indistinguishable from the sand roads that come through the woods from several directions to the town, and if it were not for the old and weirdly leaning catalpa trees, it would be possible to pass through Martha without sensing its difference from the surrounding woodland”); 

The little leachate seep on the side of a Meadowlands garbage hill (“But in this moment, here at its birth, at a stream’s source in the modern meadows, this little seep was pure pollution, a pristine stew of oil and grease, of cyanide and arsenic, of cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, nickel, silver, mercury, and zinc. I touched this fluid – my fingertip was a bluish caramel color – and it was warm and fresh”); 

At the Pine Ridge tribal powwow, a dancer in the men’s Traditional Dance competition (“A dancer came right by me. He was a big man, and in his costume – turkey-feather bustle three feet across, feathered anklets, feathered gauntlets, beaded headband, tall roach made of a porcupine tail atop his head – he seemed magnified in every dimension, almost a spirit-being. Then I saw the wristwatch he on beneath the gauntlet and the sweat on his temple, and the concentration in his eyes”); 

The wrapping string at Chatsworth General Store (“Wrapping string unwound from a spool on a wall shelf and ran through eyelets across the ceiling and down to a wooden counter”); 

The big wicker basket that eighty-three-year-old muskrat trapper George Schilling carried on his back, filled with muskrats (“The muskrats had long thick black tails and long yellow teeth that were curved like uncut fingernails”); 

The wildflowers at the location of the fatality marker where Suanne Big Crow’s accident occurred (“Little megaphone-shaped blossoms of pale lavender on a ground vine, called creeping jenny hereabouts, and a three-petaled flower called spiderwort, with a long stem and long, narrow leaves. The spiderwort flowers were a deep royal blue. I had read that in former times the Sioux crushed spiderwort petals to make a blue jelly-like paint used to color moccasins”). 

Of the many wonderful details in these three great books, my favorite is the thumbprints of oil on the bologna sandwich that Le War Lance makes for Frazier: “At lunchtime Le went in the house and brought me out a sandwich made of a quarter-inch thick slice of bologna on white bread with lots of mayonnaise. The sandwich had a few faint thumbprints of oil on it but was tasty anyway.” I don’t know why, but that line makes me smile every time I read it. It’s such a great detail. 

Another aspect of these books I relish is their nature description. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.