April 12, 2010 Issue

Kelefa Sanneh’s “Beyond The Pale” in this week’s issue is a cool – perhaps too cool – review of three books on “whiteness.” I count at least ten instances in this piece where Sanneh, instead of expressing outrage in the face of racism, opts for a cooler response: (1) the reference to an overtly racist Glenn Beck quote as an example of Beck’s “adventurous thoughts and memorable language”; (2) the description of Henry Louis Gates’s arrest as “one of the summer’s most entertaining reality shows”; (3) his suggestion that “often the most appropriate answer to the question [what do you mean by white culture?] is a joke or a series of jokes”; (4) his description of the congresswoman Helen Chenowith-Hage’s veiled racist comment as an “ingenious euphemism”; (5) his question – “Should we pretend to be surprised?” – in response to the whiteness of Tea Party membership; (6) his question – “But what of it?” in response to the observation that American politics has been segregated for decades; (7) his description of a passage in James Baldwin’s “On Being White … And Other Lies” as being “marvelously splenetic”; (8) his quip about a racist statement by Hippocrates (quoted in one of the books under review - Nell Irvin Painter’s “The History of White People”), which wittily recycles the Chenowith-Hage quotation: “the warm-climate community, a few millennia ahead of schedule”; (9) his sarcasm about the connection the craniologist Johann Kaspar Lavater made between whiteness and weakness: “It is a delicate race, always on the verge of being overrun or adulterated, dethroned or debunked”; (10) the astonishing rationalization of Leigh Anne Tuohy’s racist rant in the movie “The Blind Side,” telling a black man to stay in his own neighborhood, as “refreshing, because there’s no trace of anxiety in her white identity.” Sarcasm, irony, jokiness, breeziness, rationalization – these apparently are the appropriate responses to racism today. Baldwin’s “splenetic” reaction, “marvelous” as it is, is now considered old hat. Gates’s outrage at being arrested in his own home by a white cop is mere entertainment. The message here seems to be: no matter what, stay cool. Personally, I prefer a little anger, politically incorrect though it may be. I think Baldwin’s outrage is more than just marvelous; it’s effective. And the same goes for Gates’s fierce indignation. It’s still possible to be “intellectual” and yet at the same time bring a little heat: see Gates’s great “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man” (The New Yorker, October 23, 1995).

April 5, 2010 Issue

“I suppose” is one of Calvin Trillin’s signature moves for jump-starting his travel stories: “I suppose I could say that we decided to take a house in the South of France for a month because …” (“Hanging Around in Uzes”); “I suppose you could say that we went to Guadeloupe one cold winter as a gesture of support for its efforts to celebrate female chefs” (“A Woman’s Place”). This week in the magazine, Adam Gopnik tries it out in his piece “No Rules!”: “I suppose I would have an easier time deciding if the Paris-based French food-guide-and-festival group that calls itself Le Fooding is going to be able to accomplish all that it has to set out to accomplish – which seems to be nothing less than save the preeminence of French cuisine from going the way of the Roman Empire, the five-act tragedy, and the ocean liner – if I had an easier time defining what it is and truly hopes to do.” As a hook, does that work for you? It doesn’t for me. For one thing, it’s too convoluted. For another, it’s too abstract. Like a good cook, Trillin keeps it simple. I pushed myself to read “No Rules!”. I found myself not enjoying it much. It wasn’t always this way with Gopnik’s writing, was it? There was a time when I clipped his articles from the magazine and saved them in a folder. I think that folder still exists somewhere, buried in a box of old clothes, photo albums, etc. in our basement. I remember one early piece – it was about an old guy who spent all his time hanging out at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel. It contained some great descriptions of the hotel, including this dandy (I looked it up on-line just now in the New Yorker archives): “he would … enter the hotel under the long, sloping green-and-white striped awning that extended all the way from the driveway, above Sunset Boulevard, to the main entrance.” And I remember the pleasure I experienced reading his writings about (in no particular order) Audubon, shaker furniture, Joseph Cornell and Times Square, to name but a few. Unfortunately, he diluted that pleasure when he wrote what has to be one of the silliest comments the magazine ever published. I’m referring to Gopnik’s “Blame Canada” (March 2, 2002), in which he sketched a Canada I hardly recognized. Among other crazy things, he said, “The Mounties are there in their bright-red uniforms to say, ‘Shoot if you want, we'd rather talk.’” Well, like most generalizations, this one breaks down as soon as you start discussing specific cases. I know of Mounties who would not hesitate, and who have not hesitated, to meet fire with fire. Gopnik’s taint is his penchant for generalizing. Take “No Rules!” for example, where he says sweepingly, “In America and England, you are what you think about eating.” Is that really the case? What about all those straitlaced investors, lawyers and accountants who are devoutly conservative in their values, but who regularly dine at all those great creative little restaurants we read about in Tables For Two? I find more and more that Gopnik’s writing lacks specificity. There isn’t one memorable concrete sentence in “No Rules!”, unless you count his description of Zoe Reyners (“an exquisite, nervous blonde in white linen with a distinct resemblance to the young Brigette Fossey”). What’s happened to the writer who noticed that long, sloping green-and-white striped awning at the Beverly Hills Hotel? Perhaps he’s losing his touch. And yet … and yet, I can’t give up on him. Every now and then he produces a pearl. For example, three years ago in a piece called “New York Local” (September 3 & 10, 2007), he wrote this opening line: “Twelve-thirty on a beautiful summer day, and the chicken committee of the City Chicken Project is meeting at the Garden of Happiness, in the Crotona neighborhood of the Bronx.” Now that’s what I call a hook! It’s why I keep reading Gopnik.

March 29, 2010 Issue

Who is The New Yorker’s best fashion writer? I think it’s still Judith Thurman, but Lauren Collins is coming up fast on the inside. Take her “Check Mate” (September 14, 2009), for example. Dig that “tufting scarps of millstone grit” in her opening paragraph. My test for inspired fashion writing is simple; it’s the same one James Wood uses when he’s fondling narrative detail: palpability. Here’s Collins’s description of a Burberry tote bag: “It was made of yellow leather, pale as sorbet, and its surface had been shaved, or chiffonaded, so that it appeared to be covered in thousands of eyelashes.” Now I ask you, is that not one of the loveliest, most palpable things you’ve ever read? Alas, Collins is not in this week’s “The Style Issue.” Thurman is. Her “Face It” didn’t do much for me. The best thing about it is the red-pink-orange Laurie Rosenwald illustration. That and Thurman’s magnificent subjectivity. Her “I” is never very far away from her subject, and I love that. In “Face It,” she takes us with her into an aircraft lavatory and lets us watch her put cream on her face. Not just any cream; its “Boot’s No. 7 Protect & Perfect Intense Beauty Serum,” don’t you know. Thurman gets a smile from me when she says, “I started to protect and perfect myself in the plane’s lavatory, despite a long-standing personal security procedure – I never look in the mirror by that merciless light.” Okay, that’s funny, but it doesn’t pass the test. Where’s the palpability? There’s a smidgin of it in Rebecca Mead’s flyweight “The Prince of Solomeo,” a profile of Brunello Cuicinelli, a sweater maker who lives in a cashmere cocoon of unreality on a mountain top in Umbria. Here’s the smidgin: “In cream-colored velvety corduroy pants and an oatmeal-colored cashmere sweater, he had the plush and contented aspect of a pampered cat.” I confess I could not relate to this pampered puss in the least. Consequently, I only skimmed the rest of the article. Call it palpability; call it tactility; whatever, I’m still in search of it and the magazine this week is damn short of it – which for a so-called “style issue” is surprising, nay, shocking! Let’s look in Alexandra Jacob’s “Fashion Democracy,” shall we? Nope, not there, either, unless you count her marvelous parenthetical “At barneys.com, one must navigate the Clipper around a cone-headed mannequin.” I really like that, but it’s more surreal than it’s palpable, and right now for me it’s either palpable or it’s nothing. Might Patricia Marx’s “Four Eyes,” have what I’m looking for? It contains lots of great eyeglass descriptions, that’s for sure. Consider this beauty: “Some of the riches include sunglasses with taxicab-yellow visors over the lenses; aqua butterfly frames with rhinestones your bubbe might have worn in Miami; folding silver wire rims from the twenties; and a pair of circular specs from the eighteen hundreds whose temples end in loops so that the wearer can pin them to his wig.” But let’s face it: if you’re looking for descriptive texture (and we are, we are), glasses are not where it’s at. For sheer palpability, fabric description is unbeatable. And no one writes fabric better than Judith Thurman. Here’s a sample from her great 2005 Chanel piece, “Scenes From A Marriage”: “the ivory cocktail suit of spun-sugar bouclé, with a dissolving hem; the romantically tiered evening dress of black tulle, with a trompe l’oeil cummerbund of silver threadwork and rhinestones.” I don’t know about you, but I find that “spun-sugar bouclé” in combination with the “dissolving hem” pretty damn ravishing. And I don’t even know what bouclé is. Forget palpability; edibility is the real test.

March 22, 2010 Issue

I’m a sucker for demolition descriptions; there’s a dandy in this week’s issue: “The section, nine tons of steel and concrete, suddenly tilted forward and sank through the air, a giant concrete berg calving from the Yankee glacier. It thundered on impact, and the subway platform quaked. The field, excavators and all, disappeared in a cloud of dust. After a couple of minutes, the dust gave way to the sight of a dead upper deck on the ground; a rack of girders poked out of the concrete like the ribs of an animal carcass” (Nick Paumgarten, “The Pull”). Other highlights in the magazine this week: Sasha Frere-Jones’s “one of those glorious splinter-thin moments”; Ben McGrath’s “pillow in the shape of the S.S. Normandie”; Jeffrey Toobin’s “great swaths of Supreme Court precedent”; Lawrence Wright’s “proletarian informality.” And then we come to Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Everybody Have Fun” – a review of several books on the societal implications of happiness research – my Pick of the Week. I related to Kolbert’s piece; it touched on something a friend and I had argued about when we were in Cuba a couple of weeks ago. She’d commented that Communism seemed to be working for the Cubans because, as a people, “they appear to be happy.” I found myself snapping back: “What choice do they have? Would you choose to give up all your comforts of home and come live here?” She replied that she found the absence of consumerism in Cuba refreshing and that maybe we could learn from Cubans. At that point, I accused her of having a double standard: the Cuban way of life was okay for Cubans, but not for her. We ended up agreeing that neither of us had a sufficient understanding of how things really worked in Cuba. Little did I know (until I read Kolbert’s piece) that what we’d been arguing about has a name: “the paradox of the happy peasant.” Kolbert explains the phrase by quoting Carol Graham: “Higher per capita income levels do not translate directly into higher happiness levels.” In other words, as Kolbert notes, “the relationship between money and well-being turns out to be a lot less straightforward than is generally assumed.” So maybe my friend is right? Maybe Cubans should be left to enjoy their relative contentment? I’m still not convinced, because as Amartya Sen, an economist quoted by Kolbert, points out, “The grumbling rich man may well be less happy than the content peasant, but he does have a higher standard of living.” I recall pointing out to my friend the higher standard of living we enjoy in Canada. And I recall her chilling rejoinder: “At what cost?” In the end, this is Kolbert’s point, too. She concludes her stimulating review with some environmental logic that I find irrefutable: even if escalating consumption leads to increased happiness – a big “if,” as Kolbert’s piece makes clear - trashing the planet is still wrong.

March 15, 2010 Issue

I’m fascinated by the strategies that great writers use to make fictional reality appear real – sometimes so real that it appears to be, in John Updike’s memorable phrase, “the thing itself.” One such strategy, powerfully advocated by the realist critic James Wood, is free indirect style. Wood, in his How Fiction Works (2008), describes its effect: “The narrative seems to float away from the novelist and take on the properties of the character, who now seems to ‘own’ the words. The writer is free to inflect the reported thought, to bend it around the character’s own words.” Wood has long admired this style. In “What Chekhov Meant by Life” (included in Wood’s 1999 essay collection The Broken Estate), Wood says of Chekhov, “He sees the world not as a writer might see it but as one of his characters might.” In “At Home in the World” (The New Yorker, February 5, 2001), he says, “In Tolstoy’s fiction, as in Chekhov’s, reality appears as it might appear not to a writer but to the characters.” At the same time as Wood has advanced this notion of fictional reality, he has argued against (rightly, in my opinion) magical realism (see “Toni Morrison’s False Magic” in The Broken Estate), and what he aptly calls “hysterical realism,” a style of writing “not to be faulted because it lacks reality – the usual charge – but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself” (see “Hysterical Realism” in his 2004 collection The Irresponsible Self).

Now, in a piece called “Keeping It Real,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, Wood trashes “the rather lazy stock-in-trade of mainstream realist fiction,” including “such basic narrative grammar” as “the cinematic sweep, followed by the selection of small, telling details,” “the preference for the concrete over the abstract,” vivid brevity of character-sketching,” and several other mainstays of conventional fictional narrative. “Keeping It Real” is a review of two realist works: David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto and Chang-Rae Lee’s new novel, The Surrendered. Wood pans them both. He says of Shields’s book, which is an argument for realism, that, “His complaints about the tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken.” But he goes on to say that Shields’s “unexamined promotion of what he insists on calling “reality” over fiction, is highly problematic.” Wood provides only one extended quote from Reality Hunger, and based on my reading of it, I would have to say that it’s hard to judge whether Wood’s use of “rant” and “imprecise and overwrought” to describe the book is fair or not.

With respect to the other book under review, Lee’s The Surrendered, Wood provides only snippets of quotation. So again it’s difficult for me to form my own impression regarding the quality of its writing. Apparently it’s a far-ranging narrative (Manchuria, 1934, the Korean War, 1950, New York City, 1986, and ending with a pilgrimage to Italy). Wood says it is “utterly conventional,” “stagy, even bookish, a livid libretto.” But he also says it has many scenes that are “piercingly evoked” and that it is “spacious in design and reach.” In what are perhaps the most memorable words of the review, Wood calls The Surrendered “this slabbed magnificence.” He doesn’t say whether it or any part of it is written in free indirect style. Given Wood’s intense fondness for such a style, I suspect that if there were any evidence of it in the book, Wood would have mentioned it, and that he wouldn’t have been so quick to condemn the novel as “utterly conventional.” I confess I’m not familiar with Lee’s writing. But Wood’s review has aroused my curiosity about it. I see there are several stories by Lee in The New Yorker archive. I intend to access one or two of them and check out for myself what kind of fiction writer he is.