April 18, 2011 Issue

This week’s highlight is Geoff Dyer’s New Yorker debut. His “Poles Apart” is deeply pleasurable. I’ve long been a fan of Dyer’s work. His Out of Sheer Rage was a constant companion during my travels in Nunavut in 2006. The italicized sections of his But Beautiful, describing a Duke Ellington/Harry Carney road trip, are, for me, touchstones of what constitute great writing. My favorite sentence in “Poles Apart”? Well, actually, I have two: “There were amazing photographs of the coils of rock in the variously colored water –reddish, pink, pale blue – and there was the Zapruder-inflected footage of its construction, but the jetty had gone the way of Atlantis, sinking beneath the waveless surface of the Salt Lake.” And, “Most of what there was to see was traffic-related: gas-station logos, trucks the size of freight trains, snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder.” That “snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder” is inspired!

Two other notable pieces this week: Evan Osnos’s “The Grand Tour” (“And yet, behind Berlusconi’s opera buffa and the prosperity gospel about Chinese one-party efficiency, my busmates caught unredacted flickers of insight”) and Keith Gessen’s “Nowheresville” (“Strangest of all was the wind howling through the elevator shafts. 'Whooooo,' it said. 'Whoooo-ooo-ooo' ”).