Sunday, January 25, 2015
January 19, 2015 Issue
The sprayers went first—a pair of minesweepers clearing a path.
Then the others entered with the bag and the stretcher. They emerged several
minutes later and loaded the corpse into the back of the truck. As the truck
made its way across the square, women and children spilled out of their houses,
sat down in the dirt, and keened. I followed on foot, along with a few locals,
all of whom turned back when the truck stopped at a wall of trees. The team
filed down a narrow trail, carrying the stretcher through dark jungle. After
about a hundred yards, unmarked mounds of rich orange soil rose here and there
from the grass. Beside a shallow, rectangular hole, an elderly man in
flip-flops, cargo shorts, and a white skullcap leaned on the handle of an old
spade. He had dug all the graves. No one else from the village, he told me, was
willing to tread in that place.
The team lowered the imam’s wife into the grave. On top of
her, they dropped a heap of freshly hacked branches and leaves. Then they
stripped off their suits, gloves, and masks and deposited them in the grave as well.
Mogelson’s writing style is factual, unostentatious – well
suited to the hard reality he describes. But it has its artful aspects. At one
point, describing a trip in Tonkolili District, Sierra Leone, he says, “To get
there, we followed barely discernible tire tracks, for miles, through grass so
tall and close you feel as if you were in a car wash.”
“When the Fever Breaks” can be read as a companion to
Richard Preston’s brilliant "The Ebola Wars" (The New Yorker, October 27, 2014), which describes the work of
scientists at the Broad Institute to
sequence Ebola’s genome and track its mutations. But the two pieces differ from
each other. “The Ebola Wars” is written in the third person; “When the Fever
Breaks” is a first-person narrative. It abounds with sentences like “One day in
early November, I followed several young men down a warren of sand alleyways,
veined by rivulets of sullage, that wound through West Point, the slum to which
Fahnbulleh and her husband had been taken,” and “When I visited the quarantine
center, in Monrovia, a group of children sat in plastic chairs inside the gate,
near a metal seesaw.” I relish such sentences: the observer becomes a
participant; reporting becomes experience.
Postscript: I
delight in thisness, i.e., “any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and
seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that
centers our attention with its concretion” (James Wood, How Fiction Works, 2008). Thisness is palpability, specificity,
concreteness. New Yorker writing
brims with it. For example, in this week’s issue, it’s there in the description
of the Goldschmied & Chiari mirrors on show at Lorello Gallery: “Composite
photographs of billowing smoke transferred to reflective glass, have been
tinted petal pink or storm-cloud gray” (“Goings On About Town: Art”). It’s
there in Amelia Lester’s representation of the Via Carota’s pumpkin-and-sage
ravioli: “fluffy, beautiful, and fleeting, an exercise in virtuosity equivalent
to a concert pianist running up and down a scale very fast” ("Tables For Two").
It’s there in Jiayang Fan’s description of Nitecap’s Key Lime Fizz “with a lit
candle suspended in its froth” ("Bar Tab"). It’s brilliantly there in Sarah
Larson’s capture of Bill Murray’s line to the waitress at Tao when she brought
him two rum-and-waters: “He took one and said of the other, ‘You give that to
the kids at the orphanage’ ” ("Cinephiles"). Sometimes thisness can be in the
form of a piquant fact, e.g., “KidZania has its own currency, kidzos, which can
be used in branches around the world, or deposited in the central bank and
accessed with a realistic-looking credit card” (Rebecca Mead, "When I Grow Up"); “Recently, researchers at the University of Southern California built a
prototype 'virtual human' named Ellie, a digital therapist that integrates an
algorithm similar to Affdex with others that track gestures and vocal
tonalities” (Raffi Khatchadourian, "We Know How You Feel"). It’s hard to say
how useful all this is. But in terms of writing as pure writing, I devour it. My
favorite example of thisness, in this week’s issue, is Sasha Frere-Jones’s
description of the Sleater-Kinney band’s guitar tones: “fuzzed, doubled into
octaves, thin, then soaked, overloading” ("Sister Saviors"). “Sleater-Kinney”
is itself an inspired bit of thisness. It comes, Frere-Jones says, from the
name on a highway exit ramp in Olympia, Washington.
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