March 20, 2017, Issue

Gary Shteyngart’s “Time Out,” in this week’s issue, is pure bliss. It’s classified as “Personal History,” but it’s also a terrific reporting piece on the world of Watch Idiot Savants (W.I.S.). Shteyngart attends a secret meeting of a W.I.S. group called Redbar (“I missed out on the culmination of the evening, when all the watches were piled up for an Instagram photo with the hashtag #sexpile, but as I wandered into the autumn night my Nomos beat warmly against my wrist”), visits the Nomos workshop in Glashütt, Germany (“I observed with special delight as a watchmaker inserted a balance wheel into a new watch, and it came to life for the first time”), shops for a waterproof watch at Wempe’s on Fifth Avenue [“I was served an espresso and a Lindt chocolate by a young man who also presented me with a Tudor Heritage Black Bay 36, a glowing black-dial water-resistant watch bearing the famous ‘snowflake’ hour hand of Tudor (a sister company of Rolex)”], and talks with numerous watch geeks, including Ben Clymer, founder of the website Hodinkee (“Clymer is preternaturally calm and sumptuously bearded, a self-described ‘old soul,’ who ticks as reliably as a chronometer granted the all-important Geneva Seal”).

“Time Out” brims with inspired lines:

If you want a watch that looks like a Russian oligarch just curled up around your wrist and died, you might be interested in the latest model of Rolex’s Sky-Dweller.

I lay in bed practicing what I might say about “perlage,” “three-quarter plates,” and the rare lapis-lazuli dials on some seventies Rolex Datejusts.

Glashütte does not have so much as a proper restaurant, although every Tuesday a chicken man comes with a truck full of roasting birds, and pensioners dutifully line up as if the Berlin Wall had never fallen.

Reviewing Shteyngart’s brilliant “O.K., Glass” (The New Yorker, August 5, 2013), I said it was “close to perfection” (see here). His marvelous “Time Out” is perfection – perfect as that Nomos Minimatik Champagner beating warmly against his wrist.