Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Sunday, October 27, 2019

On Realism


I like my realism served straight – no fables, myths, or allegories mixed in. Just give me the thing itself. This thought is triggered by Richard Brody’s observation in this week’s New Yorker regarding Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club Encore: “Coppola can’t avoid a dash of mythology when filming brutal killings.” That, to me, is a damning criticism. I recall seeing The Cotton Club when it originally appeared in 1985. I don’t remember anything about it, except that it was a disappointment. Maybe my response was influenced by Pauline Kael’s review of it. She called it a pastiche (“Coppola apparently believes this pastiche to be an authentic, epic view of the Jazz Age”: The New Yorker, January 7, 1985). Brody’s recent assessment does nothing to spur me to see Cotton Club again.
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