The New Yorker & Me: May 10, 2021 Issue

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.

Friday, May 14, 2021

May 10, 2021 Issue

Adam Gopnik, in his absorbing “Peripheral Proust,” in this week’s issue, says that John Updike found in Proust “the only credible modern religious novelist.” He says that for Updike, Proust was “the last Christian poet.” Is this true? Updike loved Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In one of his finest essays, “Remembrance of Things Past Remembered” (included in his great 1976 collection Picked-Up Pieces), Updike wrote,

Proust’s tendrilous sentences seek out an essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith. It was a revelation to me that words could entwine and curl so, yet keep a live crispness and the breath of utterance. I was dazzled by the witty similes – the vanished fresco, the book holding the known name – that wove art and nature into a single luminous fabric. This was not “better” writing, it was writing with a whole new nervous system.

That’s one of the most beautiful descriptions of writing I’ve ever read. Updike’s love of Proust was all about his style (“the dissecting delicacy of each sentence”). He says, memorably, “In the interminable rain of his prose, I felt goodness.” Is that Christian? Maybe. Granted, Updike compared Remembrance of Things Past to the Bible, and called it “a work of consolation.” But I think it's the consolation of art, not God, that he was referring to. His love of Proust was sourced in those "tendrilous sentences." It’s the same for me.