The New Yorker & Me: Stacy Schiff on Judith Thurman's "A Left-Handed Woman"

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 Galchen, 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.

Wednesday, January 4, 2023

Stacy Schiff on Judith Thurman's "A Left-Handed Woman"

Stacy Schiff’s “Writing the Furies” (The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2022) is an excellent appreciation of Judith Thurman’s writing. It’s a review of Thurman’s new essay collection A Left-Handed Woman. It contains a number of piquant descriptions of Thurman’s style, including “The voice is so exact it can pinch,” “Her prose has high cheekbones,” and “She clambers past received wisdoms like a mountain goat.” That last one made me laugh.

Is A Left-Handed Woman as good as Thurman’s previous collection, Cleopatra’s Nose (2008)? Schiff doesn’t say directly, but she does make this interesting observation:

A published essay reads differently when it lands between hard covers. It has aged or matured. Sometimes it has gone stale. Its spark may or may not survive. And it has acquired a family. It exists not only in itself but in its resemblances and distinctions. Its siblings may show it up. Tics and preoccupations reveal themselves, as, to varying degrees, does the author herself. For whatever reason, the “I” of Cleopatra’s Nose is more forthcoming than the “I” of A Left-Handed Woman. With time, Thurman has removed herself to the middle distance.

Schiff may be onto something here. My sense is that Thurman’s New Yorker work over the last dozen years or so isn’t as strong as the writing in Cleopatra’s Nose. But, in fairness, that book sets the bar exceedingly high. It’s one of my all-time favorite essay collections: see my appreciation here.

In her piece, Schiff describes Thurman’s writing as insouciant. She says, “But it is a sly insouciance that so lights up these pages and that makes Thurman’s voice so distinct.” Right there, I think, Schiff nails it; insouciance is the essence of Thurman’s splendid style. What am I waiting for? A Left-Handed Woman is a significant collection by one of The New Yorker’s finest writers. I’m ordering it today.