Taking a Break

Tavira (Photo from portugalresident.com)

Tomorrow, Lorna and I travel to Tavira, Portugal, for three weeks to do some cycling. I’m taking the January 22 New Yorker with me. I’ll post my review when I return. The New Yorker & Me will resume on or about February 19. 

Postscript: Joan Acocella 1945 - 2024

Joan Acocella (Photo by Bob Sacha)

New Yorker critic Joan Acocella died January 7, 2024, age 78. She was primarily a dance critic. But she also wrote many wonderful book reviews, several of which are included in her 2007 essay collection Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints. Acocella appreciated candor. She says of Susan Sontag, “She talked very straight” (“The Hunger Artist”). This applies to Acocella, too. Here, as a form of tribute, are some of my favorite lines from her work:

Butler’s chapter on Cather is not a chapter on Cather; it is an essay on politics in which Cather’s text lies bound and gagged. (“Cather and the Academy”)

Always plainspoken, she became more so. (“Feasting on Life”)

These are superb letters – long, meaty, intimate, conversational. You can practically hear her breathing. And they remind us of her faithfulness to reality, her ability to let things stay mixed and strange – to let them grow at the edges and stay loose in the center. (“Feasting on Life”)

We also needed more footnotes. But never mind. This is a priceless book: a whole life, a serious life, eighty-four years long. (“Feasting on Life”)

The grand cascading sentences ... (“Finding Augie March”)

One must love the book on artistic grounds – for its comedy, its generosity, its density, its linguistic miracles – and also, still, for its hopefulness. (“Finding Augie March”)

We never find out why Guillermo got arrested, or even who he is, but this little exchange is a perfect introduction to Bedford’s style: speed, omission, the sharp bite of event, without the tedious explanation. (“Piecework”)

Her sentences are frequently incomplete, her grammar nonstandard, her chapter titles a brazen lie. (“Piecework”)

In Bedford’s world, nobody is going to get ahead, or nobody nice, but meanwhile there is mercy, free hors d’oeuvres. (“Piecework”)

I don’t know of any novel about the early twentieth century that feels more real, as if you could reach out and touch the things in it. (“Piecework”)

She should stop apologizing. If Quicksands is a sort of rummage sale, what of it? (“Piecework”)

We all know these words, and use them to account for our lives. The cells are something else: hallucinations, the meat locker of the mind. (“The Spider’s Web”)

Down this road we can scarcely go in words. But we can accept an image, a metaphor. I have seen photographs of Russian children, in front of the Hermitage, staring up at Maman in wonder. They like it, presumably because it says something true. (“The Spider’s Web”)

Don’t laugh – Fitzgerald believes the same thing. She combines an old-world faith with a completely modern pessimism. (“Assassination on a Small Scale”)

And the writing was marvelous – high-toned, Brahmin, but full of zest and the pleasure of performing. Her openers were always thrown down with a great flourish. (“The Hunger Artist”)

Whatever she felt was fed back into her argument, a short, violent conflagration at the end of which any idea that illness is a mark of ennoblement or of shame—something that the victim caused or, by virtue of personality, was doomed to—lies like a burnt cinder at the bottom of Sontag’s rhetorical furnace. (“The Hunger Artist”)

But the montage is not surreal – it’s real, it’s New York City – and the objects don’t fly around in that self-important, dérèglement des sens way. They stay put, and honk the way they should. Waterfalls pour from the sky, but they’re really there, on a billboard. In the city O’Hara found his own, more modest version of Surrealist hallucination. (“Perfectly Frank”)

O’Hara loved things that lived in time, things that moved – ballet, movies, Action painting, New York – and he made himself the partner of time. [“Perfectly Frank”]

But the poems were manifesto enough. With their colloquialism, with their empirical record of daily events, with the friends wandering in and out – “Jap” (Jasper Johns) waiting at the train station, “Allen” (Ginsberg, hung over) throwing up in the bathroom – and, above all, with their craft so lightly worn, the poems constituted a clear refusal, if not of the high mission of poetry, then any duty to kneel before the throne. (“Perfectly Frank”)

In her novels, Mantel is unflinching, and I like her that way. (“Devil’s Work”)

I have stressed the dramatis diaboli, but in most of mantel’s novels there is a regular English reality going on that might make you wish for Hell instead. (“Devil’s Work”)

Ugly families, though, are only a subspecialty. Mantel is a master of ugliness in general. (“Devil’s Work”)

Art redeems us from time: in Hadrian’s case, by shaping his life into a meaningful curve (ambition to mastery to exaltation to disaster to reconciliation); in Yourcenar’s case, by enabling her to do the shaping, and in the process to write her first great novel, save her own life. (“Becoming the Emperor”)  

On David Salle's Excellent "Follow the Light"

Alexx Katz, Sharon and Vivian (2009)

It’s early yet, but already there's an essay out that will surely be considered one of 2024’s best. I’m referring to David Salle’s wonderful “Follow the Light” (The New York Review of Books, January 18, 2024). It’s a review of Alex Katz: Gathering, an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City, October 21, 2022 – February 20, 2023. Salle loved the show. He writes,

As you made your way up the Guggenheim’s spiral ramp, it was one goddamned masterpiece after another, triumphs of point of view, of touch and color and composition. Of image. Of style.

Salle analyzes that style as follows: 

Katz took the conventions of realism and merged them with the flatness and scale associated with Pop Art. Unlike his Pop contemporaries, he eschewed the black outline of cartooning. His subject is not the mediated imagery of advertising but things seen in the here and now.

This view of Katz’s art as a merger of realism and Pop appeals to me much more than the view that it’s straight realism. To me, Katz’s images lack the specificity that is characteristic of great realist painting. Too many details are left out. They’re more Pop than realist. 

Katz is a great colorist. It’s that aspect of his art that I relish most. Salle appreciates it acutely. Consider his description of Katz’s Sharon and Vivian (2009):

There are maybe twelve or thirteen distinct colors, some blended a bit to make secondary tones. A good 80 percent of the painting is covered by five colors that are close together on the spectrum: mustard yellow, pink, peach, orange, light brown. The painting creates an atmosphere of golden, enveloping warmth, tempered by the women’s detached stares: warm plus cool. Against the large expanse of yellow, the tiny quantities of blue—the cobalt irises of one, a patch of ultramarine dress with pale blue figures in it, a blue-black dress strap—work like visual punctuation. A few reddish highlights backed by some umber shadows in the light brown hair mark the middle darks, and the enormous, nearly solid black of the sunglasses is like a tuba or bassoon giving heft to the oboes and French horns that carry the melody. The painting is jaunty, forthright, witty, highly musical, and unhedged; it’s matter-of-fact and stringent at the same time.

That “Against the large expanse of yellow, the tiny quantities of blue—the cobalt irises of one, a patch of ultramarine dress with pale blue figures in it, a blue-black dress strap—work like visual punctuation” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired! I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: Something Salle says in “Follow the Light” that I don’t quite agree with: “The people who appear in Katz’s paintings attest to his lifelong commitment to poetry and modern dance, and to a sophistication that has nothing to do with fashion or money.” I don’t know about that. Katz’s people seem pretty damn well-off to me. I’m not the only one who thinks this. Julian Bell, in his “In Margate: Alex Katz” (London Review of Books, November 8, 2012), refers to “Katz’s swift, slick images of wealthy Brooklynites on holiday in Maine.” He sees Katz’s paintings as, among other things, an “affirmation of moneyed style.”  

January 15, 2024 Issue

I’m fascinated by the differences between the two versions of Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two” – one in the magazine, the other on newyorker.com. I know I’ve written about this before. I’ll probably write about it again. The situation is similar to the days when Pauline Kael provided two different versions of her movie reviews – one a long-form essay, the other a capsule review for the “In Brief” section of the magazine. It was interesting to see how she performed the reduction - what she cut, what she kept. It’s the same with Rosner. I take it she writes the long piece first. That’s the one that appears on newyorker.com. Then, for the print version of the magazine, she trims it down to fit the smaller space.

For example, the newyorker.com version of her “Tables for Two: Old John’s Diner,” in this week’s issue, begins,

I always read the whole menu at a diner, but I don’t really need to. My order is both predictable and unremarkable: a cup of soup, a cheeseburger with fries. Sometimes I’ll switch things up and have a Greek salad, with extra feta cheese, or corned-beef hash and scrambled eggs, though the side of fries always remains. A cup of coffee—lots of milk—and a slice of pie. If I were to scroll back through my life, tallying every diner meal, every fat ceramic mug of watery coffee, I think they might number in the thousands. 

For the print version, she cuts the first four sentences. The piece begins, “If I were to scroll back through my life, tallying every diner meal, every fat ceramic mug of watery coffee, I think they might number in the thousands.”

Another example: when she describes Old John’s lemon pie in the website version, she says, “The lemon-meringue pie is unimpeachable, with a buttery crumb crust and pucker-tart yellow curd under a snowcap of floaty, marshmallow-like meringue.” In the print version, this is changed to “the lemon-meringue pie was impeccable, a buttery crumb crust and pucker-tart yellow curd under a snowcap of floaty meringue.” I devour both versions, but the web version’s “snowcap of floaty, marshmallow-like meringue” is slightly more delectable.

The piece has a great theme: the diner as time machine. The web version says, “Diners, as a rule, are time machines; whether through the formica sheen of the nineteen-forties, the chromium optimism of the fifties, or the pastel geometries of the eighties, a diner traffics in nostalgia for past decades and past selves.” In the print version, this is reduced to “diners, as a category, are time machines, fuelled by memory of past decades and past selves.” Again, both versions are excellent, but the web version is more detailed. Comparing the two affords a peek at Rosner’s compositional process, or at least her editorial process, which is a form of composition. Also, if you read only the print version, you’re missing out on many wonderful, delicious details. 

Top Ten "New Yorker & Me": #10 "George Bellows's 'Stag at Sharkey's' and 'Both Members of This Club' "

George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey's (1909)

Time to kick off my “Top Ten New Yorker & Me” archival series. Each month I’ll look back and choose what I consider to be one of this blog's best posts. Today’s pick is "George Bellows's 'Stag at Sharkey's' and 'Both Members of This Club' " (July 26, 2012):

George Bellows’s great boxing paintings Stag at Sharkey’s (1909) and Both Members of This Club (1909) have always been regarded as realist pictures, pitiless depictions of boxing’s viciousness. Peter Schjeldahl, in his recent "Young and Gifted" (The New Yorker, June 25, 2012), describes Stag at Sharkey’s as follows:

The fighters at Sharkey’s collide in no way that I’ve ever seen in the ring: each with a leg lifted far from the floor, as one man jams a forearm into the bloody face of the other, while cocking a blow to the body. Their livid flesh, radiating agony, is a marvel of colors blended in wet strokes on the canvas. The picture is at once a snapshot of Hell and an apotheosis of painting. It evinces sensitive restraint by muting the expressions of the riotous ringsiders. Almost as good, though flawed by overly indulged caricature, is “Both Members of This Club” (1909), in which a black fighter reduces a white one to a howling incarnation of pain.

David Peters Corbett, in his An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters (2011), says of Both Members of This Club:

The prominent bone of the left-hand fighter’s raised forearm, his sharp ribcage above the meaty drop of his belly, his raw, red face and ribs, call to mind the unforgiving realism of Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef.

“Livid flesh, radiating agony,” “snapshot of Hell,” “howling incarnation of pain,” “raw, red face and ribs,” “unforgiving realism” – descriptions that reflect the standard realist reading of Bellows’s boxing paintings.

But Joyce Carol Oates, in her “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings” [included in her 1989 essay collection (Woman) Writer], takes a slightly different view. She writes: “Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club, realistic in conception, are dreamlike in execution; poetic rather than naturalistic.”

What does Oates mean by “poetic”? Is she suggesting that Bellows’s boxing paintings are, somehow, nonrealist? I recall George Segal’s comment on Edward Hopper: “What I like about Hopper is how far poetically he went, away from the real world” (quoted in John Updike’s “Hopper’s Polluted Silence,” Still Looking, 2007). Is Oates saying that Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club depart, in some way, from “the real world”? I don’t think so. I think what she’s referring to is the way Bellows has painted them so as to emphasize the blood. She says, “However the eye moves outward it always circles back inward, irresistibly, to the center of frozen, contorted struggle, the blood-splattered core of life.” She contrasts Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club with Bellows’s bloodless Dempsey and Firpo (1924), in which “Bellows makes no attempt to communicate what might be called the poetic essence of this barbaric fight.”

Reading Oates’s “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings,” I was reminded of what she said in her great "The Treasure of Comanche County" (The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005) about McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: “Blood Meridian is an epic accumulation of horrors, powerful in the way of Homer’s Iliad; its strategy isn’t ellipsis or indirection but an artillery barrage through hundreds of pages of wayward, unpredictable, brainless violence.” Oates relishes works of art that unflinchingly show “the blood-splattered core of life.” Interestingly, she describes McCarthy’s prose as “poetic.” For her, it seems, blood and poetry are synonymous.

Factual Writing Is Just As Immersive As Fiction (Contra Nathaniel Rich)

Nathaniel Rich, in his recent review of James A. W. Heffernan’s Politics and Literature at the Dawn of WW II, argues that, as a reading experience, factual writing is less immersive than fiction. He says, 

There is one dark art, however, that nonfiction cannot fully replicate: the ability of immersive narrative literature, and especially fiction, to blur, or even eradicate, the boundary between reader and subject. Readers of a history are reminded on every page, with every footnote and dutiful scholarly reference and contextual aside, of one’s distance from the action. The reader even of a memoir or a diary can never fully suspend disbelief, since the dramatic stakes of the narrative rely on its authenticity—on the assertion that the events described really happened and that the people depicted really experienced them.

Novelists don’t tend to bother about that. A novel’s success depends not on its faithfulness to reality but on the author’s ability to beguile the reader into empathizing with its hero and, for a brief time, exchanging the reality of the world for the reality of the novel. (“Writing Under Fire,” The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2023)

I strongly disagree. I’m currently reading Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), an account of his two-thousand-mile journey down the Mississippi River, piloting a sixteen-foot aluminum motorboat, and I couldn’t be more immersed. I’m right there with him as he tries to navigate sloughs, chutes, towboats, stumps, eddies, boils, locks, and wing dams. It’s one of the most immersive books I’ve ever read. Same goes for his Passage to Juneau (1999) and Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia (2010) and Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969). There’s no boundary between me and the worlds described in them. I’m there. These events really happened. No suspension of disbelief is necessary. Just sink in and experience them – that's the promise these great books gloriously fulfill. Rich underestimates the power of factual writing.  

January 1 & 8, 2024 Issue

Adam Gopnik’s “Winter Sun,” in this week’s issue, is ostensibly a review of Anka Muhlstein’s Camille Pissarro: The Audacity of Impressionism. But after saying a few kind words about the book (e.g., it “invites us to head to the museums to look at the work again”), he embarks on his own interpretation of Pissarro’s life and work. Mulstein is rarely heard from again. I find this annoying. When I read a review, I want to know if the subject book is worth reading. I want to know what it’s about and, just as importantly, I want to know about the quality of its writing. Is it flat, clichéd, and boring, or is it sharp, vivid, and specific? A sample quotation would be appreciated so that I can judge for myself. Gopnik fails to do any of this. 

He also makes at least one questionable judgment of Pissarro. He says that until Pissarro reached his final decade, he was a mediocrity. My favorite Pissarro, Cabbage Field, Pontoise, was painted in 1873, thirty years before he died. Is it mediocre? Not in the eyes of this beholder. Not in the eyes of T. J. Clark, either. Clark writes,

Can we agree that the light in Cabbage Field, which is immediately breathtaking, is some kind of high-summer gloaming, maybe with moisture in the early evening air? (Of course, the painting is equivocal about clock time. It isn't a Monet sunset. It could be that the peasants are taking advantage of the coolness of the morning. But the overall colour balance seems to look forward to dusk). Light is coming down from a whitened sky, pink just beginning to appear in it – coming from behind the hill (whose crest has a few houses just visible among trees), so that the hill is silhouetted, but with light humming in the foreground, flooding everywhere, muting the high silhouettes, picking out feathery edges of foliage on the lower trees and the plump leaves in the cabbage patch. There are three peasants in the fields: a woman with a basket, a man in blue and a further faint figure far back to the right in a shadowed clearing. The emptiness of the air above the field closer to us – the coloured emptiness – is a tour de force of illusion. The man in blue alerts us to the presence of a haze, almost a ground mist, of very light blue-purple all round him, seeping towards the woman with the basket. And there is a ghostly blue halo behind the tree above him. The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth. There are many such wonders. 

Things emerge from the evening light only gradually: it is the light that is striking, not the ghosts of trees. The edge of visibility is a world of its own. Push towards the unnoticeable in vision, therefore, and if necessary the unpaintable: that seems to be Pissarro’s self-instruction. Look at the dark leafless tree in the picture’s left foreground, drawn dark on dark against the hill and the house. How did Pissarro do it? How did he see it as paintable in the first place? Or look at the light caught in the trees on top of the hill, and the final flourish of touches that establish the sparser tree standing on its own between the houses, its dark greens scrawled liquid on pink. [“Strange Apprentice,” London Review of Books, October 8, 2020; retitled "Pissarro and Cézanne" in Clark’s superb 2022 collection If These Apples Should Fall]

Now that’s more like it. Attentive, descriptive, analytical, exquisite – my idea of great critical writing. Pissarro was in the front rank of artists long before his final decade. Gopnik doesn't do him justice. 

Is Painting Describable?

Camille Pissarro, Cabbage Field, Pontoise (1873)

V. S. Pritchett, in his absorbing “Malraux and Picasso” (Lasting Impressions, 1990), said, “Painting and sculpture cannot be translated into words. One art cannot evoke another.” Is this true? I don’t think so. The easiest way to disprove it is to adduce T. J. Clark's wonderful art writings. Clark ingeniously explores difficult artworks. Here, for example, is an excerpt from his descriptive analysis of Pissarro’s Cabbage Field, Pontoise (1873):

Light is coming down from a whitened sky, pink just beginning to appear in it – coming from behind the hill (whose crest has a few houses just visible among trees), so that the hill is silhouetted, but with light humming in the foreground, flooding everywhere, muting the high silhouettes, picking out feathery edges of foliage on the lower trees and the plump leaves in the cabbage patch. There are three peasants in the fields: a woman with a basket, a man in blue and a further faint figure far back to the right in a shadowed clearing. The emptiness of the air above the field closer to us – the coloured emptiness – is a tour de force of illusion. The man in blue alerts us to the presence of a haze, almost a ground mist, of very light blue-purple all round him, seeping towards the woman with the basket. And there is a ghostly blue halo behind the tree above him. The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth. There are many such wonders. 

Things emerge from the evening light only gradually: it is the light that is striking, not the ghosts of trees. The edge of visibility is a world of its own. Push towards the unnoticeable in vision, therefore, and if necessary the unpaintable: that seems to be Pissarro’s self-instruction. Look at the dark leafless tree in the picture’s left foreground, drawn dark on dark against the hill and the house. How did Pissarro do it? How did he see it as paintable in the first place? Or look at the light caught in the trees on top of the hill, and the final flourish of touches that establish the sparser tree standing on its own between the houses, its dark greens scrawled liquid on pink. [“Strange Apprentice,” London Review of Books, October 8, 2020; retitled "Pissarro and Cézanne" in Clark’s excellent 2022 collection If These Apples Should Fall]

I love that passage. It expands my appreciation of Pissarro’s great art. But note that “How did Pissarro do it?” Clark acknowledges the difficulty of what he’s doing. Perhaps Pritchett is partially right; a one-for-one equivalence of painting and words may not be possible. But one art can certainly evoke the other. Clark’s brilliant, subtle writing shows the way.

Acts of Seeing: Spring Breakup

Sylvia Grinnell River, 2007 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Reading R. M. Patterson’s description of spring breakup on the Nahanni, I recalled my own experience walking the Sylvia Grinnell just after the ice went out. June 21, 2007, Vernon (our Saint Bernard) and I hiked along the riverbank, watching big chunks of ice collide. Sylvia was running wild, celebrating her liberation. Along the river edge, bundles of candle ice glittered in the sun. Snow, clouds, ice, blue sky, and the frothing blue-green braid of the river surging past – it was exhilarating to be there. My eyes devoured it. 

2023 Year in Review

Photo by David Guttenfelder, from Luke Mogelson's "Trapped in the Trenches")

I always like to start these things with a drink. What’ll it be this year? Hannah Goldfield, in her wonderful “Tables For Two: Eyval” (March 13, 2023), mentions “stealing sips of a friend’s orange-blossom Negroni, a cold and viscous concoction that lingered on my tongue and in my memory (I can taste it now!), the intoxicating, floral perfume of the orange-blossom water achieving thrilling alchemy with the herbal gin, bitter Aperol, and sweet vermouth.” Yes, I’ll have one of those, please. Okay, let’s roll. 

Highlight #1: Two pieces by Luke Mogelson – “Trapped in the Trenches” (January 2 & 9, 2023) and “Underworld” (May 29, 2023) – evoke the Ukraine War with a specificity that puts us squarely there: 

In the grainy, green world of the phosphor screen, the stars gleamed like bioluminescent plankton. Herring and Rambo moved deliberately between the black silhouettes of trees, many of which had been splintered and contorted by artillery. I was looking at a tilled field to our left when a shimmering tail arced overhead, collided with another streaking light, and radiantly detonated. Herring said that it was a Russian missile intercepted by an anti-aircraft weapon. [“Trapped in the Trenches]

Highlight #2: Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Talk to Me” (September 11, 2023), an account of her visit with a team of scientists attempting to use artificial intelligence to speak with sperm whales. In an unforgettable scene, she witnesses the birth of a baby sperm whale:

Suddenly, someone yelled out, “Red!” A burst of scarlet spread through the water, like a great banner unfurling. No one knew what was going on. Had the pilot whales stealthily attacked? Was one of the whales in the group injured? The crowding increased until the whales were practically on top of one another.

Then a new head appeared among them. “Holy fucking shit!” Gruber exclaimed.

“Oh, my God!” Gero cried. He ran to the front of the boat, clutching his hair in amazement. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” The head belonged to a newborn calf, which was about twelve feet long and weighed maybe a ton. In all his years of studying sperm whales, Gero had never watched one being born. He wasn’t sure anyone ever had.

Highlight #3: Burkhard Bilger’s “Crossover Artist” (April 3, 2023), a profile of neuroscientist/musician David Sulzer that brims with inspired passages, including this beauty: 

A modicum of noise is essential to any instrument’s sound, it turns out. Reeds rasp, bows grind, voices growl, and strings shimmer with overtones. In West Africa, musicians attach gourds to their xylophones and harps to rattle along as they play. Music, like most beautiful things, is most seductive when impure.

Highlight #4: Hannah Goldfield’s new “On and Off the Menu” column in the magazine’s “Critics” section. Goldfield is one of my favorite writers. It’s great to see her get more space for her delectable food writing. Here’s a sample from her “Upper Crust” (October 27, 2023):

For anything else, you’ll find me at Modern. Not long ago, my husband and I and our two small children met my parents there for lunch. It was the first visit for my kids, and cramming together into a familiar, dimly lit booth felt like passing down a primal ritual. New Haven is not a slice town; you get a whole pie and savor it sitting down. My father pointed out a server who he guessed had been working there almost as long as he’d been a regular, at least thirty years. I burned the roof of my mouth on my first bite, then tried to soothe it with gulps from an icy pitcher of Foxon Park white birch beer, a sweet, slightly earthy local soda you’ll find at any New Haven pizzeria. After a few slices, my hands were covered in soot.

Highlight #5: Helen Rosner’s “Tables For Two” columns. Rosner is a ravishing describer. Her “Tables For Two: Sailor” (December 4, 2023) is one of my favorite pieces of the year. Here’s a taste:

Slicing into the sphere of wrapped radicchio leaves, I discovered an interior of fragrant rice studded with firm, creamy borlotti beans. Taking a bite of this mixture, bathed in a wine sauce—which was rich and emulsified and, I learned later, vegan—was like sinking into a quicksand of warmth and flavor. The leaves of the radicchio imparted a lingering hint of bitterness, a scalpel through the savory roundness of everything else. This is the dish, I thought to myself—the dish of the restaurant, perhaps the dish of the year.

Other top picks of the year:

Rebecca Mead, “Dutch Treat,” February 27, 2023 (“Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream”);

Jill Lepore, “Pay Dirt,” March 20, 2023 (“There are more than two hundred mail-order seed companies in the United States, and, if you’ve ever ordered from any of them, chances are that your mail has been swollen with catalogues, their covers of radicchio red, marigold yellow, and zinnia pink peeking out from beneath the annual drab-gray crop of tax documents and the daily, dreary drizzle of bills, solicitations, and credit-card offers”).

Lauren Collins, “Pins and Needles,” March 27, 2023 (“You could hear his ski-parka opera coats rustling through the narrow corridors. There were murmurs of appreciation for a trapezoidal satin T-shirt that Demna said took three months to make, and for a clementine-colored day suit with edges that looked like they could draw blood, shown with a slick black fruit-bowl hat”);

Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Thomas Wågström’s Pictures of the Living and the Lifeless,” April 26, 2023 (“All photographs are about transience. This lies in the very nature of photography, since everything in the world is continually changing, and what a photo depicts vanishes the next instant, or becomes something else. One could say that all photography is about loss. But one could also say the opposite: photographs salvage something from time, as from a burning house”);

Jackson Arn, “Early Bloomer,” May 8, 2023 (“With O’Keeffe’s works on paper, however, scrutiny is like oxygen. These are images so dense with detail that the poster treatment would ruin them. ‘No. 12 Special’ (1916) is like a glossary of the footprints that charcoal can leave on paper: thin, slashing lines; plump, leisurely ones; smears pressed into the grain of the page with a rag or a fingertip. No matter how carefully you study these grace notes, you never forget the melodious whole: a bouquet of spirals dragging their tails behind them, refusing to be decoded”);

Adam Gopnik, “Postscript: Bruce McCall,” May 15, 2023 (“In what used to be called a ‘biting’ vein, he blended a wild surrealist sensibility—founded on an impeccable illustrator’s technique, always manifesting visions, dreams, impossibilities in scrupulous hyper-realism—with a sharp, sometimes caustic tone, beautifully underlit by melancholia”); 

Burkhard Bilger, “Soul Survivors,” June 5, 2023 (“His voice was hoarse with loss, accompanied only by finger snaps and a glimmering electric guitar, like rain in a gutter”);

Ed Caesar, “Cormac McCarthy’s Narrative Wisdom,” June 14, 2023 (“I wonder why, then, on hearing the news of his death last night, I found myself momentarily overcome. Perhaps because I met McCarthy first in a peculiarly receptive period, and perhaps because the provenance of my relationship with his writing leads me back through the decades of my own life. And perhaps because, looking again in the old books, I find so much pleasure in the authority of his voice, and the wisdom that flames out from his pages, and it is painful to imagine that such a fire has been extinguished”);

Robert Sullivan, “Not a Shark,” July 31, 2023 (“A waft of trash came up from under the pier, and a gaggle of high schoolers walked out onto the pier to take pictures of the orange sky. ‘It’s the end of the world,’ one of them shouted—then he spotted WasteShark. ‘Wait, are you guys monitoring something?’ ”);

Sam Knight, “Hive Mind,” August 28, 2023 (“I touched the glass. The hive thrummed. The smell of honey rolled across the pasture”);

Rachel Syme, “The Suitor,” September 25, 2023 (“She glided down the center aisle, wearing a beaded, sheer white garment that looked like a tuxedo jacket whose hem was melting to the floor. Two men in swim caps carried the train of the dress. From far away, the piece shimmered as if made of shaved ice”);

Nick Rudick, “Watching the Southern Tip of Manhattan Change, for Forty Years,” September 30, 2023 (“Mensch includes a vista of the cheese grater, here cutting a lonely path into the sky far above more modest buildings, jutting upward from the city like the handle of a sledgehammer”); 

Ben McGrath, “Dystopian Slime,” October 9, 2023 (“A stray horn, a searchlight upwind, a marine radio hissing intermittently about bridge traffic: sometimes, amid this dystopian sublime, it was difficult to distinguish the choreography from the merely urban”);

John McPhee, “Under the Carpet Bag” (October 16, 2023 (“And now, in 1964, at Camp Don Bosco, in Missouri, I was walking up a dirt road with Bill Bradley and Ed Macauley. The road consisted of deep parallel ruts with a grassy hump in the middle. Bradley was in one rut, Macauley in the other, and I was up on the hump between them. I am smaller than most people—about as small as Andrew Carnegie, James Madison, Vladimir Putin, Joseph Stalin, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Actually, I was five feet seven at my zenith and have lately condensed. The hump was a good foot higher than the ruts. Nonetheless, the three of us in outline formed the letter M”);

Amanda Petrusich, “Horny on Main,” October 23, 2003 (“My favorite track on the new album is 'How to Stay with You.' It’s got a wiggly, nineteen-seventies feel, with a skronky keyboard line and unexpected bits of saxophone. Sivan’s voice is a little deeper here, with a hint of night-after grit”);

Zachary Fine, “The Man Who Changed Portraiture,” November 3, 2023 (“The linen cuff on van der Mersch’s right hand is done in four touches, max. Even when you’re standing ten feet back from the canvas, you can peel off individual brushstrokes with your eyes. They’re just floating there, like little spears of light”);

James Wood, “Trysts Tropiques,” November 13, 2023 (“Eng can write with lyrical generosity and beautiful tact: moths are seen at night ‘flaking around the lamps’; elsewhere, also at nighttime, ‘a weak spill of light drew me to the sitting room.’ Shadowy emotions are delicately figured: ‘His eyes, so blue and penetrating, were dusked by some emotion I could not decipher.’ Lesley’s account of her affair with Arthur has a lovely, drifting, dreamlike quality—the adulterers almost afloat on their new passion, watched over by the hanging painted doors of Arthur’s house on Armenian Street”);

Rachel Aviv, “Personal Statement,” November 27, 2023 (“She seemed uniquely incurious when I read her lines from her journal”);

Ed Caesar, "Speed," December 25, 2023 ("We did a warmup lap in Sports Mode—or Baby Mode, as Roys called it—hitting 155 m.p.h. Then he switched to something called F5 Mode. Before the final, short straightaway, he asked me if I was ready. When he hit the accelerator, it was like being strapped to a surface-to-air missile. Each gear change provoked the car to ever more noise and aggression. We hit 170 m.p.h., then braked to make the final turn. I stifled the urge to scream, but not to curse").

And now, with my last few drops of that superb Negroni, I want to propose a toast: Here’s to the greatest magazine in the world! New Yorker without end, amen! 

Credits: (1) Illustration by Sophy Hollington, from Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Talk to Me”; (2) Photo by Cole Wilson, from Hannah Goldfield’s “Upper Crust”; (3) Illustration by Nolan Pelletier, from Jill Lepore’s “Pay Dirt”; (4) Georgia O’Keeffe, “Untitled (Abstraction/Portrait of Paul Strand” (1917); (5) Photo by Alice Zoo, from Sam Knight’s “Hive Mind”; (6) Illustration by Roche Cruchon, from Amanda Petrusich’s “Horny on Main.”

3 for the River: R. M. Patterson's "Dangerous River"

This is the first in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite riverine travelogues – R. M. Patterson’s Dangerous River (1953), Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), and Tim Butcher’s Blood River (2007) – and compare them. Today, I’ll begin with a review of Dangerous River. 

This great book is an account of two exploratory trips that Patterson took on the South Nahanni River, Northwest Territories, Canada – one in 1927, the other in 1928-29. At that time, Patterson says, the South Nahanni had a daunting reputation: “The Nahanni, they said, was straight suicide. The river was fast and bad, and if a man ever did get through those canyons what would he find in that little known country of the Yukon divide?” Well, Patterson aimed to find out. The result is one of the most detailed, evocative, thrilling wilderness adventures I’ve ever read. 

The first trip is three months long, beginning mid-July, 1927, in Fort Simpson. Patterson poles his sixteen-foot Chestnut Prospector canoe up the Liard River to Nahanni Butte, where the South Nahanni comes in. Then for two weeks, he paddles, poles, and tracks his way up the treacherous South Nahanni through canyons of sheer cliffs, some of which are over three thousand feet high, to a spectacular waterfall, now known as Virginia Falls, nearly twice the height of Niagara. After viewing the Falls, he turns and heads back downriver. He spends a few days exploring a tributary called Flat River. He spends a few more at the campsite of Albert Faille, helping him build a log cabin. Then he continues on to Nahanni Butte and camps on an island in the Liard. From there, he travels to Fort Liard. By now it’s September. He continues up the Liard to the mouth of the Fort Nelson River, and follows that river all the way to Fort Nelson, where he sells his canoe. On September 19, he sets out on foot to hike to Fish Lake, but loses the trail and has to return to Fort Nelson. Six days later, he makes a second attempt, this time in the company of a pack train traveling to Sikanni Post. Now it’s October. He hikes from Sikanni Post to Fort St. John, on the Peace River. At Fort St. John, he catches a ride on a river freighter, heading for the town of Peace River, where he plans to take the train out.

It's a thrilling trip through country wild to the limits of the term. Patterson encounters waves, whirlpools, drift piles, sweepers, rapids, moose, eagles, thunder storms, and hordes of blood-thirsty mosquitoes. Here, for example, is his description of the twenty-mile stretch approaching the Falls:

Short canyons of red and yellow rock through which the river boils and races: rock strewn in dry summers of low water and with five- and six-foot waves in the riffles; powerful eddies that drive a loaded canoe upstream on a slack trackline too fast for a man on the shore, clambering frantically over the tumbled rocks, to keep pace with it; sharp rocks on to which the eddies or the waves from the big riffles drive the canoe, slicing its canvas; whirlpools, driftpiles, sheer cliffs with deep, racing water at their feet – all these are crowded close in those twenty miles as if to test the spirit of the voyageur to the breaking point.

And here’s his account of his attempt to navigate Hell’s Gate Rapid:

I tried that rapid three times, but the current in the canyon was stronger than I had thought, and I was not able to get speed enough on the canoe to drive it up on the crest of the riffle that barred the way. Twice the canoe climbed the ridge, close under the big waves, only to be flung across the river and driven down the canyon, almost touching the cliff on the portage side. At the third and last attempt the eddies worked in my favour: the canoe was climbing the hill of racing water with speed enough (I thought) to take it on and over, when suddenly a gust of wind blew down the river, the nose swung off course and the canoe slid down into the lower whirlpool. It started to spin and then was lifted on the upsurge of a huge boil from below. It was like the heave of one’s cabin bunk at night in some great Atlantic storm. Then the water fell away from beneath the canoe, and I caught a glimpse of the white waves of the rapid, a long way above, it seemed. The canoe rose once more and spun again, and then at last the paddle bit into solid water and drove the outfit out of the whirlpool and down the canyon for the last time, taking a sideways slap, in passing, from a stray eddy and shipping it green as a parting souvenir of a memorable visit.

Patterson’s second trip in Nahanni country is even wilder. This time he’s joined by his friend and fellow-adventurer Gordon Matthews. May 24, 1928, Patterson, Matthews, and four dogs travel down the Liard in three Chestnut canoes lashed together, powered by a four-horsepower Johnson outboard. They go up the South Nahanni, which is in full flood (“an awe-inspiring spectacle”). They get as far as the Splits and the outboard smashes on a snag. They cache half their load. June 1, Patterson takes one of the canoes and continues on up the river; Matthews stays behind with the dogs. Three days later, Patterson finally conquers the Splits. He encounters two men, Starke and Stevens, who are trying to pilot their scow upriver. The three men strike a deal: in exchange for Patterson’s help, they’ll put his canoe and half his load on board the scow and carry it as far as the Hot Springs. After nine toiling days, they make it almost to the Hot Springs, but no farther. They haul the scow out of the river and put it up on blocks to wait for the river to drop. June 18, Patterson caches his load, heads back downriver, picks up the remainder of his equipment, brings it up to Starke’s camp and caches it with the rest of his things. Then he turns and heads downriver to Matthews’ camp. July 13, Patterson and Matthews are camped in the Lower Canyon. They explore the surrounding area. They shoot two rams. They continue their journey upriver. Now it’s August and the two men are in Deadmen’s Valley; they pick a site on the south bank, a little above the mouth of Prairie Creek, and build a cabin. From there, Patterson canoes upriver and explores the Flat River country on foot. He shoots a moose and catches an enormous Dolly Varden (“about the size of a young porpoise”). Now it’s September, Patterson is back with Matthews at the cabin. They get ready for winter, finishing the cabin, setting up a cook stove, cutting firewood, hunting. Matthews shoots a black bear. Patterson explores Ram Creek on foot. He stalks two Dall rams. September 20, first severe frost. Falling leaves. Patterson canoes downriver, hunting for game. September 29, first snow. October 12, ice in the Nahanni. Patterson and Matthews range the valley, on foot and by canoe, hunting. October 24, freeze-up of the Nahanni, end of canoeing. October 27, first day of winter. November, they start fur-trapping – weasels, foxes, mink, and marten. Patterson explores the Meilleur River Valley (“There was so much to see and one would never come this way again”). Temperatures are between forty and fifty below now. Back at the cabin, “there was always something to fiddle with”: moccasins to mend and sometimes snowshoes; a rifle or pistol to be cleaned; bannock or sourdough bread to bake and a stew of moose meat and partridges to be tended and seasoned; Patterson’s diary to be written up; torn parka to mend; knives and axes to sharpen; dog-harness to be stitched; traps to be filed and adjusted; and always the day’s catch of fur to be dealt with. As always, weather is key. Here’s what it was like on December 2:

In the small hours of December 2, the wind rose to a gale and swung into the northwest, and from there it blew all day long, a searing blast of cold out of a cloudless sky, drifting the snow down the river with a hissing, scratching sound like that of driven sand. I was home alone all day, cutting wood, fixing up some fur and sharpening axes and saws. The rim of the sun showed for a while at midday over the Bald Mountain, but its rays gave no warmth and soon camp lay again in the shadow. The raving wind was whipping the tall spruce around like fishing rods; it was somewhere between thirty and forty below, and the dogs, who usually spent their idle hours lying on mats of spruce beneath the overturned canoes, whimpered uneasily and sought the shelter of the dog house. The wind raged on through the night: in the odd lull one could hear the sharp reports of splitting trees and faintly, for it was across the wind, a fusillade of expanding ice from the delta of Prairie Creek. In the cabin, well-chinked though it was, the alarm clock froze up, and around the latch hole and the door jamb, and on every nail head of the door, there was gathered almost a quarter of an inch of rime.

On December 19, Matthews hits the trail for Fort Simpson, almost two hundred miles away, traveling by dogsled. But he encounters open water in the Lower Canyon and has to turn back. December 24, he tries again, this time hauling a canoe with him. He tries crossing the open water in the canoe, but it upsets, dumping him and the dogs into the icy water. He gets a fire going, thaws himself out, and goes on. Meanwhile, back at the cabin, Patterson tends the traplines. On January 4, he shoots a wolverine. January 21, he hikes up to the head of the valley, right up to Second Canyon Mountain. The temperatures are now close to sixty below. January 23, he makes wolverine soup. Matthews hasn’t returned. Patterson decides that if he’s not back by January 30, he’ll go searching for him. February 1, no sign of Matthews. Patterson straps on his snowshoes, shoulders his pack, and heads downriver. It’s quite a trek! Deep snow, open water, camping outdoors in thirty-five-below weather, a risky crossing on a fragile ice bridge. Patterson stays with Jack la Flair at his cabin for a couple of days, and then goes on. Now he’s on the Liard; a storm hits. The wind rises to a screaming blast. He spends the night at Joseph Marie Cote’s cabin. “Come in, come in,” Joe says. “This is no fit day for a sacré wolf to travel.” Next day, he goes on. “Snowshoe sickness” appears in his right ankle. Snow continues to fall; the wind is savage. While crossing the river, he stubs his snowshoe on a point of ice and falls over, wrenching his left knee. He looks for a place to camp, finds an old abandoned cabin. He crawls inside and makes a fire. During the night the roof nearly caves in. The cabin walls repeatedly catch fire. The next day he hobbles on, head down, into the searing wind, covering his face with his big gauntlet mitts. But his ankle soreness flares up again. He can barely move. He looks for cover. Climbing up the river bank, he sees tents – a hunting party of Slave Indians. They take him in and warm him up and give him a tent of his own for the night. He strikes a deal with one of the young Indians, who is going next day to Fort Simpson with an empty dogsled, to go with him and to throw his packsack into his cariole. Early next morning, they hit the trail. The temperature is forty-five below and the wind is still the same icy blast. The day, for Patterson, is “a hell of stabbing pain and awkward movement.” He writes, “My world, as seen through a curtain of frosted eyelashes, was a vast, white emptiness through which a dog team and an Indian were running at a steady jog. They had always been there, and they always would be there – there was no end to it.” Suddenly, the dogs break out of the straight and go floundering through the snow towards the west bank. Patterson and the Indian follow. There in the bush is a cabin. In a tree nearby, there’s a rifle hanging. Patterson recognizes it – Matthews’ Mauser – and just as he does, Matthews himself comes out of the cabin, running towards him. 

My summary traces the sequence of events, but it utterly fails to convey the most pleasurable aspect of Patterson’s narrative – his glorious specificity. Here, for example, is his description of crossing the river at the Splits:

I must have crossed about fifteen feet above the big waves for I heard the wash of one just behind me. But there was no time to look: the loaded canoe was handling like a lump of lead, and I had to reach land somewhere above the three-hundred-yard-long driftpile under which part of the river seemed to draw into some hidden channel behind. The canoe hit the steep shingle bank with a crash and started to slide downstream: the driftpile was only about twenty yards away. I swung the canoe’s nose tight in to shore and then rose up and jumped with the trackline in my left hand, throwing away the paddle, which fell with a clatter on the stones. The force of my jump shot the canoe out into the current, and the jerk came on the line as I rolled over on the shingle, trying for a foothold. The heavy canoe caught the full sweep of the Nahanni and skidded me on my tail end over the stones towards the river, too frightened even to swear. But some bygone flood had half buried an old spruce root deep in the tightly cemented shingle and, struggling and fighting, I fetched up against that with both feet – and the trackline held and I drew the canoe in to shore, five yards and no more above the hungry, sucking driftpile. I made the canoe fast to the root while I went to get the paddle: then I tracked upstream towards the camp where I said goodbye to Faille nine months ago.

That is one example, among dozens, of Patterson’s extraordinary skill at description. In future posts, I’ll consider other aspects of his art, e.g., his sense of place, love of nature, use of detail. But first I want to introduce the second book in my trio – Jonathan Raban’s splendid Old Glory. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.