Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb "New Yorker" Essayists (Part IV)

This is the fourth post in my series “Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb New Yorker Essayists,” a celebration of Judith Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman (2022) and Jill Lepore’s The Deadline (2023), in which I’ll select four of my favorite pieces from each collection (one per month) and try to say why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Lepore’s delightful “Buzz” (July 25, 2022).

“Buzz” tells about Volkswagon’s new electric bus, the ID. Buzz. It also salutes the old VW bus, symbol of Sixties counterculture. Lepore attends the New York International Auto Show to see the Buzz: 

Volkswagen displayed its gleaming fleet in a back corner of the main show floor, where the Buzz was parked on a platform behind a plastic half wall and roped off, like a work of art. It was one of the few cars at the show that you couldn’t climb into or touch. 

She visits the Volkswagon factory in Hanover, Germany, where the Buzz is made:

Parts are moved from place to place not with Plattenwagen but with autonomous vehicles, R2-D2-ish beeping carts—the ugly, clumsy ancestors of a new species of sleeker, prettier driverless cars, the dinosaurs to those birds. They stopped, politely, at every intersection, their cameras looking both ways before crossing the road. 

She takes the new Buzz for a test drive: 

The difference between driving the bus and driving the Buzz is the difference between beating eggs with a whisk and pressing the On button of a mixer. There’s just very little to do. The accelerator has a triangle on it, a Play button; the brake has two vertical lines on it, for Pause. 

She says, “I drove around the block, gliding, almost floating, noiselessly, effortlessly. I hit Pause.”

Most memorably, she writes about VW buses she and her family have owned. Here’s her description of their twenty-year-old Vanagon:

It was rusty and brown, with a stick shift, and the locks didn’t work and it smelled like smoke, except more like a campfire than like cigarettes, and we took it camping and pushed down the seats to make a bed and slept inside, with two toddlers and a baby and a Great Dane, and we all fit, even with fishing poles and Swiss Army knives and battery-operated lanterns and binoculars and Bananagrams and bug spray and a beloved, pint-size red plastic suitcase full of the best pieces from our family’s Lego collection. It was, honestly, the dream. If you took it to the beach, you could just slide open the door and pop up the table—the five seats in back faced one another—and eat peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches while watching the waves or putting a baby down for a nap. The carpet would get covered with sand and crushed seashells. Weeks later, the whole van would still smell like a cottage by the sea.

That’s one of my all-time favorite Lepore passages. I love the details, especially that “pint-size red plastic suitcase full of the best pieces from our family’s Lego collection.” 

“Buzz” is a perfect blend of factual reporting and personal experience. It’s one of Lepore’s best pieces.