Photo by John MacDougall
September 21, 2005, I was nosing around Qamman Point, a few kilometres outside Sanirajak, Nunavut, with my friend George Qulaut. I spotted this beautiful eroded whale vertebra. It seemed like an Arctic still life just waiting to be photographed. I love the combination of textures: bleached bone, orange lichen, coarse tundra. That’s George in the background, keeping an eye out for polar bears.
There hasn’t been a funny girl on the screen for so long now that moviegoers have probably also got used to doing without one of the minor, once staple pleasures of moviegoing: the wisecracking heroines, the clever funny girls—Jean Arthur, of course, and Claudette Colbert, and Carole Lombard, and Ginger Rogers, and Rosalind Russell, and Myrna Loy, and all the others who could be counted on to be sassy and sane. They performed a basic comic function—they weren’t taken in by sham; they had the restorative good sense of impudence—and in the pre-bunny period they made American women distinctive and marvellous.... The comedy is the comedy of cutting through the bull, of saying what’s really on your mind.
I don’t think Kael aspired to be a “funny girl.” But she loved making wisecracks, and she could always be counted on for being “sassy and sane” and “cutting through the bull.” In a way, I think she saw herself in the tradition of Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, and the other wisecracking actresses she mentions. They definitely influenced her impudent approach to criticism.
“Bravo!” contains several quintessential Kael lines. This one, for example: “Most Broadway musicals are dead before they reach the movies—the routines are so worked out they’re stiff, and the jokes are embalmed in old applause.” And this: “And the tears belong to her face; they seem to complete it, as Garbo’s suffering in 'Camille' seemed to complete her beauty.”
“Bravo!” is one of Kael’s best pieces. I applaud The New Yorker for republishing it. Hail Kael!
In Winters’ artful hands, Kennedy is a great photography subject. But as a politician, he’s repugnant. His opposition to vaccine mandates and military aid to Ukraine is vile.
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| Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (Photo by Dan Winters) |
It’s interesting to compare James Wolcott’s “French Fries and Sympathy” (in his recent collection Critical Mass) with Pauline Kael’s “Comedians” (in her classic 1984 collection Taking It All In). Both are reviews of Barry Levinson’s charming, offbeat 1982 autobiographical movie Diner. They provide an excellent opportunity to contrast Kael’s and Wolcott’s critical approaches. Also, I want to see how the student stacks up against the master. Wolcott was a Kael disciple, a Paulette. They saw Diner together. Wolcott writes about it in his memoir Lucking Out (“ ‘What’s that they’re pouring on the French fries?’ she asked as the camera panned the diner counter. ‘Gravy.’ ‘They put gravy on French fries?’ ‘Oh, yeah, beef gravy. Though chicken gravy is an option’ ”). Wolcott was just a fledgling; Kael was at the height of her powers. The comparison may be unfair to Wolcott. On the other hand, he may surprise us. He’s an inspired metaphorist. And he’s closer to Diner’s culture than Kael is; he grew up near Baltimore, where Diner is set.
Both pieces are appreciative. Kael, in her “Comedians,” calls Diner “a wonderful movie,” “that rare autobiographical movie that is made by someone who knows how to get the texture right.” Wolcott, in his “French Fries and Sympathy,” describes the film as a “bittersweet reverie about the pleasures of noshing and chumming about until the squeak of dawn.”
Wolcott’s piece starts strong. His first paragraph contains this marvelous line:
As Baltimore pretties itself with crinkly gold Christmas decorations and rows of navy-blue Colt banners, Levinson’s characters – Eddie (Steve Guttenberg), Shrevie (Daniel Stern), Fenwick (Kevin Bacon), Billy (Timothy Daly), and Boogie (Mickey Rourke) – scheme and gamble, cop cheap feels and mull over impending marriages, blow warmth into their knotted fists, reminisce about high school escapades, razz each other into fits of helpless laughter.
That “blow warmth into their knotted fists” is very fine.
In contrast, Kael’s loveliest effect is her conclusion:
Levinson has a great feel for promise. At the diner, the boys are all storytellers, and they take off from each other; their conversations are almost all overlapping jokes that are funny without punch lines. The diner is like a comedy club where the performers and the customers feed each other lines – they’re all stars and all part of the audience. The diner is where they go to give their nightly performances, and the actors all get a chance to be comedians.
Both critics admire Diner’s talented young cast. Both are excited by Mickey Rourke’s Boogie. Kael calls Boogie “the sleaziest and most charismatic figure of the group.” Wolcott describes him as a “tattered prince of sleaze.” Wolcott’s depiction of Kevin Bacon’s eyes as a “bleary, amused scrunch” is very good, as is Kael’s notation of Steve Guttenberg’s “perfectly inflected Paul Newman-like grins.”
Both critics are superb noticers. In his piece, Wolcott points out that the drummer in the strip-joint scene is “portrayed by Jay Dee Daugherty , formerly the drummer for Patti Smith.” In “Comedians,” Kael notes “the kid wandering around quoting from Sweet Smell of Success.” Regarding the wedding scene, Kael mentions “the Baltimore Colts marching song and the bridesmaids’ dresses in the Colts’ colors (blue and white), and Beth trying to teach her record-aficionado husband to dance.” Looking at the same scene, Wolcott observes,
Here girls in white gloves flex their fingers in anticipation of the flung bouquet, Earl affably picks his way through the buffet, Boogie and the gang gather around the table (ties loosened, smiles relaxed); the entire sequence has a hushed tenderness in which every character is given his dignified due and then suspended in time, to be remembered only with fondness.
That phrase, “girls in white gloves flex their fingers in anticipation of the flung bouquet,” is wonderfully alive. At the end of his piece, Wolcott says that Diner’s “world and feelings have the full crack of life.” So, too, do these two splendid, generous-hearted reviews.
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| Illustration by Jon Han |
I’m inspired by The New York Times’ recent “100 Best Books of the 21st Century” to compile my own list. Except my list will be much narrower and more specialized, focusing on my favorite form of writing – essays on art and literature. Each month I’ll pick an essay and try to get at what I respond to and why. A new series then – “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature” – starting September 7, 2024.
Paumgarten writes about his continuing obsession with the Grateful Dead (“Despite broadening taste, periodic bouts of embarrassment, and decades of personal growth and/or decay, my fascination with the music has somehow only deepened”). He describes the Sphere:
The Sphere is connected to the Venetian by an air-conditioned passageway. Outside, the building serves as an incandescent orbic billboard, with 1.2 million L.E.D.s, each containing four dozen diodes. Ad space, basically, or an electronic canvas in the round. Inside, it’s a performance venue, with about eighteen thousand seats arrayed under a vast dome that doubles as the world’s largest and highest-resolution L.E.D. screen. The sound system features some hundred and sixty thousand speakers, which allow engineers to direct discrete sounds at individual seats. The venue can also vibrate those seats and produce smells—an Odorama and an Orgasmatron in one.
He visits casino bars and talks with other Deadheads. One guy named Matty K. tells him, “This show at the Sphere was the best show I have ever seen. I was dead sober, not even a beer. It holds up to any Dead show ever.” In response, Paumgarten writes, “This was blasphemy, especially from a guy who’d been there for what I considered glory days. But I’d come across the Mayer mania before, and perhaps the Sphere had powers of persuasion I’d not yet encountered.”
As it turns out, the Sphere does have such powers. Paumgarten vividly describes his experience of the concert, which he attends with an old friend he calls “my wingman”:
An hour before showtime, we shuffled along the carpeted corridor from the Venetian, spilled out into the heat for a few minutes, then ducked into the orb. The exuberance of the thousands, as they rode escalators into an ambient, crepuscular glow in the Sphere’s cavernous ecto-chamber, was contagious, though the scale of the place felt a little like an affront to the gods. “Reminds me of ‘The Towering Inferno,’ ” my wingman said. We rode to the very top, to take in the enormity from above; the pitch of the stands reminded me of the precipitous upper deck in the old Yankee Stadium—step lightly. Soon we had our seats, our twenty-five-dollar craft beers, and, in spite of our skepticism, that familiar thrum of expectancy. The band went on at seven-thirty-five, right on time, like a puck drop.
He says of the show,
It’s all tightly choreographed, but the music still feels alive, improvised, viney. A not-unpropulsive jam scored a vista of the desert at night, a gesture toward the group’s 1978 trip to Egypt: a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree view of the Great Pyramids under a lunar eclipse, bats winging in the shadows of the Sphinx. Then, to the delight of the Mayerheads, a wanky “Sugaree,” under a shower of scarlet begonias. “What a showoff,” a guy behind me said.
“Keep showing off,” another responded.
Of the Sphere, Paumgarten writes,
The Sphere is a cutting-edge concert hall, a marvel of engineering and technology, a visual and auditory feast. It was like nothing I’d ever seen, a new frontier of live entertainment, and there were moments on both nights where some combination of sound and screen made me want to call everyone I knew, even those with no affection for anything Dead, and say what my editor had said to me: “Go!”
“Dead Reckoning” is a worthy companion to Paumgarten’s brilliant “Deadhead” (The New Yorker, November 26, 2012). I enjoyed it immensely.
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| Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy Blog |
This is the fifth and concluding post in my series “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – my homage to New Yorker great John McPhee. Today I’ll review “Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (The New Yorker, December 15, 2003; included in McPhee’s 2006 collection Uncommon Carriers).
In this superb piece, McPhee retraces the waterways of Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). It artfully blends two trips in one: Thoreau’s 1839 trip and McPhee’s 2003 trip on the same rivers. Hence the title of the piece when it appeared in The New Yorker: “1839/2003.” It’s also posted on newyorker.com as “Paddling After Henry David Thoreau.” But I prefer the title that McPhee gave it when he collected it in Uncommon Carriers – “Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.”
The piece unfolds in seven untitled segments. Segment one covers the first day of McPhee’s trip. It starts on August 31, 2003, in Concord, Massachusetts. McPhee and his long-time friend Dick Kazmaier launch their canoe (an Old Town Penobscot 16) on the Sudbury River, from the same location, according to Thoreau scholars’ best guess, that Thoreau and his brother John launched their boat (a fifteen-foot-long skiff they’d built themselves). McPhee and Kazmaier paddle down the Sudbury to Egg Rock, where it joins the Concord River, then down the Concord to where it enters the Merrimack River, then up the Merrimack as far as Tyngsborough, where Kazmaier bids McPhee farewell and yields his place to McPhee’s son-in-law, Mark Svenhold, for the rest of the trip. McPhee and Svenhold overnight in Tyngsborough at a resort hotel called Stonehedge.
Segment two describes in greater detail what McPhee and Kazmaier saw, did, and thought as they paddled the Concord that first day. McPhee writes,
Sunday morning and “the air was so elastic and crystalline that it had the same effect on the landscape that a glass has on a picture. . . . We were uncertain whether the water floated the land, or the land held the water.” In 2003, the Concord was similar for us that Sunday afternoon. Blue herons lined it like gargoyles. Who knows what pious thoughts they were thinking. Thoreau says that on this day “the fishes swam more staid and soberly, as maidens go to church,” and “the frogs sat meditating, all Sabbath thoughts, summing up their week.” Like the Thoreaus’ dory, our canoe moved through flat-calm water that reflected the surrounding world. Thoreau says, “It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water . . . for only Nature may exaggerate herself.” The water we rudely broke with our paddles was as clear as the air and the reflection. Moreover, in eleven miles on the Concord we saw one beer can (afloat), one orange-and-white plastic barrel (in the alders), and no other flotsam or jetsam. The Clean Water Act of 1972 was among the highest legislative accomplishments of the twentieth century. It owed more than a little to thought set in motion by Henry David Thoreau.
Note the artful way McPhee interweaves Thoreau’s observations with his own. The whole piece is like that – the two trips blending, almost as if McPhee and Thoreau are traveling together, which, in a sense, they are.
Segment three chronicles the second day of McPhee’s journey, as he and Svenvold continue up the Merrimack. They go under the Tyngsborough Bridge. An hour later, they cross into New Hampshire. McPhee describes the river:
The river was peaceful, mostly silent, secluded. From time to time, we heard the surf of highways we could not see. We saw kingfishers along the Merrimack, and blue herons, the fisher kings. Eight Canada geese came in, splat, for belly-flopping crash landings—the only kind of landing they can manage. We saw a shopping cart, a truck muffler, a dolly, dead sweepers full of Styrofoam debris.
They encounter a wastewater treatment sprayer:
Far ahead and near the west bank, a small geyser was shooting white water straight upward in the otherwise flat river. The eruption was only a couple of feet high but in that apparently motionless riverscape it had the focal effect of a natural phenomenon. It drew us toward it—the ultimate orifice of the Nashua Wastewater Treatment Facility, spinning great concentric swirls of white foam on the river, like half an acre of cappuccino. This hideous sight was enough to frighten a shipful of Vikings, as Mark Svenvold was prepared to affirm. The discharge smelled like laundry detergent and chlorine, nothing worse, but in this place more than anywhere else—including all the rocks and rapids to come—I preferred that the canoe remain upright.
That “spinning great concentric swirls of white foam on the river, like half an acre of cappuccino” is wonderfully vivid.
In segment four, day two of the journey continues. McPhee writes,
Passing under a pair of high bridges, we came to the mouth of the Nashua River not long after noon. Turning into it, we pulled up the canoe on a sandy beach among boulders, and, under red maples, ate Stonehedge-prepared club sandwiches laced with avocado. The Nashua was clear, smooth, and fast—not white water but a firm current coming down through a railroad bridge whose bowstring trusses enhanced a lovely scene. The Nashua River, near its mouth, bisects the city, flourishing three oxbow bends before debouching into the Merrimack. The Thoreaus, after passing under a covered bridge and arriving at the Nashua, were not much interested. Henry praises the tributary for its “elm-shaded meadows” at Groton, but says that “near its mouth it is obstructed by falls and factories, and did not tempt us to explore it.” It tempted Mark and me, and we took off for the public library, digging hard against deceptive currents. A week earlier, for training purposes, we had gone a mile and a half against the upper Delaware at a stage near flood. But this was more difficult, possibly because the Nashua was shallow and we were not poling. Working off the avocado, we got around a meander bend and under the 101 bridge, almost a mile up. Then we came to a small island, beyond which were another railroad bridge and a dam. On our left was the spire of St. Casimir’s Catholic Church, dark-red brick, 1857. St. Casimir’s is on Temple Street near Scripture. Scripture is one-way. On our right was a brick mill, fourteen years old when the Thoreaus went by, with three large arches standing in the river, framing a pitch-black watery cavern. We fought up past the arches to the top of the island, where we decided to let the Nashua return us to the Merrimack.
That “working off the avocado” made me smile. McPhee’s humor abounds in this piece.
This segment is also notable for its structural analysis of Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. McPhee quotes scholar Linck Johnson, who calls it a “complex weave.” McPhee comments, “The first image that came to my mind was a string of lights—or any linear structure with things hanging on it, like a heavily loaded clothesline.” McPhee himself has used this type of structure: see, for example, “A Forager” (The New Yorker, April 6, 1968; included in his 1968 collection A Roomful of Hovings).
Segment five covers day three of the trip, from Nashua to Reeds Ferry. On this stretch of the Merrimack, McPhee and Svenhold see vestiges of the lock and canal that the Thoreaus and the floating freight carriers of the time used to circumvent a ledge. McPhee writes,
The lock doors, of course, were wooden and perishable, but some of the remains include hinges. The guide wall stood on the easterly side. Opposite was a large part of the long wall that led boats to the lock, just as the long walls of the Ohio, the Illinois, the Tennessee, the upper Mississippi lead thousand-foot tows past the bullnoses of guide walls and into locks today. In boulders along the Merrimack we saw iron rings, where canal boats, in the heavy traffic, were tied up to wait for their turns in the lock.
And when they stop for lunch on an island, McPhee, connoisseur of golf balls, finds and identifies two of them (“In the sand at our feet were two golf balls—each a Strata zero”).
In segment six (day 3 of the trip), McPhee and Svenvold pick their way through a daunting set of six distinct falls. Here’s McPhee’s description of their passage through one of them – Coos Falls:
As we approached Coos, we were again confronted by the chimeric stone wall, making the river look impassable. At each big rapid, a wing dam had been a component of the engineering—an oblique arm sticking far up into but not all the way across the river, its purpose to divert water through the canals and locks. The wing dam at Moore’s Falls had been thirty-two hundred feet long, at Coos twenty-five hundred. That’s a lot of rock to pile up. Now scattered through the rapids, it appears from a distance to be as integral as it once was, and from nearby to be the rocks of a riverbed on Mars. The Coos canal had been framed by the east bank and an island, and now consisted of two small pools separated by isthmuses of high dry rock. It was certainly no thoroughfare, but it seemed preferable to the souse holes, standing waves, and growing water that reached across the river from the west side of the island. We carried the canoe up and over the first isthmus, paddled the second pool, and carried the canoe across the boulders to the north end of the island. There was still a lot of white water in front of us and no way to paddle it, so I walked upcurrent with the fifty-foot rope and, when it was straight, turned and pulled the canoe up to me. Three good pulls and it came on its own, or so it seemed—just picked its way around the boulders, up ledges, and through the little rips until I had to stop it with my hand. Mark came up and held the canoe while I made my way upstream another fifty feet with the rope. I turned and pulled. That got us to the pool above Coos Falls.
They stop for lunch at Griffin’s Falls. McPhee’s wife, Yolanda, joins them. After lunch, McPhee and Svenhold continue upriver to Stark Landing (“further up all the rapids than we had thought we’d ever get”). They keep going. They pole, walk, and line their way through “boulder gardens and bygone weirs” to Merrill’s Falls in Manchester. (“I found three golf balls in Merrill’s Falls," McPhee says.)
Segment seven covers the fifth and final day of the trip. McPhee writes,
Making good time on the motionless water, we had soon covered more than five miles, were back in the wooded isolation characteristic of the river, and were looking up a straight shot of two and a half miles to a small distinctive mountain, or, in Thoreau’s words, “We could see rising before us through the mist a dark conical eminence called Hooksett Pinnacle.” After passing under three bridges, two of them abandoned, we would come to the end of our trip at A.J. Lambert Riverside Park, Hooksett Village, below Hooksett Dam—a spectacular scene colluding natural white cascades with water falling over the dam and plunging from the powerhouse.
The above is a very rough summary of one of McPhee’s most intricate, beautiful pieces. What makes it intricate is the way the two journeys are so closely interwoven. What makes it beautiful is the writing – both McPhee’s and Thoreau’s. The combination is double bliss.
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| Patricia Lockwood (Photo by Thomas Slack) |
The best book review of the year (so far) is Patricia Lockwood’s “Isn’t that ... female?” (London Review of Books, June 20, 2024). It’s an appraisal of A. S. Byatt’s recently reissued Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories. Actually, it’s an appraisal of Byatt’s entire oeuvre. Lockwood loves Byatt. She writes,
I have read it all, beginning with Babel Tower (1996), back when I was the age of Frederica Potter graduating from school at Blesford Ride, sinking her uniform into the canal as her older sister, Stephanie, looks on. I have gone to the bookstore on publication day in my pyjamas and asked them to unbox the new one; it’s back there, I know it. I have twice fumbled through The Biographer’s Tale (2000), a book which seems to take place entirely in a filing cabinet (don’t worry, there are also sadistic pictures). If you told me she had a lost novel about paperweights, I would believe you. And I would read that too.
What I savor are Lockwood’s ingenious descriptions – surreal montages of incredibly vivid, concentrated imagery inspired by Byatt’s works. For example:
The cover of the original edition of Medusa’s Ankles – hell, the title, let’s be honest – illustrates the aesthetic problem. An ivory ribbon, a speckled lobster, blown poppies, a lascivious oyster. A hand mirror reflecting a whitish lake, a heavy key. These are seen to be her concerns, lacquerish, decorative, romantic. But the hand mirror fills with blood, the cabinet of wonders displays a skull. On the other side of the pomegranate, maggots like instinct pearls.
And:
My affinity is perhaps unexpected. I know the books so well that looking at them on the shelf is like reading them. What she created for me, in the Frederica quartet, was a kind of internal geography. Over on the left, in the darkness, is the wood where the smooth-between-the-legs Alexander is not quite managing to make it happen with the frustrated housewife Jenny, released into the ache of the unattainable by her part in the play being put on at Long Royston. Up in the tower is the evasive poet Raphael Faber, ever withdrawing his tapered fingertips, dry as his own spice cakes. Out on the moors is Jacqueline, with thick sandwiches, observing her population of Cepea nemoralis. Carrying dishes to the communal kitchen is ill-fated Ruth, with her plait down her back. In the car the mystic madman Lucas Simmonds is eternally interfering with Marcus. And Stephanie, suffering from “an excess of exact imagination,” exerting her whole will to bring her family together, is wrestling with the slithering Christmas turkey in its dish.
And this extraordinary summary of Margaret Drabble:
The white satin and little gold pins of Stephanie in The Virgin in the Garden (1978), frightened, unhappy, knowing she is leaving the life of the mind behind, yet compelled by the dense matter of Daniel’s body; the chilling image of the bride in A Summer Bird-Cage, devouring, immoral, greedy as golden syrup, drunk on the morning of her wedding, in a wild silk dress and a dirty bra, telling her sister she would love her forever if she made her some Nescafé.
No other critic writes like this. James Wood creates wonderful collages of exquisite quotation. This one, for example, from his great “Red Planet” (The New Yorker, July 25, 2005), a review of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men:
He is also a wonderfully delicate noticer of nature. His first novel, “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), has this picture of lightning: “Far back beyond the mountain a thin wire of lightning glowed briefly.” The protagonist of “Child of God” (1973), a psychotic necrophiliac named Lester Ballard, lights a fire in an old grate, and as it races up the disused chimney sees a spider that “descended by a thread and came to rest clutching itself on the ashy floor of the hearth.” How strange and original that “clutching itself” is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shrivelling. “Blood Meridian” is a vast and complex sensorium, at times magnificent and at times melodramatic, but nature is almost always precisely caught and weighed: in the desert, the stars “fall all night in bitter arcs,” and the wolves trot “neat of foot” alongside the horsemen, and the lizards, “their leather chins flat to the cooling rocks,” fend off the world “with thin smiles and eyes like cracked stone plates,” and the grains of sand creep past all night “like armies of lice on the move,” and “the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake.” McCarthy liked this last phrase so much that he repeated it, seven years later, in “All the Pretty Horses” (1992): “Where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows.”
But this is different from Lockwood’s fever dreams of condensed imagery. Here’s one more from her Byatt piece:
Contemporary reviewers pointed out that The Children’s Book contained a mathematically impossible number of glazes. But colour was one of Byatt’s strongest points, such that you can feel different schemes in every book. The greens of Possession – vegetable, mineral and moss when we are in Brittany – and the burnishing panther of the fairy tales, gold-purple-black, stalking through. The buttery sunlight and gouache of Still Life. Reading her at seventeen I had an idea that perhaps the English had a better sense of colour because they spent so much time looking at teacups; I must be highly disadvantaged in this regard. Coffee cups have Garfield on them – or, if you’re unlucky, Odie. They do not fill your mind with the soft dreaming tints that made up Byatt’s encyclopedia. She has to mention it every time; it is more than an attribute, it is an achievement, a soul. The eggs of things are being lifted up out of their Easter dye, and don’t you exclaim every time? What a surprise! Look at that one!
Those last three sentences are inspired. The whole piece is inspired – criticism as passionate creation.
Walking on Bruckner Boulevard one morning, I was stunned by the loudness of the trucks. (No other borough has truck traffic like the Bronx’s, partly because its Hunts Point market, for produce, meat, and fish, is the largest food-distribution depot in the world.) I also heard cars, vans, motorcycles, an Amtrak train, airplanes, and, on the lower Bronx River nearby, the horn of a tugboat pushing a barge. Even during the emptiest days of the covid shutdown, the Bronx’s pulse of transport kept pounding.
And:
One September morning at ten-forty-five, I set out from Manhattan for a walk of about ten miles. When I was halfway across the Third Avenue Bridge, heading into the Bronx, a horn of unknown origin blasted twice. Then double barricades with blinking red lights went down at either end of the bridge. I hurried to get to the Bronx side. A guy in a hard hat and a bright-green vest with bright-orange stripes showed me how I could scoot around the edges of the barricades. He said that workers were testing the bridge. Then the bridge’s whole middle span began to move, rotating slowly and smoothly on its central pivot, until it was perpendicular to the roadway. Watching it do that was like seeing the Empire State Building telescope down to the size of a Pizza Hut—a technical surprise, but just another event of the day. Most of the bridges over the Harlem River open by rotating. They’re what are called swing bridges, as opposed to lift bridges, which go up and down. For ten or fifteen minutes, traffic sat waiting. Then the bridge pivoted back, the barricades lifted, and the traffic moved.
And:
All kinds of things are on the ground in the Bronx: Q-tips. A pigeon foot. Those Christmas-tree-shaped air fresheners that hang from rearview mirrors. Syringes with pale-orange plastic stoppers on their needles. Sunglass lenses. The butts of menthol cigarettes. A bathroom sink. A single pink, almond-shaped artificial fingernail. The white plastic tips of cigarillos. Little bags that once held fortune cookies, with pagodas faintly printed on them in red. Inside-out surgical gloves. Pennies. Scratched-off scratch-off tickets. Green puddles of antifreeze. Hair picks with handles shaped like fists. Pieces of broken mirrors. Flattened pieces of sugarcane. Corona beer-bottle caps. Coconut husks. Crumpled paper handouts offering cash for diabetes test strips, with a number to call. Crushed traffic cones. Dashboard dice. Skeins of hair for extensions. Spiced-whiskey bottles with devil silhouettes on the labels. covid masks. Black plastic takeout bags that skitter, ankle-high, on the wind. Pavement graffiti: “Lost Virginity at this Spot 11-1-16.”
That “Black plastic takeout bags that skitter, ankle-high, on the wind” made me smile. As we know from Frazier’s great “Bags in Trees” series, he’s obsessed with plastic bags.
“Paradise Bronx” brims with inspired Bronx details. I enjoyed it immensely.
More than vivid action, more than pungent detail, more than memorable imagery, what I seek in literature is authenticity of personal experience. These three brilliant books brim with it. They are wonderful personal journals – living, breathing accounts of what their authors saw, did, felt, and thought as they made their way down (or, in the case of Dangerous River, up) the mighty rivers that are their great subject. What makes them personal is the author’s “I,” which is present on almost every page – never intrusively, never out of egotism, but only for the purpose of indicating that what’s being told really happened. The “I” authenticates the experience being described. Patterson writes, “I passed through the Gate of the Nahanni, where the walls close in and the quiet green river glides silently between tawny precipices that climb a thousand feet sheer into the sky,” and I believe him. I believe he was there. Raban writes, “I went through Lock 6 at Trempealeau and the river changed again, into another crazy terra-cotta of islands, lakes and creeks, with the buoyed channel running close under the bluff on the Minnesota shore,” and I believe him; I believe he was there. Butcher writes, “The first evidence I had that we had reached Ubundu was the sound of the rapids. For hundreds of kilometres the Congo River had ben mute and yet suddenly, as we rounded a headland, I could make out the sound of rushing water. It was terrifying.” Again, I believe him. I believe he was there. Actually, it’s not a matter of belief; it’s a matter of proof – credible evidence adduced by invaluable eye witnesses.
Would it be different if these sentences were written in the third person? For me – absolutely. The third person is dry and impersonal. It’s detached from the reality it’s reporting. Patterson, Raban, and Butcher are not detached from their rivers. Quite the opposite: they are intimately attached. Their use of the first person powerfully conveys their attachment.
Are these books self-portraits? Yes, totally. Raban, in Old Glory, encounters a resident of Muscatine, Brad Funk, who questions his motives for making the trip. “I’m worried that you’re going to condescend to us,” Funk says. Raban replies, “I’m just passing through, trying to watch what happens to me.” Funk says, “But you’re going to write a book.” Raban replies, “Yes, but it won’t be an ‘objective’ book. It’s not going to be the inside story on America. It might be the inside story on me, but that’s rather different.”
It might be the inside story on me. Right there, I think, Raban shows awareness of the double aspect of his project – both window and mirror. The same goes for Dangerous River and Blood River. They’re subjective to the bone. That’s what I love about them. They reflect the singular, idiosyncratic personalities of their authors. For example, here is Patterson, in Dangerous River, battling mosquitoes:
It had been a devil of a day. The night before had been hot, for there was hardly any darkness and no time for the earth to cool. The early morning was dead still and hot: it was the worst morning for mosquitoes that I ever saw. As the sun rose, the hum outside my net rose to a savage humming note: I counted the brutes on a certain area of the net, and then I multiplied that out and made a very conservative estimate of the number in the air. Why, dammit, there were two thousand of the maddening insects waiting out there, shouting for my blood! It wasn’t even worth fighting with them over breakfast; I would go straight on, and stop and breakfast when the breeze got up. So I reached out from under the net, grabbed a pot of cold rice and raisins and got it inside with me and had some of that. Then I dressed myself and oiled my face and hands with citronella and put on my bit of head protection – a square yard of mosquito netting, folded cornerways into a triangle of double thickness. I put this over my head like a shawl, crossed the ends under my chin, put them round the back of my neck and fetched them to the front again and tied them there, tucking them down into my shirt which I buttoned up tightly. Then I crammed a hat on my head over the netting, crawled out, tore camp to pieces, threw it into the canoe and grabbed the pole and went on.
That detailed procedural description of how he fashioned a mosquito head net for himself is pure Patterson. He’s lively, practical, resourceful.
Raban, in Old Glory, learns the intricacies of the Mississippi as he goes. Sometimes he makes mistakes. For example, on the first day of his trip, he enters a lock prematurely. Here’s what happens:
I wasn’t even supposed to be here. In my newly won assurance I hadn’t troubled to notice the red light at the entrance, and as my boat slopped and skidded in the lock I got cursed for a blind sonafabitch shit who should’ve waited for the fuckin’ green light, you asshole. Were they going to drown me in cold blood in order to teach me a lesson? The lockman allowed me my rope only after he’d run through such a lexicon of expletives that the torrent of excrement being tipped on me from the lock wall was roughly equal to the volume of turbulent water on which I was just managing to keep afloat. I was torn between fright, fury and bleating apology. As I sank into the emptying chamber, I heard my own whinnying voice collapse into a stutter of f’s. F-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f, I went, my own attempt at obscenity turning as seemly as a line of asterisks in a Victorian novel.
My own whinnying voice – Raban’s self-portrait is often unflattering. He’s as hard on himself as he is on other people.
All three writers candidly express their emotions – joy, anger, anxiety, frustration, fear. Butcher, in Blood River, makes his fear palpable. It’s in his legs:
My legs ached with fear, but I tried to stride up the river bank with confidence, approaching a group of men sitting silently on the ground next to a quiver of beached pirogues.
It’s in his eyes:
I knew my bravado to be a fragile thing with an unreliably short half-life. I also knew it would not be long before the Congolese gunman worked this out. Stomping off purposefully through the undergrowth, I was desperate to maintain the illusion of control.
All three writers are at once humanly fallible and thrillingly adventurous. They’re wonderful company. I admire them immensely.
Postscript: Another aspect of these great books that I relish is their nature description. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.
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