March 31, 2025 Issue

Anytime Richard Brody comments on Pauline Kael – beware! He doesn’t like her. His hostility goes back to his “Shoah at Twenty-Five” (December 7, 2010), in which he comes perilously close to calling Kael anti-Semitic because she dared to criticize Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. In this week’s issue, Brody has a “Takes” piece that revisits Kael’s “Notes on Heart and Mind” (January 23, 1971). He appears to praise it. But don’t be fooled. His knife is out. He calls it “something of a manifesto” that “reveals why, despite Kael’s status as the foremost critic of her era, she was also sharply at odds with it.” He notes “the rise of the New Hollywood era that Kael would celebrate as a golden age,” and says, “she was hostile to many of its masterworks.” This is false. For one thing, “Notes on Heart and Mind” is not “something of a manifesto,” not even close. It’s a collection of rants she wrote out of frustration with how bad the movies were at that time. If you want to read her manifesto, read “Trash, Art and the Movies” (1969) – one of the great critical essays of the twentieth century. 

But the main reason Brody’s claim is false turns on his use of “many” (“she was hostile to many of its masterworks”). Okay, name one. Name one masterwork of the New Hollywood era, the so-called golden age of American cinema, that Kael was hostile to. I can think of at least a dozen that she celebrated: McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Cabaret, The Godfather, Mean Streets, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, Phantom of the Paradise, The Godfather, Part II, Shampoo, Nashville, Carrie, Taxi Driver. Kael wasn’t at odds with these revolutionary new American movies. She loved them!

The “Takes” series invites New Yorker writers to “revisit notable works from the archive.” Brody’s choice of Kael’s “Notes on Heart and Mind” is odd. It’s one of her weakest pieces. She wrote it when she was in a funk. She included it in her final collection For Keeps (1995), but she cut it drastically. With so many great Kael reviews and essays to choose from, why did Brody pick this one? I think it goes back to his hatred of her Shoah review. He’s exacting his revenge. 

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Structure

This is the fourth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their structure.

The Pine Barrens and The Meadowlands are structured thematically. On the Rez flows more or less chronologically, with timeouts for historical perspective. The Pine Barrens consists of nine chapters. Each chapter has a particular theme. Here’s a table showing each chapter’s title and subject:

1. The Woods from Hog Wallow	Tells about Fred Brown, a seventy-nine-year-old Pine Barrens native, who lives in a shanty in the heart of the forest. “Come in. Come in. Come on the hell in.” Brown accompanies McPhee on road trips through the pines. “As the car kept moving, bouncing in the undulations of the sand and scraping against blueberry bushes and scrub-oak boughs, Fred kept narrating, picking fragments of the past out of the forest, in moments separated by miles....”
2. The Vanished Towns	Tells about the vanished towns of the Pine Barrens, e.g., Martha Furnace (“With the exception of the furnace mound, there is not a trace of a structure in Martha now. The streets are bestrewn with a green and blue glittering slag, but they are indistinguishable from the sand roads that come through the woods from several directions to the town, and if it were not for the old and weirdly leaning catalpa trees, it would be possible to pass through Martha without sensing its difference from the surrounding woodland”).
3. The Separate World	Tells about the people of the Pine Barrens – their work, their isolation, and their “live and let live” spirit. “The sphagnum-blueberry-cranberry-wood-charcoal cycle was supplemented in other ways as well – most notably in December, when shiploads of holly, laurel, mistletoe, ground pine, green briar, inkberry, plume grass, and boughs of pitch pine were sent to New York for sale as Christmas decorations.
4. The Air Tune	Tells about the Pine Barrens’ distinctive place names, names of plants and flowers, and folktales. “There is a plant in the Pine Barens that has velvety, magical leaves to which water absolutely will not adhere. The pineys call it neverwet.”
5. The Capital of the Pines	Tells about Chatsworth, the principal community in the Pine Barrens. McPhee visits Chatsworth General Store: “When I first stopped in there [Chatsworth General Store], I noticed on its shelves the usual run of cold cuts, canned foods, soft drinks, crackers, cookies, cereals and sardines, and also Remington twelve-gauge shotgun shells, Slipknot friction tape, Varsity gasket cement, Railroad Mills sweet snuff, and State-Wide well restorer. Wrapping string unwound from a spool on a well shelf and ran through eyelets across the ceiling and down to a wooden counter.”
6. The Turn of Events	Tells about three major events in Chatsworth’s history: the Chatsworth Fire, in 1954; the crash and death in the woods, in 1928, of an aviator who was known as Mexico’s Lindbergh; and a visit, in 1927, by S.E. il Principe Constantino di Ruspoli, an authentic Italian prince who happened to be a native of Chatsworth.
7. Fire in the Pines	Tells about the Pine Barrens’ high susceptibility to fire. “A remarkably common cause of fire in the pines is arson. Standing in all that dry sand, the forests glisten with oils and resins that – to some people – seem to beg for flame.”
8. The Fox Handles the Day	Tells about various animals and plants that are native to the Pine Barrens. “Twenty-three kinds of orchids grow in the Pine Barrens – including the green wood orchid, the yellow-crested orchid, the white-fringed orchid, the white arethusa, the rose pogonia, and the helleborine – and they are only the beginning of a floral wherewithal that botanists deeply fear they will someday lose.”
9. Vision	Tells about a plan to construct a jetport and city in the Pine Barrens. “We moved on to see the site of the jetport, which would cover thirty-two thousand five hundred acres and would eliminate virtually all of the Upper and Lower Plains, several ponds, a lake, an entire state forest, and Bear Swamp Hill.”

The Meadowlands is similarly structured – eleven chapters, each with its own theme. Here’s a table showing each chapter’s title and subject:

1. Snake Hill	Tells about the one-hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall rock that “sticks out of the very middle of the Meadowlands like a geological mistake.” “At the top, I can see for miles. To the north and west, a low ridge contains the area like a bowl with a lip made of little cities and towns. To the east, I can still see the Manhattan skyline, only now it is not shouting but whispering from behind another ridge. To the south, I can see out past the refineries and their towers of smoke and flame, out past the boat-loading cranes that feed along the cargo-containered fields of the Port of Newark like huge dark insects, out toward the Atlantic Ocean.”
2. An Achievement of the Future	Tells about various plans for development of the Meadowlands, e.g., futuristic theme park, industrial city, giant dairy farm. “People were always trying to invent new uses for the Meadowlands; most people felt anything was better than what was there.”
3. Gone with the Wind	Tells about Sullivan’s exploration of the Meadowlands town of Kearny, e.g., his visit to the Kearny Library, where he views the world’s largest collection of foreign translations of Gone with the Wind.
4. Walden Swamp	Tells about two canoe trips into the Meadowlands that Sullivan took with his friend Dave. “Passing over more underwater fences, we felt as if we were paddling just above Atlantis. At precisely one hour and fifty-two minutes into the trip, we saw our first abandoned appliance, a refrigerator.”
5. Valley of the Garbage Hills	Tells about the Meadowlands’ dumps. “One afternoon I drove back through a field of abandoned cars and walked along the edge of a garbage hill, a forty-foot drumlin of compacted trash that owed its topography to the waste of the city of Newark.”
6. Skeeters	Tells about attempts to control the swarms of Meadowlands’ mosquitoes. “Touring mosquito-infested areas of New Jersey with Victor is like touring a red-light district with a vice squad detective.”
7. Treasure	Tells about canoeing the Meadowlands with Leo Koncher, searching for treasure. “Leo Koncher is always searching for something when he goes out on expeditions into the swamp. One thing he searches for is a relic of one of the old plank roads that once crossed the Meadowlands. Specifically, he looks for remnants of the old road from Jersey City to Belleville.”
8. Digging	Tells about people and things buried in the Meadowlands, e.g., Jimmy Hoffa. “The morning that Dave and I set out to dig for Jimmy Hoffa was beautiful and sunny, and as we drove through Jersey City, we got lost and circled underneath the Pulaski Skyway a couple of times and wondered for a brief moment if a van full of Korean churchgoers might be following us.”
9. Bodies	Tells about exploring the Meadowlands with a retired detective from Kearny named John Watson. “Watson has a voracious appetite for all facts pertaining to the Meadowlands, facts that he is always willing to share.”
10. The Trapper and the Fisherman	Tells about two rival Meadowlands environmentalists – Bill Sheehan and Don Smith. “One day I took one of Sheehan’s eco-tours. I thought it was going to be ponderous and National Geographic special-like, but it had a good-natured feel of an afternoon on a fishing boat and I found myself hankering for a beer.”
11. Point-N0-Point	Tells about a visit that Sullivan made to the very tip of Bayonne, to the bottom of the Meadowlands, to the farthest point down he’d ever been. “On the coast of old Bayonne or in the junkyards that are on the Newark side of the sealike Newark Bay, I can’t seem to find a way in anywhere. I can’t get up the nerve to plunge into the particular breed of junkyard that grows there, through the particular kind of rubble, through the particular fields of weeds.”

On the Rez’s structure differs from the other two books. It’s more chronological. It unfolds sequentially in the order of Frazier’s visits to the Pine Ridge Reservation. It consists of fifteen untitled chapters. Two chapters – 1 and 5 – are historical. They tell the story of the Indians’ resilience in the face of mass destruction. The remaining chapters are an account of Frazier’s visits to the rez over a four-year period (1995-1999). Here’s a table summarizing what each chapter is about:

1.	Tells about Frazier’s admiration for Indians. “Of course I want to be like Indians. I’ve looked up to them all my life. When I was a young man my number-one hero was the Oglala leader Crazy Horse.”
2.	Tells about Frazier’s friendship with Le War Lance. “He calls me every week, it seems, to ask for money. It’s good that he does, I suppose, to keep me from getting sentimental when I think of him. Even now I can feel my words want to pull him in the wrong direction, toward a portrait that is rose-tinted and larger than life, while he is pulling the other way, toward reality. Sometimes when he calls, his voice is small and clear, like neat printed handwriting; other times, depending on his mood and how much he’s had to drink, his voice is sprawling and enlarged, like a tall cursive signature with flourishes on the tail letters and ink blots and splatters alongside.”
3.	Tells about Frazier’s first visit to Pine Ridge Reservation, August, 1995. “At dawn, I took a back road from Hermosa to the reservation. There was no one else about. I had the radio tuned to KILI, the Pine Ridge radio station, which broadcasts from the reservation near the village of Porcupine. It was playing Lakota singing and drumming. Under an overcast sky, the prairie looked drained of color. Here and there I saw burned patches, the black extending in tongues where the wind had pushed it. In the middle of one burned patch was a car seat, also burned. A wheel rim with shreds of tire still on it hung from a fence post. Two rows of tires lay flat on the roof of a turquoise-colored trailer, anchoring the roof against the wind. I followed the road into a wide valley, crossed a bridge over the Cheyenne River, and was on the reservation.”
4.	Tells about Frazier’s first day on the rez, traveling with Le and Floyd John, visiting various places, e.g., Big Bat’s Conoco and Wounded Knee. “We coasted down the hill to the Wounded Knee junction. Just ahead of us was a Volkswagen bus with oval license plates. It hesitantly turned left, then inched onto the drive that led up to the massacre monument and the site of the Catholic church. The driveway to the monument at America’s most famous massacre site is a deeply rutted single-lane dirt track so unpromising as to give any car owner pause. History here has had little time to reflect; it seems to be waiting for further developments, perhaps Wounded Knee III or IV.”
5.	Tells about the history of various American Indian tribes, e.g., the Kickapoo, Cherokee, Iroquois, and Navajo. “As fighters, the Iroquois were fierce. Their large and far-ranging war parties reduced to misery Indian nations as distant as the Illinois on the shores of the Mississippi, the Huron north of Lake Superior, and the Erie south of the lake that has their name. The Iroquois enjoyed torturing captives. Returning from their conquests, they usually made an event of it, with the women and children joining in. To incapacitate enemy warriors immediately after capture, the Iroquois would break the captives’ fingers with their teeth.”
6.	Tells more about Frazier’s first visit to the rez. He attends a rodeo (“The first event, the folksy rodeo announcer said, would be Mutton Bustin’, a bucking-sheep-riding contest for kids. At an end of the arena the small contestants assembled in a line, many in hats so big and pants so pegged they looked like tacks. One at a time they climbed into the bucking chutes, got aboard, and came out on sheep who flung themselves around more vigorously than I would have believed sheep could move. Some of the kids were quite little and got bucked off quickly. A few began to cry and ran for their dads to the accompaniment of the announcer’s uncomforting folksy commentary. Other kids hung on like burrs until the sheep quit bucking, and a swell of applause and honking car horns rose from the spectators”). Another afternoon, Frazier and Le visit Le’s sister Aurelia Two Crow. Another day, he, Le, and Floyd John drive to PTI Propane, south of Pine Ridge almost to the town of White Clay, to get Le’s propane fuel tank refueled. The filler hose ruptures and propane gas spews out all over. Fortunately, there’s no explosion. Frazier sees Le and Floyd John laughing. When they get in the car, Frazier asks them what they were laughing about. Le tells him they made some joke about almost getting blown up. Frazier says he doesn’t think it’s very funny. Le says, “Well, that’s the Indian way. We’d rather laugh about still being alive than moan about how we almost died.”
7.	Tells about Frazier’s next visit to the rez, November, 1995. Describes the town of White Clay. “White Clay. White Clay! Site of so many fistfights, and of shootings and beatings and stabbings! Next-to-last stop of so many cars whose final stop was a crash! Junkyard, dusty setting for sprawled bodies, vortex consuming the Oglala Sioux! Sad name to be coupled with the pretty name of Nebraska! White Clay, White Clay!”
8.	Tells about the many old Indian bars in towns and cities across the U.S., many of which have vanished without a trace. Visits some of the bars that still exist, e.g., the Longhorn Saloon, in Scenic, South Dakota (“The wind-scoured South Dakota sky over the badlands was bright blue that afternoon, but in the Longhorn Saloon cigarette smoke hung thick. A column of sunlight slanting through it from a window made a luminous gray shaft above an unoccupied table piled with perhaps three dozen empty Budweiser cans”). Visits the town of Buffalo Gap, South Dakota, where there’s an old bar called the Stockman. Tells the story of the fatal stabbing of an Oglala man named Wesley Bad Heart Bull, at the Stockman (then called Bill’s Bar), January 21, 1973, and the violent intervention of the American Indian Movement in the trial of the man accused of the murder.
9.	Tells about Le’s visit to Frazier’s home in Missoula, late January, 1996. Tells about Frazier’s next visit to the rez soon after. On his return home, he gets in a car accident. Tells about the accident and his harrowing drive through a blizzard. “By now the snow was coming down so hard I could see only a short distance ahead, and when semis passed me, I could see almost nothing but the snow they swirled. The road was a dim blowing world in which headlights suddenly appeared in the rearview mirror and red taillights suddenly flew by and disappeared. The tape holding the windshield to the frame quickly came apart, and the windshield hung loose like a drapery, bouncing with every jolt and letting snow in to pile up on the dash.”
10.	Tells about Frazier’s next visit to the rez, summer of 1996. He attends powwow. “The men sat on metal folding chairs in a circle around the drum, hitting it hard with leather-wrapped drumsticks and singing a traditional song in loud, high-pitched unison, above which a single higher voice occasionally rose. Full dark had fallen by now, and the overhead lights had come on, but many corners of the powwow ground were half-lit or in shadow. Shadows made it hard to see all the singers’ faces. In a circle around them, intent white people watched and listened, some holding microphones to catch the sound. The observers’ faces were wide-eyed, but the singers, as they leaned into the light and back out of it, had their eyes screwed shut and their mouths wide open in song. Some of the singers held a hand to one ear to plug it, the way musicians in recording studios do. They sang at full-voice, from deep inside themselves, all of them hitting each note and word with vehemence and exactly the same time. The singing, a survival from hundreds of years ago, filled the arena and echoed to the prairie sky.”
11.	Tells more about Frazier’s 1996 summer visit to the Pine Ridge Reservation. Tells about his discovery of the SuAnne Big Crow Heath and Recreation Center and the room inside dedicated to the memory of SuAnne Big Crow. “At the end of the hallway on the right was a smaller room with glass trophy cases along the walls. The trophies all were from the athletic career of SuAnne Big Crow, the teenage girl in the photos, the person for whom the center was named. I looked at the trophies, I watched a short video of playing on a VCR in the room, I read some framed news stories about SuAnne Big Crow, and a sense of discovery came over me. Here was a hero – not a folk hero, a sports hero, a tribal hero, or an American hero, but a combination of all these. I had thought that Oglala heroes existed mostly in the past. But a true Oglala hero appeared in the late 1980s, while the rest of the world was looking the other way, in suffering Pine Ridge, right under everyone’s noses: SuAnne Big Crow.”
12.	Tells about the heroic life of SuAnne Big Crow. Frazier talks with her mother, Chick Big Crow. He talks with her high school basketball coach, Charles Zimiga. He talks with members of the basketball team that SuAnne played for – the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes. He describes the Lakota shawl dance that SuAnne spontaneously did at center court in a pre-game warm-up in the town of Lead. She was fourteen at the time. Lead fans were yelling at the Lady Thorpes, calling them “squaws” and “gut-eaters.” SuAnne ran out onto the court, “unbuttoned her warm-up jacket, took it off, draped it over her shoulders, and began to do the Lakota shawl dance.” She also began to sing in Lakota, “swaying back and forth in the jump-ball circle, doing the shawl dance, using her warm-up jacket for a shawl.” The crowd went completely quiet. Frazier writes, “In the sudden quiet, all you could hear was her Lakota song. SuAnne stood up, dropped her jacket, took the ball from Doni De Cory, and ran a lap around the court dribbling expertly and fast. The fans began to cheer and applaud. She sprinted to the basket, went up in the air, and laid the ball through the hoop, with the fans cheering loudly now. Of course, Pine Ridge went on to win the game.”
13.	Tells more about SuAnne Big Crow. Tells about the 1989 state basketball tournament held in Sioux Falls, in which SuAnne scores the winning basket for Pine Ridge in the final second of the championship game. “There’s a scramble, Milbank has it for an instant, loses it; and then, out of the chaos on the floor: order, in the form of SuAnne. She has the ball. She jumps, perfectly gathered, the ball in her hands overhead. Her face lifts toward the basket, her arched upper lip points at the basket above the turned-down O of her mouth, her dark eyes are ardent and wide open and completely seeing. The ball leaves her hand, her hand flops over at the wrist with fingers spread, the ball flies. She watches it go. It hits inside the hoop, at the back. It goes through the net. In the same instant, the final buzzer sounds.”
14.	Tells more about SuAnne Big Crow. Tells about her tragic death in a car accident, February 9, 1992. Frazier visits the site on Interstate 90 where the accident occurred. “After a few minutes I walked back down the incline to the fatality marker and sat beside it in the grass out of sight of traffic. When I did, I noticed wildflowers – little megaphone-shaped blossoms of pale lavender on a ground vine, called creeping jenny hereabouts, and a three-petaled flower called spiderwort, with a long stem and long, narrow leaves. The spiderwort flowers were a deep royal blue. I had read that in former times the Sioux crushed spiderwort petals to make blue jelly-like paint used to color moccasins. Mid-June must be these flowers’ peak season: among the roadside grasses, lost hubcaps, and scattered gravel, the spiderwort and creeping jenny grew abundantly.”
15.	Tells about Frazier’s subsequent visits to the rez, including one in December, a couple of weeks before Christmas. “At lunchtime Le went in the house and brought me out a sandwich made of a quarter-inch-thick slice of bologna on white bread with lots of mayonnaise. The sandwich had a few faint thumbprints of oil on it but was tasty anyway. I sat on an upended stove log in the sun and looked at the stuff in the yard – an armchair, a pink plastic bottle in the shape of a baby’s shoe, a pile of shingles, an old-fashioned TV antenna, beer cans, a rusting John Deere swather. Across the open field to the east, a flock of pheasants flew low and almost in a straight line. I counted twelve of them. Le took a 12-volt auto battery from the trunk of the Celebrity and sat down cross-legged by it on the ground and began to clean the battery posts with a rag. On his back under the car, Floyd John wrenched and tapped. At the side of the house, Gunner, the dog, growled away at a section of deer ribs Le had thrown her. Two kittens, one yellow and one black, chased each other around. A warm wind blew. For a moment, we might have been sitting in front of a tipi in an Oglala camp along the North Platte River 150 years ago, braiding lariats and making arrows and gazing off across the Plains.

All three of these books are artfully structured. I confess I prefer On the Rez’s chronological structure slightly more. It’s more journal-like. For me, the journal structure is the most mimetic of the way real life actually unfolds. 

All three of these books contain an immense amount of action – walking, driving, canoeing. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.