Are Frankenthalers Beautiful?

Helen Frankenthaler, Mauve District (1966)

Are Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings beautiful? I’m inclined to say yes. Peter Schjeldahl said no: “The upshot for pleasure-seeking eyes is that her paintings aren’t only not beautiful, they aren’t even pretty” (The 7 Days Art Columns 1988-1990, 1990). 

Schjeldahl’s judgment seems harsh. Is he right? Recently, two New Yorker critics looked at Frankenthaler’s work. They express a more appreciative view. Adam Gopnik, in his “Fluid Dynamics” (April 12, 2021), writes, 

By using the paint to stain, rather than to stroke, she elevated the components of the living mess of life: the runny, the spilled, the spoiled, the vivid—the lipstick-traces-left-on-a-Kleenex part of life. 

Gopnik focuses on Frankenthaler’s “soak-stain” technique. I think he’s right to do so. That was her great discovery – thinning her paints with turpentine and letting them soak into a large, empty canvas. He says, 

What’s impressive about the early soak-stain Frankenthalers, of course, is how unpainted they are, how little brushwork there is in them. Their ballistics are their ballet, the play of pouring, and a Rorschach-like invitation to the discovery of form. Paramecia and lilies alike bloom under her open-ended colors and shapes. 

Zachary Fine, in his “Let It Bleed” (January 12, 2026) takes a similar approach. He writes, 

Instead of treating the “blank” canvas as some heroic arena where a painter goes to battle with predecessors or inner demons, Frankenthaler saw it for what it was: thousands of off-white porous fibres, usually cotton duck or linen, woven together into a deceptively smooth surface. For centuries, painters had primed canvases, building up layers of thick pigment and glaze to create the illusion of luminosity and depth. But Frankenthaler diluted her paints with turpentine, so that they’d stain the raw canvas like blood on a bedsheet. 

Looking at Frankenthaler’s work formally, i.e., in terms of her soak-stain technique, rouses my tactile sense. I want to reach out and touch its paint-soaked skin. Right there, I think, is the source of its beauty.

September 22, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. The Maira Kalman cover is brilliant! Titled “Stéphane Mallarmé with Shawl,” it shows the poet all in gray, wearing a vivid red-and-white patterned scarf and an opulent pink bowtie. Kalman is one of the preeminent colorists of our time. It’s great to see her still doing New Yorker covers.

2. One of my favorite “Talk of the Town” writers is Robert Sullivan. He relates (as I do) to quirky individuals who do things solely for their own sake. His “Manhattan's Springs,” in this week’s issue, is a perfect example of his own idiosyncratic work. It’s about a Brooklyn-based photographer named Stanley Greenberg, who walks through upper Manhattan and the Bronx, posting copies of James Reuel Smith’s photos of old springs and wells near the spots where they originally existed. Sullivan writes,

On a recent summer day, Greenberg moved through the Bronx with the brisk authority of a biker who has little time for automobiles, methodically checking the map on his phone, pulling copies of Smith’s photos from his backpack, watching for construction sheds. “The city will take the photos down, and so will landlords, but they seem to last longest on these sheds,” he said. Many of the photographs have already disappeared, though a friend recently spotted one that had been posted in June, at Broadway and 108th Street, outside a closed bagel shop. “I don’t care,” Greenberg said. “I just want to post them all.”

It's a curious project, charting the disappearance of old water sources. Greenberg has a deep sense of transience. So does Sullivan. I enjoyed this piece immensely.

3. Another enjoyable piece is Lauren Collins’ “The Unicode.” It’s a profile of a giant clothing company based in Tokyo called Uniqlo. Until I read this piece, I’d never heard of it. Collins visits the company’s headquarters. She visits a newly renovated Uniqlo store in the Tokyo neighborhood of Asakusa. She visits the Uniqlo store in Paris. She visits the Uniqlo offices in London, where she talks with Uniqlo’s creative director Clare Waight Keller. She attends an event at Tate Modern, in London, in which people around the world vie to design a Uniqlo shirt. In Paris, she meets and talks with Uniqlo’s founder, Tadashi Yanai, who still serves as its C.E.O., and who is now the second-richest man in Japan. It’s quite a tour! My favorite part is Collins’ description of Uniqlo’s factory:

The employees were working on a batch of women’s chocolate-brown 3D Knit Soufflé Yarn Skirts (size M) and forest-green 3D Knit polo shirts (size XL). After the machines pumped out the items, the clothes were sent, ten at a time, to be examined for flaws. At an inspection station, a woman in pigtails and a surgical mask was in the process of checking a green polo. She draped it over two upright illuminated cones—think lightsabres mounted on a lazy Susan—scrutinizing the fabric for snags and holes. As we watched, a chimelike tune filled the room. “Five minutes until break,” Tomoya said. 

Collins is excellent at conveying the culture of complex corporations. Her “House Perfect” (The New Yorker, October 3, 2011), a portrait of IKEA, is masterly. “The Unicode” is every bit as good. 

4. Yet another absorbing piece in this week’s issue is D. T. Max’s “The Behemoth.” It tells about Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, an immense unfinished church in Barcelona, begun in 1882, and the amazing construction work currently underway to complete it. The Sagrada Família is an unusual church. Max describes it as "a head-spinning mixture of morphing geometrical forms, many inspired by nature. Its conical Art Nouveau pinnacles have the lumpy beauty of sandcastles." He visits the construction site and describes the activity. He’s guided by Jordi Faulí, the project’s ninth and current chief architect. The two of them ride rickety construction elevators, crawl through small passageways, climb vertical catwalks. The views are stunning. Here’s a sample:

Suddenly, we were standing inside the Mary tower, which is four hundred and fifty-two feet tall. Its walls were white—the color of purity—and the interior was brightly illuminated by eight hundred triangular windows of translucent white glass. The windows, Faulí later explained, were a scaled-up version of ones Gaudí had made for the sacristy, a section of Sagrada Família for which the architect had made a complete model.

The tower was a cone that narrowed to a point as it ascended. At the center of its circular base was a glimmering white hyperboloid, a gigantic stone object that looked like a cooling tower at a nuclear power plant. The hyperboloid had no top or bottom—it was a skylight that opened onto the nave below. Through this aperture, sunlight could filter all the way down to the church floor.

“The Behemoth” is a fascinating tour of an astonishing architectural work of art. I devoured it.

5. Beautiful architecture is also the subject of Adam Gopnik’s “Making a Move,” a tour of Philadelphia’s new Calder Gardens. Gopnik writes,

As one enters and descends, the space unfolds in a purposefully whimsical range of materials. Volcanic-seeming black rock lines a catacomblike stairway, punctuated by a single glass window framing a lone Calder. Tiered seats lead down into a viewing area that doubles as an amphitheatre for lectures or performances. Though buried, the sometimes monumental forms of the exhibition space rise convexly, lifting upward, while light from the Parkway pours in through floor-to-ceiling windows. Even underground, one feels enlarged, not entombed. And there’s nothing tomblike about the constant rumble of traffic from the boulevard outside.

Uniqlo factory, Sagrada Família, Calder Gardens – all transfixing places you can visit vicariously in this week’s splendid New Yorker. 

August 25, 2025 Issue

I’m enjoying The New Yorker’s “Takes” series immensely. In this week’s installment, Adam Gopnik revisits Joseph Mitchell’s “Joe Gould’s Secret” (September 19 and 24, 1964). He writes,

On the surface, Mitchell’s prose style derived from the economical newspaper writing he learned at the New York World. But his real heroes were the Joyce of “Dubliners” and the great Russian stylists—Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov. 

This is perceptive. In his best pieces – “Joe Gould’s Secret,” “Up in the Old Hotel,” “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” “The Rivermen” – Mitchell’s approach is Joycean. He seeks not just meaning; he seeks epiphany.

Reading Gopnik’s absorbing piece, I recalled three other wonderful appreciations of Mitchell’s work: William Maxwell’s Introduction to the 1999 Vintage paperback Joe Gould’s Secret; Mark Singer’s “Joe Mitchell’s Secret” (The New Yorker, February 22 & March 1, 1999; included in his 2005 collection Character Studies); and Janet Malcolm’s “The Master Writer of the City” (The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015; included in her 2019 collection Nobody’s Looking).

Mitchell, in his superb “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” wrote one of my favorite opening sentences: “When things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries down there.”

Joseph Mitchell is one of The New Yorker’s greatest writers. A shout-out to Adam Gopnik for honoring him in “Takes.”  

April 28, 2025 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Adam Gopnik’s “In the Neighborhood,” a delightful postscript to his wonderful “Fresh Paint,” in last week’s New Yorker. It’s a guide on where to eat near the Frick. Here’s a taste:

Begin a blessed Saturday morning at the newly expanded Frick Collection. Be sure to stop at James McNeill Whistler’s “Arrangement in Black and Gold.” Then, though Madison Avenue—heavily weighted down by flagship stores, making a touch monotone the once beautiful flow of galleries, boutiques, and coffee shops—is not all it was, it can still be a pleasure to stroll, staring down the enticing side streets that point toward Central Park. Where to stop for breakfast? There is the last remaining Three Guys coffee shop, right up Madison at Seventy-fifth. All the breakfast dishes are available there, along with the great and vanishing run of sandwiches—B.L.T., tuna on rye—that marked New York cuisine for so long. E.A.T., the outpost of the Eli Zabar empire—which really is an empire, with a single emperor—is farther up, at Eighty-first Street, for unimprovable lox and soft scrambled eggs. And, for coffee after the meal, walk in the opposite direction to Via Quadronno, right off East Seventy-third, which makes one of the best cappuccinos in the city.

I enjoyed this brief piece immensely. I hope Gopnik writes more of them.

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. 

May 15, 2023 Issue

Reading this week’s issue, I was struck by something that Adam Gopnik says in his wonderful tribute to the great New Yorker illustrator Bruce McCall, who died May 5, 2023. Gopnik writes, “Many creative people of original gifts live at right angles to their talent, the difference between who they are and what they make being astounding, but no one was ever more right-angled—transcendent talent to human type—than Bruce.” I find this concept of the “right-angled” artist intriguing. It contradicts Buffon’s famous saying that the style is the man. Gopnik contrasts McCall’s outward “perfect Canadian” demeanour (“self-deprecating to almost hilarious degree,” “polite to an almost ferocious fault”) with his anarchic, elegant art, blending “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.” Note that “wild surrealist sensibility.” Right there, I think, is where McCall and his extraordinary art converge. The angle vanishes.  

Best of 2021: The Critics

Illustration by Toma Vagner, from Alex Ross's "Grinding Bass"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2021 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “Who’s We?,” October 25, 2021 (Typically snugged into the cellophane wrappers of packs of cigarettes the artist has smoked, they are singly—and all together—exquisite, achieving feats of formal and coloristic lyricism by way of used chewing gum, scraps of fabric, metal fragments, feathers, thread, and very much whatnot. The works convey a homing instinct for beauty in the humblest of materials, and in the most democratic of citizenly activities: walking in the city”).

2. James Wood, “The Accursed,” April 19, 2021 [“Technically, it’s a combination of free indirect style (third-person narration pegged to a specific character) and what might be called unidentified free indirect style (third-person narration pegged to a shadowy narrator, or a vague village chorus)”]. 

3. Peter Schjeldahl, “Movements of One,” February 1, 2021 (“Morandi drains our seeing of complacency. He occults the obvious”).

4. James Wood, “Connect the Dots,” October 4, 2021 (“Every so often, a more subtle observer emerges amid these gapped extremities, a writer interested merely in honoring the world about him, a stylist capable of something as beautiful as ‘the quick, drastic strikes of a bow dashing across the strings of a violin,’ or this taut description of an Idaho winter: Icicles fang the eaves’ ”).

5. Peter Schjeldahl, “Home Goods,” February 15 & 22, 2021 ("As a mot juste for ‘The Progress of Love,’ I nominate ‘silly’ ”).

6. Alex Ross, “Grinding Bass,” December 13, 2021 ("The music is amorphous, engulfing, gelatinous, ferocious. Some passages evoke a subterranean machine revving up, grinding as it ascends toward the surface; others suggest tiny creatures excavating a cavernous space. Climaxes have a rancid beauty, the beauty of catastrophe and collapse").

7. Nathan Heller, “The Falconer,” February 1, 2021 (“Reducing the world, as on the canvas or the page, is a process of foreclosing on its fullness, choosing this way and not that one, and how you make those choices reveals everything about the person that you are”).

8. Rachel Syme, “On the Nose,” February 1, 2021 (“I knew I loved the smell of violets—their chalky, chocolate undertones. Or I thought I knew. Sitting down at my keyboard, I began to waver. Was it more like talcum powder and linden honey? Or like a Barbie-doll head sprinkled with lemonade?”).

 9. Anthony Lane, “Feel the Power,” July 5, 2021 (“The acting is of a soaring ineptitude; the deeper Diesel emotes, the more he resembles a man who dabbed too much wasabi on his tuna roll”). 

10. Adam Gopnik, “Fluid Dynamics,” April 12, 2021 (“For her fond biographer, Frankenthaler’s art delights the eye, as it was designed to, and that’s enough. Enough? It’s everything”).

Elaine Blair's "Hemingway's Consolations"

Ernest Hemingway (Portrait by Sébastien Plassard)

To me, it’s a serious mistake to write about Hemingway without mentioning his incomparable style. Yet, that’s exactly what Elaine Blair does in her “Hemingway’s Consolations” (The New York Review of Books, September 23, 2021). “Humiliation,” “violence,” “death,” “failure,” “hate” – these are the words she invokes to assess Hemingway’s work. “Beautiful,” “sensuous,” “poetical” are nowhere to be found. 

Hemingway created one of the most sublime styles in all of literature. Ho hum, we know that. No, we don’t. His stylistic achievement is in danger of being buried under criticism such as this: 

It takes a simple statement—and it must be simple—to get to the bottom of the emotional truth of a situation. You can speak of Hemingway’s verbal economy in relation to modernism, or realism, or personal style. But at their most powerful, his brevity and simplicity are in service of emotional release. Hemingway’s work consoles us, if it does console us, according to the verbal principles of a good psychotherapeutic interlocutor. [“Hemingway’s Consolations”]

Well, okay, maybe so. All I can say is that Hemingway’s work consoles me in a completely different way – in service of the pleasure principle. For example, consider this beauty:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. [A Farewell to Arms, 1929]

Each word is a painterly touch. Hemingway’s hero was Cézanne. Like Cézanne, he had an extraordinary feel for life’s sensuous surfaces. “He wrote pleasure far better than violence,” Adam Gopnik says, in his excellent “Hemingway, the Sensualist” (newyorker.com, June 26, 2017). He’s right.

May 10, 2021 Issue

Adam Gopnik, in his absorbing “Peripheral Proust,” in this week’s issue, says that John Updike found in Proust “the only credible modern religious novelist.” He says that for Updike, Proust was “the last Christian poet.” Is this true? Updike loved Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In one of his finest essays, “Remembrance of Things Past Remembered” (included in his great 1976 collection Picked-Up Pieces), Updike wrote, 

Proust’s tendrilous sentences seek out an essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith. It was a revelation to me that words could entwine and curl so, yet keep a live crispness and the breath of utterance. I was dazzled by the witty similes – the vanished fresco, the book holding the known name – that wove art and nature into a single luminous fabric. This was not “better” writing, it was writing with a whole new nervous system.

That’s one of the most beautiful descriptions of writing I’ve ever read. Updike’s love of Proust was all about his style (“the dissecting delicacy of each sentence”). He says, memorably, “In the interminable rain of his prose, I felt goodness.” Is that Christian? Maybe. Granted, Updike compared Remembrance of Things Past to the Bible, and called it “a work of consolation.” But I think it's the consolation of art, not God, that he was referring to. His love of Proust was sourced in those "tendrilous sentences." It’s the same for me. 

In Praise of the Decorative Impulse: Gopnik v. Updike

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 79 (1975)

I found Adam Gopnik’s praise of the decorative impulse, in his recent “Fluid Dynamics” (The New Yorker, April 12, 2021), refreshing. Too often abstraction is condescended to as merely decorative. Recall John Updike’s famous putdown of Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park No. 79 (1975): “Meeting a painting like this, so beautiful in its balanced tones and enigmatic nervousness, not in our reductive pages but on a suitably large wall, we accept it as ‘art,’ an expensive variety of wallpaper” (Just Looking, 1989). 

I read that many years ago and never forgot it. Is that what abstraction is – “an expensive variety of wallpaper”? Gopnik provides a tonic counter-perspective: “For her fond biographer, Frankenthaler’s art delights the eye, as it was designed to, and that’s enough. Enough? It’s everything.”

April 12, 2021 Issue

Reviewing Alexander Nemerov’s Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, in this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik says that Nemerov “is underequipped to make people and pictures live on the page. No one could pick a picture out from all the others after reading his description of it.” I’m not sure this is entirely fair. In his book, Nemerov describes Frankenthaler’s early The Sightseers (1951) as follows:

A spread of thick sweeping black lines structures the picture, the artist keeping them loose and open. The lines move and vibrate, making a syncopated visual field, alive with scribbled crayon color, like a flashing neon sign caught in the pulsing moment when images and afterimages are the same.

And here’s his description of Frankenthaler’s great Mountains and Sea (1952):

The shapes in it remain stable – a bouquet of pastel colors anchors it at the center, alsmost as if the picture were a massive floral still life – but they also rise and float. Too turpentine-soaked to be opaque, each color refuses to be dense. Lightness comes into being, so the painting implies, precisely in its precariousness. Lightness is fugitive – it is always falling away, as Helen’s choice to suspend the whole floral array on the single blue line above the pink ball implies.

That “Too turpentine-soaked to be opaque, each color refuses to be dense” is very fine. Gopnik’s criticism of Nemerov’s ekphrasis is a shade harsh.

The best description of Frankenthaler’s work that I’ve read is by Peter Schjeldahl: 

Yellow Caterpillar, 1961, and Seascape with Dunes, 1962, feature rhythmical lollops of intense color as fresh as cold water and hanging together with the vernacular rightness of great jazz. 

That’s from Schjeldahl’s “ ‘Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective’ ” (in Schjeldahl’s The 7 Days Art Columns 1988-1990), a review that also contains this memorably cutting line: “But the upshot for pleasure-seeking eyes is that her paintings aren’t only not beautiful, they aren’t even pretty.”

February 8, 2021 Issue

Adam Gopnik, in his absorbing “The Human Clay,” in this week’s issue, seems preoccupied with Lucian Freud’s “fat” paintings. He calls Freud “the British painter of fat people who own their fat—who maintain an ungrumbling harmony with their own imperfection so complete that it becomes a kind of perfection.” I’m not a fan of Freud’s “fat” paintings; I find them repulsive. But I love his Two Japanese Wrestlers by a Sink (1983/87). For me, that’s the work that best represents his extraordinary realist art. Why? How long have you got? Because, one, almost everything that exists deserves reverence and can be the subject of art, and this crazy-good painting of a sink, faucets, and running water proves it. Two, if you test an image by its reality, as I do, this one by Freud easily passes; you can almost hear that water as it flows from the brass taps down into the sink, into the silver drain. Three, my eyes devour the rich, gorgeous, luscious painterliness of it, each tile a miniature abstract masterpiece, the sink a blend of whites – ivory, cream, bone, porcelain – with subtle hints of beige, blue, gray, and mauve; the brass taps the essence of brassiness; the water like a braid of liquid crystal. A most original and striking picture. 

Lucian Freud, Two Japanese Wrestlers by a Sink (1983/87)

Best of the Decade: Alternate List

Photo by Marcin Gala, from Burkhard Bilger's "In Deep"

I had fun doing “Best of the Decade.” But skimming the crème de la crème off ten years’ worth of New Yorker reporting pieces wasn’t easy. Narrowing the list to just twelve was agony. I was forced to discard many wonderful articles, including some personal favorites. To atone for my ruthless selection process, I’ve decided to compile a second list – twelve more excellent pieces that could easily have made the first list, if there’d been room. Here are my picks, with a choice quotation from each in brackets:

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Deadhead,” November 26, 2012 (“In the pavilion, the tapers had set up a cityscape of microphone stands, like minarets, and through them there was the sight of Jerry Garcia, fat and hunched, virtually immobile in a haze of his own cigarette smoke”). 

2. Burkhard Bilger, “In Deep,” April 21, 2014 (“One passage led back to the beginning of the sump, another to the loop behind them, a third to a dead end they’d explored earlier. That left one unexplored passage. It took them up a short corridor, along a rising slope of terraced mustard-colored flowstone, and into a small domed chamber. There was an air bell at the top about the size of a car trunk, so they swam up and took off their helmets and neoprene hoods to talk. They seemed to be at a dead end. They were cold, tired, and disoriented, and their air ration had nearly run out. There was no choice but to head back”). 

3. Dana Goodyear, “The Earth Mover,” August 29, 2016 (“I walked into the site, through smooth gray-brown gravel mounds, serene and raked as Zen gardens, graded to the angle of repose, so that no rocks slide. Like blast shields, the mounds blocked the view; their shapes, which can be seen in whole only from the air, form a coded alphabet of charm stone, dog bone, cross, and adze. A ramp sloped up to the east, to the top of a bulwark, against which leaned massive ceramic stelae”).

4. William Finnegan, “Silver or Lead,” May 31, 2010 (“To check out La Familia’s claim to be driving cristal addiction from Michoacán, I went to Zamora, a midsized city in the northwestern corner of the state. La Familia was doing some vivid social messaging there. Two days before my arrival, and some weeks earlier, groups of flagellants had appeared on the roads around Zamora—men with their shirts pulled up or off and their backs whipped raw. The men chanted and carried placards denouncing themselves as thieves and rapists. Some of the placards were signed ‘La Familia’ ”).

5. Aleksandar Hemon, “Mapping Home,” December 5, 2011 (“I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the odor of hard life and sewage—during the siege, people had often taken shelter from the shelling in their basements”).

6. Peter Schjeldahl, “The Flip Side,” November 29, 2010 (“But nothing that we know of anticipated the eloquence of van Eyck’s glazes, which pool like liquid radiance across his pictures’ smooth surfaces, trapping and releasing graded tones of light and shadow and effulgences of brilliant color”).

7. Geoff Dyer, “Poles Apart,” April 18, 2011 (“The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away. The constellations were complicated by passenger jets, blinking planes, flashing satellites. It was like rush hour in the era of interplanetary travel. The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight”).

8. Alexandra Schwartz, “Bounty Hunters,” November 25, 2019 (“You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear. You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them. It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart”).

9. Dexter Filkins, “Atonement,” October 29 & November 5, 2012 (“Lobello might not have felt that he needed to apologize, but he was haunted by what had happened, traumatized, maybe even ruined. He wanted to know that the survivors understood why he had done what he had, even if it was not entirely defensible. And he wanted them to know that he felt their suffering in his own. Lobello did not quite say it, but when I left his apartment I felt that what he was really looking for was absolution”).

10. Rebecca Mead, “Sole Cycle,” March 23, 2015 (“Haslbeck suggested that I try on the lace-up boot, and I slipped my bare foot into it. With the warmth and softness of the fur, and the cradling comfort of the foot bed, it felt wonderful. I think I may have gasped”).

11. Gabrielle Hamilton, “The Lamb Roast,” January 17, 2011 (“Then the sun started to set and we lit the paper-bag luminarias, and the lambs were crisp-skinned and sticky, and the root beer was frigid, and it caught, like an emotion, in the back of my throat”).

12. Adam Gopnik, “Cool Running,” July 11 & 18, 2016 (“A birthday cake appeared, and then—a hallucinatory moment—another Icelandic actress sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ in a perfect impression of Marilyn singing it to J.F.K., sexy sibilant by erotic syllable: ‘Happy biiirthday, Misstah Prez-uh-dent . . .’ The crowd cheered in pleasure and recognition. We live on one planet, indivisible”).

First Person Perfect

Photo by Alice Zoo, from Rebecca Mead's "Going for the Cold"

There’s a type of narrative sentence I find irresistible. Example: “One day, I went to Athens and met Joe Corn, a senior wildlife biologist for SCWDS, who has trapped and studied thousands of wild hogs” (Ian Frazier, “Hogs Wild”). Now, that might strike you as fairly mundane. You were probably expecting something with a bit more pizazz. But pizazz is not what this kind of sentence is about. Here’s another one: “Later that day, I crowded, together with what seemed like the entire remaining population of Reykjavik, into Ingólfstorg square to watch the Iceland-Austria match” (Adam Gopnik, “Cool Running”). That’s a shade more exotic than Frazier’s “wild hogs” line, but it still has the three main ingredients I relish: first-person pronoun (“I”), active verb (“crowded”), and specific nouns (“Reykjavik,” “Ingólfstorg square,” “Iceland-Austria match”). Often one or more of the nouns is a place name. As a means of jump-starting an account of an interesting experience, such sentences are unbeatable. I read them and think, Let’s go! Here are a few examples from recent New Yorker pieces:

Not long after sunrise on a gray Halloween morning, I joined the members of the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond Association for a celebratory swim and breakfast. – Rebecca Mead, “Going for the Cold”

A little after midnight, while Hunter was still in jail, I swung by Thirty-eighth and Chicago, where people were still congregating. – Luke Mogelson, “The Uprising”

On a cool Monday morning in May, I met Fidel at the Church of the Good Shepherd, an austere gray stone building with red doors on the corner of Fourth Avenue and the Bay Ridge Parkway. – Jonathan Blitzer, “Higher Calling”

One crisp, bright morning in February, I walked along a brook just outside the center of Davos, toward the headquarters of the Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research. – James Somers, “Cold War”

In November, just before the first snows shut down access to the Whites, I made a final trip to the Schulman Grove. – Alex Ross, “The Bristlecones Speak”

Three Superb "New Yorker" Pieces on Iceland

Photo by Valdimar Thorlacius, from Elizabeth Kolbert's "Independent People"

In my post last week regarding the June 8 & 15 New Yorker, I focused on Peter Schjeldahl’s wonderful critical essay “Apart.” But there’s another excellent piece in that issue – Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Independent People.” It’s about Iceland’s response to COVID-19 – how it managed to beat the curve. But it’s also a rarity – a coronavirus travelogue. Kolbert says, “Despite the generalized gloom, it was thrilling to be going somewhere; for the previous eight weeks, the farthest I’d travelled was to the liquor store.” It was thrilling for me, too, just to be able to vicariously tag along with her as she nosed around Reykjavík,  struggling to abide by the rules of her modified quarantine. My favourite part of the piece is the last paragraph, in which Kolbert describes a Reykjavík evening:

That evening, the weather was clear and cool—by New York standards, too cool to eat outside, by Reykjavík standards balmy. The outdoor cafés were crowded. Restaurants had been asked to arrange their tables to keep groups two metres apart, but some diners, I noticed, had pushed the tables closer together. Everyone was talking and laughing, masklessly. The scene was completely ordinary, which is to say now exotic—just people meeting up with friends for dinner. For a traveller these days, this might be an even better draw, I thought, than glaciers or whale-watching.

That “Everyone was talking and laughing, masklessly” is inspired!

Reading “Independent People,” I recalled two other New Yorker pieces on Iceland that I enjoyed immensely: Adam Gopnik’s “Cool Running” (July 11 & 18, 2016) and Nick Paumgarten’s “Life Is Rescues” (November 9, 2015).

“Cool Running” is Gopnik’s first-person account of his experience hanging out with historian Guðni Jóhannesson as he campaigned to become Iceland’s President. I like the last paragraph of this piece, too – a description of election-night at the Reykjavík Grand Hotel ballroom when it became clear that Jóhannesson won:

I have always wanted to be the first to say to someone “Congratulations, Mr. President.” And so I waited for Guðni to come to the ballroom. He arrived at last, buffeted by cameras, and made a speech, with Eliza, in a blue First Lady’s dress, by his side. He was obviously promising to be the President of all Icelanders, the last step in the choreography of candidacy. A birthday cake appeared, and then—a hallucinatory moment—another Icelandic actress sang “Happy Birthday,” in a perfect impression of Marilyn singing it to J.F.K., sexy sibilant by erotic syllable: “Happy biiirthday, Misstah Prez-uh-dent . . . ” The crowd cheered in pleasure and recognition. We live on one planet, indivisible.

Paumgarten’s “Life Is Rescues” tells about his experience riding with a search-and-rescue team on patrol in Iceland’s southern plain. The team is part of Iceland’s renowned Slysavarnafélagið Landsbjörg – an extensive system of emergency-response volunteers. The piece contains one of my favourite details in all New Yorker writing – bananas hanging on a row of plastic hangers in a kitchen tent:

I wandered out into the rain and then into the kitchen tent. On a row of plastic hangers someone had hung the team’s bananas. Each hanger held two bunches. I stood looking at this, in admiration and wonder. Iceland.

“Admiration and wonder” pretty well sums up the viewpoint of all three of these great New Yorker pieces. I highly recommend them.

May 4, 2020 Issue

The New Yorker’s coronavirus coverage continues to impress immensely. Of its many superb pieces – Peter Hessler’s “Life on Lockdown,” Adam Gopnik’s “Abundance of Caution,” Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The One and the Many,” Rivka Galchen’s “The Longest Shift,” Jonathan Blitzer’s “Juan Sanabria” – perhaps the most striking and original (so far) is “April 15, 2020,” in this week’s issue. It's a kaleidoscopic account of a single day in New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic, written by twenty-five New Yorker reporters and illustrated (in the online version) by seventeen photographers. 

Comprising thirty-two snapshots of life in the city, the piece is structured chronologically, beginning “soon after midnight” at John F. Kennedy Airport and ending twenty-four hours later at Lower Manhattan Hospital. In between, it visits, among other places, Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach (“The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere”); the Amazon fulfilment center on Staten Island (“Previously, masked employees wielding thermometer guns had taken co-workers’ temperatures as they entered the four-story building; now an automated system was in place”); the Hudson Theatre near Times Square (“A drained wash of yellowish light came from a single bulb on the lip of the stage”); the Montefiore Medical Center, in the Bronx (“Urgent codes rang out on the P.A. system: ‘Rapid response,’ for when a patient can’t breathe; ‘C.A.C.,’ for cardiac arrest”); the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“But, that morning, as daffodils bloomed and cherry trees shed pink petals onto sidewalks all over the city, the urns stood empty”); the American Museum of Natural History (“In individual containers on a sunny windowsill, a dozen large garden spiders sat in their webs”); the Herald Square subway station (“An elderly woman dozed behind a phone-charging kiosk, sitting on a suitcase, leaning against a well-filled shopping cart, her head nodding”); an I.C.U. at Weill Cornell Medicine (“Bright fluorescent lights; on the bed, a gaunt man with paper-white hair, age seventy-five. Intubated. His skin was nearly translucent”); the top floor of an East Village walkup (“Near the window, Fredericks tuned his electric guitar—a teal-blue Bobkat with a Stratocaster neck”); Sherman’s Flatbush Memorial Chapel, in Midwood, Brooklyn (“Inside, four tables held eight bodies, some of them in scuffed orange pouches from the hospital, others in clear sleeves no thicker than garbage bags”); on a tugboat on the north shore of Staten Island (“With its nearly seven-thousand-horsepower engines and azimuth propeller, it can go forward, backward, and sideways, or spin like a top on the water”).

“She wore a high-visibility vest, and her eyes danced brightly above a blue mask” – I relish sentences like that. “April 15, 2020” brims with them.

My favourite part is the visit to Russ & Daughters on East Houston Street. The reporter (is it Helen Rosner?) describes the aroma inside the shop: “The next day, the air was perfumed with a familiar smell—smoky, briny, yeasty-sweet—tinged with a jagged note of surface cleaner.” The quotation at the end made me smile:

Tupper regarded the assemblage as it came together on the counter. “This is a small little order,” he said. “But you know, right now, if someone wants a quarter pound of whitefish salad, we’re doing whatever we can.”

Whoever conceived the idea of this brilliant mosaic portrait of twenty-four hours in the life of NYC as it struggles to deal with the pandemic is a genius. Bravo, New Yorker!

Postscript: The online version of “April 15, 2020” is a remarkable photo text, featuring forty-five still images and four short video loops. The photos and videos don’t appear to depict people or scenes mentioned in the text, but they certainly complement it. Like the text, they document New York's coronavirus reality. Many of them are artfully matter-of-fact. For example:

Andre D. Wagner, "11:50 A.M., Williamsburg, Brooklyn"

Joseph Michael Lopez, "2:53 P.M., West Farms, the Bronx"

Dina Litovsky, "9:58 P.M., Times Square"

My favourite “April 15, 2020” illustration is Sam Youkilis’s “10:13 A.M., Tribeca,” a transfixing fifteen second video loop showing a masked florist assembling a bouquet of purple lilacs – the visual equivalent of a lyric poem. My eyes devour it. 

Bread, Bread, Bread

Leo Espinosa's illustration for Bill Buford's "Good Bread"

Reading Bill Buford’s “Good Bread” (April 13, 2020), I recalled two other excellent New Yorker “bread” pieces: Lauren Collins’ “Bread Winner” (December 3, 2012) and Adam Gopnik’s “Bread and Women” (November 4, 2013). It’s interesting to compare them.

Buford’s “Good Bread” is about his apprenticeship to a Lyon bread maker identified simply as “Bob.” Here’s his description of Bob’s boulangerie:

By nine, a line extended down the street, and the shop, when you finally got inside, was loud from people and from music being played at high volume. Everyone shouted to be heard—the cacophonous hustle, oven doors banging, people waving and trying to get noticed, too-hot-to-touch baguettes arriving in baskets, money changing hands. Everyone left with an armful and with the same look, suspended between appetite and the prospect of an appetite satisfied. It was a lesson in the appeal of good bread—handmade, aromatically yeasty, with a just-out-of-the-oven texture of crunchy air. This was their breakfast. It completed the week. This was Sunday in Lyon.

Collins’ “Bread Winner” profiles Apollonia Poilâne, “C.E.O. of the company that for eight decades has made Paris’s most celebrated bread.” Collins says of Poilâne,

Thin, pale, and refined, Apollonia—more of a baguette of a woman than a miche—is a formidable presence. She dispenses her opinions with the peremptory air of a mother-in-law giving child-care advice. She makes recommendations with the efficient gravity of a doctor writing a prescription. Still, she projects a mixture of innocence and experience. Her eyes are often hooded, from fatigue, but so are her sweatshirts. “I have a very instinctive and simple approach to bread,” she told me. “My philosophy is a small array of breads, each with its own use. I do not believe in making one bread with hazelnuts, one with almonds, and one with cumin, just for the hell of it.” Her other prejudices include breads that contain meats (“doughy and nasty”), breads that contain cheeses (“frivolous”), breads that contain novelty ingredients, such as algae (“not very relevant”), “organic” breads (“I don’t believe in paying money to some guy sitting behind a desk to certify something, when my father and grandfather before me were working very closely with their suppliers to make sure there were as few pesticides as possible”), panini (“pointless”), bakeries that sell soda (“drives me nuts”), and the French habit of eating foie gras with gingerbread (“fucking disgusting”).

Gopnik’s “Bread and Women” tells about a weekend he spent with his mother, learning how to bake bread. He says,

As we mixed and kneaded, the comforting sounds of my childhood reasserted themselves: the steady hum of the powerful electric mixer my mother uses, the dough hook humming and coughing as it turned, and, in harmony with it, the sound of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the background, offering its perpetual mixture of grave-sounding news and bright-sounding Baroque music. (A certain kind of Canadian keeps the CBC on from early morning to bedtime, indiscriminately.)

All three of these pieces are wonderfully evocative. For example, here’s Buford’s account of accompanying Bob on one of his delivery rounds:

Bob drove fast, he talked fast, he parked badly. The first stop was L’Harmonie des Vins, on the Presqu’île, a wine bar with food (“But good food,” Bob said). Two owners were in the back, busy preparing for the lunch service but delighted by the sight of their bread guy, even though he came by every day at exactly this time. I was introduced, Bob’s new student, quick-quick, bag drop, kisses, out. Next: La Quintessence, a new restaurant (“Really good food,” Bob said, pumping his fist), husband and wife, one prep cook, frantic, but spontaneous smiles, the introduction, the bag drop, kisses, out. We crossed the Rhône, rolled up onto a sidewalk, and rushed out, Bob with one sack of bread, me with another, trying to keep up: Les Oliviers (“Exceptional food”—a double pump—“Michelin-listed but not pretentious”), young chef, tough-guy shoulders, an affectionate face, bag drop, high-fives, out.

Here’s Collins’ description of Poilâne’s manufactory:

A baker was sliding a batch of pale miches into the oven with a wooden paddle the length of an oar. He and his apprentice wore canvas shoes, white shorts, and white T-shirts. They looked like tennis pros. The air was warm, with a breakfasty smell. The oven roared. To make the loaves, the bakers had churned flour, water, and salt in a mechanical mixer. (It’s like a KitchenAid, but many times larger.) After letting the dough rise in a wooden box, they shaped it by hand, then let it rest a second time. Finally, the master baker used a razor blade to score the top of each loaf with the signature “P.” (The practice, known as “docking,” insures that the loaf doesn’t burst while it’s baking.)

And here’s Gopnik’s description of bread dough's feel:

I was taken by the plasticity of every sort of dough, its way of being pliable to your touch and then springy—first merging into your hands and then stretching and resisting, oddly alive, as though it had a mind of its own, the collective intelligence of all those little bugs. Bread dough isn’t like dinner food, which usually rests inert under the knife and waits for you to do something to it: bread dough sits there, respiring and rising, thinking things over.

You can tell from the sensuousness of their descriptions that all three of these writers love bread. Buford says of a roll he’s served at Boulangerie Vincent in Le Bourget-du-Lac:

It had the flavors that I had tasted at breakfast. I asked for another roll, broke it open, and stuck my nose into la mie, the crumb—Frederick’s routine. It smelled of yeast and oven-caramelized aromas, and of something else, an evocative fruitiness. I closed my eyes. Bob.

Collins says of Poilâne’s signature loaf: 

A Poilâne miche brings to mind something with which a troubadour might have sopped up broth at a medieval tavern. It reverberates in the mouth for a few seconds after you’ve swallowed it, as though the taste buds were strings.

Gopnik describes the smell of baking bread:

Then, there are the smells. There’s the beery, yeast-release aroma that spreads around the kitchen, the slowly exuding I’m-on-my-way smell of the rising loaf, and the intensifying fresh-bread smell that comes from the oven as it bakes. The deepest sensual pleasure of bread occurs not when tasting but when slicing, cutting into softness that has suddenly gained structure: the pile of yeasty dough, after its time in the hot oven, turned into a little house, with a crisp solid roof and a yielding interior of inner space. 

Mmm, so good! These three “bread” pieces are double bliss: the subject is delicious; the writing is divine.