10 Best Personal History Pieces: #1 Aleksandar Hemon's "Mapping Home"

The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces appear there. Over the past nine months I’ve chosen nine of my favorites (one per month). Today I conclude the series with my #1 pick – Aleksandar Hemon’s great “Mapping Home” (December 5, 2011).

This is a tale of two cities – Sarajevo and Chicago. Hemon is Sarajevan to the tips of his fingernails. He was born and grew up there. Of his 1991 self, age 26, when he was writing a newspaper column called “Sarejevo Republika,” he writes, 

Fancying myself a street-savvy columnist, I raked the city for material, absorbing impressions and details and generating ideas for my writing. I don’t know if I would’ve used the word back then, but now I am prone to reimagining my younger self as one of Baudelaire’s flâneurs, as someone who wanted to be everywhere and nowhere in particular, for whom wandering was the main means of communication with the city. Sarajevo was a small town, viscous with stories and history, brimming with people I knew and loved, all of whom I could monitor from a well-chosen kafana perch or while patrolling the streets. As I surveyed the estuaries of Vase Miskina or the obscure, narrow streets in the hills, complete paragraphs flooded my brain; not infrequently, and mysteriously, a simple lust would possess my body. The city laid itself down for me; wandering stimulated my body as well as my mind. It probably didn’t hurt that my daily caffeine and nicotine intake bordered on stroke-inducing—what wine and opium must have been for Baudelaire, coffee and cigarettes were for me.

Hemon’s sensibility is intensely flâneurial. For example: 

I entered buildings just to smell their hallways. I studied the edges of stone stairs rounded by the many soles that had rubbed against them in the past century or two. I spent gameless days at the Željo soccer stadium, eavesdropping on the pensioners—the retirees who were lifelong season-ticket holders—as they strolled in circles within its walls, discussing the heartrending losses and unlikely victories of the past. I returned to places I had known my whole life in order to capture details that had been blurred by excessive familiarity. I collected sensations and faces, smells and sights, fully internalizing Sarajevo’s architecture and its physiognomies. I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul. Physically and metaphysically, I was placed. 

And then, in 1992, the most devastating thing happens – the Bosnian War. Hemon is in Chicago on a cultural exchange when it starts. He’s supposed to return to Sarajevo on May 1. His father advises him to stay away. Nothing good is going to happen at home, he says. Daily, Hemon wrangles with his conscience: should he stay or return home? Much of that wrangling he does while incessantly roaming the streets of Chicago, “as though I could simply walk off my moral anxiety.” He writes,

I’d pick a movie that I wanted to see—both for distraction and out of my old habits as a film reviewer—then locate, with my friend’s help, a theatre that was showing it. From Ukrainian Village, the neighborhood where I was staying, I’d take public transportation a couple of hours before the movie started, buy a ticket, and then wander in concentric circles around the movie theatre. 

He calls himself “a tormented flâneur”: 

A tormented flâneur, I kept walking, my Achilles tendons sore, my head in the clouds of fear and longing for Sarajevo, until I finally reconciled myself to the idea of staying. On May 1st, I did not fly home. On May 2nd, all the exits out of the city were blocked; the longest siege in modern history began. In Chicago, I submitted my application for political asylum. The rest is the rest of my life.

In Chicago, he experiences “anxiety of displacement.” He copes by walking. He takes a job canvassing for Greenpeace. It takes him all over the city:

So, in the early summer of 1992, I found myself canvassing in the proudly indistinguishable, dull western suburbs (Schaumburg, Naperville); in the wealthy North Shore ones (Wilmette, Winnetka, Lake Forest), with their hospital-size houses and herds of cars in palatial garages; and in the southern working-class ones (Blue Island, Park Forest), where people invited me into their homes and offered me stale Twinkies. But my favorite turf was, predictably, in the city: Pullman, Beverly, Lakeview, and then the Parks—Hyde, Lincoln, Rogers. Little by little, I began to sort out the geography of Chicagoland, assembling a street map in my mind, building by building, door by door. Occasionally, I slacked off before canvassing, in a local diner, struggling to enjoy the burned-corn taste of American coffee, monitoring the foot traffic, the corner drug trade, the friendly ladies. A few times, I skipped work entirely and just walked and walked in the neighborhood assigned to me. I became a low-wage, immigrant flâneur.

He moves to a rough neighborhood called Edgewater, on Chicago’s North Side. He develops a set of ritualistic practices:

Before sleep, I would listen to a demented monologue delivered by a chemically stimulated corner loiterer, and occasionally muffled by the soothing sound of trains clattering past on the El tracks. In the morning, drinking coffee, I would watch from my window the people waiting at the Granville El stop, recognizing the regulars. Sometimes I’d splurge on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway (now long gone) that offered a $2.99 all-you-can-eat deal to the likes of me and the residents of a nursing home on Winthrop, who would arrive en masse, holding hands like schoolchildren. At Gino’s North, where there was only one beer on tap and where many an artist got shitfaced, I’d watch the victorious Bulls’ games, high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar. I’d spend weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theatre. I often played with an old Assyrian named Peter, who owned a perfume shop and who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and forced me to resign, would make the same joke: “Can I have that in writing?” But there was no writing coming from me. Deeply displaced, I could write neither in Bosnian nor in English.

Gradually, gradually, Chicago enters him. He begins to know it “in his body” the way he knew Sarajevo. He becomes a local:

Little by little, people in Edgewater began to recognize me; I started greeting them on the street. Over time, I acquired a barber and a butcher and a movie theatre and a coffee shop with a steady cast of colorful characters (the chess players). I discovered that in order to transform an American city into a personal space you had to start in a particular neighborhood. Soon, I began to claim Edgewater as mine; I became a local. It was there that I understood what Nelson Algren meant when he wrote that loving Chicago was like loving a woman with a broken nose: I fell in love with the broken noses of Edgewater. On the AiR’s ancient communal Mac, I typed my first attempts at stories in English.

I love this piece. It describes the anxiety of displacement that many of us feel when we move to a new place, and it prescribes an antidote – walk, wander, look, collect sensations, internalize the architecture. In other words, be a flâneur. 

Credit: The above illustration by Riccardo Vecchio is from Aleksandar Hemon’s “Mapping Home” (The New Yorker, December 5, 2011).

The First Person Is Real (Contra Merve Emre)

Merve Emre (Photo from The New York Review of Books)

Merve Emre, in her profoundly wrongheaded “The Illusion of the First Person” (The New York Review of Books, November 3, 2022), argues that the “I” in personal essays is a fiction. She says, 

Most essayists and scholars who write about the personal essay agree that its “I” is, by necessity and choice, an artful construction. Watch, they say, as it flickers in and out of focus as a “simulacrum,” a “chameleon,” a “made-up self,” a series of “distorting representations” of the individual from whose consciousness it originates and whose being it registers. 

She goes further. She contends that individual subjectivity, on which the “I” is based, is also fiction. She writes,

What if individual subjectivity were as much a fiction as the “I” with which it so prettily speaks? What if stressing the artifice of the first person were, as Louis Althusser argued, a strategy for masking “the internal limitations on what its author can and cannot say”? What if the real limitation of the genre were its glittering veneer of expressive freedom, of speaking and writing as a self-determining subject? What if no performance of stylish confession or sly concealment could shake this ideology loose? What if these performances only intensified the enchantments of subjectivity?

My answer is that, if all these “what ifs” were true, the personal essay would die. It would no longer be a firsthand account of lived experience. To me (this is my own individual subjectivity speaking), the “I” of the personal essay authenticates the experience it describes. It’s what makes that experience real. For example:

I try to be the best-dressed person in the infusion room. I wrap myself up in thrift-store luxury and pin it together with a large gold brooch in the shape of a horseshoe. The nurses always praise the way I dress. I need that. Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins.

After the infusion is done, I sit up until I fall over. I don’t give up until I give up. I try to win all the board games, remember all the books any of us have read, stay up late. Terrible things are happening in my body. Sometimes I will say it to my companions: “Terrible things are happening inside of me.” Finally, forty or forty-eight or sixty hours later, I can’t move and there is nothing to take for the pain, but, trying to be obedient to medicine and polite to my friends, I take something for the pain.

That’s from Anne Boyer’s brilliant “The Undying” (The New Yorker, April 15, 2019), her memoir of her experience fighting triple-negative breast cancer. “Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins.” How I love that sentence! Subjective to the bone. Is it fake? Come on! It’s presented in the magazine as “personal history,” i.e., as fact. There’s no doubting the authenticity of her experience. And, I submit, there’s no doubting the authenticity of her “I.” She is who she represents herself to be. How do I know? Because her “I” is part of her glorious style. And her style is who she is. 

Here's another example, this from one of my favorite personal essays – Edward Hoagland’s “Of Cows and Cambodia” (included in his great 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River):

During the invasion of Cambodia, an event which may rate little space when recent American initiatives are summarized but which for many of us seemed the last straw at the time, I made an escape to the woods. The old saw we’ve tried to live by for an egalitarian half-century that “nothing human is alien” has become so pervasive a truth that I was worn to a frazzle. I was the massacre victim, the massacring soldier, and all the gaudy queens and freaked-out hipsters on the street.

That’s from the essay’s remarkable opening paragraph. Whose “I” is that if not Hoagland’s? No one else writes that way. His style is as identifiable as a fingerprint. Subjectivity is at the heart of it. He has his own distinctive way of looking at things. His use of the first person to express himself is as natural to him as breathing. I can’t imagine him writing any other way.

Take another example. This is from Aleksandar Hemon’s wonderful “Mapping Home” (The New Yorker, December 5, 2011), his account of leaving Sarajevo and learning to live in Chicago. He writes,

I was still working for Greenpeace at this point, walking different city neighborhoods and suburbs every day, but every night I came back to the Edgewater studio I could call my own. I was beginning to develop a set of ritualistic practices. Before sleep, I would listen to a demented monologue delivered by a chemically stimulated corner loiterer, and occasionally muffled by the soothing sound of trains clattering past on the El tracks. In the morning, drinking coffee, I would watch from my window the people waiting at the Granville El stop, recognizing the regulars. Sometimes I’d splurge on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway (now long gone) that offered a $2.99 all-you-can-eat deal to the likes of me and the residents of a nursing home on Winthrop, who would arrive en masse, holding hands like schoolchildren. At Gino’s North, where there was only one beer on tap and where many an artist got shitfaced, I’d watch the victorious Bulls’ games, high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar. I’d spend weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theatre. I often played with an old Assyrian named Peter, who owned a perfume shop and who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and forced me to resign, would make the same joke: “Can I have that in writing?” But there was no writing coming from me. Deeply displaced, I could write neither in Bosnian nor in English.

I think it’s just plain common sense to interpret Hemon’s “I” as signifying Hemon himself. If it isn’t Hemon, who is it? Who is splurging on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway? Who is watching the Bulls’ games at Gino’s North, “high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar”? Who is spending weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theatre. Some ideal version of himself? I don’t think so. Hemon isn’t into writing ideal versions of himself. On the contrary, his aim is to bring us as close as he can to his immigrant experience. The piece is represented as fact, and I think it is fact, every word, including Hemon’s “I.” The onus is on Emre to prove otherwise. Invoking Adorno doesn’t cut it. 

Another example:

I had written about movies for almost fifteen years, trying to be true to the spirit of what I loved about movies, trying to develop a voice that would avoid saphead objectivity and let the reader in on what sort of person was responding to the world in this particular way.

That’s Pauline Kael, from her wonderful “The Movie Lover” (The New Yorker, March 13, 1994). There’s no chameleon here, no glittering veneer. Individual subjectivity exists. It thrives! It’s the key to great writing, nothing less. 

One more example:

I do not take notes as I read. I dog-ear—verso-top, recto-bottom—and underline sentences and paragraphs. I create a document and type out every underlined sentence and paragraph, sorted by book. Then I create a second document and sort the sentences and paragraphs by subject. The process of doing this usually gets me to a preliminary articulation of the argument I want to make, its beginning and its end, its arc, and its subclaims. I handwrite outlines in a very haphazard way, on the backs of bank statements and other stray envelopes strewn across my worktable. 

Seven “I”s. Who do they belong to? Answer: Merve Emre: see “Educate, Entertain, Scold, Charm: Merve Emre, interviewed by Lauren Kane” (The New York Review of Books, April 16, 2022). Is it really her? Perhaps those “I”s are just made-up versions of herself. But I don't think so. I think it’s really her in full individualist subjective mode. Writing outlines on the backs of bank statements? How bourgeois!   

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”).

James Wood's "The Nearest Thing to Life"

What does criticism gain by being personal? By “personal” I don’t mean ad hominem. I mean autobiographical. What is a critic aiming to accomplish when he includes a chunk of his own personal experience in his writing? In his new collection, The Nearest Thing to Life, James Wood serves up four essays, each of which contains a personal component. This is a departure for Wood. Most of his work consists of reviews – among the best in the business. He’s also written at least two personal essays – “The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon” and “Packing My Father-In-Law’s Library” – both collected in his great The Fun Stuff (2012). The pieces in The Nearest Thing To Life weave together personal history and literary commentary. They’re more ruminative than analytical. They’re like autobiography set to literary theory. For example, the first essay in the book, titled “Why?” (originally published in the December 9, 2013 New Yorker) is a meditation on death and fictional form. It begins with an account of a memorial service that Wood attended and ends with an examination of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. In between, it discusses death, religion, Wood’s strict religious upbringing, his discovery of fiction’s freedom (“I still remember that adolescent thrill, that sublime discovery of the novel and short story as an utterly free space, where anything might be thought, anything uttered”), and propounds a theory – “To read the novel is to be constantly moving between secular and religious modes, between what could be called instance and form.” The piece is a shade heavy on religion for my taste, but in light of Wood’s upbringing (“The scriptures saturated everything”), that’s forgivable. The real question is whether this form of essay is preferable to Wood’s essay-reviews. Before I answer, let’s briefly consider the other three pieces in The Nearest Thing to Life.

The second piece is “Serious Noticing” – my favorite of the four. It extends and amplifies Wood’s splendid philosophy of “detail.” In his How Fiction Works (2008), he says, “In life as in literature, we navigate via the stars of detail.” Wood has a jeweler’s eye for detail. He distinguishes between real and literary detail, relevant and irrelevant detail, “off-duty” and “on-duty” detail. In “Serious Noticing,” his consideration of Chekhov’s “The Kiss” (“The details are the stories; stories in miniature. As we get older, some of those details fade, and others, paradoxically, become more vivid. We are, in a way, all internal fiction writers and poets, rewriting our memories”) leads to a reminiscence about growing up in the northern English town of Durham (there’s a wonderful line describing coal pouring down a chute into the basement of his family’s house – “I vividly remember the volcanic sound, as it tumbled into the cellar, and the drifting, bluish coal-dust, and the dark, small men who carried those sacks on their backs, with tough leather pads on their shoulders”). The piece advances a theory of “life-surplus” (“the life-surplus of a story lies in its details”); talks about “serious noticing” (serious noticing is a way of “rescuing the life of things from their death”); and concludes by observing, “We can bring the dead back by applying the same attentiveness to their shades as we apply to the world around us – by looking harder: by transfiguring the object.” I question that last bit about “transfiguring the object.” It connects with an observation that Wood makes earlier in the piece: “Just as great writing asks us to look more closely, it asks us to participate in the transformation of the subject through metaphor and imagery.” So when Wood says, “by looking harder: by transfiguring the object,” he seems to be saying “looking harder” means looking at something in terms of its potential for metaphor and imagery. I disagree. For me, “looking harder” means seeing things exactly as they are. C. K. Williams, in his On Whitman (2010), says,

As for the body of the world, of existence – Whitman isn’t trying to raise reality through his poetry to another level of being, another realm of possibility: his poetry embodies rather the gigantic illuminations that are evident in perception. Unlike Rilke’s earth that desires only to be transformed; unlike Traherne’s “The corn was orient and immortal wheat,” Whitman’s vegetation is itself, his poems don’t need or want a mode of existence that depends on transformation: his metaphoric stuff is inherent in his perceptions; rather than using mind to alter reality, he finds ways to enlarge the underused senses of the mind, to fling the eyes and ears open wider, to make more sensitive the endings of the nerves.

Wood’s theory of transformation aside, his philosophy of detail, as expressed in How Fiction Works, and elaborated in “Serious Noticing,” seems to me one of the most useful, beautiful ideas in all of literary criticism. His love of detail is palpable. When he says, in “Serious Noticing,” “I think of details as nothing less than bits of life sticking out of the frieze of form, imploring us to touch them,” I feel his passion. I want to touch them, too.

The Nearest Thing to Life’s third essay is called “Using Everything.” It’s about the practice of literary criticism. It contains a few surprises. One of them is Wood’s revelation that “A lot of the criticism I most admire is not especially analytical but is really a kind of passionate rediscription.” He explains that by “passionate rediscription” he means “an act of critique that is at the same time a revoicing.” I like this idea of the critic as sort of jazz singer – the critic jazzing his subject text. But my first love is analysis. It’s why I read criticism. It’s why I devour Wood. He’s an excellent analyst of style, of structure and language. Here’s a quick example. In his How Fiction Works (2008), he quotes this long, remarkable sentence from Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre –

Lately, when Sabbath suckled at Drenk’s uberous breasts – uberous, the root word of exuberant, which is itself ex plus uberare, to be fruitful, to overflow like Juno lying prone in Tintoretto’s painting where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit – suckled with an unrelenting frenzy that caused Drenka to roll her head ecstatically back and to groan (as Juno herself may once groaned), “I feel it deep down in my cunt,” he was pierced by the sharpest longings for his late little mother.

 – and says,

This is an amazingly blasphemous little mélange. This sentence is really dirty, and partly because it conforms to the well-known definition of dirt – matter out of place, which is itself a definition of high and low dictions. But why would Roth engage in such baroque deferrals and shifts. Why write it so complicatedly? If you render the simple matter of his sentence and keep everything in place – i.e., remove the jostle of registers – you see why. A simple version would go like this: “Lately, when Sabbath sucked Drenka’s breasts, he was pierced by the sharpest longing for his mother.” It is still funny, because of the slide from lover to mother, but it is not exuberant. So the first thing the complexity achieves is to enact the exuberance, the hasty joy and chaotic desire, of sex. Second, the long, mock-pedantic, suspended subclause about the Latin origin of “uberous” and Tintoretto’s painting of Juno works, in proper music-hall fashion, to delay the punchline of “he was pieced by the sharpest of longings for his late little mother.” (It also delays, and makes more shocking and unexpected, the entrance of “cunt.”) Third, since the comedy of the subject matter of the sentence involves moving from one register to another – from a lover’s breast to a mother’s – it is fitting that the style of the sentence mimics this scandalous shift, by engaging in its own stylistic shifts, going up and down like a manic EKG: so we have “suckled” (high diction), “breasts” (medium), “uberare” (high), “Tintoretto’s painting” (high), “where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit” (low), “unrelenting frenzy” (high, rather formal diction), “as Juno herself may have once groaned” (still quite high), “cunt” (very low), “pierced by the sharpest of longings” (high, formal diction again). By insisting on equalizing all these different levels of diction, the style of the sentence works as style should, to incarnate the meaning, and the meaning itself, of course, is all about the scandal of equalizing different registers.

Wood’s criticism abounds with such analysis or redescription or descriptive analysis. Wood can call it whatever he wants so long as he keeps writing it. I can’t get enough of it.

Another surprise in “Using Everything” is Wood’s view of criticism as a form of storytelling. He says, “The good critic has an awareness that criticism means, in part, telling a story about the story you are reading.” Really? What I like about criticism, in general, and Wood’s reviews, in particular, is that they aren’t stories. They’re description; they’re analysis; they’re argument. “Give me some straight talk. Give me a little humor. Give me something real. Above all, give me an argument,” Dwight Garner says, in “A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical” (The New York Times Magazine, August 15, 2012). I agree.

The great value of “Using Everything,” as far as I’m concerned, lies in its appreciation of criticism as literature. The best critics, Wood says, “speak to literature in its own language.” This is a refreshing corrective to the dismal views expressed by Adam Gopnik (“Criticism serves a lower end than art does, and has little effect on it”: see “Postscript:Robert Hughes,” newyorker.com, August 7, 2012) and Richard Brody (“Criticism is a parasitical operation”: see “How To Be A Critic,” newyorker.com, August 22, 2012). For me, criticism – “writerly criticism,” as Wood calls it – is one of the most stimulating, satisfying, nourishing sources of reading pleasure. Janet Malcolm’s deconstruction of Sylvia Plath biographies (The Silent Woman), Richard Ellmann’s tracing of the sources of Joyce’s “The Dead” (James Joyce), Helen Vendler’s analysis of the grammatical shifts in Seamus Heaney’s style (The Breaking of Style), Michael Fried’s analysis of the structures of Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (Realism, Writing, Disfiguration), Svetlana Alpers’s argument for the importance of the distinction between description and narration (The Art of Describing) – I could go on and on – are every bit as artful and creative as the great works they take as their subjects. They are literature. I value them immensely.

The fourth essay in The Nearest Thing to Life is “Secular Homelessness.” I praised it when it originally appeared in the London Review of Books (February 20, 2014) under the title “On Not Going Home” (see my comment here). But rereading it in The Nearest Thing to Life, I’ve had second thoughts. It is a great essay – I’m still convinced of that – the verbal equivalent of a Rauschenberg combine, in which materials as diverse as Thomas Tallis’s “O Nata Lux,” Durham Cathedral, the Hudson River, Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile,” a Green Card, a bumper sticker, Boar’s Head trucks, Deltic diesels, W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants are conjoined to make an arresting meditation on homelessness. But Wood’s mirroring off exilic literature strikes me as a bit much. His life is not in the least comparable to Said’s and Sebald’s tragic exiles, refugees, expatriates, and émigrés. And his statement that after eighteen years living in the U.S., he looks down his Boston Street and “feels nothing” is hard to comprehend. Compare it with Aleksandar Hemon’s immigrant experience, as described in his superb "Mapping Home" (The New Yorker, December 5, 2011). In March, 1992, Hemon, a Bosnian citizen, arrived in Chicago on a cultural exchange. He planned to stay only a month. But in April, the Bosnian War began and Hemon decided to stay in Chicago. To get to know the place better, he did a lot of walking. He says, “I wanted from Chicago what I’d got from Sarajevo: a geography of the soul.” Eventually, he settled into the Chicago neighborhood of Edgewater. “Little by little,” he writes,

people in Edgewater began to recognize me; I started greeting them on the street. Overtime, I acquired a barber and a butcher and a coffee shop with a steady set of colorful characters – which were, as I’d learned in Sarajevo, the necessary knots in my personal urban network. I discovered that the process of transforming an American city into a space you could call your own required starting in a particular neighborhood. Soon I began to claim Edgewater as mine; I became a local.

This is quite a different story from Wood’s. My point is that not all immigrants feel homeless. It’s possible to make a home in a new place. But you have to want to; like Hemon, you have to want “a geography of the soul.” I suspect that the only place in which Wood truly feels at home is his books. This would be the case even if he'd stayed in England.

And now to return to my initial question: Are the hybrid essays in The Nearest Thing to Life preferable to Wood’s reviews? The answer is no they aren’t. I relish the descriptive analysis of his reviews. They are a form of art. Long may he keep writing them.

Interesting Emendations: Aleksandar Hemon's "Mapping Home"

When Aleksandar Hemon’s "Mapping Home" appeared in The New Yorker (December 5, 2011), I devoured it. I enjoy reading pieces about walking. In “Mapping Home,” walking is used as a way of coping with the “anxiety of displacement.” I used it the same way when I lived in Iqaluit, tramping the dusty gravel roads, the ancient Inuit footpaths, the tundra trails along the Sylvia Grinnell River. Like Hemon in Sarajavo, and later in Chicago, “I collected sensations and faces, smells and sights,” trying to comprehend the place, to know it (in Hemon’s felicitous words) “in my body.” “Mapping Home” is included in Hemon’s excellent new collection The Book of My Lives. It’s now called “The Lives of a Flaneur.” It’s as wonderful in the rereading as in the reading. There are a few differences between this version and the New Yorker original. One of my favorite passages – a description of Hemon’s wanderings when he returned to Sarajevo in 1997 – is slightly altered. Here’s the magazine version:

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. I idled in coffee shops, drinking coffee that tasted like burned corn, instead of the foamy pungency I remembered from before the war. Everything around me was both familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant. (Emphasis added)

And here’s the book version:

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 smell of hard life and sewage – during the siege, people had taken shelter from the shelling in their basements. I idled in coffee shops, drinking coffee that tasted unlike what I remembered from before the war – it was like burnt corn now. As a Bosnian in Chicago, I’d experienced one form of displacement, but this was another: I was displaced in a place that had been mine. In Sarajevo, everything around me was familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant. (Emphasis added)

Does it matter whether you say “odor” or “smell,” “burned” or “burnt”? Is the substitution of “unlike what I remembered from before the war” for “instead of the foamy pungency I remembered from before the war” significant? For me, it is. It’s fascinating to see a master wrier like Hemon reworking his composition. In another memorable passage, “residents of a nursing home on Winthrop” becomes “drooling residents of a nursing home on Winthrop” (emphasis added). In the original of his description of his weekend chess games at Rogers Park coffee shop, he writes, “I often played with an old Assyrian named Peter, who owned a perfume shop and who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and forced me to resign, would make the same joke: ‘Can I have that in writing?’” In the book version this is changed to “I often played with an Assyrian named Peter, who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and I offered to resign, would crack the same joke: ‘Can I have that in writing?’” Comparison of the two versions discloses several other changes as well. But I don’t want to make too much of these variations. Both versions are essentially the same. Both are superb. Both are consummate expressions of what it means to locate “a geography of the soul.”

Credit: The above portrait of Aleksandar Hemon is by Riccardo Vecchio; it appears in The New Yorker (December 5, 2011) as an illustration for Hemon’s “Mapping Home.” 

September 10, 2012 Issue

There are four remarkable pieces in this week’s issue: John Seabrook’s “The Geek of Chic”; John Colapinto’s “Check, Please”; Aleksandar Hemon’s “Beyond the Matrix”; and Ian Parker’s “High Rise.” All four, I’m pleased to note, are written subjectively. The most subjective and, in many ways, the most exhilarating is Seabrook’s “The Geek of Chic.” It’s about Frederico Marchetti and his e-commerce fashion company, the Yoox Group. It reads like a journal (“In June, I was sitting next to him in the front row of the Jil Sander menswear show in Milan,” “I did some shopping on Yoox, and saw nice suits at great prices, but I needed to feel the fabric, and online shopping can’t provide that,” “It was Yoox’s twelfth birthday – June 20, 2012 – and Marchetti and I were in Florence,” “During my visit to corporate headquarters, I met the keeper of Yoox’s algorithm, Alberto Grignolo, a husky, balding man with pale eyes and a large, smiling face”). I devoured it. “The Geek of Chic” is a model piece of journalism. But it’s not this week’s Pick of the Issue. That honor goes to Parker’s brilliant “High Rise.” It’s not as gloriously subjective as Seabrook’s piece, but that’s okay because it has something else going for it that’s pure journalistic gold – an irresistibly fascinating leading character. “High Rise” is a profile of the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. Describing this amazing, youthful wizard of energy, wit, creativity and confidence, attempting to get him down on paper, Parker generates some inspired, almost surrealistic word combinations. For example: “For the 2010 promotional film, he rode down the bike path running through the heart of his beautiful, double-looped Danish Pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo, to a soundtrack of ‘I Gotta Feeling,’ by the Black-Eyed Peas.” When was the last time you saw “promotional film,” “bike path,” double-looped,” “Danish Pavilion,” “Shanghai World Expo,” “soundtrack,” and “Black-Eyed Peas” strung together? Answer: never - it's an original. “High Rise” contains many such creations. There’s a passage in it illustrating Ingels’s comparison of designing a building to a joke that’s absolutely extraordinary. I believe this is the first piece by Parker that’s caused me to sit up and take notice of his work. I’ll certainly be on the watch for it from now on.

December 5, 2011 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Aleksandar Hemon’s "Mapping Home." At first, I thought it was going to be about Hemon’s return to Sarajevo after the war, and his account of the people and places he rediscovered, and the memories that came to mind – a sort of variation on A. J. Liebling’s great Normandy Revisited (1959), which I’m currently reading. The first part of Hemon’s piece is a form of nostalgia trip. At one point, he says:

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. I idled in coffee shops, drinking coffee that tasted like burned corn, instead of the foamy pungency I remembered from before the war. Everything around me was both familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant.

The second section of “Mapping Home” is my favorite. It shows Hemon, in his mid-twenties, before he left Sarajevo for Chicago, when he worked as a film reviewer and columnist, walking Sarajevo’s streets, seeing, looking, reflecting. He says:

Fancying myself a street-savvy columnist, I raked the city for material, absorbing impressions and details and generating ideas for my writing. I don’t know if I would’ve used the word back then, but now I am prone to reimagining my younger self as one of Baudelaire’s flâneurs, as someone who wanted to be everywhere and nowhere in particular, for whom wandering was the main means of communication with the city.

That last phrase (“for whom wandering was the main means of communication with the city”) is inspired! It deepens Hemon’s theme. “Mapping Home” is not just a memory piece; it’s also about using our senses to create a definition of space. Reading Hemon’s piece, I was reminded of Sallie Tisdale’s brilliant “In The Northwest” (The New Yorker, August 26, 1991), in which she talks about the word “chorophiliac,” which means “place-lover.” Hemon is a chorophiliac. His choro is Sarajevo. He says:

I collected sensations and faces, smells and sights, fully internalizing Sarajevo’s architecture and its physiognomies. I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of of my city was the geography of my soul. Physically and metaphorically, I was placed.

“Mapping Home” deepens even further when Hemon shows how Chicago eventually became his choro, too. During his early days in Chicago, he was, he says, “a tormented flâneur.” He says:

In my ambulatory expeditions, I became acquainted with Chicago, but I did not yet know the city. The need to know it in my body, to locate myself in the world, had not been satisfied.”

It wasn’t until Hemon settled into the Chicago neighborhood of Edgewater that he started to feel “placed.” One of the highlight passages of “Mapping Home" is Hemon’s vivid description of how he gradually started feeling like an Edgewater “local.” Here’s a brief excerpt:

In the morning, drinking coffee, I would watch from my window the people waiting at the Granville El stop, recognizing the regulars. Sometimes I’d splurge on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway (now long gone) that offered a $2.99 all-you-can-eat deal to the likes of me and the residents of a nursing home on Winthrop, who would arrive en masse, holding hands like schoolchildren. At Gino’s North, where there was only one beer on tap and where many an artist got shitfaced, I’d watch the victorious Bulls’ games, high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar.

Little by little, Hemon started to feel at home in Edgewater. He says, “I discovered that in order to transform an American city into a personal space you had to start in a particular neighborhood.”

I’m attracted to pieces about place. I’m doubly attracted when they’re written at street level by a writer addicted to walking. Aleksandar Hemon’s “Mapping Home” is such a piece. I enjoyed it immensely.