The Startling Emotional Intensity of "Normal People"

I just finished watching episode 5 of Normal People on CBC Gem. I’m enjoying the series immensely. Looking for critical perspective on it, I found an interesting newyorker.com piece by Anna Russell titled “How Normal People Makes Us Fall in Love.”

Russell says of the show’s two leading characters, Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan,

Their similarities—they’re both bookish (they discuss “The Communist Manifesto” and “The Golden Notebook” in the novel), curious about the wider world, and intensely private—are undermined by an inability to communicate at critical moments, leading to heartbreaking misunderstandings.

That’s an illuminating point and helps explain Connell and Marianne’s on-again, off-again relationship. The word “intensely” is key here. Russell uses it again later in her piece:

They are drawn together again by an unbeatable first-love chemistry (“It’s not like this with other people,” Marianne says), replicated onscreen with startling emotional intensity. Over twelve half-hour episodes—any longer, and the viewer would surely combust—Marianne and Connell come together, and fall apart, and come together again.

That “any longer, and the viewer would surely combust” makes me smile. It’s exactly the way I feel now, and I’m only halfway through the series.

Postscript: I have a theory that might help explain Connell and Marianne’s crazy on-again, off-again relationship. It’s pretty cockeyed, but here goes. Passionate love feeds upon denial. Connell and Marianne unconsciously keep throwing obstructions in the way of their natural love for each other in order to intensify their passion. Freud put it this way: 

Some obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of libido to its height; and at all periods of history, wherever natural barriers in the way of satisfaction have not sufficed, mankind has erected conventional ones in order to be able to enjoy love. [“The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life” (1912)]

Best of 2018: Talk

João Fazenda, illustration for Michael Schulman's "Grasshopper"

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Talk of the Town” pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Michael Schulman, “Grasshopper,” October 15, 2018 [“He took a breath. ‘Moving along: you also serve a beef-tartare tostada?’ (Correct.) ‘And that has some fried grasshopper on it?’ (Actually, the insect is toasted over a wood fire, Bazdarich said. Radcliffe, his pencil trembling, scribbled ‘toasted’ ”)].

2. Anna Russell, “Leafy Greens,” July 9 & 16, 2018 [“Hydroponics are a slippery slope. You might find yourself, one Sunday morning, at a Santa Monica farmers’ market, loitering among the apples, say. You come across a bunch of papalo, a leafy herb native to central Mexico, and toss it in your mouth (your tastes are expansive; a papalo leaf is nothing to you) and wham!: a brand-new flavor. Suddenly, you’re up at all hours, watching vertical-farming videos on YouTube, ordering seed packets from eBay, buying rhizomes—rhizomes!—and worrying about spider mites. You get some fennel crowns and a pouch of parasitic wasps, and you’re on your way”].

3. Anna Russell, “Reunion,” September 17, 2018 (“Once, he arrived to find cello parts scattered around the room, attended to by different experts, like an intensive-care unit”).

4. Anna Russell, “Caffeinated,” March 19, 2018 (“In Think Coffee, a man in a blazer, holding two hot drinks, waited while the pair examined the dimples on the compostable lids. ‘Decaf, cream, and black—that’s all,’ Specht said”).

5. Anna Russell, “Close Shave,” February 5, 2018 (“Ralph applied shaving cream and started to make short, silent strokes with a straight razor. A fan rattled; outside, a bus pulled away from the curb”).

6. Amy Goldwasser, “Wet Ink,” November 12, 2018 [“After finishing uptown, a few hours later, they went to Maffia’s apartment, to make ink. One batch was pure pokeberry juice (vivid magenta). Another included five varieties of acorn boiled with rust from various sources—nuts and bolts, wire, brackets—and a drop of gum arabic. It came out a complicated silver-gray”].

7. Nick Paumgarten, “Angel in Hastings,” April 23, 2018 [“The contrast between the back seat’s spacious, buttery interior and the driver’s livery (T-shirt, worn jeans, jean jacket) is sharp enough to make you wonder if the car is stolen”].

8. Sam Wasson, “Yes, And,” July 23, 2018 (“Levy furrowed his eyebrows and did an impression of a lugubrious rabbi. ‘What a place to lose a cow,’ he said”).

9. Lauren Collins, “Invitation,” July 9 & 16, 2018 (“De Rougé lifted his laptop so that the Inserras could get a better look at the room’s pistachio-colored moldings. Then he turned around so they could see all the way down the gallery—a two-hundred-and-thirty-foot view”).

10. Nicolas Niarchos, “Cartography,” July 9 & 16, 2018 (“He swivelled the antenna, and the music turned into a burst of Creole”).

2018 Year in Review

Jorge Colombo, "The Honeywell" (2018)

Behold another fat stack of New Yorkers – forty-eight of them, each a tremendous source of reading pleasure. It’s fascinating to watch the pile grow, starting in January with the first solitary issue. At the beginning of each year, I always wonder whether the magazine will be able to match the quality of its previous year. And each year, it always does. 2018 was no exception. Among the highlights: 

1. The appearance of three of my all-time favorite writers: John McPhee (“Direct Eye Contact,” March 5); Ian Frazier (“Airborne,” February 5; “The Maraschino Mogul,” April 23; “The Day the Great Plains Burned,” November 5); and Janet Malcolm (“Six Glimpses of the Past,” October 29). I treasure their work.

2. Three extraordinary reporting pieces: David Grann’s “The White Darkness” (February 12 & 19); Nicholas Schmidle’s “Rocket Man” (August 20); Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Degrees of Freedom” (November 26).

3. Anna Russell’s wonderful “Talk of the Town” stories, including “Close Shave” (February 5), “Caffeinated” (March 19), “Leafy Greens” (July 9 & 16), and “Reunion” (September 17).

4. Hannah Goldfield’s ravishing “Tables For Two” food descriptions. 

5. All the “Bar Tab” columns, and the wonderful Jorge Colombo artwork that illustrate the newyorker.com versions.

6. Peter Schjeldahl’s brilliant exhibition reviews, and his notes for “Goings On About Town.” Schjeldahl is the magazine’s supreme pleasure-giver. 

I could go on and on. Instead, over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I loved most. Thank you, New Yorker, for another splendid year. I’d be lost without you. New Yorker without end, amen! 

September 17, 2018 Issue

In this week’s issue, Anna Russell scores another Talk triumph, her third this year. The others are “Caffeinated” (March 19) and “Leafy Greens” (July 9 & 16). In her new piece, “Reunion,” she accompanies virtuoso cellist Matt Haimovitz on his way to a repair shop to pick up his beloved Matteo, a rare, multimillion-dollar cello, which Haimovitz has owned and played for thirty years. Matteo required fixing because fifteen months earlier, Haimovitz accidentally dropped it while teaching a student. Russell writes, 

He had played it for thirty years, until, fifteen months earlier, while giving a lesson to a promising Canadian student, he dropped it, and the cello’s neck snapped. Since then, the instrument had been undergoing extensive repairs by a team of five luthiers at Reed Yeboah Fine Violins, near Columbus Circle. Now the shop had called to say that Matteo was ready for release.

The piece builds suspense: Will the rebuilt cello sound the same as the original? At first the answer appears to be no:

Haimovitz sat down and played a few hoarse scales, before launching into a jaunty tune, the prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. He ended on a long note, and then sat in silence. “Hmm,” he said.

But then a new bow is provided and Haimovitz plays the cello again: 

He leaned in, listening. “Yeah,” he said. He played a mournful tune, Philip Glass’s “Overture,” and came up smiling: “Very cool!” Everyone applauded.

The ending is inspired:

Afterward, flushed, Haimovitz was more circumspect. While playing, he said, he couldn’t help thinking about the old Matteo. “There were moments where it was, like, I’m missing certain things, where’s that?” But then something changed. “Gradually, the vibration felt the same.” He accepted a glass of prosecco. “It’s a process,” he said.

July 9 & 16, 2018 Issue

Four excellent “Talk of the Town” stories in this week’s issue: Nicolas Niarchos’s “Cartography”; Anna Russell’s “Leafy Greens”; Betsy Morais’ “Debrief”; and Lauren Collins’s “Invitation.”

Nicolas Niarchos’s “Cartography” is about a guy named David Goren who’s obsessed with pirate radio stations. Niarchos immediately snares my attention with the sort of found detail I relish: 

With one hand, he tuned an FM dial connected to a directional antenna. With the other, he jotted frequencies onto a notepad advertising Ortho Tri-Cyclen. (“That’s my wife’s,” he said. “She’s a nurse-practitioner.”)

Only certain writers notice stuff like that. It may not be much, just a notepad advertising a contraceptive, but it catches Niarchos’s eye. He must’ve asked Goren about it, or Goren noticed him noticing it – hence Goren’s explanation in parenthesis.

The notepad isn’t mentioned again. Niarchos goes on to describe Goren tuning in various pirate radio stations. We listen in as a Caribbean religious pirate hails a man in Toronto: “ ‘Good evening, Mr. Junior,’ a man’s voice said, addressing a listener. ‘Mr. Junior up there in Toronto, Canada.’ ”

In Anna Russell’s “Leafy Greens,” chef Alex Guarnaschelli visits Farm.One, Manhattan’s largest hydroponic farm, located “deep underground beneath the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary and the Michelin-starred restaurant Atera.” Guided by the farm’s creator, Rob Laing, Guarnaschelli tastes some of the plants – anise hyssop, micro-dill, mizuna, mint flower, bronze-fennel fronds. My favourite passage is a description of her encounter with a row of marigolds:

A row of marigolds caught her eye. “The taste of a marigold is one I deeply associate with my first tomato,” she said. She recalled how her grandmother would plant marigolds next to tomatoes because they keep the bugs away.

Laing was collecting a sample from a top shelf. “We’ve seen more people using it for desserts,” he said. “Like with chocolate, even.”

“Oh, that’s so fucking Swedish,” Guarnaschelli said. 

That last line made me laugh, although it’s hard to say why – maybe the emphasis on “Swedish,” maybe its profane gusto. Whatever the reason, it’s a terrific line. Russell captures it perfectly. She has a great ear. 

In Betsy Morais’ “Debrief,” Eugene Thacker, a philosopher who teaches a course on pessimism, meets up with a few of his former students at a Williamsburg bookstore. Morais writes,

A sign on the front door said, “Come on in,” but the store’s grate was pulled down. “Uh-oh,” said Aaron Newman, who recently completed his master’s degree in liberal studies. It had been raining, and there was still mist in the air. Rachelle Rahmé, another recent graduate, said, “I love this kind of weather.” Soon, the sun peeked out, the shopkeeper arrived, and the group was ushered into a pleasant back yard. Thacker, who is from the Seattle area, told them that he takes comfort in a gloomy sky: “It’s contemplative.”

I like the easy-going atmosphere of this piece. For a bunch of pessimists, Thacker and his group seem almost cheerful. Morais catches this paradoxically positive vibe in her final paragraph:

If pessimism is about futility, what’s the point of writing about it? Thacker’s not sure, but he thinks that there’s something interesting about “undertaking the practice anyway.” He added, “Maybe it means next time around, the only students who get A’s are the ones who don’t turn in a paper.” The alums laughed. Humor can be helpful to pessimists. “I went through a phase of watching a lot of standup comedy,” Thacker said. “I love George Carlin. He takes no political side. Everyone deserves our spite.”

Lauren Collins is the veteran in this quartet, with a number of Talk classics to her credit, including, “Sideline” (June 19, 2017), “Dog’s Dinner” (February 8 & 15, 2016), and “Bird’s-Eye View” (July 6, 2015). Her “Invitation,” in this week’s issue, tells the story of a French count who tracked down descendants of an American army doctor who bivouacked at his family’s estate in 1944. The count’s name is Aymeric de Rougé, “the proprietor of Baronville—a twenty-four-hundred-acre estate, an hour southwest of Paris”; the army doctor’s name is Frank Inserra, who “had been particularly kind to de Rougé’s father, Bertrand.” Inserra died in 1990. The nub of this absorbing piece is a Skype conversation between de Rouge and Inserra’s son, Francis, in Rockville, Maryland, and Inserra's daughter, Donna, in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Collins writes,

On a recent Wednesday, Aymeric de Rougé was at Baronville, where he manages ventures related to the estate, including a line of champagne. He sat in front of a laptop in the dining room, beneath a huge chandelier.

“O.K., I have you blasted through the speakers,” he said to Francis and his sister Donna. De Rougé had invited them to visit Baronville, but for now they were Skyping.

My favourite part of “Invitation” is the conclusion, when de Rouge uses his computer to show Francis and Donna the room he’s in:

Toward the end of the conversation, Donna, tearing up, said that it had made her feel as if her father were a little closer. Then Francis addressed the Count. “I have to tell you,” he said, “I’m looking at your house—”

“ ‘House’ doesn’t seem like the right word,” Donna said.

De Rougé lifted his laptop so that the Inserras could get a better look at the room’s pistachio-colored moldings. Then he turned around so they could see all the way down the gallery—a two-hundred-and-thirty-foot view.

“Oh, my heavens,” Donna said. “Can you imagine what that would’ve been like for Dad?”

It’s an inspired ending to a touching story, which Collins beautifully tells in a mere 933 well-chosen words.

March 19, 2018 Issue

“The architects Louise Harpman and Scott Specht began collecting takeout-coffee lids when they were in college, in the nineteen-eighties, and continued the practice as graduate students at Yale.” So begins Anna Russell’s excellent Talk story “Caffeinated,” in this week’s issue. Reading it, I instantly thought of Robert Sullivan. In his great Cross Country (2006), Sullivan chronicles, among other things, his fascination with plastic coffee lids. At one point, he says,

Plastic coffee lids represent an area in the cross-country world where stream-lined uniformity has not yet prevailed – they are the last vestiges of differentiation. I don’t like to think that we would ever be a one-lid nation, though that day may come.

He even mentions Louise Harpman and Scott Specht:

In their seminal essay on lid design, Louise Harpman and Scott Specht, two lid collectors, identified what they called the “pucker” as the next developmental step in the to-go lid: a plastic lid with a hole, the hole being in that portion of the lid that is constructed in an elevated, mountain-range-like shape.

Russell’s piece tells about some fieldwork Specht and Harpman conducted recently in SoHo. They visit a number of cafés, including Lafayette, La Colombe, Think Coffee, and Gasoline Alley. Russell writes,

In Think Coffee, a man in a blazer, holding two hot drinks, waited while the pair examined the dimples on the compostable lids. “Decaf, cream, and black—that’s all,” Specht said.

“Caffeinated” artfully conveys Specht and Harpman’s crazy world of coffee lid collecting. I enjoyed it immensely.

Best of 2017: Talk

Tom Bachtell, "Michel Houellebecq" (2017)

Here are my favorite “Talk of the Town” stories of 2017:

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Bong Show,” May 15, 2017 (“One object widely admired by the other lampworkers was a pea-green monster truck with big black tires and flames exuding from six tailpipes—every inch of it glass”).

2. Ian Frazier, “Extra Credit,” August 7 & 14, 2017 [“On exhibit were a palm-leaf book the size of a sheaf of paint samples, a big ball of raw rubber from a rubber tree (one of Sri Lanka’s resources), boxes of Ceylon tea (“We have the best, best tea”), a large stone grinder for spices (“Sri Lankan women were strong, back in the day”), her grandmother’s sitar, a replica of a seated Buddha considered to be the fifth-greatest statue in the world, and a statue of the fasting Buddha (“For six years, he ate no food and never opened his eyes”) that was made of welded iron”].

3. Robert Sullivan, “Facing History,” June 19, 2017 (“At Goodfellows, a barbershop on Fourth Avenue, people knew the church but not the tree. ‘In the North? That seems strange,’ a customer said”).

4. Lauren Collins, “Sideline,” June 19, 2017 (“He must have been chewing on his cigarette, because it hung from his mouth like a broken limb”).

5. Tad Friend, “Pulverizer,” June 19, 2017 (“Slugging down the rest of his soda, he continued, ‘I had an acting teacher who told me, “Michael, there are two types of actors: those who act with their ass”—squirmy Richard Dreyfuss types—“and those who act with their balls.” ’ His eyes got moist. ‘On this movie I got down on my knees and prayed before takes, and then just grabbed my balls and tried somehow to be of service’ ”).

6. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Incidents,” June 19, 2017 (“In front of him, a set of stairs led up to a rectangular opening cut into a wall. Beyond the opening was an empty chamber. Lights installed in the walls of the chamber were making it glow different shades—first fuchsia, then baby blue, then electric yellow. Everything outside the chamber also kept changing color, including Turrell”).

7. Nick Paumgarten, “Good Taste,” November 27, 2017 (“His top-of-the-line loudspeaker system, at three hundred and forty thousand dollars (no wonder we settle), is the Imperia: two seven-foot steel towers, each with a couple of huge flared wooden horns, one atop another, along with some smaller aluminum-alloy horns. Between them, on the floor, are the boxed bass horns. The standing horns, fashioned out of Pennsylvania ash, bring to mind an old gramophone, or a morning glory. They make it sound as if the musicians are in the room”).

8. Anna Russell, “Odds and Ends,” November 6, 2017 (“ ‘I like ordinary objects,’ Oldenburg said. ‘If you have one object meet some other object, which claims to be ordinary, then you’d have something even more extraordinary.’ He moved to another shelf. ‘That’s a bottle, that’s a piece of an automobile tire, and this”—he pointed to a brown globule—‘is obviously something coming out of a tube’ ”).