Ben Lerner's "The Storyteller"

W. G. Sebald (portrait by Yann Kebbi)

What to make of Ben Lerner’s “The Storyteller” (The New York Review of Books, October 21, 2021)? Well, for one thing, it’s one of the best reviews of W. G. Sebald’s work I’ve ever read, right up there with James Wood’s “Sent East” (London Review of Books, October 6, 2011) and Anthony Lane’s “Higher Ground” (The New Yorker, May 29, 2000). For another, it’s an eloquent defence of the novelist’s right to repurpose facts. Lerner says,

How do you acknowledge—not just in an acknowledgments page but in the structure of the work itself—that you have models and that you’ve departed from them? Here Sebald’s purposeful destabilization of fact and fiction, and his dramatic alteration of the facts in question, within his four great books of prose fiction is a moral and aesthetic necessity, not some sort of failing: it foregrounds artifice, constructedness; it proclaims that Sebald is experimenting with making sense, making pattern, that he is weaving out of disparate materials an artwork that will not live or die according to fact-checkers.

I love that last line. I just want to emphasize that it’s also possible to make literary artworks purely from facts. Fiction isn’t an essential ingredient of literary art. I wish Sebald’s brilliant The Rings of Saturn were factual. It’s so good at creating the illusion of a real account of an actual journey that I have to keep reminding myself that not one word of it is reliable. 

I read Sebald for his exquisite melancholy. This, for example:

As usual when I go down to London on my own, a kind of dull despair stirred within me on that December morning. I looked out a the flat, almost treeless landscape, the vast brown expanse of ploughed fields, the railway stations where I would never get out, the flock of gulls which makes a habit of gathering on the football pitch on the outskirts of Ipswich, the allotments, the crippled bushes overgrown with dead traveller’s joy on the embankments, the quicksilver mudflats and channels at Manningtree, the boats capsized on their sides, the Colchester water-tower, the Marconi factory in Chelmsford, the empty greyhound track at Romsford, the ugly backs of the terraced houses past which the railway line runs in the suburbs of the metropolis, the Manor Park cemetery and the tower blocks of flats in Hackney, sights which are always the same and flit past me whenever I go to London, yet remain alien and incomprehensible in spite of all the years that have passed since my arrival in England. I always feel particularly apprehensive on the last stretch of the journey, where just before turning into Liverpool Street station the train must wind its way over several sets of points through a narrow defile, and where the brick walls rising above both sides of the track with their round arches, columns and niches, blackened with soot and diesel oil, put me in mind once again that morning of an underground columbarium. [Austerlitz]

As Lerner says, Sebald sees death everywhere. On Sebald's obsession with ruins, Lerner writes,

More generally, if history is one long catastrophe returning in new guises, the work of historical reckoning can pass into a transhistorical fatalism. This is why I can lose patience with Sebald’s narrators’ tendency to see only ruins, which is a way of not seeing forms of life and meaning-making that have sprung and might spring up in their midst. It’s not that it’s depressing; it’s that it’s leveling.

This is a good point. We need artists like Sebald to remind us of life’s transience. But we also need artists with a more balanced vision, who remind us that even in the midst of death there’s life – “the green weed breaking through the stone” (Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson, 2020). 

Contenders for "Top Ten Reporting Pieces" (So Far)

Illustration by Bjorn Lie (from Dana Goodyear's "Mezcal Sunrise")

Well, with only eight weeks left in the year, I want to start considering what my “Top Ten Reporting Pieces” might look like. Here are some of the contenders:

Ben Lerner, “The Custodians” (January 11, 2016)

Tad Friend, “Holding the T” (January 18, 2016)

Andrew O’Hagan, “Imaginary Spaces”  (March 28, 2016)

Dana Goodyear, “Mezcal Sunrise” (April 4, 2016)

Carolyn Kormann, “The Tasting-Menu Initiative” (April 4, 2016)

Dexter Filkins, “The End of Ice” (April 4, 2016)

Ian Frazier, “The Bag Bill” (May 2, 2016)

Lizzie Widdicombe, “Happy Together” (May 16, 2016)

Jonathan Franzen, “The End of the End of the World” (May 23, 2016)

Hilton Als, “Dark Rooms” (July 4, 2016)

Adam Gopnik, “Cool Running” (July 11 & 18, 2016)

Jill Lepore, “The War and the Roses” (August 8 & 15, 2016)

Nick Paumgarten, “The Country Restaurant” (August 29, 2016)

Dana Goodyear, “The Earth Mover” (August 29, 2016)

Janet Malcolm, “The Performance Artist” (September 5, 2016)

Tom Kizzia, “The New Harpoon” (September 12, 2016)

Ian Parker, “Knives Out” (September 12, 2016)

Burkhard Bilger, “Ghost Stories” (September 12, 2016)

Ian Frazier, “Patina” (September 19, 2016)

Elizabeth Kolbert, “A Song of Ice” (October 24, 2016)

These pieces are listed in the order they appeared in the magazine. Eventually, the list will have to be whittled down to ten – no easy task (they’re all excellent pieces). And I’ve learned from previous years not to decide prematurely. Last year, with about three weeks to go, I was sure Nick Paumgarten’s “Life Is Rescues” would be my #1 pick. Then Ben McGrath’s extraordinary “The Wayfarer” appeared, in the December 14 issue, and I had to revise my opinion (see here). By the way, where is McGrath? He’s a consistent Top Ten contender. But this year, he’s yet to appear. I miss him.  

Mid-Year Top Ten (2016): Reporting Pieces

Photo by Benjamin Lowy

Time to pause, look back, and take stock of my 2016 New Yorker reading experience thus far. As ever, pleasure is my guide. The reporting pieces that afforded me the most pleasure are:

1. Jonathan Franzen’s "The End of the End of the World," May 23, 2016 (“Although the colony was everywhere smeared with nitric-smelling shit, and the doomed orphan chicks were a piteous sight, I was already glad I’d come.”)

2. Carolyn Kormann, "The Tasting-Menu Initiative," April 4, 2016 (“Carola Quispé, a former Gustu student, aimed the gun into a glass of foamy pink liquid and topped it off with smoke, then added a coca-leaf garnish. ‘It’s made with papa-pinta-boca-infused singani, lime juice, and egg whites, balanced with palo santo syrup,’ she said. It felt like drinking incense.”)

3. Andrew O’Hagan, "Imaginary Spaces," March 28, 2016 (“The set was a living organism, emitting turmoil and images of chaos: when an old piano was played, its discordancy seemed to echo through the language; when Cumberbatch, as Hamlet, feigned madness, or became mad, the portraits on the walls seemed to glower at him.”)

4. Dana Goodyear, "Mezcal Sunrise," April 4, 2016 (“She poured some into a jícara, the dried hull of a fruit, often used to serve mezcal, and offered it to me. It was tangy and slick, like a dirty Martini, with a whiff of neat’s-foot oil.”)

5. Ben Lerner, "The Custodians," January 11, 2016 [“In Kline’s work, I discover (or at least I project) vulnerability as well as technophilia: rather than producing works that can be shattered or lost, he is sending blueprints into the future.”]

6. Ian Frazier, "The Bag Bill," May 2, 2016 (“Elmore, the pro, then dazzled everybody by extracting a noxious blue plastic drop cloth from a sidewalk callery-pear tree in about half a second.”)

7. Tad Friend, "Holding the T," January 18, 2015 (“These friendships are usually squash-specific: we play, postmortem a bit, then part. But they’re stamped by the pleasure of jamming together, of collaborating on a jubilant rag of hissing strings, percussive splats, sneaker squeaks, and winded grunts.”)

8. Dexter Filkins, "The End of Ice," April 4, 2016 (“Chhota Shigri—six miles long and shaped like a branching piece of ginger—is considered one of the Himalayas’ most accessible glaciers, but our way across was a rickety gondola, an open cage reminiscent of a shopping cart, which runs on a cable over the Chandra. With one of the porters working a pulley, we climbed in and rode across, one by one, while fifty feet below the river rushed through gigantic boulders.”)

9. Judith Thurman, "The Empire's New Clothes," March 21, 2016 (“Her appliqués mushroom magically on the slope of a skirt. A mermaid gown that Charles James might have made for Gypsy Rose Lee is crossbred with a Ming vase; a cascade of ruffles evokes the waterfall in a brush-painted landscape.”)

10. Jill Lepore, "The Party Crashers," February 22, 2016 (“With our phones in our hands and our eyes on our phones, each of us is a reporter, each a photographer, unedited and ill judged, chatting, snapping, tweeting, and posting, yikking and yakking. At some point, does each of us become a party of one?”)

Honorable Mentions: Patricia Marx, “In Search of Forty Winks” (February 8 & 15, 2016); Lizzie Widdicombe, “Barbie Boy” (March 21, 2016); Lauren Collins, “Come to the Fair” (April 4, 2016); James Lasdun, “Alone in the Alps” (April 11, 2016); Gay Talese, “The Voyeur’s Motel” (April 11, 2016); Rachel Aviv, “The Cost of Caring” (April 11, 2016); Elizabeth Kolbert, “Unnatural Selection” (April 18, 2016); Ariel Levy, “Beautiful Monsters” (April 18, 2016); Lauren Collins, “The Model American” (May 9, 2016); Lizzie Widdicombe, “Happy Together” (May 16, 2016); Raffi Katchadourian, “The Unseen” (June 20, 2016).

Tomorrow, I’ll post my favorite critical pieces.

Credit: The above photo, by Benjamin Lowy, is from Carolyn Kormann’s “The Tasting-Menu Initiative” (The New Yorker, April 4, 2016).

January 11, 2016 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Ben Lerner’s exceptionally beautiful, cerebral "The Custodians." It’s about the Whitney Museum of American Art’s replication committee and its determination of “when a work of art, or a part of a work of art, cannot be fixed or restored in the traditional ways—when and how it must, instead, be replicated.” What makes the piece so beautiful is that it’s sort of a verbal equivalent of the sculptural assemblage it describes. Just look at some of the myriad elements it comprehends: the High Line (“Grass grows over the rails, trees among the trestles; it’s almost as if nature had reclaimed the infrastructure of a civilization wiped out by an unspecified disaster”), the Whitney’s mirror-paneled elevator (“half of the occupants are filming their reflections as we ascend”), Josh Kline’s Cost of Living (Aleyda) (“a janitor’s cart, to which L.E.D. lights have been taped, and on which are several objects, printed in plaster and cyanoacrylate: brushes, sponges, a bottle of cleaning … two 3-D prints of the digitally imaged head of ‘Aleyda,’ a housekeeper at the Hotel on Rivington, along with a print of her hand, enclosed in a plastic glove, and of her foot, in a sock and shoe”), the Whitney’s conservation department (“The space is open and airy, despite giant fume extractors that snake down from the ceiling”), Barkley Hendricks’s Steve (“a full-length portrait of a man wearing a white suit and mirrored sunglasses, in which the windows of Hendricks’s studio—and, if you look closely, part of Hendricks’s head—are reflected”), John Ruskin’s The Lamp of Memory (“In The Lamp of Memory, written in 1848, John Ruskin … argued that buildings and objects must be left to decline, even die—that the ‘greatest glory of a building . . . is in its Age’ ”), two Mark Rothko triptychs (“black rectangles on a plum-colored ground”), Rothko’s Harvard murals (“five large mural paintings … ranging from light pink to deep purple”), the Frances Mulhall Achilles Library (“has a huge bank of sloped windows facing the Hudson River”), Claes Oldenburg’s Ice Bag Scale C (“a combination of custom-made and commercially available materials, including three motors and six fans designed to make the bag move more or less at random—to make it seem alive”), Nina Simone’s Who Knows Where the Time Goes (“The recording sounds particularly beautiful, because my headphones are staticky, a false patina that interacts well with the lyrics and the grain of Simone’s voice”), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“I walk among the ancient sculptures that we leave fragmented and paintless even though we could try to restore the vivid polychromy they originally possessed”).

What holds all this wild variegated material together, what makes it cohere, is Lerner’s marvelously perceptive “I” (“I walk south on Manhattan’s High Line …”; “I feel as if I were wandering through a composite …”; “I can’t help thinking of it as the Noah’s Ark of American Art”; “I enter through the museum’s glass façade …”; “As I leave the building, I find myself thinking of the ship of Theseus …”; “I asked Mancusi-Ungaro about Petryn …”; “Talking about Rothko with Mancusi-Ungaro, I was struck, not for the first time, by how the work of a conservator can re-sacralize the original art object”; “But when I arrived at the library I was put in mind of more recent mythology …”; “I was struck by how contact between the museum and the artist inevitably changes the art it would conserve”; “I felt that I was watching conservation shade into collaboration”). Lerner is subjective to the bone.

“The Custodians” reads more like a personal essay than it does reportage. That’s what draws me to it. What makes the piece cerebral is Lerner’s examination of the idea of art conservation from every conceivable angle – restoration, “reversibility,” tratteggio, replication, collaboration. “The Custodians” ’s formal integration of so many ideas and elements into such a shapely, absorbing composition smacks of genius.   

James Wood's "The Fun Stuff"

James Wood, in the Preface of his great How Fiction Works (2008), writes, “I admire Milan Kundera’s three books on the art of fiction, but Kundera is a novelist and essayist rather than a practical critic; occasionally we want his hands to be a bit inkier with text.” Occasionally we want his hands to be bit inkier with text – how fine that is! It perfectly catches the quality I most desire in a critic’s writing – deep immersion at the level of sentence and structure. Wood’s hands are always inky with text – right up to his elbows. That’s what I love about his work. He gets inside writing, analyzing the words-as-arranged-on-the-page. Helen Vendler, in her review of Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue, writes, “The art of Heaney’s criticism is never to lose touch with the writing act, the texture of the lines on the page” (Soul Says, 1995). That’s Wood’s art, too. His new collection, The Fun Stuff, contains twenty-five essays - seventeen of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. They are all bravura pieces of writing, knit together by three of Wood’s abiding themes: the noticing eye, a distain for convention, and a love of the long sentence.

A key element of Wood’s aesthetic is close observation of detail. “Literature teaches us to notice,” he says in How Fiction Works. Of one of his favorite writers, Saul Bellow, he says, “Bellow notices superbly” (How Fiction Works). In "Red Planet," one of his earliest New Yorker pieces (not included in The Fun Stuff), he says that Cormac McCarthy is a “wonderfully delicate noticer of nature.” In "Reality Effects" (another New Yorker piece not included in The Fun Stuff), he says that John Jeremiah Sullivan is a “fierce noticer.” In "Cabin Fever" (yet another New Yorker review missing from The Fun Stuff), he says that the protagonist of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams is a “steady noticer of the natural world, and that the novella’s prose follows his eye, with frequent exhalations of beauty.” In "Wounder and Wounded" (in The Fun Stuff), he calls V. S. Naipaul a “brilliant noticer.” Wood himself deserves this compliment; he’s a brilliant literary noticer. Mark O’Connell, in his terrific review of The Fun Stuff, says, “When Wood block-quotes, you pay attention—as you would to a doctor who has just flipped an X-ray onto an illuminator screen—because you know something new and possibly crucial is going to get revealed” ("The Different Drummer," Slate, November 2, 2012). I know exactly what O’Connell means; I totally agree with him. Wood has a jeweler’s eye for choice quotation and a luminous way of presenting it. For example, here’s a passage from his excellent "Beyond a Boundary: 'Netherland' as Postcolonial Novel" (in The Fun Stuff):

The eye that sees the “orange fuzz” of the streetlights is the eye that elsewhere in the novel, alights on the “molten progress of the news tickers” in Times Square, the “train-infested underpants” of Hans’s little boy, “a necklace’s gold drool,” the “roving black blooms of four-dollar umbrellas,” and that sees, in one lovely swipe of a sentence, a sunset like this: “The day, a pink smear above America, had all but disappeared.”

That “in one lovely swipe of a sentence” is delightful, perfectly describing O’Neill’s inspired “pink smear” line.

Wood is impatient with conventionality. In "Keeping It Real" (The New Yorker, March 15, 2010; not included in The Fun Stuff), he describes Chang-Rae Lee's The Surrendered as "a book that is commendably ambitious, extremely well written, powerfully moving in places, and alas, utterly conventional." He scorns what he calls the “cumbersome caravans of plot” (“Life’s White Machine: Ben Lerner,” in The Fun Stuff). In “Keeping It Real,” he exclaims, “All this silly machinery of plotting and pacing, this corsetry of chapters and paragraphs, this doxology of dialogue and characterization!” As an alternative to all this “silly machinery,” Wood points to novels such as Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and Teju Coles’s Open City. Regarding Lerner’s novel, he says:

Lerner is attempting to capture something that most conventional novels with their cumbersome caravans of plot and scene and “conflict,” fail to do: the drift of thought, the unmomentous passage of undramatic life: what he calls several times in the book “life’s white machine”: “that other thing, the sound-absorbent screen, life’s white machine, shadows massing in the middle distance … the texture of et cetera itself.”

The Fun Stuff evinces Wood’s fondness for the long sentence. In “Beyond a Boundary,” he writes, “O’Neill writes elegant, long sentences, formal but not fussy, punctually pricked with lyrically exact metaphor.” Regarding postwar avant-garde fiction, in “‘Reality Examined to the Point of Madness’: László Krasznahorkai” (in The Fun Stuff), he says,

A lot has already disappeared from this fictional world, and the writer concentrates on filling the sentence, using it to notate, produce, and reproduce the tiniest qualifications, hesitations, intermittences, affirmations, and negations of existence. This is one reason why very long, breathing, unstopped sentences, at once literary and vocal, are almost inseparable from the progress of experimental fiction since the 1950s.

In his beautiful personal essay, "The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon," Wood describes his notion of the “ideal sentence”: “a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but disheveled, careful and lawless, right and wrong."

Wood himself occasionally writes a medium-length, Krasznahorkaiesque sentence. Consider, for example, this syntactically rich, eighty-eight word assemblage from “Life’s White Machine: Ben Lerner”:

At once ideological and post-ideological, vaguely engaged and profoundly spectatorial, charming and loathsome, Adam is a convincing representative of twenty-first century American Homo literatus – a creature of privilege and lassitude, living through a time of inflamed political uncertainty, yet certain only of his own uncertainty and thus always more easily defined by negation than by affirmation, clearly dedicated to poetry but unable to define or defend it (except to intone emptily that poetry isn’t about anything) and implicitly nostalgic for earlier, mythical eras of greater strength and surety.

The New Yorker took one look at that line and put a period after “Homo literatus,” breaking the sentence in two (see "Reality Testing," October 31, 2012). Obviously, Wood prefers the single, long line. When he collected the piece in The Fun Stuff, he opted for his original conception.

The Fun Stuff is a brilliant collection of critical and personal pieces, one of the best in recent memory. I'm enjoying it immensely.