Best of the Decade: #1 Ian Frazier's "Blue Bloods"

Illustration by Owen Freeman, from Ian Frazier's "Blue Bloods"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #1 pick – Ian Frazier’s "Blue Bloods" (April 14, 2014).

This wonderful piece is about Frazier’s fascination with horseshoe crabs, an animal that, as he points out, has “been around at least two hundred times as long as human beings.” But now they’re in decline, he reports. Humans may be driving these tough little creatures to extinction. He says, “Sea-level rises may cause shoreline reinforcement that wipes out their habitat.” 

There’s an unforgettable scene near the end of “Blue Bloods” that illustrates Frazier’s point. He’s on the shore of Delaware Bay, driving a gravel road that “skirted the bay so closely that it required a barrier wall of riprap for protection.” He writes,

The crumbling brittle of horseshoe-crab parts under the car wheels now became so thick it was unnerving, with uncrushed, whole horseshoe crabs all over the road as well. I pulled onto the left-hand berm to investigate. When I climbed up on the riprap wall, I saw throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks. The carnage stretched into the distance and had a major-battlefield air, reminiscent of the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg. Some of the horseshoe crabs seemed to be moving feebly. The ones on the road had evidently managed to make it past the rocks.

That description of horseshoe-crab carnage, likening it to “the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg,” is inspired! It’s one of the reasons I’ve chosen “Blue Bloods” as my #1. 

Another reason is that it’s so quintessentially Frazerian. Frazier is a superb describer. “Blue Bloods” brims with delightful description. Here, for example, is his portrait of a horseshoe-crab person named Diane SanRomán:

On that morning, she wore knee-high rubber boots, a bright-pink cotton shirt, and complicated turquoise earrings: an in-the-field style that became familiar. “My life was good before I discovered horseshoe crabs, but now it’s even better!” she announced to me, adding that she was raising a thousand horseshoe-crab eggs in the bathroom of her apartment, in Manhasset, and that her husband, a doctor who specializes in clinical nutrition, kindly put up with them. Along with playing conga drums, she throws pots and is pursuing her second M.A., in experimental psychology with a focus on marine biology. She looks enough like the late Bea Arthur, the star of the nineteen-seventies sitcom “Maude,” that it would be negligent not to say so.

And here’s his depiction of the Dupont Nature Center viewing deck:

Bird-watchers lined its railings with emplacements of telescopes and cameras. Some of the bird-watchers were talking on their cell phones and leaving excited messages for other bird-watchers. When the other bird-watchers called back, the ring tones were birdcalls. Jeffery Davis, a birder from near Philadelphia, offered me a look through his well-positioned 30-power Kowa telescope. Oystercatchers, stilts, dowitchers, willets, black-bellied plovers, dunlins, royal terns, ruddy turnstones, semipalmated sandpipers—along the sand and in the shallows, thousands of heads were going up and down as long, thin bills plucked up what probably were horseshoe-crab eggs. A single horseshoe crab swam nearby on the surface, on its side. Lenses turned to the odd swimmer for half a minute, then went back to the birds.

Conga drums, “complicated turquoise earrings,” birdcall ring tones – I love Frazier's details. He notices stuff most people overlook or disregard. "Blue Bloods" is one of his finest acts of attention.

Best of the Decade: #2 Luke Mogelson's "The Avengers of Mosul"

Photo by Victor J. Blue, from Luke Mogelson's "The Avengers of Mosul"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #2 pick – Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul” (February 6, 2017).

“The Avengers of Mosul” is a brilliant, brutal, immersive account of Mogelson’s experience traveling with an Iraqi police unit called the Nineveh Province SWAT team, made up almost entirely of native sons of Mosul, as they fight to liberate their city from ISIS occupation. The piece is divided into four sections: (1) “Up the Tigris”; (2) “Entering the City”; (3) “A Respite from Battle”; and (4) “Urban Combat.”

The first section, “Up the Tigris,” opens with the SWAT team located in the village of Kharbardan, anxiously awaiting orders to join the assault on ISIS-held Mosul. The orders come, and the SWAT team moves up the eastern bank of the Tigris River, helping the Ninety-first Brigade of the Iraqi Army’s 16th Division clear half a dozen villages of ISIS occupants. The Brigade halts outside the village of Salahiya. The SWAT team continues into town on its own. Mogelson writes,

We accelerated into the lead, hurtling down alleys and whipping around corners. I was impressed that the driver could steer at all. The bulletproof windshield, cracked by past rounds, looked like battered ice, and a large photograph of a recently killed SWAT-team member obstructed much of the view.

In the second section, “Entering the City,” the SWAT team is stationed in Shaymaa, a neighborhood on Mosul’s southeastern edge. Mogelson travels to an aid station set up outside Shaymaa by the 9th Division. He describes the arrival of injured soldiers:

A Humvee belonging to an infantry unit that was working with the 9th Division parked outside the aid station and unloaded a soldier whose left arm was open to the bone. His face was raw with burns; he was unconscious, and snorting loudly through his nose.

After several days at the aid station, Mogelson catches a ride to a SWAT-team position inside Shaymaa. He writes,

Upstairs, we found First Lieutenant Omar Ibrahim hunched below a shattered window. An oblong hole gaped in the cinder-block wall behind him, where a rocket-propelled grenade had exploded the day before. Omar was one of the only men in the unit whom I’d never heard raise his voice—he rarely spoke at all—and he recounted the grenade incident with sangfroid.

“They’re very close,” he said.

Peeking over the windowsill, we could glimpse dense blocks of identical-looking houses with water tanks on their roofs, the domes and minarets of mosques scattered here and there. One of the houses belonged to Dumbuk’s uncle and cousins; another held Hadi’s wife and daughter. ISIS and the men’s loved ones were in the same place, but ISIS was too close and their loved ones were too far away.

That night, gunmen attacking the SWAT team’s line approached so near that we could hear them crying “Allahu Akbar!” Bullets whistled overhead; red tracers arced and disappeared. In the morning, rounds smacked against the walls of the house occupied by Mezher [Major Mezher Sadoon, the SWAT team’s deputy commander], and a mortar rattled the windows. To the east, two enormous blasts preceded two enormous plumes.

The 9th Division asks the SWAT team to help it capture the adjoining neighborhood of Intisar, where ISIS resistance is fierce. The SWAT team enters Intisar and is nearly decimated. Mogelson reports,

Of the forty-odd men who’d been in Intisar, twenty-two had been seriously injured and two killed. Nearly everyone else was hurt to some degree. Four of the swat team’s seven Humvees had been destroyed and abandoned on the battlefield. Two others were out of commission. Later that night, I met Rayyan [Lieutenant Colonel Rayyan Abdelrazzak, commander of the SWAT team]] in the house where he was staying, by himself. His eyes downcast, his voice almost a whisper, he said, “They defeated us.”

In the third section, “A Respite From Battle,” the SWAT team is given a week off. Mogelson visits the father and siblings of a SWAT-team member named Souhel Najem in a camp for internally displaced people (I.D.P.s), “a vast grid of white tents enclosed by cyclone fencing,” in a village called Hassan Sham. The next day, he visits Corporal Bilal, a forty-year-old member of the SWAT team, at a private acute care hospital in Erbil. Bilal’s hand had been nearly severed by a suicide truck explosion in Intisar. Mogelson writes,

I found Bilal in an electrically reclining bed. The air in the room smelled mildly of rot. His left hand was splinted and bandaged; long metal pins protruded from it. His thumb, his ring finger, and his little finger were black. I asked the obvious question. When would the fingers be amputated?

“They were supposed to do it three days ago,” Bilal said. “The problem is, I don’t have the money because our salaries are late.”

The next afternoon, Bilal’s doctor agrees to perform the surgery, with the understanding that Bilal will pay at a future date. Mogelson says, “The black fingers were amputated successfully. By then, however, the necrosis had spread, and another operation was required to remove the entire hand.”

The last section, “Urban Combat,” chronicles Mogelson’s experience as he follows the SWAT team back into battle, this time in a part of Mosul known as Gogjali. Mogelson writes,

To reach the SWAT team’s new positions, my interpreter and I drove down Highway 2 until we reached a berm that had been heaped across the lanes, and then turned left onto an unpaved road with a decapitated corpse lying in the middle of it. Stray dogs picked at the body; children played nearby. The unpaved road paralleled the cemetery, which lay behind a row of houses. At the end of the row, a perpendicular alley offered a sight line to the brown field of tombstones and, beyond it, the buildings in Al Quds. The SWAT team was in a house on the other side of the alley.

ISIS snipers shoot at the house:

The snipers eventually quit for the night, but they resumed with gusto in the morning. The SWAT-team members who were not stationed on the roof went to the road behind the house. Bullets zinged up the alley leading to the cemetery. Every now and then, the men backed a Humvee into the alley and aimed a few bursts from the Dushka at Al Quds; they also launched grenades from a turret-mounted MK19. The moment the Humvee pulled back behind cover, more bullets hit the house and the houses around it. They kicked up dirt and slapped against walls. They pierced an empty fuel tanker. They shook the branches of a tree and cut down leaves. They ricocheted off power-line poles, ringing them like bells.

The SWAT team is deployed to Aden, a neighborhood west of Gogjali. One of its positions is a school. Mogelson writes,

The school was a large two-story building that jutted into the clearing—and therefore was exposed on three sides. We had to duck low while climbing an exterior staircase. A corridor ran the length of the second floor, ending at an open doorframe that gave onto a landing. A bedsheet had been hung from the frame, but you still had to hew to the corridor walls, because the snipers in Akha [a nearby neighborhood] sometimes shot through the sheet.

Mogelson crawls on his stomach under the bedsheet. He describes what he sees:

Outside, two machine guns were propped, on bipods, in front of small holes in a waist-high wall. The floor was covered with spent ammunition. Peering through a hole, I could see the houses across the clearing and, behind them, the yellow dome of a mosque. Souhel [a SWAT-team member] drew my attention to a house with a corrugated-tin roof and several square windows missing their panes.

“There are three ISIS in there,” he said.

While Mogelson is in the school, a mortar lands “so thunderously that we thought, mistakenly, that it had hit the building.” He reports,

People were screaming. I followed Basam downstairs and outside. A crater gaped in the street; a metal cistern raised on stilts was spewing water. The screams came from a house around the corner. We pushed through a gate and found a man in a tracksuit lying in the driveway. Before we could attend to him, a woman came out and yelled that more seriously wounded people were inside. She led us into the living room, where an older, shirtless man sat on a couch. Blood smeared his torso and was splattered all over his pants. People were holding sopping red cotton pads to both sides of his face. He was having trouble breathing. When he saw us, he pitched forward, as if to say something. Instead of words, blood spilled from his mouth.

A young boy lay at the man’s feet. He was also shirtless and bleeding heavily from wounds on his torso and his legs.

It was a challenge to focus. The living room was crowded with screaming relatives and neighbors. While we worked on the boy, a woman began shaking my shoulder and shouting in my ear. I had to push her away. My interpreter later told me what she’d been saying: “Don’t let my son die!”

Note that “we.” Mogelson is more than an observer; he’s a participant, helping dispense first aid.

Also in this section, Mogelson visits another I.D.P. camp, this one in Khazer. He goes there to see a SWAT-team member nicknamed Dumbuk (his real name is Mohammad Ahmed), who is recovering from a leg wound suffered in the fighting in Aden. Mogelson writes, “As we ate, Dumbuk told me that as soon as his leg and arm healed he planned to rejoin the swat team. He was happy to see his relatives, but he missed the front line.” This line reminded me of something A. J. Liebling said in the Foreword of his great Mollie & Other War Pieces (1964):

I know that it is socially acceptable to write about war as an unmitigated horror, but subjectively at least, it was not true, and you can feel its pull on men’s memories at the maudlin reunions of war divisions. They mourn for their dead, but also for war.

“The Avengers of Mosul” is an extraordinary piece of writing, one of the best I’ve read in a long time. In summarizing it, I’ve cherry-picked a few incidents to convey its vividness. I relish the way it unfolds sequentially without flashbacks. I relish its factual style. I relish its focus on the SWAT-team members. Most of all, I relish its details, e.g., a Humvee’s interior (“I crammed into Mezher’s vehicle, sharing a seat with a corporal in a black balaclava. We were wedged in amid ammo boxes, ammo belts, and the feet of another policeman, who stood in the turret behind a Dushka, a Russian heavy machine gun”); a medic’s cigarette ash (“He spoke excellent English, and worked with calm efficiency, often while smoking a cigarette, the ash falling on his patients”); the SWAT team’s deputy commander sitting on the edge of a bed “casually flipping a hand grenade around his finger”; inside a new aid station (“The fake-gold pages of a Koran, draped with a garland of plastic roses, were mounted on the wall, above bags of saline hanging from protruding screws”); the way a soldier puts his foot on a prisoner’s head (“The soldier in the cap twisted his boot back and forth, as if putting out a cigarette”); the ringtone of the Swat-team commander’s phone (“His phone kept ringing: the tone was the theme song from the movie ‘Halloween’ ”); a woman suturing a boy’s face with needle and thread (“It looked as if she’d dipped her hands in a bucket of red paint. I cut the thread and tried to shoo her off. A minute later, while attending to the wounds on the man’s legs, I looked up and saw that she was stitching him again”).

Reviewing “The Avengers of Mosul” when it originally appeared in The New Yorker, I called it a “masterpiece of war reportage” (see here). It’s also one of the most memorable New Yorker pieces I’ve ever read. 

Best of the Decade: #3 Janet Malcolm's "Iphigenia in Forest Hills"

Photo by James Messerschmidt, from Janet Malcolm's "Iphigenia in Forest Hills"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #3 pick – Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” (May 3, 2010).

The tagline of this great piece is “Anatomy of a murder trial.” That’s essentially what it is. Malcolm analyses all the participants – judges, lawyers, witnesses, jurors, even her fellow reporters. She takes nothing at face value. But she’s far from an objective onlooker. She’s fascinated by the accused, Mazoltuv Borukhova, a doctor accused of murdering her husband after a family court judge awarded him sole custody of their only child. Malcolm says, “She looked like a captive barbarian princess in a Roman triumphal procession.” She says, “Borukhova’s otherness was her defining characteristic.” She describes the case – a case that most people would consider open-and-shut – as an “enigma”: “She couldn’t have done it and she must’ve done it.”

You’ll notice that I said “judges” in the plural. There are two hearings intertwined here. One is the custody case, presided over by Judge Sidney Strauss. Strauss, not Borukhova, is the villain of the piece. It’s his decision that, in Malcolm’s words, “drove Borukhova to her terrible expedient.” She calls Strauss “petulant” and “irrational.” She says,

Courts routinely remove children from homes where they are neglected, abused, malnourished, traumatized. I know of no other case where a well-cared-for child is taken from its mother because it sits on her lap during supervised visits with an absent father and refuses to “bond” with him. 

The other hearing is the murder trial, presided over by Judge Robert Hanophy (known as “Hang’em Hanophy”), who is even more repellent than Strauss. Malcolm writes,

Hanophy is a man of seventy-four with a small head and a large body and the faux-genial manner that American petty tyrants cultivate. From his dais he looks out over the courtroom, taking in every spectator as well as every actor in the drama being played out under his direction. “You there with the cap,” he will raise his voice to say to a spectator. “Take it off. You can’t wear that in here.” In 1997, Hanophy was censured by the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct for making “undignified, discourteous and disparaging remarks” and being “mean-spirited” and “vituperative” during a sentencing. But a document of censure has no consequences. Hanophy’s absolute power remains unchanged, and he continues to exercise it with evident enjoyment, and without any sign of doubt.

Without any sign of doubt – what words could be said of a trial judge that are more damning than that? 

Malcolm views the trial skeptically. She sees it as “a contest between competing narratives.” We know from Malcolm’s previous work that she’s suspicious of narrative. “The true memory or dream or thought,” she says, in “Six Roses ou Cirrhose?” (The New Yorker, January 24, 1983), "is often so unformed and murky and inchoate that it cannot be expressed except by resort to narrative description, which somehow falsifies it.” In “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” she says,

We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this human tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.

She calls the trial process “artificial” and “inhuman.” But she also finds it fascinating, and she makes it fascinating to read. The “malleability of trial evidence” fascinates her. Cross-examination fascinates her (“A successful cross-examination is like a turn of the roulette wheel”). And she devours contradiction (“If witnesses abided by the oath to 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,' there wouldn’t be the contradictions between testimonies that give a trial its tense plot and the jury its task of deciding whom to believe”).

I think what makes this piece so memorable is Malcolm’s sympathy for Borukhova, a woman who, as Malcolm says, had "a way of getting under people’s skin and setting off serious allergic reactions.” Not many of us would have sympathy for such a person. But Malcolm does, so much so that she actually tries to intervene on Borukhova’s behalf (“Then I did something I have never done before as a journalist. I meddled with the story I was reporting. I entered it as a character who could affect its plot. I picked up the phone and called Stephen Scaring’s office”). The moment comes after Malcolm interviews one of the prosecution’s witnesses, David Schall, who is the court-appointed law guardian of Borukhova and her husband’s daughter. After the interview, Malcolm has such serious concerns about his mental stability that she calls Borukhova’s lawyer, Stephen Scaring. He asks her to fax him her notes of the interview. She does so, and next day in court Scaring moves for leave to recall Schall to question him concerning his mental health. Judge Hanophy denies the motion and the trial proceeds. But I’ve never forgotten the boldness of Malcolm’s move. It takes ovaries to do what she did. She damn near became a witness in the very trial she was covering.

Postscript: The book version of “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” published in 2011, is slightly longer than the New Yorker piece. It contains a scene - one that doesn't appear in the magazine version - that is one of my favorites in all of Malcolm’s writings. It’s a description of a mosaic in the lobby of the courthouse where Borukhova’s trial was held. Malcolm says,

The mosaic is a wondrous sight, but, as people hurry through the security barrier toward the elevators, they do not take it in. I noticed it only because one day, during a long recess, I was walking around the courthouse looking for things to notice.

Malcolm goes on to describe the mosaic in detail. But it’s that “I was walking around the courthouse looking for things to notice” that I love. It perfectly captures the flâneurial sensibility in action. It's one of my touchstones.

Best of the Decade: #4 Raffi Khatchadourian's "Transfiguration"

Photo by Dan Winters, from Raffi Khatchadourian's "Transfiguration"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #4 pick – Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Transfiguration” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2012).

“Transfiguration” is an extraordinary account of a ground-breaking surgical operation – “a full face transplant, something that had never been done before.” What do I mean by “extraordinary”? Consider this passage:

Pomahac walked back to the Tupperware container and gently took the transplant out. His movements were clinical and measured, as if he were handling a delicate piece of art. The face was the same color as his surgical gloves: latex beige, pale, glistening with ice water. It was slightly unshaven, as if the beard had grown in transit. The rubbery-looking skin supported an inch or so of cartilage, vessels, fat, and nerves – a red mash of tissue – beneath it. Spread out in Pomahac’s hands, the face was massive, about the circumference of a hubcab.

I read that eight years ago, when the piece first appeared, and I’ve never forgotten it. Khatchadourian’s depiction of the face color (“latex beige, pale, glistening with ice water”) is transfixing. The detail about it being “slightly unshaven” is inspired. His description of the whole complex, intense operation, consisting of two procedures (removal of the donor’s face; replacement of the recipient’s face with the donor’s face), is spellbinding. Over the years, I’ve read some great New Yorker action descriptions (McPhee on canoeing, Angell on baseball, Paumgarten on skiing, Buford on cooking), but this piece on surgery is – I’ll say it again – absolutely extraordinary.

Khatchadourian is an excellent noticer of details. Here’s his description of the surgeon Bohdan Pomahac transferring the face:

Pomahac carefully swiveled from the trolley to the operating table, placing the donor’s face where Wien’s own face had been. “It’s going to go twice around his,” he observed dispassionately. During the dissection, Pomahac had cut the skin far beyond the hairline, to transplant part of the scalp as well. The donor’s hair was slightly lighter than Wiens’s – it had some gray in it – and some of Wiens’s hair poked out from underneath, as if he were wearing an ill-fitting mask.

That “some of Wiens’s hair poked out from underneath, as if he were wearing an ill-fitting mask” is superb.

It’s not clear whether Khatchadourian actually witnessed the face transplant first hand, or whether his descriptions are reconstructions based on videos, transcripts, interviews, etc., but it doesn’t matter. His account of the operation appears totally authentic, completely accurate, and positively riveting.

Not only is Khatchadourian a great describer; he’s also a brilliant quoter. “Transfiguration” is a rich, beautifully interwoven assemblage of quotation from multiple first and secondary sources. Khatchadourian appears to have sought out and directly talked to most of the people principally involved, including Dallas Wiens, the incredibly brave, resilient, tolerant recipient of the face transplant; Jeffrey Janis, the reconstructive surgeon who oversaw Wiens’s miraculous recovery at Parkland Hospital; Bernard Devauchelle, chief of maxillofacial surgery at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire d’Amiens, who conducted the first face transplant; Bohdan Pomahac, America’s “leading specialist in face transplants,” and leader of the surgical team that performed Wiens’s operation; Elof Eriksson, chief of plastic surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who was a key member of Pomahac’s team; and various members of Wiens’s family.

Reviewing this piece back in 2012, I wrote, “Khatchadourian’s ‘No Secrets’ and ‘The Gulf War’ are brilliant, but ‘Transfiguration’ is his masterpiece (so far). It’s an unforgettable piece of writing. It moves Khatchadourian to the front rank of New Yorker writers.” 

Best of the Decade: #5 John McPhee's "The Orange Trapper"

Photo by Phillip Toledano, from John McPhee's "The Orange Trapper"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #5 pick – John McPhee’s “The Orange Trapper” (The New Yorker, July 1, 2013; included in his 2018 collection The Patch). 

“The Orange Trapper” is a perfect example of McPhee’s late style – personal, playful, artful. It’s about McPhee’s golf ball collecting compulsion (“From my bicycle in New Jersey, if I am passing a golf-links batture, my head is turned that way and my gaze runs through the woods until a white dot stops it, which is not an infrequent occurrence. I get off my bike and collect the ball”). And what, you might ask, is a “golf-links batture”? McPhee explains: 

The woods that lie between public roads and private fairways remind me of the dry terrain between a river levee and the river itself. In Louisiana along the Mississippi this isolated and often wooded space is known as the river batture. If you’re in Louisiana, you pronounce it “batcher.” 

McPhee’s descriptions of his golf ball hunting adventures generate delectable quasi-surreal passages. For example:

You get off your bike, pick up a ball, and sometimes are able to identify the species it hit. Pine pitch makes a clear impression. Tulip poplars tend to smear. An oak or hickory leaves a signature writ small and simple. A maple does not leave maple syrup.

Tulip poplars tend to smear– pure McPhee. I devour it. Why? Why do I relish that sentence? It’s only five words – but what a delightful combination! Tulip poplars tend to smear– it chimes. There’s poetry in it. 

And how about this beauty:

This is not on one of my biking routes, but on solo rides I have been there, and returned there, inspired by curiosity and a longing for variety and, not least, the observation that in the thickets and copses and wild thorny roses on the inside of Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence are golf balls—Big Bank golf balls, Big Pharma golf balls, C-level golf balls (C.E.O., C.O.O., C.F.O. golf balls), lying there abandoned forever by people who are snorkeling in Caneel Bay.

That “in the thickets and copses and wild thorny bushes on the inside of Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence” is wonderful. But what makes the construction a true McPhee is that inspired last bit – “lying there abandoned forever by people who are snorkeling in Caneel Bay.” I’m willing to bet that, in all of literature, no writer has ever before combined “biking routes,” “solo rides,” “thickets and copses and wild thorny roses,” “Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence,” “golf balls,” “Big Pharma,” “abandoned,” “snorkeling in Caneel Bay” in one line. It’s a gorgeous, cabinet-of-wonders sentence, one among many, in this marvellous, memorable, light-hearted piece.   

Best of the Decade: #6 Ben McGrath's "The Wayfarer"

Photo by Victor Schrager, from Ben McGrath's "The Wayfarer"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #6 pick – Ben McGrath’s brilliant “The Wayfarer” (December 14, 2015).

“The Wayfarer” tells the story of a sixty-three-year-old riverine nomad named Dick Conant, who spent his days paddling his Coleman canoe (“packed as if for the apocalypse, with tarps and trash bags and Army-surplus duffels”), voyaging America’s waterways.

McGrath first met Conant on September 1, 2014, on the bank of the Hudson River, at Piedmont, New York. He interviewed him at his campsite and wrote a “Talk of the Town” story about him called "Southbound" that appeared in the September 22, 2014 New Yorker. Three months later, Conant went missing. His canoe was found upside down near the mouth of Big Flatty Creek, on Albemarle Sound, North Carolina.

McGrath describes Conant as follows:

He was sixty-three, and spoke in a mellifluous high timbre that seemed almost childlike. He wore denim bib overalls, a T-shirt, and muddy brown boots, and stood six feet one and weighed three hundred pounds. He had a rust-colored beard, with patches of white, and his face was as red as a boiled lobster shell—a riparian Santa. He laughed with great heaves of his gut. His handshake offered the firmest grip I’ve ever felt.

McGrath endeavours to reconstruct Conant’s life, including his last trip – from Plattsburg, N.Y. to Big Flatty Creek, N.C. He talks to members of Conant's family, to some of Conant’s old friends, and to people Conant encountered on his travels (Conant recorded their names in his journals). For example, he talks to state trooper Edwin Scollon, who provides a remarkable description of his brief encounter with Conant at Willsboro Point, on the shore of Lake Champlain. Here’s an excerpt:

I found Mr. Conant in a bed that he had made upon a pebbled shoreline and under a canopy of cedars. He hadn’t heard me come around the house and I took a moment to size him up. He looked quite comfortable; he had a book propped up on his midsection and all that was left of his dinner was the can that had once contained it. It was readily apparent to me, from all that he had in and about his canoe, that Mr. Conant was making a long trip. If I hadn’t had a job to do, I would have left him alone. He had made this little piece of shoreline his own for the night and even though he was outdoors, I did feel that I was about to disturb his privacy.

McGrath also talks to harbor pilot Dougy Walsh. He, too, had a vivid memory of meeting Conant: “ ‘I was blown away by this guy,’ Walsh recalled. ‘He didn’t have any nautical charts! He was using a road atlas!’ ”

McGrath talks to a resident of Trenton, N.Y., Kevin Jolley. Conant was taking a break from an arduous portage through Trenton, when Jolley encountered him and used his iPhone to video-record a conversation with him. Here’s McGrath’s superb rendering of that conversation:

Scene: Conant, sitting on a street corner, leaning back against a green duffel, boots crossed, maps in his lap, hands knotted over his midsection. He has a Camaro Z28 cap on his head, and a toothbrush and a pen poking out of his breast pockets. The canoe is off to his right, parallel to the curb. A white brick building advertising “Plumbing & Heating Materials” squats in the background. Strewn backpacks and bags, a crate, a blue bucket, a Gatorade bottle: a landlubber’s boating picnic. A man in a motorized wheelchair cruises west, not on the sidewalk but in the street, against the flow of traffic, and doesn’t so much as turn his head to acknowledge the strange voyager.

“Where you headed?” a voice offscreen asks.

“I’m headed down to Florida,” Conant says, laughing.

“What made you stop through Trenton?” another voice asks. “Just the map?”

“Well, no,” Conant says. “I want to get on the Delaware, so I can head down to—there’s a Chesapeake-Delaware Canal that I can take into Chesapeake Bay. Now, Chesapeake Bay’s a large body of water, and I’ll be exposed. But it’s not as large as the Atlantic Ocean.”

The first offscreen voice asks, “Yeah, man, what’s your whole purpose, though?”

Before Conant can finish answering, a black S.U.V. pulls up alongside the curb, looming over the canoeist, and the camera turns away. A woman leans out the window. “Excuse me,” she says. “I’m looking for River View Plaza?”

You can tell from that passage – the Camaro Z28 cap, the toothbrush and pen poking out of Conant’s pockets, the canoe, the backpacks and bags, crate, blue bucket, Gatorade bottle – that McGrath relishes Conant’s details. I do, too.

“The Wayfarer” abounds with wonderfully specific, evocative, vibrant sentences. For example:

Biding his time in Austin, listening to an astronomy radio program on his headphones and scavenging from dumpsters, he thought of himself as a locust, lying in wait, hidden from civilization until his bank account began to grow again.

For a few days at a time, he might not speak to a soul, content with his Western novels and his chores. A circling beaver at dusk. A waning moon over the Green Mountains. Hooded Merganser ducklings at play. And then, suddenly feeling a social tug, he would beach in a river town and make several stops: a grocery, a church, a library, a bar.

After a mile or so, looking through a pair of binoculars I saw the flash of a yellow paddle blade, and there he was, bobbing in the ebb tide, riding so low that he appeared almost to be sitting on the water.

He arranged several sticks of driftwood crosswise, as a makeshift ramp for pulling the boat above the high-water mark. His overalls were draped across the bow, air-drying after a laundry dunking earlier in the morning. He was wearing swimming trunks and a salt- and sweat-stained T-shirt that said “New Orleans French Quarter.” His digital watch, I noticed, was set to Mountain Time. Rummaging around in his cooler, he asked me if I wanted a soda pop, and mentioned that he planned to have some ice water. He gave a few shakes to an old Gatorade bottle that he’d been re-using. “I got peaches,” he said. “You want one?”

And my favourite:

A few of the bridges over the canal were so low that he had to lean back and retract his chin, sliding underneath, as though into an MRI scanner, while cars rolled overhead. 

Reading this great piece, I thought of James Wood’s observation: “To notice is to rescue, to redeem; to save life from itself” (The Nearest Thing to Life). That’s what McGrath does in “The Wayfarer”; he brilliantly notices this solitary, authentic, tragic wanderer and thereby saves him from oblivion. Joseph Mitchell did the same thing in his classic “Joe Gould's Secret” (The New Yorker, September 19 & 26, 1964). I think “The Wayfarer” is destined to be a classic, too. 

Best of the Decade: Second Thoughts

Photo by George Steinmetz, from Lauren Collins's "Angle of Vision"

Well, I’m midway in my “Best of the Decade” series and I’m having second thoughts about it. I now think it was folly to attempt it. There are just too many great pieces to choose from. Boiling the selection down to twelve has been agony. I’ve had to be absolutely ruthless. Many wonderful pieces have been excluded.

I’m going to continue with the series. But when I’m finished, I intend to provide an alternate list of twelve more pieces – all of which are deserving of “Best of Decade” status. That won’t do justice to all the New Yorker pieces I cherish, but at least it will help mitigate the severity of the selection process.

As for the list I’m currently working on, here are the six picks I’ve made so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

7. Lauren Collins’s “Angle of Vision” (“In dreams—mine, at least—flying is like swimming. But the air was crisp and thin, not viscous, as I’d imagined it. I didn’t have to make my way through it; it made its way through me. Being upright in the air feels like being upside down on the ground. My spine stretched. I felt like I’d be an inch taller when I touched down. In twenty seconds, my feet thudded into the valley floor”);

8.  Joseph Mitchell’s “Street Life” (“Another thing I like to do is to get on a subway train picked at random and stay on it for a while and go upstairs to the street and get on the first bus that shows up going in any direction and sit on the cross seat in back beside a window and ride along and look out the window at the people and at the flowing backdrop of buildings. There is no better vantage point from which to look at the common, ordinary city—not the lofty, noble silvery vertical city but the vast, spread-out, sooty-gray and sooty-brown and sooty-red and sooty-pink horizontal city, the snarled-up and smoldering city, the old, polluted, betrayed, and sure-to-be-torn-down-any-time-now city”); 

9. Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden” (“During the next four minutes, the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered”);

10. Robert A. Caro’s “The Transition” (“Whirling in his seat, Youngblood shouted—in a ‘voice I had never heard him ever use,’ Lady Bird recalled—‘Get down! Get down!’ and, grabbing Johnson’s right shoulder, yanked him roughly down toward the floor in the center of the car, as he almost leaped over the front seat, and threw his body over the Vice-President, shouting again, ‘Get down! Get down!’ ”);

11. Elif Batuman’s “The Memory Kitchen” (“Near the beekeeper’s table, a farmer was selling live turkeys. There were seven or eight of them sitting on a row of crates, occasionally nodding their heads and gurgling, like members of a jury”);

12. Tad Friend’s “Thicker Than Water” (“The wave caught them from behind and lifted them until they were surfing its face. They hung there for five seconds—their port gunwale tilting overhead, the Yamaha outboard whirring in the air—as if time were taking a breath. Jason still believed that they’d shoot the barrel and make it out. Then the starboard gunwale hit sand, and with fantastic power the wave lifted the boat and hurled it onto the sandbar upside down. All that was visible of Jabb from above was a strip of maroon-painted hull”).

Best of the Decade: #7 Lauren Collins's "Angle of Vision"

Photo by François Lagarde, from Lauren Collins's "Angle of Vision"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #7 pick – Lauren Collins’s "Angle of Vision" (April 19, 2010).

“Angle of Vision” is one of my all-time favorite New Yorker pieces. It’s a profile of the aerial photographer George Steinmetz. Here’s what I said about it when it originally appeared:

Another tremendous piece this week is Lauren Collins’s "Angle of Vision." I’m rapidly becoming a Collins devotee. (See my effusions a few weeks ago regarding her lovely "Check Mate.") What I like about her work is her unhesitating willingness to write in the “I” – to present her stories as personal experiences. “Angle of Vision” is an example par excellence of her subjective approach where she not only profiles paraglider flyer/photographer George Steinmetz; she actually straps on a paraglider (Steinmetz calls it a “flying lawn chair”) and flies it herself, reporting back on what it felt like: “In dreams – mine, at least – flying is like swimming. But the air was crisp and thin, not viscous, as I’d imagined it. I didn’t have to make my way through it; it made its way through me. Being upright in the air feels like being upside down on the ground. My spine stretched. I felt like I’d be an inch taller when I touched down. In twenty seconds, my feet thudded into the valley floor.”

“Angle of Vision” is a big, gorgeous multi-panelled mural of a story. Time jumps around. The opening section introduces us to Steinmetz on expedition in southeastern Algeria. Collins is there with him. The next section describes the paraglider and how Steinmetz uses it to take aerial photographs. The third part (the Sefar flight) cuts back to Algeria and shows us Steinmetz and his crew attempting unsuccessfully to photograph an isolated plateau. The fourth part takes us back to the Sahara and talks about the Tuareg people. The fifth part takes us back to the expedition in Algeria and shows us Steinmetz discovering a prime camera subject – the high dunes of Tin Merzouga. Here’s Collins’s wonderful description of the dunes: “Their parabolic swells and eskered spines, splitting shadow, reminded me of horseshoe crabs. In the fading light, the sand turned from the color of paprika to a blood-orange shade and then to an iridescent purple, like eyeshadow, eventually deepening to a chocolaty brown.” That “eskered spines” is inspired! The sixth part is a biographic sketch of Steinmetz and an overview of his photographic accomplishments. The seventh section takes us to Steinmetz’s home in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, where Collins joins him and they review some of Steinmetz’s photos. Collins’s description of Steinmetz’s aerial shot of the fortified village of Beni Isguen is worth quoting: “Captured at sunrise, in warm light, the houses were the color of seashells. At sunset, they were bleached out, shards of bone. Their roofs, invisible from the street, had been painted in aquas and turquoises, so that from above, they looked like swimming pools.” The eighth and final section of “Angle of Vision” is a mini-history of flying. It concludes memorably with Collins’s own twenty-second paraglider flight.

The foregoing is my separation of Collins’s story into its constituent parts. As she’s written it, there’s no sectioning, no numbering; the whole thing flows seamlessly from the first scene to the last. I’ve taken time to describe its structure because I like how it starts out by plunging us directly into action, into Steinmetz’s desert expedition. Only after we’re caught up in Steinmetz’s struggles in the desert, do we receive the background facts about him, his work, his flying machine, etc. The classic template for this type of narrative structure is, of course, John McPhee’s “Travels in Georgia” (The New Yorker, April 28, 1973). See also his great “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977). I wonder if Collins has used this particular structure in any of her previous pieces. I’ll have to check. [The New Yorker & Me, May 7, 2010]

All this still applies. “Angle of Vision” is “a big, gorgeous multi-panelled mural of a story.” Collins’s “unhesitating willingness to write in the ‘I’ – to present her stories as personal experiences” is what I love about her work. That “parabolic swells and eskered spines, splitting shadow” is inspired! For all these reasons, “Angle of Vision” is my #7 pick.

Best of the Decade: #8 Joseph Mitchell's "Street Life"

Joseph Mitchell (Photo by Therese Mitchell)

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #8 pick – Joseph Mitchell’s wonderful “Street Life” (February 11 & 18, 2013).

This piece is Mitchell’s paean to walking as a way of becoming part of the city. He says, “What I really like to do is wander aimlessly in the city.” What makes the piece memorable for me are its many long, flowing sentences – almost stream-of-consciousness-like. This one, for example:

At any hour of the day or night, I can shut my eyes and visualize in a swarm of detail what is happening on scores of streets, some well known and some obscure, from one end of the city to the other—on the upper part of Webster Avenue, up in the upper Bronx, for example, which has a history as a dumping-out place for underworld figures who have been taken for a ride, and which I go to every now and then because I sometimes find a weed or a wildflower or a moss or a fern or a vine that is new to me growing along its edges or in the cracks in its pavements, and also because there are pleasant views of the Bronx River and of the Central and the New Haven railroad tracks on one side of it and pleasant views of Woodlawn Cemetery on the other side of it, or on North Moore Street, down on the lower West Side of Manhattan, which used to be lined with spice warehouses and spice-grinding mills and still has enough of them left on it to make it the most aromatic street in the city (on ordinary days, it is so aromatic it is mildly and tantalizingly and elusively exciting; on windy days, particularly on warm, damp, windy days, it is so aromatic it is exhilarating), or on Birmingham Street, which is a tunnel-like alley that runs for one block alongside the Manhattan end of the Manhattan Bridge and is used by bums of the kind that Bellevue psychiatrists call loner winos as a place in which to sit in comparative seclusion and drink and doze and by drug addicts and drug pushers as a place in which to come into contact with each other and by old-timers in the neighborhood as a shortcut between Henry Street and the streets to the south, or on Emmons Avenue, which is the principal street of Sheepshead Bay, in Brooklyn, and along one side of which the party boats and charter boats and bait boats of the Sheepshead Bay fishing fleet tie up, or on Beach 116th Street, which, although only two blocks long, is the principal street of Rockaway Park, in Queens, and from one end of which there is a stirring view of the ocean and from the other end of which there is a stirring view of Jamaica Bay, or on Bloomingdale Road, which is the principal street of a quiet old settlement of Negroes called Sandy Ground down in the rural part of Staten Island, the southernmost part of the city.

And this:

I never get tired of gazing from the back seats of buses at the stone eagles and the stone owls and the stone dolphins and the stone lions’ heads and the stone bulls’ heads and the stone rams’ heads and the stone urns and the stone tassels and the stone laurel wreaths and the stone scallop shells and the cast-iron stars and the cast-iron rosettes and the cast-iron medallions and the clusters of cast-iron acanthus leaves bolted to the capitals of cast-iron Corinthian columns and the festoons of cast-iron flowers and the swags of cast-iron fruit and the zinc brackets in the shape of oak leaves propping up the zinc cornices of brownstone houses and the scroll-sawed bargeboards framing the dormers of decaying old mansard-roofed mansions and the terra-cotta cherubs and nymphs and satyrs and sibyls and sphinxes and Atlases and Dianas and Medusas serving as keystones in arches over the doorways and windows of tenement houses.

Mitchell’s depth of observation in this piece is astonishing. His love of lists – a sure sign of true interest in real reality – is everywhere present. Consider this beauty:

Pretty soon my obsessive curiosity began to dominate me, and I went to a succession of Masses in St. Patrick’s that encompassed seven Sundays, the Easter-cycle Masses; and then I went to Masses in some representative Eastern Catholic churches that are in union with Rome, Syrian-rite churches and Byzantine-rite churches and Armenian-rite churches; and then I went to Masses or Liturgies in some Orthodox churches, Greek Orthodox churches and Russian Orthodox churches and Carpatho-Russian Orthodox churches and Ukrainian Orthodox churches and Albanian Orthodox churches and Bulgarian Orthodox churches and Serbian Orthodox churches and Romanian Orthodox churches; and then I went to Liturgies in two so-called Old Catholic churches, one that I found in a Polish neighborhood in Manhattan and another that I found in a Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn. 

Helen Vendler says, “Finally, the only test of a poem is that it be unforgettable.” The same applies to essays, in my opinion. Joseph Mitchell’s splendid “Street Life” easily passes the test.  

Best of the Decade: #9 Nicholas Schmidle's "Getting Bin Laden"

Photo illustration by John Ritter, from Nicholas Schmidle's "Getting Bin Laden"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #9 pick – Nicholas Schmidle’s extraordinary “Getting Bin Laden” (August 8, 2011). 

From the moment I saw the news of bin Laden’s assassination, I wanted to know how it happened. Schmidle’s piece told me in detail after fascinating detail. Here, for example, is his description of James, one of the twenty-three Navy SEALs who carried out the raid:

James, a broad-chested man in his late thirties, does not have the lithe swimmer’s frame that one might expect of a SEAL—he is built more like a discus thrower. That night, he wore a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, and carried a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with extra ammunition; a CamelBak, for hydration; and gel shots, for endurance. He held a short-barrel, silenced M4 rifle. (Other SEALs had chosen the Heckler & Koch MP7.) A “blowout kit,” for treating field trauma, was tucked into the small of James’s back. Stuffed into one of his pockets was a laminated gridded map of the compound. In another pocket was a booklet with photographs and physical descriptions of the people suspected of being inside. He wore a noise-cancelling headset, which blocked out nearly everything besides his heartbeat.

The amazing level of specificity in that passage is typical of the entire piece. And it’s all the more impressive when you consider that Schmidle himself didn’t experience any of it. His piece is based entirely on interviews and research. 

Schmidle puts us there with the Navy SEALs in the Blackhawks as they fly towards Abbottabad (“During the next four minutes, the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered”). 

In a flashback, he puts us with the SEALs in the Nevada desert as they rehearse the mission (“The pilots flew in the dark, arrived at the simulated compound, and settled into a hover while the SEALs fast-roped down”). 

He puts us with President Obama, Vice-President Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and others, in a small office adjoining the Situation Room, as they watch a video feed “showing real-time footage of the target, which was being shot by an unarmed RQ 170 drone flying more than fifteen thousand feet above Abbottabad.” 

He puts us inside the Blackhawk as it crash-lands inside the walls of bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound (“The pilot jammed the nose forward to drive it into the dirt and prevent his aircraft from rolling onto its side. Cows, chickens, and rabbits scurried”). 

And, most crucially, he puts us inside bin Laden’s bedroom at the moment he’s killed (“The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye. On his radio, he reported, ‘For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.’ After a pause, he added, 'Geronimo E.K.I.A.'—‘enemy killed in action’ ”). 

The piece is beautifully structured in nine sections. The first section immediately plunges us into the mission (“Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden”). 

The next two sections are flashbacks, detailing the planning and preparation for the raid. The pivotal fourth section artfully transitions from the grainy black-and-white crash-landing scene that Obama, Biden, et al., are watching on their screen at the White House to the reality of the crash as it’s occurring in bin Laden’s compound. 

Sections 5 and 6 describe the raid as it rapidly unfolds inside the compound, including the killing of bin Laden’s courier (“The Americans’ night-vision goggles cast the scene in pixellated shades of emerald green. Kuwaiti, wearing a white shalwar kameez, had grabbed a weapon and was coming back outside when the seals opened fire and killed him”), bin Laden’s brother, bin Laden’s son, and bin Laden himself. 

Section 7 tells what happened immediately after bin Laden is killed – the placement of bin Laden’s corpse in a body bag, the collection of flash drives, CDs, DVDs, and computer hardware from bin Laden’s house, the extraction of DNA from bin Laden’s body, the destruction of the damaged Blackhawk, and the SEALs’ escape in a Chinook. 

Sections 8 and 9 cover bin Laden’s burial at sea and Obama’s meeting with the SEALs at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. 

Boldly and bravely executed, the raid on bin Laden is one of the most astonishing military feats of our time. Nicholas Schmidle's "Getting Bin Laden" reports it superbly.