April 24, 2017, Issue

Last year’s Food & Travel Issue, containing four brilliant pieces (Lauren Collins’s “Come to the Fair,” Dana Goodyear’s “Mezcal Sunrise,” Carolyn Kormann’s “The Tasting Menu Initiative,” and Dexter Filkins’s “The End of Ice”), was my pick for Best Issue of the Year (see here). It’s a tough act to follow. This year’s Food & Travel Issue suffers in comparison. It lacks the kind of pungent, textured specificity I associate with great food and travel writing. Rachel Monroe’s “#Vanlife” isn’t bad, if you relish sentences like “King checked Instagram on her phone; her most recent post, a shot of a storm building over the Pacific, had been something of an aesthetic departure—most Where’s My Office Now images include King, the van, or Penny; the most popular tend to include all three—and it was underperforming.” But I don't. I couldn’t be done with it fast enough. The same goes for Lauren Collins’s “Secrets in the Sauce,” in which the sentence “Barbecue might be America’s most political food” stopped me cold; I didn’t read another line. I skimmed Daniel Mendelsohn’s “An Odyssey,” an account of a trip he and his father took on a cruise ship, retracing Odysseus’ journey. This may strike some as interesting; it didn’t do anything for me. Politics, social media, and patriarchal Greek poetry make a strange and unappealing hash.

Speaking of hash, care for a pot brownie? No, not really, but I read Lizzie Widdicombe’s “High Cuisine” anyway, because … well, because it’s by Lizzie Widdicombe, writer of, among other piquant pieces, the superb “The Bad-Boy Brand” (April 8, 2013). “High Cuisine” contains at least two inspired sentences:

A team from Weedmaps, a “Yelp for pot” based in Irvine, California, was visiting the facility, and a photographer had set up a light box, which he was using to take pictures of pot cookies.

I nibbled a small pie: it tasted like pumpkin, but with a weedy aftertaste, which brought back Proustian memories of high school.

For me, the best food writing in this otherwise dismal Food & Travel Issue is found in Shauna Lyon’s “Tables For Two: King” and Talia Lavin’s “Bar Tab: The Binc.” Lyon’s piece offers pure, sensuous bliss:

A spectacular, bracing salad served at the beginning of March included a pink radicchio that one guest had recently spied in the produce section of Eataly, and a mysterious soft-crunchy, hollow stalk, which turned out to be the heart of a puntarelle, whose chickory-like leaves were more easily identified. The coniglio alla cacciatora, or hunter’s rabbit, came as nubs of tender, gamey meat on a bed of polenta larded with cheese and butter, and the onglet appeared as great red slices of hanger steak, alongside al-dente chickpeas. For dessert, a Pernod semifreddo in a dainty coupe was an inspired touch.

Lavin’s “The Binc” shows a deep pleasure taken in description:

The interior is suffused with a warm, orangey glow, and, though it just celebrated its one-year anniversary, it feels curiously unfocussed in time. There is a faded portrait of a mustachioed man from an indeterminate era, and antique marionettes of soldiers hanging on a cloudy, wall-size mirror; the rest-room signs are done in careful Art Deco lettering. On a recent Saturday night, the bar top was crowded with rows of multicolored tinctures, like cardamom bitters and sweet-potato shrub, which added complexity to cocktails such as the Whitaker (vodka, ginger) and the Fall of Roebling (tequila, habanero). Twelve barflies gave the room a pleasantly full, but not overcrowded, air.

I have a suggestion for next year’s Food & Travel Issue: turn it over to the “Tables For Two” and “Bar Tab” crew; let them write it.

Reality Cake

A couple of weeks ago, in the "Bookends" column of The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Leslie Jamison and Daniel Mendelsohn extolled the merits of memoir-novels. Jamison’s piece particularly sticks in the mind. She seems to think that fictionalizing memoir makes it more artful. She asks, “So what’s the lure of the blur? Why do we like that space of uncertainty in which we don’t know what’s been invented and what hasn’t?” She answers, “There’s an electric charge in toggling back and forth between the shimmer of what’s been artfully constructed and the glint of what actually was.” She says, “We get the frisson of admiring the narrative as both artifact and plain fact, a North Pole both imagined and constructed. We get to have our reality cake and eat it too.” “Reality cake” is a good name for memoir-novels. They’re confections of the real and the fictive. I have no interest in them. I prefer reality served straight – all facts, no fiction. But this doesn’t mean that I lose out on the experience of Jamison’s “frisson.” This is where I take issue with Jamison. She asserts that it’s fiction that makes reality artful, as if, say, John McPhee’s Coming into the Country and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains are just inert lumps of raw fact. There are works of factual writing that are as beautifully and artfully wrought as any novel. Fiction doesn’t necessarily make reality artful; it just makes it fake.

Notes on James Wolcott's "Critical Mass"

James Wolcott, in his delectable essay collection Critical Mass, describes John Updike’s Hugging the Shore as being “crammed with goodies.” The same can be said of Critical Mass. One of its most enjoyable aspects is Wolcott’s Kaelesque ability to pin his subjects with arresting, sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued appraisals. For example, he says Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s “conveys the champagne fizz and sparkle of fashion magazines in the fifties, the infusion of frisky new energy into old money. It’s all surface, but the surface dances.” He calls Capote’s “La Côte Basque, 1965” “a cutthroat string quartet.” He says of William Shawn, “His desk was an altar where the ideals of accuracy, clarity, and understated elegance were held sacrosanct. Every article, no matter how ephemeral, was groomed like a French poodle.” Of Norman Mailer: “The crippler is that in his writing Mailer was psychologically, creatively, empathetically tone-deaf when it came to women, his female characters a creamy mélange of angel-whores whose lipstick was ripe for smearing – a Playboy Bunny mansion of haughty bitches and breathy ditzes whose dialogue bore no resemblance to indoor speech.” On William Styron: “My own problem with Styron’s ennobled potboilers was not his subject matter, point of view, historical accuracy, pale-male effrontery, or any other heavy carbs, but the sheer awful self-conscious succulence of the prose, a fruit-orchard in every scene-painting description.”

Wolcott doesn’t analyze at the level of language the way James Wood does. His hands aren’t as inky with text (to steal a phrase from Wood) as Wood’s are. Both critics are incredible metaphoricists. Wolcott mixes his metaphors more than Wood does. His writing is fizzier, more audacious. In his piece on Marvin Mudrick, Wolcott says that Mudrick “turned litcrit into a spinoff of stand-up comedy.” The same can be said of Wolcott. Like Kael, he’s a master of the parenthetical wisecrack. His inspired “Ved, have a melon ball,” in “The Love Bug,” makes me laugh every time I read it.

Reading Wolcott, I’m sometimes reminded of Wilfrid Sheed, except he doesn’t treat criticism as a game the way Sheed did. Sheed’s reviews were all about how witty he could be. Wolcott is more attentive to his subject, more descriptive. When he’s really digging his material, he can strike some wonderfully surprising, surreal word combos. Consider this beauty from Wolcott’s superb “Manny Farber’s Termite Art” (included in Critical Mass):  

His McCabe and Mrs. Miller features a broken bar of Hershey’s chocolate, and The Films of R. W. Fassbinder so trims the fat from Fassbinder’s blobby corpus that what’s left is a pair of toilets, a telephone cord and receiver stretched across an empty bed, a giant beer bottle, and a magazine spread on Hanna Schygulla.

When was the last time you saw “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Hershey’s chocolate,” “R. W. Fassbinder,” “blobby corpus,” “toilets,” “telephone cord,” “empty bed,” “giant beer bottle,” “magazine spread,” and “Hanna Schygulla” conjoined in the same sentence? I’ll bet, never. It’s the prose equivalent of a ravishing Rauschenberg combine. I love it.

Wolcott doesn’t treat Capote and Cheever as failed saints the way (say) Daniel Mendelsohn and Colm Tóibín do. “Liar,” “failure,” “snob,” “drunk” occur so often in Mendelsohn’s “The Truman Show” (included in his How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, 2008) and Tóibín’s “My God, the Suburbs” (London Review of Books, November 5, 2009), I found myself thinking, these guys enjoy using these words. It’s tonic to read Wolcott’s Capote and Cheever pieces because he avoids Mendelsohn’s and Tóibín’s moralizing, prosecutorial approach. Wolcott relishes Capote’s and Cheevers’s complex, tormented personalities. He says of Capote:

For many, the fizzle of Answered Prayers and his personal tailspin offer a spectacle more engrossing than the arc of a distinguished life. A dignified exit may be desirable in principle, but if you can have your subject bumming around in his bathrobe in public, then you’ve got yourself a Cautionary Tale. There but for the grace of God and an empty liquor cabinet go I.

On Cheever, he writes:

Our literary life would be poorer without its theatrical touch-ups, and Cheever’s are no more to be begrudged and censured than the pile of buttermilk batter that James Dickey became or Isak Dinesen’s eye shadow.

I agree. The essence of being human is that we screw up. I applaud Wolcott’s humanism (and humor). Dan and Colm, have a melon ball. 

Mendelsohn's Malice

Daniel Mendelsohn, in his malicious “The Truman Show” (The New York Times Book Review, December 5, 2004; included in Mendelsohn’s 2008 collection How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken) looks down his nose at Truman Capote and judges him to be a failure. He says it three times: (1) “In his inexorable disintegration, Capote represents a distinct type of American failure – the artist whose early success is so spectacular that both life and art are forever trapped by, and associated with, long-past triumphs”; (2) “Thus seduced by his own reputation, he failed to pursue an artistic avenue that could well have led him to greater success”; (3) “Together, they [a volume of Capote’s letters entitled Too Brief a Treat and The Complete Short Stories of Truman Capote] provide intriguing insights into the nature both of his gift and of his terrible failure.” Terrible failure? We are talking here about the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, In Cold Blood, and – my favorite Capote work – The Muses are Heard. Rather than focusing on Capote’s writing, Mendelsohn dwells on Capote’s personal life. In addition to calling Capote a failure, he also calls him an “inveterate liar.” I find this ad hominem form of book reviewing despicable. I’m interested in the writing, not the writer. Compare Mendelsohn’s piece with Thomas Mallon’s New Yorker review of the same two Capote books (“Golden Boy,” The New Yorker, September 13, 2004). Mallon says,

To best experience Capote the stylist, one must go back to his short fiction, his work in the form that he called his “great love”; it was a genre he neglected through the nineteen-sixties, and then, near the end of his life, began to woo again. In fewer than four hundred pages, Random House has just given us “The Complete Stories of Truman Capote” ($24.95). If some of the earliest, most precocious efforts seem derivative (“My Side of the Matter” now feels awfully like Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.”), one experiences as strongly as ever his gift for concrete abstraction (“She had a hectic brightness”) and his spectacular observancy: the eyes of a woman taking off her glasses seem “stunned by freedom; the skimpily lashed lids fluttered like long-captive birds abruptly let loose.” Again and again, his lyricim, to poignant effect, stops just short of overripeness: a parked car, buried in new snow, “winked its headlights: help! help! silent, like the heart’s distress.”

By staying close to Capote’s writing, Mallon's piece is much fairer than Mendelsohn’s.

Here are two more examples of Capote’s “spectacular observancy.” The first one is from his great The Muses are Heard, which ran as a two-part article in The New Yorker (October 20 & 27, 1956), and the second one is from his much maligned “La Côte Basque,” which is a fragment of his unfinished novel Answered Prayers, published in 1986:

Beyond the Brandenburg Gate, we rode for forty minutes through the blackened acres of bombed-out East Berlin. The two additional buses, with the rest of the company, had arrived at the station before us. We joined the others on the platform where The Blue Express waited. Mrs. Gershwin was there, supervising the loading of her luggage onto the train. She was wearing a nutria coat and, over her arm, carried a mink coat zippered into a plastic bag.

Even for this those who dislike champagne, myself among them, there are two champagnes one can’t refuse: Dom Pérignon, and the even superior Cristal, which is bottled in a natural-colored glass that displays its pale blaze, a chilled fire of such prickly dryness that, swallowed, seems not to have been swallowed at all, but instead to have turned to vapors on the tongue and burned there to one damp sweet ash.

Those acutely seen details – “a mink coat zippered into a plastic bag,” champagne “bottled in a natural-colored glass that displays its pale blaze” – are the mark of a terrific describer. Capote’s writing brims with such details. I think, in the long run, Judge Time will be kind to it. Meanwhile, we’ll have to put up with moralizing critics like Daniel Mendelsohn who judge Capote’s life, not his work.

Credit: The above 1973 photograph of Truman Capote is by Henry Diltz, and is used to illustrate Daniel Mendelsohn’s “The Truman Show,” The New York Times Book Review, December 5, 2004.

July 12 & 19, 2010 Issue

I’ve spent the last couple of days in the stimulating company of Meghan O’Rourke’s writings. She has an interesting piece (“The Unfolding”) in this week’s issue. After I read it, I decided to go back and look at two other items by her that appeared recently in the magazine, namely, her great poem “My Aunts” (April 20, 2009), and her critical piece “Good Grief” (February 1, 2010). O’Rourke is preoccupied with death. She says in “Good Grief” that when her mother died she felt “abandoned, adrift.” “Good Grief” is not directly about O’Rourke’s loss of her mother; it’s an analytical piece about ways of grieving. It looks at Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s “stage theory” and finds that it is largely a fiction. O’Rourke views grief and mourning as “complicated and untidy processes.” Of course, she’s right. How could it be otherwise? Grief is a messy emotion. What I find interesting is that O’Rourke doesn’t delve into the messiness; she stays at a fairly abstract level in this piece. Similarly, in “The Unfolding,” she appears accepting of the oblique approach that Anne Carson employs in her memory book Nox to capture the feelings she experiences flowing from the loss of her brother. “The Unfolding” is a beautifully crafted review of Carson’s Nox. Nox is an unusual book, to say the least. O’Rourke describes it as being “as much an artifact as a piece of writing.” She says, “The contents arrive not between two covers but in a box about the size of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Inside is an accordion-style, full-color reproduction of the notebook, which incorporates pasted-in photographs, poems, collages, paintings, and a letter Michael once wrote home, along with fragments typed by Carson.” Nox appears to be more like an assemblage than a book. The premise on which Nox seems to rest is that “Michael hides in these images, and the point is that all the words and analytical exercise in the world can’t rescue him.” My response to this is: of course, Michael can’t be “rescued”; but through painstaking description and analysis, could he not be made more specific? In Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, which I am currently (slowly) making my way through, Mendelsohn visits Auschwitz. He finds the concentration camp too much of a “symbol.” He says, “I thought, as I walked its strangely peaceful and manicured grounds … [that] it had been to rescue my relatives from generalities, symbols, abbreviations, to restore them to their particularity and distinctiveness, that I had come on this strange and arduous trip.” Nowhere in O’Rourke’s review of Nox does she quote a description of Michael. She says Carson provides affecting details, “but she doles them out sparingly.” In O’Rourke’s most telling observation, she says, “The photos, the fragments of letters, the scraps of translated language enable her to ‘show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding.’” But surely there is a better way to make use of these fragments? O’Rourke calls her piece “The Unfolding,” and I’m sure this refers, at least in part, to the act of opening up the “accordion” notebook inside the Nox box, but it could also describe memory’s sudden unfolding when it is triggered by an encounter with these scrapbook traces. O’Rourke doesn’t say whether Carson uses the traces of Michael contained in Nox as aide-memoire, but I suspect Carson doesn’t use them in this way. She doesn’t want to. O’Rourke quotes Carson as trying to convey “a certain fundamental opacity of human being.” I’m surprised that O’Rourke isn’t more critical of Carson’s opaque, metaphysical approach to writing about loss. Certainly, O’Rourke herself is not inclined this way, at least not in her delightful poem “My Aunts,” which when it came out in The New Yorker last year, I immediately identified as a keeper, clipped it from the magazine and put it in a folder of my favorite New Yorker poems. “My Aunts” is O’Rourke’s attempt to rescue her aging flamboyant aunts (how many is not clear; at least three, I think) from their mortality by representing them in such vivid, bright word imagery that they might live forever, at least in the form of this poem. It’s a breathless twenty-line sprint of exquisitely noticed (and remembered), crazy, funny details: “doing jackknives off the diving board after school”; “They used to smoke in their cars, rolling the windows down and letting their red nails hang out.” It ends in awareness of the aunts’ vitality imperiled by death: “Stop now, before the green comes to cover up your tall brown bodies.” Vitality and mortality, life and loss – these are O’Rourke’s dual themes. As in the midst of life we are in death, so, in “My Aunts,” in the presence of vitality, we feel its ephemeralness.