December 1, 2014 Issue

Recently, I’ve read some amazing New Yorker medical pieces – Jerome Groopman’s “Print Thyself” and “The Transformation,” Richard Preston’s “The Ebola Wars” – but Emily Eakin’s “The Excrement Experiment,” in this week’s issue, is one of the damnedest things I’ve ever read. It’s about treating disease with fecal microbiota transplants (FMT). It’s the type of subject that’s so novel and arresting that the reporter is well advised to just get out of the way and let the facts speak for themselves. That’s what Eakin does. Along the way, she generates interesting, slightly surreal sentences such as, “In September, Leach gave himself a fecal transplant with the aid of a turkey baster and a bemused Hadza man, who served as his donor.” Eakin’s “Celluloid Hero” (The New Yorker, October 31, 2011) made my “Best of 2011” list. “The Excrement Experiment” may well be a “Best of 2014” contender.

Another piece in this week’s issue that I enjoyed immensely is Joseph Mitchell’s “A Day in the Branch,” a fragment of a memoir found in his papers after he died in 1996. It’s a reminiscence of his time growing up in North Carolina when he spent many of his days roaming a wild swamp river called the Pittman Mill Branch. He says of the river, “I would walk slowly and keep looking into the water, studying it. The water mesmerized me….” Reading that brought to mind the great opening paragraph of his classic “The Rivermen” (The New Yorker, April 4, 1959; included in his 1992 collection Up in the Old Hotel), in which he says, “I often feel drawn to the Hudson River, and I have spent a lot of time through the years poking around the part of it that flows past the city. I never get tired of looking at it; it hypnotizes me.” “A Day in the Branch” shows the roots of Mitchell’s deep appreciation of the Hudson – the youthful days he spent pleasurably hanging around the Pittman Mill Branch, walking it, smelling it, fishing it, swimming in it, climbing its trees, sometimes pretending he was a bobcat.    

Objectivist Takeover?

New Yorker writers divide into two broad categories – Objectivists and Subjectivists. Objectivists write mainly in the third person; they’re loath to say “I.” Subjectivists write mainly in the first person; their pieces read almost like excerpts from their personal journals.

Throughout the magazine’s history, Subjectivism has predominated; I much prefer it. Liebling, Mitchell, Bailey, and Rouché wrote in the first person, as do McPhee, Singer, Frazier, Bilger, Friend, Kolbert, Wilkinson, Remnick, Thurman, Paumgarten, Collins, Batuman, and Mead. But lately, it seems to me, the number of Objectivist pieces appearing in the magazine has been on the rise. Jill Lepore’s “American Chronicles” pieces, Kelefa Sanneh’s “Fish Tales” (March 7, 2011), David Grann’s “A Murder Foretold” (April 4, 2011), Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden” (August 8, 2011), George Packer’s “A Dirty Business” (June 27, 2011), George Packer’s “Coming Apart” (September 12, 2011), Nicholas Schmidle’s “Three Trials for Murder” (November 14, 2011), and Kelefa Sannah’s “Sacred Grounds” (November 21, 2011) are all written in the third person. (Packer and Schmidle may protest the Objectivist charge on the basis of a line or two of first-person perspective buried deep in their otherwise impersonal narratives), but they can’t deny that the gist of their approach is fundamentally Objectivist.) In the magazine’s November 28th issue, all four features are essentially Objectivist: Mattathias Schwartz’s “Pre-Occupied”; Ariel Levy’s “The Renovation”; George Packer’s “No Death, No Taxes”; and Raffi Khatchadourian’s “In The Picture.” I say “essentially” because some of these pieces contain a light sprinkling of “told me” and “said to me” – feeble attempts to mitigate their over-all machined, Objectivist feel and look. The last section of Khatchadourian’s “In The Picture” suddenly turns Subjectivist (“When the video ended, JR had to rush out. He wanted to surprise Nourry by showing her a SoHo rooftop that he had discovered. Two days later, he flew to Edinburgh, and then to Paris, where I caught up with him”), but it’s too little, too late.

I prefer the Subjectivist approach because it’s closest to the most true-to-life form of writing, namely, the journal. A journal tells what happened from the point of view of the writer as he or she actually experienced it. It seems to me that journalism is most effective when it is journal-like. Here are a few examples of quintessential journal-like sentences taken from recent New Yorker articles:

One day, Cagan took me to visit the Aras station, an hour’s drive south-east of Kars, near the Armenian border. (Elif Batuman, “Natural Histories,” October 24, 2011)

Beach trials the next morning were called off owing to rain, so I took a train to Amsterdam and visited the Rijksmuseum. (Ian Frazier, “The March of the Strandbeests,” September 5, 2011)

It was after 6 P.M. when we sat down at Dean’s editing machine, a twelve-thousand-dollar 35-mm. Steenbeck, to look at some rushes. (Emily Eakin, “Celluloid Hero,” October 31, 2011)

One day in July, I watched Grimaud play the pieces on “Resonances,” her current CD, in the Stadhalle, in Bayreuth. (D. T. Max, “Her Way,” November 7, 2011)

At the end of May, when I visited Yusuke Tataki, the worker who was inside Reactor Building No. 4 at the time of the quake, he said that he had passed up offers to go back as a jumper. (Evan Osnos, “The Fallout,” October 17, 2011)

On a recent Saturday, Worsley and I and a few others attempted to whip up the dinner that King George III ate on the evening of February 6, 1789. (Lauren Collins, “The King’s Meal,” November 21, 2011)

Such sentences make pursuit of the story part of the story. They clue the reader in on what the writer is thinking and doing. Most importantly, they help authenticate what’s being described. Objectivist pieces feel and look synthetic. Yes, they’re often magnificently crafted (see, for example, Kelefa Sanneh’s “Sacred Grounds,” The New Yorker, November 21, 2011). But they feel as if they’ve been manufactured (I almost said “made-up”) rather than experienced first-hand.

Fortunately, there are still lots of Subjectivists writing for The New Yorker. But the number of Objectivist pieces appearing in it seems to be on the upswing. The November 28th issue is filled with them. Objectivism appears to be trending at the magazine. I think it should be discouraged.

Credit: The above portrait of Joseph Mitchell is by Al Hirschfeld; it appears in The New Yorker (February 22, 2004), as an illustration for Mark Singer's "Joe Mitchell's Secret."

October 31, 2011 Issue

The New Yorker is a great traveling companion. I took the October 31st issue with me to Cuba. It was a constant source of pleasure during my two-week visit there. There are so many delectable items in it: Lizzie Widdicombe’s description of The Leopard At Des Artistes’ zabaione with berries (“egg yolks and Marsala wine, beaten tableside over an open flame, until it reaches the consistency of a sugary alcoholic cloud”); Richard Brody’s representation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “architectural precision” (“he presses his lovers into hard-edged industrial, corporate, and domestic spaces by way of graphically etched, high-contrast camera work that emphasizes the coldly thrilling modernism of tall buildings, progressive urbanism, and avant-garde design”); the poetry of the vegetable names in Burkhard Bilger’s excellent “True Grits” (“He set aside a bag of Whippoorwill peas and another of Zipper cream peas – the ones speckled brown and black, the others bright pink, like magic seeds from ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’”); Dan Chiasson’s analysis of Tomas Tranströmer’s style (“Tranströmer seeks not the ‘deep image’ but the elusive surface of things”); James Wood’s assessment of Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving Atocha Station (“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”); Peter Schjeldahl’s close look at an African wooden sculpture (“The figure is all palpably moving parts: mouth open, eyes raised, knees bent, weight shifted to the right leg, and breasts swaying. She wields a rattle. A pattern of bold striations repeats in the coiled hair, a necklace, and anklets”). I loved all these things. Most of all I loved Emily Eakin’s “Celluloid Hero.” I’m a sucker for descriptions of the creative process. “Celluloid Hero” contains a beauty – a description of how Tacita Dean made “FILM” for exhibition at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. In a beautifully crafted, intensely engaging narrative, Eakin reports the various technical obstacles Dean encountered (e.g., the difficulty involved in fashioning “masks” thin enough to convincingly create the illusion of a filmstrip with sprocket holes) and the ways they were solved (e.g., using a digital laser device to produce a 3-D plastic mask that was less than a millimetre thick). Along the way, Eakin provides gorgeous descriptions of Dean’s art. Here is one of my favorites: “Her carefully layered shots had a sculptural quality; the glass-matte ostrich egg, appearing more than twenty feet tall, protruded from the screen as if it had been hurled right through it.” Eakin is new to me. As far as I know, “Celluloid Hero” is her first New Yorker piece. I look forward to many more.