On Narrative Structure: Denby v. McPhee

Photo by Grant Cornett

I want to compare two New Yorker essays on narrative structure – David Denby’s “The New Disorder” (March 5, 2007) and John McPhee’s “Structure” (January 14, 2013). Denby, in his piece, looks at an array of movies that “jump backward and forward in a scrambling of time frames that can leave the viewer experiencing reactions before actions, dénouements before climaxes, disillusion before ecstasy, and many other upsetting reversals and discombobulations.” These movies include Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006), Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2001). Denby questions their topsy-turvy structures. He says of Babel, 

Part of the disconnection that the movie presents as a universal fact of our world is produced by the odd way it is put together. And, once one notices the inorganic structuring of the material, and the hostile tease of the editing, one begins to wonder if the conjunction of so many mishaps isn’t a kind of abuse of the freedom that’s normally granted to fiction.

Of another Iñárritu movie, 21 Grams, he writes,

“21 Grams” moves sideways and turns itself inside out, but in no order. We see Sean Penn lying in a hospital bed and then, a few scenes later, moving around outdoors, and then back in bed, and then making love, and then nearly dead, and so on. But why? Since none of the characters are part of any reality that makes sense to us, we can’t say, as we did at “Amores Perros,” that a social malaise has made the normal sequencing of the story irrelevant. On the contrary, we may wonder if Iñárritu and his editor didn’t scissor the movie into fragments in order to give soap-opera dismalness the appearance of radical art.

Denby doesn’t totally dismiss these “puzzle box” films. He says of Pulp Fiction, “By scrambling the time sequence, Tarantino explicitly created an impression of the eternal present, the sense that what is happening was always happening, will always be happening.” But he does make the case for chronological structure:

Storytellers, relying on sequence and causality, make sense out of nonsense; they impose order, economy, and moral consequence on the helter-skelter wash of experience. The notion that one event causes another, and that the entire chain is a unified whole, with a complex, may be ambivalent, but, in any case, coherent meaning, not only brings us to a point of resolution; it allows us to navigate through our lives.

Contrast this with McPhee’s view in “Structure.” He finds chronological order boring. He says, “After ten years of it at Time and The New Yorker, I felt both rutted and frustrated by always knuckling under to the sweep of chronology, and I longed for a thematically dominated structure.” He refers to his “A Fleet of One” (The New Yorker, February 17 & 24, 2003), an account of a road trip he took with trucker Don Ainsworth: 

Think about it. Think how it appeared to the writer when it was still a mass of notes. The story goes from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States. Has any other writer ever done that? Has any other writer ever not done that? Even I had done something like it in discussing North American geology in “Annals of the Former World.” You don’t need to remember much past Meriwether Lewis, George R. Stewart, John Steinbeck, Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and William Least Heat-Moon in order to discern a beaten path. If you are starting a westbound piece in, say, Savannah, can you get past Biloxi without caffeinating the prose? If Baltimore—who is going to care if you get through Cumberland Gap? New York? The Hackensack River. If you start in Boston, turn around. In a structural sense, I turned around—once again reversing a prejudice. In telling this story, the chronology of the trip would not only be awkward but would also be a liability.

McPhee opted for a thematic structure. He also tells about devising a structure for another journey piece, “Tight-Assed River” (The New Yorker, November 15, 2004). He says,

The river was the Illinois—barge route from the Mississippi to the outskirts of Chicago. At Grafton, in southern Illinois, the Billy Joe Boling collected its fifteen barges from larger tows in the Mississippi, wired them taut as an integral vessel, and went up the Illinois until constricting dimensions of the river forced another exchange, with a smaller towboat, and the Billy Joe Boling took a new rig of fifteen barges downstream. This endless yo-yo was not exactly a journey in the Amundsen sense. There was no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. If ever there was a journey piece in which a chronological structure was pointless, this was it. In fact, a chronological structure would be misleading. Things happened, that’s all—anywhere and everywhere. And they happened in themes, each of which could have its own title at the head of a section, chronology ignored.

I love that “Things happened, that’s all—anywhere and everywhere. And they happened in themes.” It’s certainly one way of looking at it. But does life really happen that way? Maybe in retrospect it does. I prefer chronology, a linear narrative that is mimetic of the journey itself. I suppose that makes me boring, but so be it. At least I’m not alone. To a degree, I think Denby is with me. 

Best of the Decade: #12 Tad Friend's "Thicker Than Water"

Jason Mleczko (Photo by Grant Cornett)

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favorite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I’ll pick a piece and try to express why I’m drawn to it. Today, I begin with my #12 choice – Tad Friend’s superb “Thicker Than Water” (February 10, 2014).

“Thicker Than Water” tells about a Nantucket nautical nightmare: a huge wave overturns a boat carrying five young sport-fishermen. The piece puts you squarely there with the men in the churning water as they fight for survival. Of its many vivid images, the one that sticks in my mind is of the twenty-three-foot boat, named Jabb, hanging in the air and then beginning to flip:

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.

That “as if time were taking a breath” is inspired. The whole piece is inspired, from its opening sentence (“The stripers weren’t biting”) to the concluding words of Tom Mleczko, who rescued the five men: “What if I hadn’t seen that little movement? What if I’d been looking two degrees to the left? The ocean—it turns out it’s pretty impersonal. It doesn’t care.”

The names of the five guys are Jason Mleczko, Andrew Curren, Joe Coveney, Kent McClintock, and Alex Cameron. Jason is the skipper. Friend says of him: “A strapping six-foot-five fisherman with dirty-blond hair, Jason had the candid, boisterous manner of a golden retriever.” The other main “character” in the piece is Jason’s father, Tom, “whose four boats constituted the island’s largest fleet.” Friend describes Tom as “a taciturn, gravel-voiced man who loved to combat the elements.” When Jabb capsizes, Jason knows that his father is likely their only hope of being saved. But he also knows that his father will be disappointed in him for allowing Jabb to flip (“His mind went to his father. I’m an idiot, he thought. We don’t capsize”). 

The action of “Thicker Than Water” is the rescue, with a psychological undertow flowing from the conflicted father-son relationship. This conflict surfaces dramatically during the rescue when Tom coldly refuses to help Jason secure Jabb:

Up top, Jason threw his arms around his father, who gave him a preoccupied pat and said, “What are we going to do about that boat?” Jason stared, hoping his father would say, “You take the wheel, and I’ll go anchor Jabb,” but he didn’t. Tom knew he was behaving stiffly, and he later said, “I felt that, as Jason’s employer and his father, I should make this whole thing better—only I didn’t know how.” Jason unspooled the line attached to Purple Water’s anchor, cut a hundred and fifty feet, and threw the anchor overboard. Then, reluctantly, he followed the anchor into the water and swam the line to Jabb. As he began making clumsy half hitches, tethering the line to Jabb’s bow with numb fingers, the passengers came on deck, astonished that Tom wasn’t immediately taking Alex to the hospital, and even more astonished to see Jason back in the water. When the task was done, Jason swam to Purple Water’s bow, but couldn’t pull himself onto it. Tom looked over, askance, and Jason said, “Cap, I’ve been in the water for four hours—I’m at about ten per cent.” He finally crabbed himself aboard.

It’s an astounding moment in an astounding piece. I read it six years ago when it first appeared; I’ve never forgotten it.  

Photos and Illustrations 2014

Riccardo Vecchio, "The Fugitive" (Detail)

The New Yorker is, of course, a great read. But it’s also an immense pleasure to look at. From 2014’s rich yield of New Yorker photos and illustrations, I’ve chosen twelve favorites:

1. David Black’s “Seu Jorge” (“Goings On About Town,” November 17, 2014)

2. Bendik Kaltenborn’s “The New Music Bake Sale” (“Goings On About Town,” March 17, 2014)

3. Pari Dukovic’s “Scarlett Johansson” (for Anthony Lane’s “Her Again,” March 24, 2014)

4. Michael Gillette’s “Jo Nesbø” (for Lee Siegel’s “Pure Evil,” May 12, 2014)

5. Grant Cornett’s “Jason Mleczko” (for Tad Friend’s “Thicker Than Water,” February 10, 2014)

6. Riccardo Vecchio’s “Elizabeth Harrower” (for James Wood’s “No Time For Lies,” October 20, 2014)

7. Ethan Levitas’s “Hospitality and Pannonia Quartet” (“Goings On About Town,” February 3, 2014)

8. Leo Espinosa’s “The Office Through the Ages” (for Jill Lepore’s “Away From My Desk,” May 12, 2014)

9. Dan Winters’s “Pardis Sabeti and Stephen Gire” (for Richard Preston’s “The Ebola Wars,” October 27, 2014)

10. Edwin Fotheringham’s “The Trip to Italy” (for David Denby’s “Lasting Impressions,” September 1, 2014)

11. Carolyn Drake’s “Anya Fernald” (for Dana Goodyear’s “Élite Meat,” November 3, 2014)

12. Conor Langton’s “Magic in the Moonlight” (for David Denby’s “Under the Spell,” July 28, 2014)

Mid-Year Top Ten (2014)

July is here - time for my annual Mid-Year Top Ten. I like making this list. It helps me take stock of my New Yorker reading experience. Valley fever, Barack Obama, a nautical nightmare, nuclear fusion, Muslim Brotherhood court cases, Berlin techno, horseshoe crabs, Stonehenge, life aboard an aircraft carrier, extreme cavers, Soylent, Ukraine, William S. Burroughs, archeophonists, emotional memory – these are just some of the fascinating subjects covered so far this year. The payoff has been immense reading pleasure. From a rich mid-year harvest, here are the pieces I’ve most enjoyed.

Fact Pieces

1. Ian Frazier’s “Blue Bloods” (April 14, 2014)

2. Tad Friend’s “Thicker Than Water” (February 10, 2014)

3. Burkhard Bilger’s “In Deep” (April 21, 2014)   

4. Raffi Khatchadourian’s “A Star in a Bottle” (March 3, 2014)

5. Nick Paumgarten’s “Berlin Nights” (March 24, 2014)

6. Lizzie Widdicombe’s “The End of Food” (May 12, 2014)

7. David Remnick’s “Going the Distance” (January 27, 2014)

8. Laura Miller’s “Romancing the Stones” (April 21, 2014)

9. Peter Hessler’s “Revolution On Trial” (March 10, 2014)

10. Keith Gessen’s “Waiting for War” (May 12, 2014)

Critical Pieces

1. Peter Schjeldahl’s “The Outlaw” (February 3, 2014)

2. James Wood’s “The World As We Know It” (May 19, 2014)

3. James Wood’s “The Punished Land” (June 23, 2013)

4. Dan Chiasson’s “Mother Tongue” (June 2, 2014)

5. Christine Smallwood’s “Ghosts in the Stacks” (June 9 & 16, 2014)

6. Jill Lepore’s “Away From My Desk” (May 12, 2014)

7. Joanna Biggs’s “We” (January 27, 2014)

8. Alex Ross’s “Blockbuster” (June 23, 2014)

9. Anthony Lane’s “Road Trips” (May 12, 2014)

10. Judith Thurman’s “Dressing Up” (May 5, 2014)

Best Talk Story

Sophie Brickman’s “Say Cheese” (January 6, 2014)

Best Short Story

Roddy Doyle, “Box Sets” (April 14, 2014)

Best Poem

Justin Quinn’s “Recession Song” (April 28, 2014)

Best Blog Post

Casey N. Cep’s “A Thousand Words: Writing From Photographs” (February 26, 2014)

Best Cover

Bruce McCall, “Polar Bears on Fifth Avenue” (January 13, 2014)

Best Issue

April 21, 2014 (The Journeys Issue), containing three enormously enjoyable pieces – Laura Miller’s “Romancing the Stones,” Geoff Dyer’s “Shipmates” (which just missed making my Top Ten), and Burkhard Bilger’s “In Deep”

Best Illustration

Riccardo Vecchio’s wallpaper-and-naked-old-ladies illustration for Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s “The Fugitive” (May 12, 2014) (see above artwork)

Best Photograph

Grant Cornett’s portrait of Jason Mleczko, illustrating Tad Friend’s brilliant “Thicker Than Water” (February 1o, 2014)

Best Sentence

If you feel like eating a carrot-and-black-trumpet-mushroom salad with your second tequila cocktail, you’re in luck, and perhaps it’s the right call—the windows frame an obnoxiously bright Equinox gym, where Lululemoners reading Us Weekly on the elliptical pedal through the night in silent rebuke. - Amelia Lester, “Bar Tab: Wallflower” (March 31, 2014)

Best Paragraph

The third huge wave came early and from a new angle, surging toward their port stern. With no time to turn into it, Jason shouted, “Hold on!,” and pinned the throttle to outrun it. But at the Shallow Spot there was no deeper water to escape to. 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. – Tad Friend, “Thicker Than Water” (February 10, 2014)

Best Description

Armed with an ant’s perspective and a technology titan’s resources, Myhrvold captures the swirling magma of a blueberry’s interior and the translucent reptilian juice sacs of a grapefruit. – Sophie Brickman, “Say Cheese” (January 6, 2014)

Most Memorable Image

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. – Ian Frazier, “Blue Bloods” (April 14, 2014)

Most Inspired Detail

When the other bird-watchers called back, the ring tones were birdcalls. – Ian Frazier, “Blue Bloods” (April 14, 2014)

Credit: The above artwork is Riccardo Vecchio’s illustration for Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s “The Fugitive” (The New Yorker, May 12, 2014).