March 13, 2017, Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Jake Halpern’s absorbing “A New Underground Railway,” in which he visits a refugee safe house known as Vive on the east side of Buffalo, talks with some of the migrants staying there, talks with some of the staff, attends a “house meeting” in Vive’s basement cafeteria, meets a young Columbian man named Fernando who is preparing to sneak across the U.S.-Canada border, and drives him to the location (“a corridor of fields surrounded on both sides by thick forest”) where he wants to attempt his crossing. Halpern writes the kind of specific, direct, unadorned prose I relish. For example, here’s his account of driving Fernando to his drop-off point:

We drove on in silence. It was near midnight, and there were no other cars on the road. We approached the point where he wanted to be dropped off. On Google Earth, the fields had looked trimmed, but the ones in front of us were wildly overgrown. There was no moon, so it was impossible to distinguish the fields from the forests on either side.

I stopped in the middle of the road. On the right side, the route north, there was a steep embankment leading down to the fields. Fernando grabbed his backpack and opened his door; in the blackness, the car’s overhead light seemed glaringly bright. I told him to call me when he made it, or if he felt that he was in serious danger. He nodded goodbye, scurried down the embankment, and disappeared into the brambles.

“A New Underground Railway” puts us squarely there with Fernando, Tita, and other asylum-seekers, showing us their desperation. It’s a powerful argument for a more humane, empathetic approach to immigration.    

August 10 & 17, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. My pleasure-seeking eyes devoured the “Goings On About Town” capsule review of the Met’s “Van Gogh: Irises and Roses,” particularly the description of the roses: “pinwheels of thickly applied light blue, cream, and canary yellow.”

2. Amelia Lester’s “ ‘Did he say scallop sperm?’ He did, and it’s mild, sweet, and a little bit wobbly, like custard,” in her superb "Tables For Two: Shuko," is inspired.

3. Jake Halpern’s absorbing "The Cop" brings us face to face with the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. The officer’s name is Darren Wilson. Halpern says, “Many Americans believe that Wilson need not have killed Brown in order to protect himself, and might not have resorted to lethal force had Brown been white.” I share that belief. After reading Halpern’s detailed piece, I still believe it. Wilson didn’t shoot Brown in the back. But he did fire ten bullets at him. Halpern says that a few bullets missed him, “but he was hit in the chest, the forehead, and the arm.” This, in my view, is damning evidence of Wilson’s overreaction. His insistence that “I did my job that day” is outrageous.

October 11, 2010 Issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg’s lyrical reconstruction of Buffalo’s East Side, as it was in 1947 (see my “Interesting Emendations” post here ), was still fresh in my mind when I opened this week’s issue of the magazine and found an article with the heading “Letter From Buffalo.” The article, called "Pay Up," is by Jake Halpern. It’s about a small-time debt collector named Jimmy, and it describes a present-day Buffalo that is very different from Klinkenborg’s pulsing, thriving post-war metropolis. In 1947, Buffalo was, in Klinkenborg’s words, “still an outpost of the big time.” In 2010, Buffalo is, in Halpern’s words, “among the poorest cities in the nation.” Halpern hangs out with Jimmy, drives around with him in what Jimmy calls his “raggedy-ass truck,” visits Jimmy’s office, which is located in a former karate academy “on a busy thoroughfare in a rough area,” meets his oldest son, Jimmy, Jr., whom Jimmy had once beaten, goes to church with him, meets a friend who runs a soul-food restaurant, is present at Jimmy’s office for what’s known in the debt collection business as a “talk-off,” which Halpern vividly describes. Halpern writes a plain, point-and-shoot prose that eschews similes and metaphors. At least that’s the way he’s written “Pay Up.” I’m not familiar with his other work. His strong suit appears to be dialogue, and in Jimmy he’s found a street-smart, loquacious talker. Here is Jimmy talking about raising his young set of twins on his own, because their mother was serving a four-year sentence in jail:

“‘Man, I was Mr. Mom,’ he recalled. ‘I’m breaking down crying, ironing these little-bitty-ass pants at five o’clock in the morning, trying to get these kids ready for school. Like, man, if you let them oversleep they going to have a rough day, man. You got to get them up. That was worse than any street situation I was in, but the reward was so good, man.’”

And here is one of Jimmy’s “point callers,” a former crack dealer named Jamal, describing Jimmy: “‘Jimmy was never the kind of person you fucked with, and he still ain’t,’ Jamal explained. ‘Don’t take his kindness for weakness. The street shit is always going to be in you.’” If you put priority on reality over theory, as I do, you are going to appreciate Halpern’s “Pay Up.” It delivers you exactly into the rub of things. (“Man, you right in the underbelly of it,” Jimmy says to Halpern, at one point in their travels through the Bailey-Delavan area, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Buffalo.) Halpern’s piece reminds me of Ian Frazier’s "The Rap" (The New Yorker, December 8, 2008), except it doesn’t have Frazier’s descriptive artistry. There are no inspired sentences in “Pay Up” like this one, for example, in “The Rap”: “Railroad tracks in a sunken road cut run along-side, and the wider neighborhood offers auto junk yards of crashed vehicles with their air bags deployed, vast no-name warehouses, and chain-link fences grafted to thickets of ailanthus trees.” But "Pay Up" has its own merits, not least of which is its realism. It's a realist's raw variation on Klinkenborg's gorgeous elegy for a once great city.