Inspired Sentence 10

The childhood of the boys he drew, like the snowman, had now dissolved into adulthood: most of all, Bewick was suggesting that art, even a simple woodcut, was the only true magic that could hold lives from melting into time.

This sentence, from Jenny Uglow’s Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick (2006), beautifully expresses my own view of art’s purpose – “the only true magic that can hold lives from melting into time.” It’s a wonderful variation on James Wood’s idea that art is rescue: “Literature, like art, pushes against time’s fancy ... offers to rescue the life of things from the dead” (Serious Noticing, 2019). Both lines are inspired – two of my touchstones. 

November 10, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Reading Margaret Talbot’s absorbing profile of Joachim Trier, I recalled the strange sequence in Trier’s great The Worst Person in the World, in which the film’s central character Julie is the only person moving; everyone else is frozen still. Why? What is Trier’s point? Talbot mentions this scene. She writes,

In an inventive scene in which Julie runs to find Eivind again, Oslo kindly stops and freezes for her—a sequence shot with extras standing stock still, not with C.G.I.—so that she can capture stolen time with him without having to end things yet with Aksel. 

So she can capture stolen time with him? I don’t know about that. Time stops for everyone else, but Julie keeps moving. Time doesn’t stop for her. Anthony Lane, in his illuminating review of the film, provides a different take. He says,

Or what about the instant at which the surrounding world—humans, vehicles, dogs, the flow of coffee from a pot—freezes in mid-action, allowing Julie, the solitary mover, to run through the motionless streets toward Eivind, whom she badly needs to embrace? How better to illustrate the ecstatic indifference with which, in the throes of a silly love, we obscure everything that is not our object of desire? 

To me, this makes more sense. Julie and Eivind are so absorbed in each other, it’s as if the rest of the world doesn’t register. They see only each other. All else is irrelevant. Trier’s freezing of the action around Julie is his way of showing the obsessive nature of romantic love. 

2. James Wood, in his excellent “Last Harvest,” reviews Georgi Gospodinov’s new novel Death and the Gardener. Wood likes it. He says, “This is inevitably a sad book in places, yet it is lit with remembered warmth, happiness, laughter, and a kind of lightness characteristic of its writer.” My favorite passage in Wood’s piece describes Gospodinov’s exploration of his childhood in the Sovietized Bulgaria of the nineteen-seventies and eighties: “These investigations are meticulous, tender, palpable: buildings and radios, cars and first kisses, songs and streets are all made newly alive in memory.”

3. Hannah Goldfield went to an awful lot of trouble to host a World Series party. She describes it in her wonderful “Tableau Vivant.” Here’s a sample:

On Thursday, the day before the game, I braised the pork shoulder and mixed the crab dip, feeling triumphant in my preparedness. On Friday afternoon, I found myself in an exhilarated fugue state. Doors and drawers flew open and shut as I broiled bananas covered in brown sugar, grilled steaks, and roasted pounds of wings. I chopped scallions, toasted sesame seeds, wrenched lids off of cans of beans and condensed milk. For hours, I thought of nothing but my next move, the narcotic draw of my phone blissfully suppressed. It didn’t go without a hitch. Fifteen minutes before my guests were due, the point at which Pelosi suggested I deep-fry the shrimp, I had failed to so much as set up my dredging station. I noticed that the black T-shirt I’d been wearing since 7 a.m. was smeared with whipped cream. The doorbell rang.

Wow! I hope Goldfield’s guests were appreciative. And I hope they rooted for the Jays. Otherwise, what a waste of great food.  

Jed Perl's "Impassioned Ferocity" (Part I)

Jed Perl, in his absorbing “Impassioned Ferocity” (The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2025), reviews three recent books of criticism: Andrea Long Chu’s Authority; Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess; and T. J. Clark’s Those Passions: On Art and Politics. 

Perl asserts that Chu, in her book, misunderstands the nature of a critic’s power. He quotes her as saying that “the critic has consistently been understood as embodying a key political figure: in the eighteenth century, an enlightened king; in the nineteenth, a free citizen; in the twentieth, a state bureaucrat.” In response, Perl says,

The problem, as I see it, is that critics, at least the ones who matter, aren’t anything like kings, ordinary citizens, or state bureaucrats. They operate at an angle to society. They’re closer to street fighters than to kings. They’re self-invented. They see things their own way. They make their own rules. They’re tough, willing to commit murder, at least metaphorically, as Randall Jarrell did in his takedowns of poets whose work infuriated him.

I think Perl is right. The critics I admire definitely see things their own way. They resist orthodox interpretation. They’re always probing, questioning, arguing. They don’t take things at face value. 

Perl argues brilliantly for the critic’s right to be deeply and totally subjective. He writes,

Criticism isn’t a search for truth but for a particular person’s truth. I’ve heard critics say they approach each new experience without preconceptions. But criticism involves deep, personal conceptions, what Greenberg referred to as “homemade esthetics,” the title he had in mind for a book he never finished. (It became the title of a posthumous essay collection.) Those homemade esthetics are only the beginning of what a critic needs. Formidable critics are engaged in a dynamic or dialectic, the experience of the moment approached not without preconceptions but with an open mind, and tested against some underlying belief or beliefs, which are aesthetic beliefs. Over time those beliefs may change or evolve. Criticism isn’t a search for an absolute, what some might regard as perfect taste. It’s an experiment in aesthetic experience. This is why we can be excited by critics with whom we have fundamental disagreements. We see how their minds work, and that helps us see how ours work.

I like Perl’s emphasis on “aesthetic beliefs” and “aesthetic experience.” To me, the best criticism is aesthetic criticism. Helen Vendler defined it as follows:

The aim of an aesthetic criticism is to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique configuration. [Introduction to The Music of What Happens, 1988]

That, to me, is the essence of criticism. It’s a formalist definition. It’s interested in the elements of a particular artwork’s style – in how and why it is what it is.   

The second book considered by Perl is Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess. Perl says, 

What Rothfeld has that I find missing in many other writers of her generation is an abiding critical vision, some rock-solid belief that informs everything she does. 

According to Perl, Rothfeld’s “rock-solid belief” is that “artistic experience parallels, mirrors, extends, and magnifies our most visceral experiences.” Perl compares her to Kael. He says, 

Reading her sometimes reminds me of what it felt like, many years ago, to first encounter Pauline Kael’s work. The title of Kael’s earliest collection, I Lost It at the Movies (1965), was as brash as Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small. With both writers the bravado and slangy conversational tone are grounded in an aesthetic of amplitude, a view that art touches on life in multiple ways. Rothfeld would surely agree with Kael when she wrote of movies that they can “affect us on so many sensory levels that we become emotionally accessible, in spite of our thinking selves.”

I haven’t read enough of Rothfeld to say whether this is true or not. Her review of James Wood’s Serious Noticing disappointed. She described his writing as “sensuous,” “lush,” and “novelistic.” No. Wood is cutting. His sentences are like scalpels. He dissects texts and shows their inner workings. Rothfeld seriously misdescribes him.

The only other Rothwell piece I’ve read is her personal essay “All Good Sex Is Body Horror” (newyorker.com, February 17, 2024), in which she ingeniously connects David Cronenberg, Kafka, and sex. It’s a strange and intriguing piece. It contains at least one inspired sentence: “Maybe we will grow the wings of cherubs, but maybe we will find ourselves meshed with the coarse bristles of gigantic flies.” But it also contains passages like this:

From Cronenberg’s fever dreams, we can surmise that there is a further reason to reject the decision-theoretic model of consent: not only is it impossible for us to know what we will become if an erotic encounter is transformative but we should not want to. To determine in advance what a transformative experience will churn into existence is to sap its power, for the very essence of transformative experience is that we cannot predict how it will transform us. To be sure, it is uncomfortable to stand on the precipice of metamorphosis, but unless we are willing to assume genuine risk we cannot be undone and remade.

I’m not sure what Kael would make of that. She’d probably relish the reference to “Cronenberg’s fever dreams.” She’d probably laugh at the idea that hopping into bed with someone is like being “on the precipice of metamorphosis.” Then again, she might not. She might think of what she wrote in her superb “Tango” (The New Yorker, October 28, 1972):

He brings into this isolation chamber his sexual anger, his glorying in his prowess, and his need to debase her and himself. He demands total subservience to his sexual wishes; this enslavement is for him the sexual truth, the real thing, sex without phoniness. And she is so erotically sensitized by the rounds of lovemaking that she believes him. He goads her and tests her until when he asks if she’s ready to eat vomit as a proof of love, she is, and gratefully. He plays out the American male tough-guy sex role—insisting on his power in bed, because that is all the “truth” he knows.

That kind of sexual battle would be hard to shake off. It would be transformative all right, but not in a good way. It would be degrading and dehumanizing. Is that the risk Rothwell is referring to? Or is it just the risk of going through life without ever experiencing wild, weird Cronenbergian sex? I don’t know. I’m not going to worry about it.

The third book reviewed by Perl is T. J. Clark’s Those Passions: On Art and Politics. As Perl points out, Clark’s abiding belief is Marxism. Perl says,

While I entirely disagree with Clark that there is some inextricable link between art and politics, in some of the essays in the new collection, many written for the London Review of Books, he holds me because he allows his elegantly nuanced Marxism to be challenged by the immediacy of his responses. This Marxist is a hedonist. And a formalist. The result is some exhilarating reading.

I totally agree. It’s Clark’s hedonism – the deep, sensuous pleasure he takes in light, color, shape, and texture – that redeems him. I find his political writing too abstract. I relate to his “politics in a tragic key,” but terms like “relations of production” and “historical materialism” have always escaped my grasp. Unlike Clark, I don’t believe in class. “Nobody better, better than nobody” is my motto. His contempt for capitalism and “bourgeois society” strikes me as hypocritical. His life and work are made possible by that very system. His exceedingly beautiful books are a product of it. So is their availability to people like me out here in the sticks of Prince Edward Island. Thank you, Indigo. Thank you, Amazon.     

Perl says that the strongest essay in Clark’s book is “Art and the 1917 Revolution.” I don’t think so. My favorite piece is “Madame Matisse’s Hat,” a study of Matisse’s Woman with a Hat (1905). Clark writes,

The puzzle is the pose, and the nature of the woman’s costume. In a sense we are back to the jeering fellow-painters and their demand for literal truth. What sort of dress is Parayre wearing? What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder? How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it? Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper? How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms? It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves. And the glove in the centre – close to us, apparently – is resting on a green vertical, capped with a curlicue of purple. Sometimes in the literature she is said to be sitting with her hand resting on the arm of a chair. I wonder. I see no other sign of chair-ness hereabouts, except maybe the blunt diagonal of blood red propping up Parayre’s elbow. She could as well be holding a metal-tipped cane, or a parasol. What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak? Is it a handkerchief? If it is, the material appears to be sticking to the glove as opposed to being held by the hand inside it. Or is it a great limp flower? But never has a shape been less like any specific botanical specimen. Presumably the strip of yellow, orange and red that crosses the body towards the bottom is meant as a belt. In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?

Clark is a connoisseur of color. He describes it exquisitely: “halo of indigo,” “curlicue of purple,” “aureole of pink.” That “What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?” is inspired! This is quintessential Clark – surprising, original, delightful.

For me, delight is a key ingredient of critical writing. Perl values belief. But I think delight is just as important. 

Postscript: This is the first part of a two-part post on Perl’s stimulating piece. Part II will take issue with Perl’s comment that Janet Malcolm lacked an “aesthetic position.”  

The Adventure of the Ordinary

Last night I found myself still thinking about James Wood’s review of Geoff Dyer’s new memoir Homework, in this week’s New Yorker. Wood praises it for, among other things, its detailed descriptions of a working-class English childhood. He writes, “Down among the Cadbury Fruit & Nut, the Vesta beef curry, and the Huntley & Palmers Breakfast Biscuits is a reality rarely touched by theorists, who are too busy theorizing.” Wood has a taste for writing that makes ordinariness vivid. “The adventure of the ordinary” – that’s what he called it in his great review of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. I went back and looked that piece up. Wood writes,

Knausgaard’s world is one in which the adventure of the ordinary—the inexhaustibility of the ordinary as a child once experienced it (“the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation”)—is steadily retreating; in which things and objects and sensations are pacing toward meaninglessness. In such a world, the writer’s task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat: to bring meaning, color, and life back to the soccer boots and to the grass, and to cranes and trees and airports, and even to Gibson guitars and Roland amplifiers and Ajax. [“Total Recall," The New Yorker, August 13 & 20, 2012]

That passage is one of my touchstones. Wood values it, too. He used it again in his brilliant “Serious Noticing,” the title piece in his 2019 collection.   

July 21, 2025 Issue

Geoff Dyer and James Wood are among my favorite writers. In this week’s issue, Wood writes about Dyer’s new book Homework. The result is double bliss. Wood says,

Dyer’s memoir is a funny and often painful book that both follows and departs from the traditional working-class bildungsroman. It offers, perhaps, a stranger account than even Dyer quite allows: at times, a wounded narrative pretending not to be. Many of the classic elements are here—the murky atrocity of school food; the ecstatic discovery of literature (for Dyer, especially Shakespeare) and music (gallons of dubious prog rock); a spurt or two of rebellion; sexual fumblings in cars; the anxious opening of exam results in “buff-coloured” envelopes, those official passports to the wider world.

He says, 

Here, for the record, are the smallest specificities of a working-class English childhood in the sixties and seventies. Down among the Cadbury Fruit & Nut, the Vesta beef curry, and the Huntley & Palmers Breakfast Biscuits is a reality rarely touched by theorists, who are too busy theorizing. 

I’m interested in that reality. I will read Dyer’s book. Even if I wasn’t interested, I’d read it anyway for the pleasure of Dyer’s delectable style – a combination of “extended riffing, comic loitering, and dry exaggeration” (Wood’s description).

Near the end of his review, Wood touches on something I strongly relate to – the role that chance plays in the way our lives unfold. He says, “Dyer’s rise is solitary, freakish, and shadowed always by the chance that it might never have happened.” Shadowed always by the chance that it might never have happened. Exactly. I know that feeling. Wood expresses it perfectly.

June 23, 2025 Issue

There’s not much in this week’s issue that catches my eye. The magazine isn’t the problem. It’s me. I’m jaded. My range of interests is getting narrower and narrower. Usually, when I’m in this funk, “Goings On” bails me out. But even that stimulating section seems lacking this week. I miss art reviews. I miss Jackson Arn. I miss Peter Schjeldahl. I miss poetry reviews. I miss jazz reviews. I miss photography reviews. I miss good formalist book reviews like the ones James Wood writes. I miss Janet Malcolm. About the only thing I really like in this week’s issue is Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin’s witty artwork illustrating Hannah Goldfield’s “Ladies' Night.” It’s amazing what those two can do with a Sharpie, transforming a tall glass of foamy beer into a basketball hoop.

Karl Ove Knausgaard's "Private Eye"

I want to return to a piece that appeared in the February 3, 2025, New Yorker – Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “Private Eye.” It’s a profile of the British painter Celia Paul. Knausgaard visits her at her London studio and writes about it. He says,

When I followed her into the flat on this early-autumn day, it was therefore a little like stepping into a painting. I recognized the floor, worn and dark and made of linoleum, I recognized the plain, white walls, I recognized the window facing the museum, the light that fell through it. And Paul’s face was so familiar that it might have belonged to one of my close friends. But—and this struck me at once—reality is always much more than that which can be fixed in images, infinitely more. The other’s face continually changing, one’s own thoughts in constant flux. The various surfaces, the way light is reflected off each of them, always shifting. The history of objects, and what they signal about status, class, the personality of their owner. Every single moment is so full of information that you could spend a lifetime surveying it. So what we do is look for patterns, for whatever can be fitted into a stable structure. It is a way of managing reality: we must be able to pull out a chair and sit without expending time on the chair itself. And why should we spend time on a chair, anyway? What point would there be in taking a closer look at it, in seeing what it is really like?

That “Every single moment is so full of information that you could spend a lifetime surveying it” seems to me to express something fundamental – a key to art and writing. Close looking unlocks the significance of even the most banal-seeming objects. Writing about Knausgaard, James Wood puts it this way:

Knausgaard’s world is one in which the adventure of the ordinary—the inexhaustibility of the ordinary as a child once experienced it (“the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation”)—is steadily retreating; in which things and objects and sensations are pacing toward meaninglessness. In such a world, the writer’s task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat: to bring meaning, color, and life back to the soccer boots and to the grass, and to cranes and trees and airports, and even to Gibson guitars and Roland amplifiers and Old Spice and Ajax. [“Serious Noticing”]

How I love that “adventure of the ordinary.” The whole passage is brilliant. Knausgaard’s “Private Eye” reminded me of it. 

Postscript: The above portrait of Celia Paul is by Alice Zoo.

April 14, 2025 Issue

This week’s issue is particularly rich in content. It contains at least five pieces I want to read: Elif Batuman’s “Alien Eye”; D. T. Max’s “Life after Death”; Jon Lee Anderson’s “Strongmen”; Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Going Nuclear”; and James Wood’s “Let It Lie.” I’m going to save this New Yorker for a trip to Italy that Lorna and I are taking next month. I’ll read it on the plane. I’ll post my review when I return. 

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #4 James Wood's "Serious Noticing"

This is the seventh post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is James Wood’s “Serious Noticing,” which originally appeared in the Fall 2010 Michigan Quarterly Review. A substantially revised version is included in two of Wood’s essay collections: The Nearest Thing to Life (2015) and Serious Noticing (2019). I’ll refer to the revised version here. 

In this great piece, Wood formulates one of the most compelling theories of literature I’ve ever read. He fuses three concepts – detail, looking, and rescue. Wood relishes detail: “I think of detail as nothing less than bits of life sticking out of the frieze of form, imploring us to touch them.” He quotes from Chekhov’s “The Kiss” and Henry Green’s Loving, and says,

Like Ryabovich [in “The Kiss”] and Edith [in Loving], we are the sum of our details. (Or rather, we exceed the sum of our details; we fail to compute.) The details are the stories; stories in miniature. As we get older, some of those details fade, and others, paradoxically, become more vivid. We are, in a way, all internal fiction writers and poets, rewriting our memories.

To exemplify what he means, Wood dips into his own memory:

I was born in 1965, and grew up in a northern English town, Durham, home to a university, a majestic Romanesque cathedral, and surrounded by coalfields, many of them now abandoned. Every house had a hearth and fire, and coal, rather than wood, was used as domestic fuel. Every few weeks, a truck arrived, piled with lumpy burlap sacks; the coal was then poured down a chute into the house’s cellar – I vividly remember the volcanic sound, as it tumbled into the cellar, and the drifting, bluish coal-dust, and the dark, small men who carried those sacks on their backs, with tough leather pads on their shoulders.

That “volcanic sound, as it tumbled into the cellar” is wonderfully evocative.

Wood praises Chekhov’s eye for detail. He says Chekhov “appears to notice everything.” He calls him a “serious noticer.” For Wood, serious noticing is a key aspect of serious writing. He says, “In ordinary life, we don’t spend very long looking at things or at the natural world or at people, but writers do. It is what literature has in common with painting, drawing, photography.” 

He invokes John Berger’s distinction between seeing and looking:

You could say, following John Berger, that civilians merely see, while artists look. In an essay on drawing, Berger writes that “to draw is to look, examining the structure of experiences. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree being looked at. Whereas the sight of a tree is registered almost instantaneously, the examination of the sight of a tree (a tree being looked at) not only takes minutes or hours instead of a fraction of a second, it also involves, derives from, and refers back to, much previous experience of looking.

Interestingly, Wood links noticing with metaphor. He says,

Just as great writing asks us to look more closely, it asks us to participate in the transformation of the subject through metaphor and imagery. Think of the way D. H. Lawrence describes, in one of his poems, ‘the drooping Victorian shoulders” of a kangaroo; or how Nabokov describes a piece of tissue paper falling to the ground with “infinite listlessness,” or how Aleksandar Hemon describes horseshit as looking like “dark, deflated, tennis balls,” or how Elizabeth Bishop describes a taxi meter staring at her “like a moral owl,” or how the novelist and poet Adam Foulds notices a blackbird “flinching” its way up a tree.

These are superb examples. I agree with Wood’s main point – metaphor is an aspect of close noticing. But is it “transformation of the subject”? I don’t think so. Metaphor is descriptive. It calls up a picture. It helps us see the subject more clearly. It makes the subject more vivid. But it doesn’t transform it.

The third element of Wood’s theory – the most profound, in my opinion – is rescue. He says,

What do writers do when they seriously notice the world? Perhaps they do nothing less than rescue the life of things from their death – from two deaths, one small and one large: from the “death” that literary form always threatens to impose on life, and from actual death. I mean, by the latter, the fading reality that besets details as they recede from us – the memories of our childhood, the almost-forgotten pungency of flavors, smells, textures: the slow death that we deal to the world by the sleep of our attention.

He refers to the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard:

Knausgaard’s world is one in which the adventure of the ordinary – the inexhaustibility of the ordinary as a child once experienced it (“the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation”) – is steadily retreating: in which things and objects and sensations are pacing toward meaninglessness. In such a world, the writer’s task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat: to bring meaning, color, and life back in the most ordinary things – to soccer boots and grass, to cranes and trees and airports, and even to Gibson guitars and Roland amplifiers and Old Spice and Ajax.

That, to me, is the golden key – art’s germinating principle. Wood beautifully sums it up in his penultimate paragraph: “To notice is to rescue, to redeem; to save life from itself.”  

September 2, 2024 Issue

When I read a book review, I want to know two things: what the book's about and how it’s written. For me, the “how” is more important than the “what.” I’ll read a stylishly written book on almost any subject. These days, New Yorker reviewers rarely address form. The only exception is James Wood. Case in point is Kathryn Schulz’s “Living Under a Rock,” in this week’s issue. It’s a review of Marcia Bjornerud’s Turning to Stone. Schulz beautifully describes it: 

In its pages, what Bjornerud has learned serves to illuminate what she already knew: each of the book’s ten chapters is structured around a variety of rock that provides the context for a particular era of her life, from childhood to the present day. The result is one of the more unusual memoirs of recent memory, combining personal history with a detailed account of the building blocks of the planet. What the two halves of this tale share is an interest in the evolution of existence—in the forces, both quotidian and cosmic, that shape us.

This is the kind of book I’d be interested in reading. What is the writing like? Schulz offers a hint:

Bjornerud is a good enough writer to render all of this perfectly interesting. She has a feel for the evocative vocabulary of geology, with its driftless areas and great unconformities, and also for the virtues of plain old bedrock English. (“There is nothing to be done in bad Arctic weather but wait for it to get less bad.”) 

That’s it, that’s all she says regarding the book’s prose. Not even one extended quotation to give the reader a taste of Bjornerud’s style. 

The best New Yorker book reviewers – John Updike, V. S. Pritchett, George Steiner, Helen Vendler, Whitney Balliett, Janet Malcolm – were all great quoters. Now only James Wood continues the practice. All the rest are so in love with their own voices, they’d rather paraphrase than quote. It’s a great loss.  

Patricia Lockwood's Brilliant "Isn't that ... female?"

Patricia Lockwood (Photo by Thomas Slack)

The best book review of the year (so far) is Patricia Lockwood’s “Isn’t that ... female?” (London Review of Books, June 20, 2024). It’s an appraisal of A. S. Byatt’s recently reissued Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories. Actually, it’s an appraisal of Byatt’s entire oeuvre. Lockwood loves Byatt. She writes,

I have read it all, beginning with Babel Tower (1996), back when I was the age of Frederica Potter graduating from school at Blesford Ride, sinking her uniform into the canal as her older sister, Stephanie, looks on. I have gone to the bookstore on publication day in my pyjamas and asked them to unbox the new one; it’s back there, I know it. I have twice fumbled through The Biographer’s Tale (2000), a book which seems to take place entirely in a filing cabinet (don’t worry, there are also sadistic pictures). If you told me she had a lost novel about paperweights, I would believe you. And I would read that too. 

What I savor are Lockwood’s ingenious descriptions – surreal montages of incredibly vivid, concentrated imagery inspired by Byatt’s works. For example:

The cover of the original edition of Medusa’s Ankles – hell, the title, let’s be honest – illustrates the aesthetic problem. An ivory ribbon, a speckled lobster, blown poppies, a lascivious oyster. A hand mirror reflecting a whitish lake, a heavy key. These are seen to be her concerns, lacquerish, decorative, romantic. But the hand mirror fills with blood, the cabinet of wonders displays a skull. On the other side of the pomegranate, maggots like instinct pearls.

And:

My affinity is perhaps unexpected. I know the books so well that looking at them on the shelf is like reading them. What she created for me, in the Frederica quartet, was a kind of internal geography. Over on the left, in the darkness, is the wood where the smooth-between-the-legs Alexander is not quite managing to make it happen with the frustrated housewife Jenny, released into the ache of the unattainable by her part in the play being put on at Long Royston. Up in the tower is the evasive poet Raphael Faber, ever withdrawing his tapered fingertips, dry as his own spice cakes. Out on the moors is Jacqueline, with thick sandwiches, observing her population of Cepea nemoralis. Carrying dishes to the communal kitchen is ill-fated Ruth, with her plait down her back. In the car the mystic madman Lucas Simmonds is eternally interfering with Marcus. And Stephanie, suffering from “an excess of exact imagination,” exerting her whole will to bring her family together, is wrestling with the slithering Christmas turkey in its dish.

And this extraordinary summary of Margaret Drabble:

The white satin and little gold pins of Stephanie in The Virgin in the Garden (1978), frightened, unhappy, knowing she is leaving the life of the mind behind, yet compelled by the dense matter of Daniel’s body; the chilling image of the bride in A Summer Bird-Cage, devouring, immoral, greedy as golden syrup, drunk on the morning of her wedding, in a wild silk dress and a dirty bra, telling her sister she would love her forever if she made her some Nescafé.

No other critic writes like this. James Wood creates wonderful collages of exquisite quotation. This one, for example, from his great “Red Planet” (The New Yorker, July 25, 2005), a review of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men:

He is also a wonderfully delicate noticer of nature. His first novel, “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), has this picture of lightning: “Far back beyond the mountain a thin wire of lightning glowed briefly.” The protagonist of “Child of God” (1973), a psychotic necrophiliac named Lester Ballard, lights a fire in an old grate, and as it races up the disused chimney sees a spider that “descended by a thread and came to rest clutching itself on the ashy floor of the hearth.” How strange and original that “clutching itself” is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shrivelling. “Blood Meridian” is a vast and complex sensorium, at times magnificent and at times melodramatic, but nature is almost always precisely caught and weighed: in the desert, the stars “fall all night in bitter arcs,” and the wolves trot “neat of foot” alongside the horsemen, and the lizards, “their leather chins flat to the cooling rocks,” fend off the world “with thin smiles and eyes like cracked stone plates,” and the grains of sand creep past all night “like armies of lice on the move,” and “the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake.” McCarthy liked this last phrase so much that he repeated it, seven years later, in “All the Pretty Horses” (1992): “Where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows.”

But this is different from Lockwood’s fever dreams of condensed imagery. Here’s one more from her Byatt piece:

Contemporary reviewers pointed out that The Children’s Book contained a mathematically impossible number of glazes. But colour was one of Byatt’s strongest points, such that you can feel different schemes in every book. The greens of Possession – vegetable, mineral and moss when we are in Brittany – and the burnishing panther of the fairy tales, gold-purple-black, stalking through. The buttery sunlight and gouache of Still Life. Reading her at seventeen I had an idea that perhaps the English had a better sense of colour because they spent so much time looking at teacups; I must be highly disadvantaged in this regard. Coffee cups have Garfield on them – or, if you’re unlucky, Odie. They do not fill your mind with the soft dreaming tints that made up Byatt’s encyclopedia. She has to mention it every time; it is more than an attribute, it is an achievement, a soul. The eggs of things are being lifted up out of their Easter dye, and don’t you exclaim every time? What a surprise! Look at that one!

Those last three sentences are inspired. The whole piece is inspired – criticism as passionate creation. 

The Art of Quotation (Part I)

Jonathan Kramnick, in his absorbing Criticism & Truth (2023), argues that quotation is a key element of critical writing. He says, “Much of literary criticism turns on the art of quoting well.” He sees quotation as a form of craft – “weaving one’s own words with words that precede and shape them.” I agree. Kramnick identifies two types of quotation – in-sentence quotation and block quotation. In-sentence quotation is “embedding language from a text within your sentences.” Block quotation is “setting off larger gobbets in block form.” In-sentence quotation is a form of weaving; block quotation is a form of mortaring. Both forms are creative: “The skilled practice of writing about writing makes something new in the act of interpreting it. It is fundamentally and irreducibly a creative act.”

It’s tonic to see these points being made. Not all critics are quoters. Edmund Wilson rarely quoted. He preferred paraphrase to quotation. But, for me, the best critics are the ones who quote extensively, e.g., John Updike, Helen Vendler, James Wood, Janet Malcolm, Dan Chiasson, Leo Robson. 

Updike included quotation as Rule #2 in his “Poetics of Book Reviewing”: “Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste” (Higher Gossip, 2011).

That’s one compelling reason for critics to quote. Another is to point something out. Mark O’Connell, in his review of James Wood’s The Fun Stuff, says, “When Wood block-quotes, you pay attention—as you would to a doctor who has just flipped an X-ray onto an illuminator screen—because you know something new and possibly crucial is going to get revealed (“The Different Drummer,” Slate, November 2, 2012). This is an excellent description of Wood’s method. It’s a form of literary noticing. Kramnick calls it “fundamentally demonstrative and deictic: look at these lines, this moment; observe how they do this thing.” 

Seldom have I seen such a deep appreciation of quotation as Kramnick’s. He calls it an art, and he shows why. I applaud him. 

On James Wood: Fact v. Fiction

James Wood (Photo by Hans Glave)

Warning: this is a rant. But I'll try to keep it brief.

Can a novel be relied on as biography? To me, the obvious answer is no. A novel is by definition fiction. Therefore, it’s inherently unreliable. James Wood, in his “A Life More Ordinary” (The New Yorker, April 8, 2024) seems to have a different view. He refers to V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. He says that in writing it, Naipaul was “essentially writing the life of his own father, Seepersad Naipaul.” The key word is “essentially.” I take it to mean that, in Wood’s view, Biswas embodies the core of Seepersad’s character, but not every detail. He’s a reasonable facsimile, but not a clone. Is this true? I don’t think so. Wood, in his 1999 essay “The Real Mr. Biswas” (included in his great 2005 collection The Irresponsible Self), points out that Seepersad’s letters to his son Vidia “show that Naipaul’s father was less naïve, much less unlettered, and more worldly than Mr. Biswas.” To me, these are major differences. Seepersad Naipaul is not Mr. Biswas. A House for Mr. Biswas should not be read as his biography. Novelists alter, heighten, and omit facts. In “A Life More Ordinary,” Wood praises Amitava Kumar’s new novel My Beloved Life for its “autobiographical power.” Okay, but novels aren’t autobiography. Or put it this way: they aren’t reliable autobiography. Why do I feel so strongly about this? Because it bugs me to see a great critic like Wood (one of my heroes, actually) seemingly oblivious of the slippery ground he’s on when he blurs the line between fact and fiction. 

Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #7 "George V. Higgins's Profane Style"

George V. Higgins (Photo by Benno Friedman)

This is the fourth post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is “George V. Higgins’s Profane Style” (August 29, 2014):

My favorite part of James Wood’s superb "Away Thinking About Things" (The New Yorker, August 25, 2014), a review of James Kelman’s new story collection If It Is Your Life, is his consideration of the way Kelman “repeats and refines ‘fuck’ and ‘fucking’ ”:

A single sentence will deploy the same word differently. “If it was me I’d just tell them to fuck off; away and fuck I’d tell them, that’s what I’d say if it was me,” the narrator thinks in “The One with the Dog.” There is also “fucking” as a kind of midsentence punctuation (functioning like “but”): “She would just fucking, she would laugh at him.” And also as impacted repetition: “Fuck sake, of course she would; what was the fucking point of fucking, trying to fucking keep it away, of course she’d be fucking worrying about him,” Ronnie thinks in the story “Greyhound for Breakfast.”

Reading that, I immediately thought of my favorite novelist, George V. Higgins, and the resonant way he deployed “fuckin’ ”:

The Digger leaned on the bar. “Lemme tell you something, Harrington,” he said, “you take the rough with the fuckin’ smooth in this life. I went out to Vegas there and I said, ‘Fuck me, fuck me.’ And they fucked me. Then I get that gaff job. I got unfucked.” [The Digger’s Game, 1973]

"You take the rough with the fuckin’ smooth in this life" is a very powerful line. Its use of “fuckin’” to modify “smooth” is what powers it.

Higgins also used the contraction “fuck’re” to great effect. “Where the fuck’re you taking me?” Jackie Brown says in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1971). In The Rat on Fire (1981), Don says to Mickey, “The fuck’re you doin’ there?”

One of Higgins’s most memorable uses of “fuckin’ ” occurs near the end of his brilliant Cogan’s Trade (1975):

“There’s all kinds of reasons for things,” Cogan said. “Guys get whacked for doing things, guys get whacked for not doing things, it doesn’t matter. The only thing matters is if you’re the guy that’s gonna get whacked. That’s the only fuckin’ thing.”

That’s the only fuckin’ thing. Higgins/Cogan is talking about impending violent death. “Fuckin’ ” is used here to underscore the brute reality of being “the guy that’s gonna get whacked.” “Fuckin’ ” gives the line its existential hardness. The passage is a memento mori delivered Boston underworld style.

James Wood's Puzzling Use of "Re-description"

James Wood (Photo by David Levenson)

What does James Wood mean by “re-description”? He mentions it at least six times in the Introduction to his Serious Noticing (2019):

1. “After all, the review-essay involves not just pointing at something, but pointing at it while re-describing it.”

2. “But quotation and re-description are at the heart of the book review and at the heart of that experience that Cavell calls ‘creative.’ ”

3. “This passionate re-description is, in fact, pedagogical in nature. It happens in classrooms whenever the teacher stops to read out, to re-voice, the passage under scrutiny.”

4. “All the critic can hope to do is, by drawing attention to certain elements of the artwork – by re-describing that artwork – induce in his or her audience a similar view of that work.”

5. “It is all here, in this beautiful passage: criticism as passionate ‘creation’ (‘as if for the first time’); criticism as modesty, as the mind putting the ‘understanding’ into abeyance (‘he was baffled’); criticism as simplicity and near-silence (‘It went, he said, far beyond any analysis of which he was capable’); criticism as sameness of vision and re-description (‘was convinced, and convinced others, that what he saw was there’).”

6. "And let Brendel’s performance on the piano, his inability to quote without also recreating, stand for the kind of criticism that is writing through a text, the kind of criticism that is at once critique and re-description: sameness.” 

Why is the “re” necessary? Why not just “description”? “Re-description” implies do-over – rewriting a previous description. But that isn’t what Wood does in his own work. Take, for example, his review of Tan Twan Eng’s novel The House of Doors, in this week’s New Yorker. He calls it “an assemblage, a house of curiosities.” He refers to its “manner of layering the narratives.” He says,

Eng can write with lyrical generosity and beautiful tact: moths are seen at night “flaking around the lamps”; elsewhere, also at nighttime, “a weak spill of light drew me to the sitting room.” Shadowy emotions are delicately figured: “His eyes, so blue and penetrating, were dusked by some emotion I could not decipher.” Lesley’s account of her affair with Arthur has a lovely, drifting, dreamlike quality—the adulterers almost afloat on their new passion, watched over by the hanging painted doors of Arthur’s house on Armenian Street.

That’s primary description, is it not? Nothing is being re-described or re-voiced. Maybe Wood considers use of quotation a form of re-description. But that doesn’t make sense. Pointing out felicitous passages in a work is a form of descriptive analysis, is it not? How is it re-description? It seems to me Wood’s “re” is redundant. Earlier in his Introduction to Serious Noticing, he does omit the “re”: “Describing one’s experience of art is itself a form of art; the burden of describing it is like the burden of producing it” (my emphasis). Maybe he sees the book as description, and his review of it as a form of re-description. In his essay on Virginia Woolf (included in Serious Noticing), he comes close to saying that. He writes, “If the artwork describes itself, then criticism’s purpose is to re-describe the artwork in its own, different language.” That’s a big “if.” Helen Vendler, in the concluding paragraph of her “The Function of Criticism” (collected in her The Music of What Happens, 1988), says, “No art work describes itself.” I agree. 

Description or re-description – does it matter? Yes, absolutely. It goes to criticism’s purpose. Vendler, in the Introduction to The Music of What Happens, writes,

The aim of an aesthetic criticism is to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique confirmation.

Wood might find that statement too simplistic. But, for me, it’s a touchstone. In comparison, Wood’s notion of re-description seems vague. 

Ryan Ruby's "To Affinity and Beyond"

Great to see Bookforum back in business! There’s an absorbing piece in it by Ryan Ruby called “To Affinity and Beyond.” It touches on a lot of things I’m interested in – criticism, interpretation, argument, description. It’s a review of Brian Dillon’s new essay collection Affinities: On Art and Fascination. Ruby calls it “a kind of manifesto for an anti-critical criticism.” What’s “anti-critical” about it, says Ruby, is its lack of argument:

If nothing Dillon writes “pursues an argument” or is “built to convince,” it is, in part, an attempt to make a virtue of the limitation he confesses in Essayism: “I was and remain quite incapable of mounting in writing a reasoned and coherent argument.” He associates argumentation with the academy, whose procedures of making “judgments and distinctions” are foreign to a sensibility that prefers describing objects and noting correspondences between them. 

I relish argument. Many of my favorite critical essays are fiercely polemical, e.g., Martin Amis’s “Don Juan in Hell,” Janet Malcolm’s “A Very Sadistic Man,” James Wood’s “Hysterical Realism,” Pauline Kael’s “Circles and Squares.” Argument gives criticism a piquant bite. But I don’t think it’s essential to its effectiveness. Description, on the other hand, is key. “All first-rate criticism defines what we are encountering,” Whitney Balliett said in his Jelly Roll, Jabbo & Fats (1983). Peter Schjeldahl said something similar in his Let’s See (2008): “As for writerly strategy, if you get the objective givens of a work right enough, its meaning (or failure or lack of meaning) falls in your lap.”

Postscript: Martin Amis 1949 - 2023

Martin Amis (Photo by Jennifer S. Altman)

I see in the Times that Martin Amis has died. He’s likely best known as a novelist. But, for me, his criticism is what matters. Dwight Garner, in his “Martin Amis, Acclaimed Author of Bleakly Comic Novels, Dies at 73” (The New York Times, May 20, 2023), writes,

He also demonstrated, in the reviews and essays collected in “The War Against Cliché” (2001), that he was among the fiercest and most intelligent literary critics of his time. His reviews were an important part of his reputation.

I agree. My favourite Amis critical piece is “Don Juan in Hull” (The New Yorker, July 12, 1993), a passionate defence of Philip Larkin. At the time it appeared, Larkin was under savage posthumous attack, largely because of revelations of his politically incorrect prejudices. Amis based his defence on Larkin’s work:

The recent attempts, by Motion and others, to pass judgment on Larkin look awfully green and pale compared with the self-examinations of the poetry. They think they judge him? No. He judges them. His indivisibility judges their hedging and trimming. His honesty judges their watchfulness.

James Wood, in his tribute (“Martin Amis’s Comic Music,” newyorker.com, May 20, 2023), praises Amis’s comedy. He says,

Amis’s style combined many of the classic elements of English literary comedy: exaggeration, and its dry parent, understatement; picaresque farce; caustic authorial intervention; caricature and grotesquerie; a wonderful ear for ironic registration.

This is well said. But what I relate to isn’t Amis’s comedy; it’s his anger. Anger powers some of his best writing. For example, in his brilliant Koba the Dread (2002), he included a letter to his friend Christopher Hitchens, questioning Hitchen’s admiration for Trotsky, calling Trotsky “a murderous bastard and a fucking liar.” The letter goes on:

Let us laboriously imagine that the “paradise” Trotsky promised to “build” suddenly appeared on the bulldozed site of 1921. Knowing that 15 million lives had been sacrificed to its creation, would you want to live in it? A paradise so bought is no paradise. I take it you would not want to second Eric Hobsbawm’s disgraceful “Yes” to a paradise so bought.

Whatever his subject – Stalin, Nabokov, Trump, Updike, Princess Diana, Osama bin Laden, the list goes on and on – Amis wrote freshly, zestfully, beautifully. Recall the inspired final paragraph of his “Véra and Vladimir: Letters to Véra” (included in his 2017 collection The Rub of Time):

It is the prose itself that provides the permanent affirmation. The unresting responsiveness; the exquisite evocations of animals and of children (wholly unsinister, though the prototype of Lolita, The Enchanter, dates from 1939); the way that everyone he comes across is minutely individualized (a butler, a bureaucrat, a conductor on the Métro); the detailed visualizations of soirees and street scenes; the raw-nerved susceptibility to weather (he is the supreme poet of the skyscape); and underlying it all the lavishness, the freely offered gift, of his sublime energy.

I love that “unresting responsiveness.” It applies to Amis’s writing, too. 

February 13 & 20, 2023 Issue

One character trait I cannot abide is snobbery. I detect it in James Wood’s description of his mother in this week’s issue. He says she “possessed a full complement of petit-bourgeois anxieties, tics, and unreadable rules (such as putting the milk into the teacup before the tea)." “Petit-bourgeois” is just a fancy way of saying “lower middle class.” So that’s what Wood thinks of his mother: she’s lower middle class. He’s said it before. In his “On Not Going Home” (London Review of Books, February 20, 2014), he writes, “It was important to my Scottish petty-bourgeois mother that I didn’t sound like a Geordie.” Is there a difference between “petty-bourgeois” and “petit-bourgeois”? Wood changed it to “petit” when he collected the piece in his Serious Noticing (2019). That sounds a bit better, a shade less condescending. But whether it’s “petty-bourgeois” or “petit-bourgeois,” it’s a snobbish thing to say. I admire Wood’s writing immensely. I just wish he wasn’t so damn class-conscious.  

January 23, 2023 Issue

Merve Emre, in her "Everyone's a Critic," in this week’s issue, bashes literary scholars. She calls them deformed. She quotes John Guillory’s new book, Professing Criticism: “If there is a thesis that unites the essays in Professing Criticism, it is that professional formation entails a corresponding ‘déformation professionnelle.’ ” She argues that academia has ruined literary criticism. She says that in university, criticism is "more interested in its own protocols than in what Guillory calls 'the verbal work of art.' "  

Well, all I can say in response is that, in a lifetime of reading, some of the best criticism I’ve read is by university scholars. Examples:

Sandra M. Gilbert’s Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 1972 (Gilbert taught at Queens College of the City University of New York, at Sacramento State College, at California State College, Hayward, and at St. Mary’s College of California);

Bonnie Costello’s Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 1991 (Costello is Associate Professor of English at Boston University);

Roland Barthes’ New Critical Essays, 1980 (Barthes was professor at the Collège de France);

James Wood’s Serious Noticing, 2019 (Wood is a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University);

Helen Vendler’s The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, 2015 (Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University);

B. J. Leggett’s Larkin’s Blues, 1999 (Leggett is Distinguished Professor of Humanities and professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville);

Dan Chiasson's One Kind of Everything, 2007 (Chiasson teaches at Wellesley College);

Bożena Shallcross’s Through the Poet’s Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky, 2002 (Shallcross is an associate professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Chicago);

Eleanor Cook’s Elizabeth Bishop at Work, 2016 (Cook is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Toronto);

Robert Hass's What Light Can Do, 2012 (Hass teaches at the University of California);

Michael Wood's The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, 1994 (Wood is Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University).

I'm just scratching the surface here. These literary scholars are interested in the verbal work of art, deeply so. I enjoy their writing immensely. 

Best of 2022: The Critics

Illustration by Toma Vagner, from Anthony Lane's "Living for the City"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “Going Flat Out,” May 16, 2022 (“Gorgeous? Oh, yeah.” | “Swift strokes jostle forward in a single, albeit rumpled, optical plane. See if this isn’t so, as your gaze segues smoothly across black outlines among greenery, blue water and sky, and orangish flesh”);

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “All Together Now,” April 11, 2022 (“Red Abstract / fragment” (1968-69) is a lyrical verse text typewritten on a brushy red ground and scribbled with restive cross-outs, revisions, and notes. Its meanings dance at the edge of comprehension, but with infectious improvisatory rhythms.” | “Where art is concerned, death need be no more than an inconvenience, and, as in the case of Pritchard, being all but invisible may turn out to have been merely a speed bump”);

3. Peter Schjeldahl, “Scaling Up,” June 13, 2022 [“The distinguishing test, for me, is scale, irrespective of size: all a work’s elements and qualities (even including negative space) must be snugged into its framing edges to consolidate a specific, integral object—present to us, making us present to itself—rather than a more or less diverting handmade picture.” | “Inexhaustibly surprising smears, blotches, fugitive lines, and incomplete patterns feel less applied than turned loose, to tell enigmatic stories of their own”);

4. Peter Schjeldahl, “Dutch Magus,” October 3, 2022 [“Janssen’s expert citations of parallels in music for Mondrian’s art are a treat and a revelation for a musical doofus like me. Janssen likens the artist’s frequent motif, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, of paired horizontal black bands to the bass line running under the saxophone cadenzas of Armstrong’s group and others. (Thereby alerted, I see and spectrally hear it.) If, in Janssen’s telling, one dynamic recurs throughout Mondrian’s aesthetic adventuring, it is rhythm, incipient even in his youthful renderings from nature. Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral. Thought, if any was needed, followed touch”];

5. Peter Schjeldahl, “Stilled Life,” October 10, 2022 (“Then there are the still-lifes of remarkably unremarkable windowsill miscellanies: some random fruit and bits of studio gear transfigured by a happenstance of daylight”); 

6. James Wood, “By the Collar," April 11, 2022 (“These public events have the irresistible tang of the actual, and around them O’Toole—who has had a substantial career as a journalist, a political commentator, and a drama critic—beautifully tells the private story of his childhood and youth. But because the events really happened, because they are part of Ireland’s shameful, sometimes surreal postwar history, they also have the brutishly obstructive quality of fact, often to be pushed against, fought with, triumphed over, or, in O’Toole’s preferred mode of engagement, analyzed into whimpering submission. His great gift is his extremely intelligent, mortally relentless critical examination, and here he studies nothing less than the past and the present of his own nation”);

7. Anthony Lane, “Living for the City,” February 14 & 21, 2022 (“ 'The Worst Person in the World' strikes me as believable, beautiful, roving, annoying, and frequently good for a laugh. Like most of Trier’s work, it also takes you aback with its sadness, which hangs around, after the story is over, like the smoke from a snuffed candle”);

8. Alex Ross, “Moonlight,” January 31, 2022 (“Chopin’s Nocturne No. 7, in C-sharp minor, begins with a low, ashen sound: a prowling arpeggio in the left hand, consisting only of C-sharps and G-sharps. It’s a hollowed-out harmony, in limbo between major and minor. Three bars in, the right hand enters on E, seemingly establishing minor, but a move to E-sharp clouds the issue, pointing toward major. Although the ambiguity dissipates in the measures that follow, a nimbus of uncertainty persists. Something even eerier happens in the tenth bar. The melody abruptly halts on the leading tone of B-sharp while the left hand gets stuck in another barren pattern—this one incorporating the notes D, A, and C-sharp. It’s almost like a glitch, a frozen screen. Then comes a moment of wistful clarity: an immaculate phrase descends an octave, with a courtly little turn on the fourth step of the scale. It is heard only once more before it disappears. I always yearn in vain for the tune’s return: a sweetly murmuring coda doesn’t quite make up for its absence. Ultimate beauty always passes too quickly”);

9. Merve Emre, "Getting to Yes," February 14 & 21, 2022 ("From these two sentences, a whole history of literature beckons - a sudden blooming of forms and genres, authors and periods, languages and nations. Why is 'dressingown,' like 'scrotumtightening,' a single retracting word, as if English were steadying itself to transform into German?");

 10. James Wood, "The Numbers Game," December 19, 2022 ("There have always been two dominant styles in Cormac McCarthy’s prose—roughly, afflatus and deflatus, with not enough breathable oxygen between them").