Rachel Aviv and Anne Enright on Alice Munro

Alice Munro (Photo by John Reeves)

I see that Jane Mayer and Rachel Aviv won George Polk Awards this year. Mayer won for her “Pete Hegseth’s Secret History” (newyorker.com, December 1, 2024). Aviv won for her “You Won’t Get Free of It” (The New Yorker, December 30, 2024 & January 6, 2025). Congratulations to both of them. I confess I only skimmed Mayer’s piece. Political writing is not my bag. Aviv’s piece is a different matter. I read every word. It blew me away. It’s a deep dive into decades of Alice Munro’s family history and correspondence, along with her personal writing and published fiction, in order to recount her daughter Andrea’s sexual abuse and Munro’s subsequent use of that story for her own work. It shook my admiration for Munro’s writing right to its foundation. See my comment here. 

A few weeks after reading Aviv’s piece, I encountered another absorbing assessment of the Munro controversy – Anne Enright’s “Alice Munro’s Retreat” (The New York Review of Books, December 5, 2024). She writes,

As with many revelations, all this realigns what we already knew about Munro’s life in a way that makes more sense. It also throws a sharp light on Munro’s later fiction, throughout which elements of Andrea’s experience, and all that came after it, can be found. Some people may choose not to read the later stories: they may find it egregious that Munro both dismissed the damage done to her daughter and used it to fuel her work. Yet the tug of this long-kept secret is there on the page and, as with many unpleasant discoveries, once you see it, you find it everywhere.

Enright analyzes several of Munro’s key stories. She concludes: “I have read Munro all my life, and reading her again in light of these revelations, I find that I cannot take back my great love for her work; it was too freely given.”

I feel the same way.  

July 29, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Jane Mayer’s extraordinary “The Case of Al Franken,” an investigation of the sexual harassment accusations that caused Franken to resign his U.S. Senate seat in December, 2017. It’s extraordinary because it carefully, methodically, and extensively enacts the justice it calls for in Franken’s case. It’s the opposite of a rush to judgment. Mayer appears to have spoken to just about everyone who could possibly shed light on the eight allegations against Franken. She meticulously reports and analyzes the evidence. In the end, she doesn’t absolve Franken, but she does put the allegations (especially the damning photo of him with his hands outstretched towards the chest of his U.S.O. co-star Leeann Tweeden) in context. And she shows beyond a doubt that Franken was denied due process. My own take-away from Mayer’s piece is that Franken shouldn’t have resigned. He should’ve listened to his wife who wanted him to stay on and fight the charges. But the pressure on him was immense; thirty-six Democratic senators publicly demanded his resignation. So Franken caved. Now, he regrets doing so. After reading Mayer’s piece, I understand his regret. 

June 18, 2012 Issue

Reading The New Yorker, I navigate by the star of thisness. By thisness, I mean “any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion” (James Wood, How Fiction Works). I regret to report that there’s precious little thisness in this week’s issue, which is mostly concerned with politics, a subject that rarely generates textured writing. There are exceptions, e.g., A. J. Liebling’s The Earl of Louisiana (1961) and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Prophet of Love (2004), but not the pieces in this week's issue. Peter Hessler’s “Arab Summer,” which describes the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt, has a “puff of palpability” near the beginning (“Rifaat stashes his cans of shoe polish behind the statue of Horus”). But more typical of the piece’s wording is this line: “The Brotherhood is extremely hierarchical, and each member belongs to a five-person usra, or “family,” which meets regularly.” However, Hessler’s piece is positively inspired compared to Ryan Lizza’s “The Second Term.” The closest it gets to thisness is this insipid description of the Bachelor Farmer’s menu: “A hundred people who each gave five thousand dollars to the President’s campaign dined on a salad of house-smoked pork and a choice of roasted chicken or Copper River sockeye salmon (a vegetarian menu was also available).” As for Jane Mayer’s “Bully Pulpit,” I skimmed it and quickly moved on. Evangelist talk-show hosts  are far too easy targets for The New Yorker. They’re irrational; we know they’re irrational. Forget them. There are bigger and better fish to fry. The fourth political piece in this week’s issue is Jill Lepore’s “Benched.” It’s sort of a companion to Jeffrey Toobin’s recent “Money Unlimited” (The New Yorker, May 21, 2012), except that its focus is more historical. Both pieces lack thisness. But they’re frustrating for another reason, too. Their analysis is driven by the same tired old Left-Right, Conservative-Liberal dichotomy that political writers have been applying for decades. Is there not some other lens we can use to try to understand our politics? See, for example, David Runciman’s use of risk assessment in some of the pieces collected in his excellent The Politics of Good Intentions (2006).

Postscript: Amid the abrasive, obnoxious politicians, revolutionaries, evangelists, and rappers crowding the pages of this week's issue, Eamon Grennon's swooping sand martins stand out - delightful, vital presences, "fill[ing] salt air with their shrill chatter" ("Sand Martins").