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

Jed Perl, in his "Impassioned Ferocity" (The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2025), says,

Much if not most of what is today thought of as criticism is just nonfiction writing with a distinctive personal voice, attitudes and opinions without any underlying idea. My impression is that among younger nonfiction writers the central focus is on developing that distinctive voice, with less focus on what’s actually said. Janet Malcolm and Dave Hickey, whose work apprentice writers in BA and MFA programs are likely to encounter, are striking essayists who leave you in no doubt as to who they are and what interests them, but neither of them has what I would call an aesthetic position. Malcolm produced a kind of personal reportage, with readers invited and expected to be alert to the sharp edges of her personality. 

No “underlying idea,” no “aesthetic position” – does this describe Janet Malcolm? I’m not concerned with Hickey. I’m not sufficiently familiar with his work to be able to comment on it. But Malcolm is one of my heroes. Her work is one of this blog’s touchstones. Click on her name in the “Labels” section and you will find eighty-four posts that discuss her writing. This post will be the eighty-fifth. 

Malcolm described herself as a deconstructionist. In the Preface to her great 1992 essay collection The Purloined Clinic, she says,

I have chosen the title of one of the pieces, a review of Michael Fried’s Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane, as the title of the collection, because in Fried I recognized another sort of double: a critic whose imagination I found uncannily familiar and congenial, and who caused me to see that I had been thinking like a deconstructionist for a long time without knowing it, like Molière’s M. Jourdain, who discovered that he had been speaking in prose all his life.

Writers aren’t necessarily their own best critics, but, in this case, I think Malcolm was right. She was a deconstructionist. In her brilliant “J’appelle un Chat un Chat” (The New Yorker, April 20, 1987), she reviews an anthology called Dora’s Case: Freud – Hysteria – Feminism (1985), edited by Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane. She says,

These new writings—feminist, deconstructive, and Lacanian, for the most part—have a wild playfulness and a sort of sexual sparkle that flicker through their academic patois and give them an extraordinary verve.

Right there, I think, is a glimpse of Malcolm’s governing aesthetic – her delight in analysis that is performed with “extraordinary verve.” It’s a description of her own work. 

Deconstruction is one way into Malcolm’s underlying aesthetic. Another is psychoanalysis. She wrote extensively about it: see, for example, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981) and In the Freud Archives (1984). Like a good psychoanalyst, Malcolm took nothing at face value. “Was the incident like a screen memory that hides a more painful recollection?” she asks in her superb “The Window Washer” (The New Yorker, November 19, 1990). “My arrival in Yalta was marked by an incident that rather dramatically brought into view something that had lain just below my consciousness”: “Travels with Chekhov” (The New Yorker, February 21, 2000). 

She had a psychoanalyst's distrust of narrative:  

We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative. [“Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” The New Yorker, May 3, 2010]

Even her photography writing has a psychoanalytical aspect. In her excellent “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.” (The New Yorker, August 6, 1979), she wrote,

Hare takes the camera’s capacity for aimless vision as his starting point and works with it somewhat the way a psychoanalyst works with free association. He enters the universe of the undesired detail and adopts an expectant attitude, waiting for the cluttered surface to crack and yield an interpretation.

To deconstruction and psychoanalysis, I would add another bedrock aesthetic idea that Malcolm believed in – decontextualization. She not only praised it, she practiced it in her own photography: see Burdock, 2008, in which she says,

What I have done with the burdock leaves is, of course, part of the enterprise of decontextualization that received its awkward name in the late twentieth century and was a fixture of that century’s visual culture. Patchwork quilts hung on the walls of museums, African tribal masks used to decorate orthodontists’ waiting rooms, ship propellers displayed on coffee tables—these are some familiar forms of the practice of taking something from where it belongs and that has a function, and putting it where it doesn’t belong and merely looks beautiful. It looks beautiful in a particular way, to be sure, the way of modernist art and architecture and design. When I remove a burdock leaf from its dusty roadside habitat, I anticipate the stylized aspect it will assume when it is set upright against the clean white walls of my attic studio, its lineaments refined by sunlight coming from above.

I think I’ve said enough to at least cast doubt on Perl’s assertion that Malcolm lacked an “aesthetic position.” Her delight in analysis – deconstruction, psychoanalysis, decontextualization – runs all through her splendid oeuvre.

Credit: The above photo is Janet Malcolm's Burdock No. 1 (2005-07).  

August 25, 2025 Issue

I’m enjoying The New Yorker’s “Takes” series immensely. In this week’s installment, Adam Gopnik revisits Joseph Mitchell’s “Joe Gould’s Secret” (September 19 and 24, 1964). He writes,

On the surface, Mitchell’s prose style derived from the economical newspaper writing he learned at the New York World. But his real heroes were the Joyce of “Dubliners” and the great Russian stylists—Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov. 

This is perceptive. In his best pieces – “Joe Gould’s Secret,” “Up in the Old Hotel,” “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” “The Rivermen” – Mitchell’s approach is Joycean. He seeks not just meaning; he seeks epiphany.

Reading Gopnik’s absorbing piece, I recalled three other wonderful appreciations of Mitchell’s work: William Maxwell’s Introduction to the 1999 Vintage paperback Joe Gould’s Secret; Mark Singer’s “Joe Mitchell’s Secret” (The New Yorker, February 22 & March 1, 1999; included in his 2005 collection Character Studies); and Janet Malcolm’s “The Master Writer of the City” (The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015; included in her 2019 collection Nobody’s Looking).

Mitchell, in his superb “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” wrote one of my favorite opening sentences: “When things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries down there.”

Joseph Mitchell is one of The New Yorker’s greatest writers. A shout-out to Adam Gopnik for honoring him in “Takes.”  

On One

Patricia Lockwood, in her “Arrayed in Shining Scales,” in the current London Review of Books, writes,

The Silent Woman has everything: psychoanalysts puking because they found Hughes too attractive, Dido Merwin writing an entire essay about how Plath was a foie gras pig, Stevenson palely loitering, thought-foxes, chipped gravestones, poetic tribunals, lesbian readings of ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, and Malcolm being perhaps more on one than any journalist before or since.

What does “on one” mean? Is it a misprint? Maybe not. Google provides this definition: “Acting crazy, stirring the pot, causing trouble, being a menace in any capacity.” Does that describe Malcolm in The Silent Woman? I don’t think so.

If you ask me, Lockwood is the one who's on one. Her "Arrayed in Shining Scales" is as wild and strange as its subject (the life and work of Sylvia Plath). I devoured it. 

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.

December 30, 2024 & January 6, 2025 Issue

Rachel Aviv, in her disturbing “You Won’t Get Free of It,” in this week’s issue, explores the complex psychosexual dynamics of Alice Munro’s family life, including the sexual abuse of her youngest daughter Andrea by her husband Gerry, and Munro's shocking decision to stay with Gerry even after Andrea told her about it. It sounds like a Munro short story, but it’s real life, with real-life consequences.  

I confess I'm struggling with my response to this piece. I'm a fan of Munro's writing. Part of me wants to defend her. Part of me realizes that what she did - "trade her daughter for art," in Aviv's words - is indefensible. I'm conflicted. "She couldn't have done it and she must have done it" - that's what Janet Malcolm said of the defendant Mazoltuv Borukhova in Iphigenia in Forest Hills. That's the way I feel right now about Alice Munro. I need more time to resolve my feelings about what she did. I may never resolve them. 

In the meantime, I'll keep an eye out for other responses to the controversy. I'd love to read Lorrie Moore on it. She admired Munro's work immensely. How is she grappling with Andrea's revelations? 

Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #2 "Janet Malcolm's 'Forty-one False Starts' - Part II"

This is the ninth 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 “Janet Malcolm’s Forty-One False Starts – Part II” (June 25, 2013):

In late 2003, two remarkable Diane Arbus exhibitions (and accompanying catalogs) – the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Diane Arbus Revelations and Mount Holyoke College Museum of Art’s Diane Arbus: Family Albums - attracted the attention of two of America’s greatest critical writers – Janet Malcolm and Judith Thurman. Thurman’s review, "Exposure Time," appeared in the October 13, 2003, New Yorker, and was later included in her superb Cleopatra’s Nose (2007). Malcolm’s piece, "Good Pictures," was originally published in the January 15, 2004, New York Review of Books, and now, nine years later, wonderfully reappears in her excellent new collection Forty-one False Starts. Both pieces are brilliant. It’s interesting to compare them, as much for what they may tell about Malcolm’s and Thurman’s style, as for what they reveal about Arbus’s work. (I’m as interested in the way Malcolm and Thurman write as I am in the way Arbus took pictures.)

The first thing to note is that Thurman’s piece is a book review; it considers only the exhibition catalogs. In contrast, Malcolm’s review covers both the exhibitions and the catalogs. This is a significant difference that accrues to Malcolm’s benefit. Her critical approach thrives on comparative analysis. In her “Good Pictures,” she pounces on a fascinating discrepancy between the Family Albums exhibition and the Family Albums catalogue and uses it to illustrate what constitutes, in her words, “true Arbus photographs.” I’m referring to the point late in Malcolm’s narrative in which she reports that the younger Matthaei daughter, Leslie, “suddenly decided she didn’t want any pictures of herself published.” As Malcolm explains, this meant that Arbus’s Leslie portraits were viewable only at the show, not in the catalog. This fact generates a quintessentially Malcolmian line: “When I went to see the Mount Holyoke show, I naturally sought out the missing pictures of Leslie and immediately understood why she had not wanted them preserved in a book.” I find that sentence thrilling for at least three reasons: (1) it shows Malcolm entering her narrative, making a story of her pursuit of a story; (2) it turns a trip to the gallery into a form of psychoanalytic inquiry (what is it about the portraits that Leslie is repressing?); (3) it creates a delicious anticipation of Malcolm’s description of what the Leslie portraits look like. With respect to this last point, Malcolm doesn’t disappoint. Immediately following the above-quoted sentence, she writes: “Leslie, an attractive girl, is the disobliging daughter, the Cordelia of the shoot. In almost every photograph, she sulks, glares, frowns, looks tense and grim and sometimes even outright malevolent.”

Malcolm then makes another brilliant analytic move – a comparison of the Leslie portraits with those of her older sister, Marcella. In what is perhaps the piece’s most memorable line, she writes, “Marcella gave Arbus what Leslie refused.” It’s like a line from a novel. Malcolm reads the pictures as a story about how Arbus made art from what appeared to be a hopelessly banal family photo shoot. In fact, earlier in “Good Pictures,” she says, “The uncut Matthaei contact sheets straightforwardly tell the story of Arbus’s two-day struggle with her commissions.” The art that emerged from this struggle are the two Marcella portraits. Malcolm describes them unforgettably:

The two portraits of Marcella that Lee and Pultz reproduce in the book are true Arbus photographs. They have the strangeness and uncanniness with which Arbus’s best work is tinged. They belong among the pictures of the man wearing a bra and stockings and the twins in corduroy dresses and the albino sword swallower and the nudist couple. Like these subjects, Marcella unwittingly collaborated with Arbus on her project of defamiliarization. The portraits of Marcella – one full-figure to the knees, and the other of head and torso – show a girl with long hair and bangs that come down over her eyes who is standing so erect and looking so straight ahead of her that she might be a caryatid. The fierce gravity of her strong features further enhances the sense of stone. Her short, sleeveless white dress of crocheted material, which might look tacky on another girl, looks like a costume from myth on this girl. To contrast the pictures of balky little Leslie with those of monumental Marcella is to understand something about the fictive nature of Arbus’s work. The pictures of Leslie are pictures that illustrate photography’s ready realism, its appetite for fact. They record the literal truth of Leslie’s fury and misery. The pictures of Marcella show the defeat of photography’s literalism. They take us far from the family gathering – indeed from any occasion but that of of the encounter between Arbus and Marcella in which the fiction of the photograph is forged.

Diane Arbus, Untitled (Marcella Matthaei) (1969)

I confess, as much as I admire this passage for its extraordinary interpretative beauty and originality, I find it disorienting. Nothing that’s gone before it, in “Good Pictures,” prepares the reader for critical phrases such as “project of defamiliarization,” “the fictive nature of Arbus’s work,” and “the fiction of the photograph.” In fact, if you are reading the essays in Forty-one False Starts serially from the beginning, you will have already encountered Malcolm’s observation, in  “Depth of Field,” that “Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness.” I don’t know if it’s possible to reconcile these two views. “Inescapable truthfulness” would seem to preclude fictionalization, unless Malcolm is reading the Marcella portraits as a type of narrative truth. Perhaps she is. Recall that in her great essay, “Six Roses ou Cirrhose” (The New Yorker, January 24, 1983; included in her 1992 collection, The Purloined Clinic), she defines narrative truth as “the truth of literary art.” Perhaps “the fictive nature of Arbus’s work” and “the fiction of the photograph,” in the sense that Malcolm uses them in “Good Pictures,” means “the truth of photographic art.”

If you read Judith Thurman’s “Exposure Time” after you read Malcolm’s “Good Pictures,” you might think that Thurman missed the story. In a way, she did. Not only does she not mention the Leslie and Marcella portraits, she devotes only three lines to Diane Arbus: Family Albums (“The pictures she took for the album, which was never published, were commissioned by magazines or by private clients, and some were made for art’s sake. Like all her work, they explored the nature of closeness and disaffection, sameness and anomaly, belonging and exclusion: the tension between our sentimental expectations of what is supposed to be and the debacle of what is. Arbus put it more simply to Crookston: ‘I think all families are creepy in a way’ ”). Instead, Thurman focuses on Diane Arbus: Revelations, which she calls the “much more ambitious Arbus show.”

But Thurman has her own Arbus story to tell or, rather, more accurately, her own Arbus brief to argue. “Exposure Time” is a tour de force of descriptive analysis that powerfully defends Arbus against, in Thurman’s words, “the hostility to her transgressions.” Thurman quotes Susan Sontag’s accusation that Arbus explored “an appalling underworld” of the “deformed and mutilated.” In rebuttal, Thurman says, “The respect and sympathy for her freaks that Arbus expresses in her letters – particularly those to her children – and her apparently solicitous, ongoing engagement with them, is at odds with the view that she was exploiting their credulity.” Conceding that Arbus was “cunning and aggressive,” she adds, “but so are many photographers.” She says,

Photography was then, and still is, a macho profession, and if she took its machismo to greater extremes than her peers of either sex, it was in part to scourge her native timidity and to prove that she had the balls to join her subjects’ orgies, share their nudity, endure their stench, revel in their squalor, and break down their resistance with a seductively disarming or fierce and often sexualized persistence until she “got” a certain expression: defeat, fatigue, slackness, anomie, or demented joy.

Diane Arbus, Untitled (7) (1970-71)

Rereading “Exposure Time,” I’m struck by the naturalness of Thurman’s style. She's more natural than Malcolm. Her lines are longer, richer, more sensuous and vivid. For example, here from “Exposure Time,” is her wonderful description of Arbus’s great Untitled (7):

In one of her masterpieces, “Untitled (7),” the rural landscape seems bathed in the lowering and eerie radiance of an eclipse, and the misshapen figures of her brain-damaged subjects—descendants of Goya’s gargoyles—march across the frame with unsteady steps as if to the music of a piper one can’t hear. A grave child of indeterminate sex with a painted mustache and averted gaze holds hands with a masked old woman in a white shift. They are oblivious of—and in a way liberated from—Arbus’s gaze. After years of posing her subjects frontally, she had begun to prefer that they did not look at her. “I think I will see them more clearly,” she wrote to Amy, “if they are not watching me watching them.”

That “and the misshapen figures of her brain-damaged subjects – descendants of Goya’s gargoyles – march across the frame with unsteady steps as if to the music of a piper one can’t hear” is very fine.

“Exposure Time” is more descriptive; “Good Pictures” is more analytical. Both are terrific - two of my all-time favorite critical pieces. It’s great to see them preserved between hard covers.

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.  

The New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

I see The New York Times is picking the 100 best books of the 21st century. Readers are invited to submit their own top ten choices. Here’s what I submitted:

Trawler (2005)

Redmond O’Hanlon

Travels in Siberia (2010)

Ian Frazier

Cross Country (2006)

Robert Sullivan

I Curse the River of Time (2010)

Per Petterson

Iphigenia in Forest Hills (2011)

Janet Malcolm

The Sight of Death (2006)

T. J. Clark

Uncommon Carriers (2006)

John McPhee

A Terrible Country (2018)

Keith Gessen

The Old Ways (2012)

Robert Macfarlane

The Ongoing Moment (2005)

Geoff Dyer

It pains me to leave out James Wood, Peter Schjeldahl, and Helen Vendler – three of my favorite writers. But when you draw up these lists, sometimes you have to be ruthless. 

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. 

Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #6 " 'Mr. Hunter's Grave' - Fact, Fiction, or Faction?"

Joseph Mitchell (Photo by Therese Mitchell)

This is the fifth 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 “ ‘Mr. Hunter’s Grave’: Fact, Fiction, or Faction?” (August 6, 2015):

It’s interesting to compare seven reviews of Thomas Kunkel’s Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker (2015) and see the various ways they respond to Kunkel’s revelation that Mitchell fabricated certain aspects of his great “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The New Yorker, September 22, 1956). The seven reviews are:

1. Thomas Berenato’s "Progress of Stories" (Los Angeles Book Review, April 21, 2015)

2. Janet Malcolm’s "The Master Writer of the City" (The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015)

3. Charles McGrath’s "The People You Meet" (The New Yorker, April 27, 2015)

4. Blake Bailey’s " 'Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker,' by Thomas Kunkel" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, May 19, 2015)

5. Thomas Powers’ "All I Can Stand" (London Review of Books, June 18, 2015)

6. John Williams’ "Review: 'Man in Profile" Studies Joseph Mitchell of 'The New Yorker' " (The New York Times, June 24, 2015)

7. Thomas Beller’s “Nowhere Man” (Bookforum, Summer 2015)

Before looking at these pieces, I want to set out the fabrications reported by Kunkel. There are six:

1. The single Saturday visit with Hunter, as described in the story, is actually a conflation of at least seven different interviews that Mitchell conducted with Hunter over a number of months.

2. The three long Hunter monologues in the story were constructed by splicing (and “embroidering”) quotations from related segments of multiple Mitchell-Hunter conversations. Kunkel says, “While Mitchell stayed faithful to the spirit and tang of Hunter’s observations, it seems clear that much of the old man’s language was Mitchell’s own.”

3. In the story, Mitchell’s first meeting with Hunter occurs in Hunter’s house; in actual fact, it took place at Sandy Ground’s African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

4. In the story, it’s Rev. Raymond Brock who steers Mitchell to Hunter; in actual fact, it was a man named James McCoy, sitting on the porch of a house in Sandy Ground, when Mitchell passed by, who first mentioned Hunter to Mitchell.

5. In the story, Mitchell first encounters Brock in St. Luke’s Cemetery; in actual fact, he didn’t meet him there. Kunkel says, “While Mitchell was preparing his story, he asked if could set their meeting in St. Luke’s Cemetery, which is one of the graveyards Mitchell knew from his early visits. Brock agreed that would make for a better read and gave his permission….”

6. In the story, Hunter takes the “BELOVED SON” wreath ribbon out of his wallet at the cemetery entrance. In actual fact, according to Kunkel, “Mitchell first came across the BELOVED SON ribbon while in Hunter’s house on his second visit there; it was spread atop a bureau in his bedroom. On a table beside Hunter’s bed lay his late son’s wallet. While it’s possible that Hunter had for a time carried the ribbon in his own wallet, it doesn’t appear he pulled it out for Mitchell in the poignant manner the writer described.”

In Man in Profile, Kunkel asks, “Should the reputation of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” suffer for the license Mitchell employed in telling it?” He answers, “As with any aspect of art, that is up to the appraiser.”

Well, let’s see what the seven appraisers listed above have to say. Thomas Berenato, in his “Progress of Stories,” writes,

What the “character” Mr. Hunter says in the story “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” is not verbatim what George H. Hunter told Mitchell in propria persona, but it is revelatory of his character, or at least of “character” period. Sometimes Mitchell sought, and received, permission from his subjects to rearrange or even reassign the dialogue that took place. Sometimes not. In any case, monologues unspool for pages at a time. Soliloquies as charming and harrowing as these are few to find outside the works of Joyce, Beckett, or Bernhard. They are all as unmistakably Mitchellian as Sebald’s are Sebaldian. Mitchell, Kunkel writes, “was in fact a first-rate writer of literature whose chosen medium happened to be nonfiction.”

Implicit in this is that fact pieces that are considered “literature” are somehow exempt from the requirement that they be accurate.

Janet Malcolm, in her “The Master Writer of the City,” expresses a similar view. She refers to Mitchell’s “radical departures from factuality.” Regarding “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” she says,

What Kunkel found in Mitchell’s reporting notes for his famous piece “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” made him even more nervous. It now appears that that great work of nonfiction is also in some part a work of fiction. The piece opens with an encounter in the St. Luke’s cemetery on Staten Island between Mitchell and a minister named Raymond E. Brock, who tells him about a remarkable black man named Mr. Hunter, and sets in motion the events that bring Mitchell to Hunter’s house a week later. But the notes show that the encounter in the cemetery never took place. In actuality, it was a man sitting on his front porch named James McCoy (who never appears in the piece) who told Mitchell about Mr. Hunter years before Mitchell met him; and when Mitchell did meet Hunter it was in a church and not at his house.

Malcolm mocks the puritanical response to the liberties Mitchell takes with the facts. She says,

He [Mitchell] has betrayed the reader’s trust that what he is reading is what actually happened. He has mixed up nonfiction with fiction. He has made an unwholesome, almost toxic brew out of the two genres. It is too bad he is dead and can’t be pilloried. Or perhaps it is all right that he is dead, because he is suffering the torments of hell for his sins against the spirit of fact. And so on.

Her view is that “Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat.” She says,

His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they’re so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition.

Malcolm suggests, “Mitchell’s genre is some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named.”

Charles McGrath, in his “The People You Meet,” takes a different view. He says, “More than we knew, or wanted to know, he [Mitchell] made things up.” Of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” McGrath says,

Mitchell’s best work is lovely and stirring in a way that a documentary or a recorded interview could never be. George Hunter, an elderly black man and Staten Island resident, and the subject of a story that is probably Mitchell’s masterpiece, would be less interesting if we had to read what he actually said. And yet the piece gains immeasurably from being presented as factual, an account of scenes and conversations that really took place. If we read it as fiction, which it is, in part, some of the air goes out.

McGrath’s view differs from Malcolm’s. She sees Mitchell’s fabrications as a function of his creative imagination. She holds that most journalists lack such an imagination (“There are no fictional characters lurking in their imaginations. They couldn’t create a character like Mr. Flood or Cockeye Johnny if you held a gun to their heads”). Whereas McGrath says, “As inglorious examples like Jayson Blair demonstrate, invention is often easier than reporting—you can do it without even leaving home—and requires no special talent other than nerve.”

McGrath doesn’t use creative license to excuse Mitchell the way Berenato and Malcolm do. But he does defend him. He says, “Mitchell’s best defense is that he wrote what he did out of affection and empathy for his subjects, not a wish to deceive.”

Blake Bailey, in his “Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, by Thomas Kunkel,” calls Mitchell’s writing “a kind of hybrid nonfiction that encompassed (with the blessing of his editors) long embellished monologues delivered by old Mr. Flood and Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, the Gypsy king, who were actually composites of various New York characters with a piquant admixture of Mitchell himself.” Other than the “long embellished monologues,” Bailey makes no mention of any of the other fabrications reported by Kunkel. He calls Mitchell “arguably, our greatest literary journalist — a man who wrote about freaks, barkeeps, street preachers, grandiose hobos and other singular specimens of humanity with compassion and deep, hard-earned understanding, and above all with a novelist’s eyes and ears.”

Thomas Powers’ “All I Can Stand,” is a favorable assessment of Kunkel’s book and a wonderful review of several of Mitchell’s best stories, including “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (“To disappear is the common fate and it would have been Mr Hunter’s, too, were it not for one thing – Joe Mitchell’s refusal to let him go. In the way of writers, Mitchell has listened to Mr Hunter, told his story, and stayed the clock”). Interestingly, throughout his piece, Powers refers to Mitchell’s stories as “fact pieces” without qualification or acknowledgment of the “license” (Kunkel’s word) that Mitchell employed in writing them. Is Powers in denial of Mitchell’s fabrications? Or does he view them as irrelevant? His failure to comment on Kunkel’s revelations is a weakness in a piece that is otherwise an excellent appreciation of Mitchell’s writing.  

John Williams, in his “Review: Man in Profile Studies Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker,” calls Mitchell “a writer who observed and imagined his way to a brilliant, heightened version of reality.” He says, “It’s clear Mitchell did make things up.” He approvingly quotes Janet Malcolm’s Kunkel review (“But few of us have gone as far as Mitchell in bending actuality to our artistic will. This is not because we are more virtuous than Mitchell. It is because we are less gifted than Mitchell. The idea that reporters are constantly resisting the temptation to invent is a laughable one. Reporters don’t invent because they don’t know how to”). It appears that Williams, like Berenato and Malcolm, sees Mitchell as a literary artist, exempt from journalism’s basic “don’t mess with the facts.”

Thomas Beller, in his “Nowhere Man,” observes that Mitchell’s pieces convey an “immersive sense of interest in their subjects, within which there is affection, even love.” He says Mitchell’s prose is “burnished with the warmth of empathy.” He doesn’t mention Mitchell’s fabrications other than to say that Mitchell wrestled with “guilt over liberties he took with facts,” and to point out that Mr. Flood was not Mitchell’s only composite character.

Until I read these reviews, I didn’t think of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” as a “heightened version of reality” (Williams) or a “kind of hybrid nonfiction” (Bailey) or “some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named” (Malcolm). I thought of it the way Powers apparently still thinks of it – as a “fact piece.” I agree with McGrath when he says, “If we read it as fiction, which it is, in part, some of the air goes out.”

I resist reading “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” as fiction. Mitchell didn’t intend it as such. In the Author’s Note of his great Up in the Old Hotel (1992), he classified it as “factual.” In my opinion, everything in it is factual, except the six fabrications listed above. They are sufficient to compromise the story’s status as a fact piece, but insufficient to justify reclassifying it as fiction. Malcolm’s phrase – “some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named” – will have to do for now. 

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.”

On Janet Malcolm's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa."

From Janet Malcolm's Diana & Nikon (1980)

Janet Malcolm was always comparing; it’s one of her signature analytical moves. In her brilliant “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.” (The New Yorker, August 6, 1979; included in her great 1980 essay collection Diana and Nikon), she compared three versions of a famous Walker Evans portrait: (1) “Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife” (1936), published in Evans’ American Photographs (1938); (2) untitled portrait, published in James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941); and (3) “Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama” (1936), published in Walker Evans: First and Last (1978). Malcolm wrote,

The 1938 version shows a young woman of the most delicate, aristocratic beauty, with elegant bones, clear eyes, and smooth white skin, gazing confidently into the camera with a slight smile of humorous indomitability on her lips – a woman who, in her poverty, has the sort of profound beauty that her more fortunate sisters may envy but will seek in their hairdressers’ and dressmakers’. The version in Walker Evans: First and Last shows an ugly hag, her face covered with lines and wrinkles, her brow furrowed with anxiety, her mouth set in a bitter line, her eyes looking out in the expectation of seeing nothing good. What one feels looking at this portrait is no longer envy but outrage at the conditions that should have turned a beautiful woman into such a defeated and desexed being – a member of what James Agee, writing in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, called “an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings.” The photograph of the sharecropper’s wife that appears in Agee’s book gives the same impression of beauty and indomitability as the one in American Photographs, even though it comes from the same negative that is used in the 1978 book. The poor printing of forty years ago did a cosmetic job, washing out lines, smoothing out the brow, minimizing the damage. The printer of the new book has performed an act of restitution, and his mercilessly scrutinizing prints are consequently more in line with Agee’s book: the pictures and the text don’t agree. The text is a howl of anger and anguish over the misery of the sharecroppers’ lives. “How can people live like this? How can the rest of us permit it, tolerate it, bear it?” Agee cries. “Don’t listen to him,” the serene, orderly Walker Evans photographs seem to say. “He exaggerates. He gets carried away. It’s not as bad as he says.”

This paragraph contains three arresting revelations: (1) there are three versions of this iconic photo; (2) the 1938 version is slightly different from the other two; and (3) the 1941 version – the one in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – is a “cosmetic” version of the one that appeared in 1978. Malcolm’s passage also contains an interesting opinion – that the 1978 “ugly hag” version is the one “more in line with Agee’s text.” Is Malcolm right? I don’t think so. 

In the text, Allie Mae Burroughs is named Annie May Gudger. At least twice, Agee describes her as beautiful:  

1. Saturday is the day of leaving the farm and going to Cookstown, and from the earliest morning on I can see that she is thinking of it. It is after she has done the housework in a little hurry and got the children ready that she bathes and prepares herself, and as she comes from the bedroom, with her hat on, ready to go, her eyes, in ambush even to herself, look for what I am thinking in such a way that I want to tell her how beautiful she is; and I would not be lying.

2. ... and now for the first time in all this hour we have sat here, Annie Mae takes her stiff hands from her ears and slowly lifts her beautiful face with a long strip of tears drawn, vertical, beneath each eye, and looks at us gravely, saying nothing.

It's true that Agee sees beauty in things that many people would consider ugly, e.g., a tenant farmer’s rough wooden shack, a tenant farmer’s worn overhauls. He eventually has this to say about his sense of beauty: 

They live on land, and in houses, and under skies and seasons, which all happen to seem to me beautiful beyond almost anything else I know, and they themselves, and the clothes they wear, and their motions, and their speech, are beautiful in the same intense and final commonness and purity.

The photo of Allie Mae Burroughs that Evans included in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is very much in line with Agee’s sense of her beauty, as expressed in his text. Malcolm’s idea that the “ugly hag” version would’ve been a better match strikes me as wrong. I think it would’ve struck Evans and Agee that way, too. 

From Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

 

Favorite Photo Reviews 10: Janet Malcolm's "The View from Plato's Cave"

Herta Hilscher-Wittgenstein, Toni, October, 1975

I love photography reviews – their comparison of images, exploration of detail, illumination of style, formulation of theory. When done right, they’re an excellent source of descriptive analysis, a form of writing I devour. Over the next few weeks, I’ll list ten of my favorite pieces and try to say why I like them. Today, I’ll start with #10:  Janet Malcolm’s brilliant “The View from Plato’s Cave” (The New Yorker, October 18, 1976; included in her great 1980 collection Diana & Nikon).

It's a review of a 1976 exhibition of photos by Nina Alexander and Herta Hilscher-Wittgenstein, at Susan Caldwell Gallery, in Soho. The pictures are of a terminally ill thirty-nine-year-old woman taken during the last months of her life and after her death. The piece is memorable for Malcolm’s bravura description of one of Hilscher-Wittgenstein’s pictures, titled Toni, October (1975):

The enormously enlarged photograph of the incision-slashed torso was the pivotal image of the show; it compelled immediate, stunned attention, and its presence invaded one’s perception of the other, less overtly horrifying images. Its horror comes from the fact that it is not a clinical study of a body on an operating table, or a medical-textbook illustration showing a person enduring photography as he does treatment, but a picture of a beautiful young woman posed in a graceful, even slightly vain attitude. She has put a silver necklace around her neck and a bracelet on one wrist. (The other wrist is encircled by a plastic hospital tag.) Her body has the delicate slenderness of a boy’s, and the photograph subtly evokes Edward Weston’s lovely study of his son Neil’s nude torso—it is similarly cropped at the neck and the pubes. The two savage arcs of messy black surgical stitches that rip into the right breast and tear down the abdomen are like obscene marks made on a statue by a vandal. The tense clash of imagery—the brutal yoking of the emblems of pain, pathology, mutilation, and inanition with the attributes of health, wholeness, volition, and grace—is paralleled by a conflict of feeling within the viewer, who is both repelled by and drawn to the image: appalled by the way the woman is exposing what it is “normal” to keep out of sight, and yet fascinated by the details thereby revealed. And, oddly, the closer the viewer looks at the incisions, the less distress he feels; finally, his repugnance recedes and is replaced by something akin to awe for the work of the anonymous surgeon, for the neat and clean way the body has been closed, for the small outward signs of damage.

Malcolm’s analysis of Toni, October is equally compelling. She writes,

The transfixing specificity of this image was present in no other work in the show; the other selections moved the viewer not by what they showed but because of what he had been told about the subject’s tragic situation. For there is nothing in the picture of the woman’s face during a spasm of pain to show that she is afflicted with cancer rather than with menstrual cramps, or in the picture of the embrace with her daughter to indicate that she is going to die rather than leave for a holiday, or even in the pictures of the corpse to make one see that this is real rather than a piece of theatre. The picture story presented here, like those in Life and Look, requires extra-photographic information by which to convey its meaning; without the introductory message, the pictures make little impression or sense. Only the photograph of the torso illustrates its own meaning, requires no explanation, has no ambiguity, can be nothing but what it manifestly appears to be.

I first read this piece forty-seven years ago when it appeared in The New Yorker. That “transfixing specificity” has stayed with me ever since. It’s one of my prime criteria for identifying great art.  

April 17, 2023 Issue

Andrea K. Scott, in her “At the Galleries,” in this week’s issue, tells about an exhibition at The Drawing Center titled “Of Mythic Worlds.” She says that the show features fifty-three works, “mostly on paper, dating from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century.” What caught my eye is her mention that Janet Malcolm is among the show’s featured artists. Scott says, “Readers of this magazine may be especially enticed by Janet Malcolm’s gnomic collages.” Well, yes, I am enticed. A few years ago Granta magazine published a collection of Malcolm’s collages called “The Emily Dickinson Series” (Granta, Issue 126, Winter 2014). The works are strange combinations of photos and documents. Scott’s “gnomic” perfectly describes them. Reading Scott’s review, I wondered what the Malcolm collages at The Drawing Center looked like. I visited drawingcenter.org to see what I could see. Several works in “Of Mythic Worlds” are shown, but none by Janet Malcolm. However, the contents of the exhibition catalogue, Drawing Papers 151: Of Mythic Worlds: Works from the Distant Past to the Present, are viewable at issuu.com. If you flip through the pages to “Notes on the Artists,” you’ll find an entry on Malcolm. It identifies the collages selected for the show, namely, Ermine and Cleopatra, both from her Emily Dickinson Series (2013). Both works are shown in the “Plates” section of the publication. 

Someday maybe I’ll write a piece tracing Malcolm’s collage-making impulse in her writings. The obvious starting point is her collage-like “Forty-one False Starts” (The New Yorker, July 11, 1994).  

Janet Malcolm, Ermine (2013)

 

 

Janet Malcolm's "Still Pictures"

Sorry, I know I said I was taking a break, and I will, I will. But before I do, I just want to flag a significant literary happening: the publication of Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory. Malcolm is one of The New Yorker’s all-time greats. She died in 2021. A new book by her is a major event. There’s an excellent review of it in The New York Times: see Charles Finch’s “Janet Malcolm Remembers,” January 8, 2023. I’ll post my response to Still Pictures in due course. It’s great to have a new book by Malcolm to look forward to. 

Toward My Own Theory of Description: Incision-Slashed Torso

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Ekphrasis – sounds like a skin condition. I prefer the plainer “description of art.” It's one of my favorite forms of representation. Example:

The enormously enlarged photograph of the incision-slashed torso was the pivotal image of the show; it compelled immediate, stunned attention, and its presence invaded one’s perception of the other, less overtly horrifying images. Its horror comes from the fact it is not a clinical study of a body on an operating table, or a medical-textbook illustration showing a person enduring photography as he does treatment, but a picture of a beautiful young woman posed in a graceful, even slightly vain attitude. She has put a silver necklace around her neck and a bracelet on one wrist. (The other wrist is encircled by a plastic hospital tag.) Her body has the delicate slenderness of a boy’s, and the photograph subtly evokes Edward Weston’s lovely study of his son Neil’s nude torso – it is similarly cropped at the neck and at the pubes. The two savage arcs of messy black surgical stitches that rip into the right breast and tear down the abdomen are like obscene marks made on a statue by a vandal. The tense clash of imagery – the brutal yoking of the emblems of pain, pathology, mutilation, and inanition with the attributes of health, wholeness, volition, and grace – is paralleled by a conflict of feeling within the viewer, who is both repelled by and drawn to the image: appalled by the way the woman is exposing what it is “normal” to keep out of sight, and yet fascinated by the details thereby revealed. And, oddly, the closer the viewer looks at the incisions, the less distress he feels; finally, his repugnance recedes and is replaced by something akin to awe for the work of the anonymous surgeon, for the neat and clean way the body has been closed, for the small outward signs of damage. 

That’s from Janet Malcolm’s great “The View from Plato’s Cave” (The New Yorker, October 18, 1976; included in her 1980 collection Diana & Nikon). It’s a description of Herta Hilscher-Wittgenstein’s photograph Toni, October (1975). I first read it when it appeared in The New Yorker; I’ve never forgotten it. (It clinched my decision to subscribe to the magazine.) It’s both description and analysis. Note three things: (1) the transfixing specificity of Malcolm’s description (“The two savage arcs of messy black surgical stitches that rip into the right breast and tear down the abdomen are like obscene marks made on a statue by a vandal”); (2) the comparative analysis (“Her body has the delicate slenderness of a boy’s, and the photograph subtly evokes Edward Weston’s lovely study of his son Neil’s nude torso – it is similarly cropped at the neck and at the pubes”); and (3), the assessment of why the picture is so “stunning” (“Its horror comes from the fact it is not a clinical study of a body on an operating table, or a medical-textbook illustration showing a person enduring photography as he does treatment, but a picture of a beautiful young woman posed in a graceful, even slightly vain attitude”). 

In my next post, I want to consider description in terms of its closely observed detail. Can there ever be “too much”?  

January 24, 2022 Issue

Eren Orbey’s “Fault Lines,” in this week’s issue, is an absorbing consideration of a remarkable case of restorative justice. It tells about the successful efforts of a woman to free the man convicted of killing her father. It probes the case from many sides. Orbey talks with the woman, Katie Kitchen. He talks with the offender, Joseff Deon White. He talks with members of Kitchen’s family. He accompanies Kitchen on a visit with White at his home. Orbey’s interest in the case is personal. He discloses that his father was also the victim of murder, and that he, like Kitchen, made efforts to contact the convicted killer. To a degree, Orbey appears to mirror off Kitchen. But he’s also questioning. He writes,

I told Kitchen that, as a child, I had found it comforting to know that my father’s killer hadn’t targeted him in particular—that the murder was, to some extent, a “random act,” as I’d heard her call White’s crime. Like Benninghoven [Kitchen’s sister], though, I chafed at Kitchen’s insistence on ignoring the question of White’s responsibility. In her narrative, the murder was a terrible accident, and White, because of systemic injustices, had been as much a victim as her father. I admired that her mission on White’s behalf was an attempt to live up to her progressive ideals. But I wondered whether she had truly let go of what the mediators had called her “coping story.” Did she accept that White may well have been the one who killed her dad, and that the crime may not have been an accident?

It bothers Orbey that Kitchen seems indifferent to the question of White’s guilt or innocence. But by the end of the piece, he appears to have resolved his frustration:

Indeed, as I reported on Kitchen’s story, I grew less frustrated by the evasive manner in which she and White discussed the murder. It moved me that each seemed attuned to what the other needed from their unusual friendship.

For me, what's tonic about “Fault Lines” is its acceptance of the ambiguity that sometimes exists at the heart of a violent crime. Remember Janet Malcolm's "She couldn't have done it and she must have done it" in her great "Iphigenia in Forest Hills"? Well, it's the same thing here. I applaud Orbey's empathy and fair-mindedness. 

But I have a question: why didn’t White take the stand at his trial? As Orbey points out, “Only White knows for sure whether he had an accomplice and, if he did, what role each of them played in the crime.” He reports that White’s lawyer, Kurt Wentz, “had chosen not to put him on the stand.” Why did he make that decision? 

2021 Year in Review

Illustration from newyorker.com

Begin with a drink. I’ll have one of those Mumbai Mules that Hannah Goldfield mentions in her excellent “Tables For Two: Bollywood Kitchen” (March 1, 2021): “vodka, ginger beer, and fresh lime juice, punched up with ground coriander and cumin and shaken over ice.” Mm, fucking delicious! Okay, let’s roll! 

First highlight: John Seabrook’s “Zero-Proof Therapy.” What a piece! It’s about Seabrook’s “raging non-alcoholism,” and his discovery of a great zero-alcoholic beer called Run Wild. It begins in the bar of the Atlantic Brewing Company, Stratford, Connecticut:

Behind the bar, Bill Shufelt, a thirty-eight-year-old former hedge-fund trader, who co-founded Athletic in 2017, drew me a pint of Two Trellises, one of the company’s seasonal N.A. brews—a hazy I.P.A. that he and the other co-founder, John Walker, Athletic’s forty-one-year-old head brewer, were test-batching. I had not raised a pint drawn from a keg since I quit drinking alcohol, exactly one thousand eight hundred and eighty-eight days earlier. The glass seemed to fit my palm like a key.

That “The glass seemed to fit my palm like a key” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – a perfect blend of the personal and the reportorial. I enjoyed it enormously. 

Highlight #2: John McPhee’s “Tabula Rasa: Volume 2.” Great to see the Master still producing at age ninety. This piece is a beauty, containing, among other arresting items, the story of how McPhee became a New Yorker writer. If you’re an aspiring writer racked by self-doubt, you should read this piece. In McPhee’s words, it’s a “chronicle of rejection as a curable disease.” It begins, improbably, with a seventeenth century Dutch ship called the Tyger, and ends in the office of William Shawn. Other ingredients: sand hogs, basketball, the Twin Towers, the Tower of London, Jackie Gleason, Bill Bradley, and lunch with the legendary Esquire editor, Harold Hayes. How does it all connect? You’ll have to read it and see. It’s quite a story!    

Speaking of greats, Janet Malcolm died this year, age eighty-six. She’s one of my lodestars. I love her unique blend of sharp-eyed journalism and sharp-tongued criticism. Many of her pieces are in my personal anthology of great New Yorker writing, including “Depth of Field,” “Performance Artist,” “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” and her extraordinary “The Silent Woman.” I’ll miss her. 

Highlight #3 is the wonderful art criticism of Peter Schjeldahl; seventeen splendid pieces this year. Among my favorites: “Movements of One” (“Morandi drains our seeing of complacency. He occults the obvious”); “Home Goods” (“Ordinary things in the world interested Chardin. That doesn’t sound rare, but, oh, it is”); and “A Trip to the Fair” (“He created this work in the dark with slathered silver nitrate, silver oxide, silver iodide, and silver bromide. Exposed to light, the strokes resolved into a filmy gestural cadenza: quietly ferocious, if such is imaginable, like superimposed eddies in a whipping windstorm”).

And while we’re at it, let’s give a huzzah for my favorite section of the magazine – “Goings On About Town” – a weekly smorgasbord of delectable mini-reviews of, among other things, art shows, movies, music, and restaurants. I devour it! For me, the most challenging “Top Ten” list is always “Best of GOAT”; there's so much to choose from, it’s tough boiling it down.

Other highlights: Rivka Galchen’s “Better Than a Balloon,” Gary Shteyngart’s “My Gentile Region,” Ann Patchett’s “Flight Plan,” Heidi Julavits’s “The Fire Geyser,” and Ed Caesar’s “Only Disconnect” – all crazy good! 

But that’s enough for now. Over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I enjoyed most. Thank you, New Yorker, for another glorious year of reading bliss.