October 20, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Alexandra Schwartz says that Joan Acocella’s “The Frog and the Crocodile” is one of her favorite Acocella pieces. It’s one of mine, too. Schwartz writes, 

Acocella’s essay deals with the improbable five-year affair between the Left Bank philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and the tough-guy Chicago writer Nelson Algren—its title comes from their pet names for each other—and was occasioned by the posthumous publication of Beauvoir’s love letters. Acocella begins with a block quote from one of the letters, a rarely attempted flex that may be the critic’s equivalent of opening a song with the bridge. We hear Beauvoir, unimpeded, as she professes her love and confesses her insecurity: Will Algren hate her if she cannot devote her life to him? Then, where Algren should answer with sweet reassurance, we get Acocella, shining the bright light of truth in our eyes. “He will hate her,” she writes. Talk about cutting to the chase.

That last line made me smile. Acocella was known for “cutting to the chase.” She talked very straight. In “The Frog and the Crocodile” she shows us a Beauvoir who was both offering herself as Algren’s love slave and asserting her independence. Acocella says of her, “From letter to letter, sometimes from paragraph to paragraph, she zigs and zags from submission to dominance.” Acocella’s history of the relationship is fascinating. And, as Schwartz points out, “Acocella doesn’t plead on Beauvoir’s behalf or condemn her. Instead, she reads the work and life in light of each other, and the results illuminate our understanding of both.” 

Schwartz’s tribute to “The Frog and the Crocodile” is excellent. I enjoyed it immensely. 

2. I also enjoyed Maggie Doherty’s “Rambling Man,” a review of Lance Richardson’s True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen. Matthiessen wrote one of my favorite books, The Snow Leopard (1978). It’s not an easy book for me to like. As Doherty says, “The spirit of Zen infuses The Snow Leopard.” For many years, I resisted it for that very reason: too cosmic for my taste. But last year, I gave it another try. It’s an account of a trek that Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller made in 1973 high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. I relish its use of first-person present tense, its chronological, diaristic structure, and, most of all, its magnificent descriptions of those wild, exotic snow mountains. For example:

At each stupa on the canyon points, the prayer stones are lit by fire-colored lichens; in the shine of thorn and old carved stones, the print of leopard and thick scent of juniper, I am filled with longing. I turn to look back at Tsakang, at the precipices and deep shadows of Black Canyon, at the dark mountain that presides over Samling, which I shall never see. Above the snowfields to the west, the Crystal Mountain thrusts bare rock into the blue; to the south is the sinuous black torrent that comes down from Kang La, the Pass of Snows. And there on the low cliff above the rivers, silhouetted on the snow, is the village that its own people call Somdo, white prayer flags flying black on the morning sun.

Doherty, in her piece, says, “It’s tempting to read The Snow Leopard as a work of confessional writing, in which Matthiessen details his weak points as a husband and a father.” I can see where it might be tempting. The book contains several introspective passages in which Matthiessen mourns the death of his wife. But it’s also a thrilling travel adventure. That’s the way I read it. 

Postscript: Joan Acocella 1945 - 2024

Joan Acocella (Photo by Bob Sacha)

New Yorker critic Joan Acocella died January 7, 2024, age 78. She was primarily a dance critic. But she also wrote many wonderful book reviews, several of which are included in her 2007 essay collection Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints. Acocella appreciated candor. She says of Susan Sontag, “She talked very straight” (“The Hunger Artist”). This applies to Acocella, too. Here, as a form of tribute, are some of my favorite lines from her work:

Butler’s chapter on Cather is not a chapter on Cather; it is an essay on politics in which Cather’s text lies bound and gagged. (“Cather and the Academy”)

Always plainspoken, she became more so. (“Feasting on Life”)

These are superb letters – long, meaty, intimate, conversational. You can practically hear her breathing. And they remind us of her faithfulness to reality, her ability to let things stay mixed and strange – to let them grow at the edges and stay loose in the center. (“Feasting on Life”)

We also needed more footnotes. But never mind. This is a priceless book: a whole life, a serious life, eighty-four years long. (“Feasting on Life”)

The grand cascading sentences ... (“Finding Augie March”)

One must love the book on artistic grounds – for its comedy, its generosity, its density, its linguistic miracles – and also, still, for its hopefulness. (“Finding Augie March”)

We never find out why Guillermo got arrested, or even who he is, but this little exchange is a perfect introduction to Bedford’s style: speed, omission, the sharp bite of event, without the tedious explanation. (“Piecework”)

Her sentences are frequently incomplete, her grammar nonstandard, her chapter titles a brazen lie. (“Piecework”)

In Bedford’s world, nobody is going to get ahead, or nobody nice, but meanwhile there is mercy, free hors d’oeuvres. (“Piecework”)

I don’t know of any novel about the early twentieth century that feels more real, as if you could reach out and touch the things in it. (“Piecework”)

She should stop apologizing. If Quicksands is a sort of rummage sale, what of it? (“Piecework”)

We all know these words, and use them to account for our lives. The cells are something else: hallucinations, the meat locker of the mind. (“The Spider’s Web”)

Down this road we can scarcely go in words. But we can accept an image, a metaphor. I have seen photographs of Russian children, in front of the Hermitage, staring up at Maman in wonder. They like it, presumably because it says something true. (“The Spider’s Web”)

Don’t laugh – Fitzgerald believes the same thing. She combines an old-world faith with a completely modern pessimism. (“Assassination on a Small Scale”)

And the writing was marvelous – high-toned, Brahmin, but full of zest and the pleasure of performing. Her openers were always thrown down with a great flourish. (“The Hunger Artist”)

Whatever she felt was fed back into her argument, a short, violent conflagration at the end of which any idea that illness is a mark of ennoblement or of shame—something that the victim caused or, by virtue of personality, was doomed to—lies like a burnt cinder at the bottom of Sontag’s rhetorical furnace. (“The Hunger Artist”)

But the montage is not surreal – it’s real, it’s New York City – and the objects don’t fly around in that self-important, dérèglement des sens way. They stay put, and honk the way they should. Waterfalls pour from the sky, but they’re really there, on a billboard. In the city O’Hara found his own, more modest version of Surrealist hallucination. (“Perfectly Frank”)

O’Hara loved things that lived in time, things that moved – ballet, movies, Action painting, New York – and he made himself the partner of time. [“Perfectly Frank”]

But the poems were manifesto enough. With their colloquialism, with their empirical record of daily events, with the friends wandering in and out – “Jap” (Jasper Johns) waiting at the train station, “Allen” (Ginsberg, hung over) throwing up in the bathroom – and, above all, with their craft so lightly worn, the poems constituted a clear refusal, if not of the high mission of poetry, then any duty to kneel before the throne. (“Perfectly Frank”)

In her novels, Mantel is unflinching, and I like her that way. (“Devil’s Work”)

I have stressed the dramatis diaboli, but in most of mantel’s novels there is a regular English reality going on that might make you wish for Hell instead. (“Devil’s Work”)

Ugly families, though, are only a subspecialty. Mantel is a master of ugliness in general. (“Devil’s Work”)

Art redeems us from time: in Hadrian’s case, by shaping his life into a meaningful curve (ambition to mastery to exaltation to disaster to reconciliation); in Yourcenar’s case, by enabling her to do the shaping, and in the process to write her first great novel, save her own life. (“Becoming the Emperor”)  

Best of 2017: 21 Inspired Lines

Rosz Chast, "Motherboard (Back)" (2017)

Shauna Lyon, describing the rich refinement of the Brooklyn bistro, Otway, notes “the natural shades of toffee, rhododendron, and sunlight filling the lovely corner space” (“Tables For Two: Otway,” June 26, 2017). That, for me, is one of the year’s most sheerly pleasurable lines. Here are twenty more to go with it:

1. A mustachioed violinist, in quasi-Edwardian garb, crouched almost fetally under water, his bow rising above the surface, like a shark’s fin, then falling below it. [Rebecca Mead, “Transformer,” September 25, 2017]

2. When I look at the back of a Datograph, one of Lange’s more complicated watches (it features a date as well as a chronograph, a kind of stopwatch), I see a small city of silver and gold gears and wheels, a miniature three-dimensional universe in which everyone is running to catch the next bus. [Gary Shteyngart, “Time Out,” March 20, 2017]

3. Rich saxophones and organs stood in for synthesizers, drums jangled and twitched, and vocalists like King Krule gave the beats another sheet of voice. [Matthew Trammell, “Step Out,” June 5 & 12, 2017]

4. The film’s images are filled with a pointillistic profusion of detail—wheat stalks at the roadside, a modern bridge’s metallic latticework, even the duo’s jazzily patterned shirts—that’s as alluring as it is nerve-jangling. [Richard Brody, “On the Wild Side,” July 3, 2017]

5. Save space, too, for malab iyo malawax, sweet crepes soaked in honey and dusted with cinnamon, and a mug of steaming qaxwo, pungent black coffee spiked with ginger. [Nicolas Niarchos, “Tables For Two: Safari,” September 4, 2017]

6. After the great pea-guacamole controversy of 2015, it takes cojones to add mint to an otherwise innocent, chunky scoop, which arrived, one afternoon, dramatically hidden under an elephant-ear-size purple-corn chip. [Shauna Lyon, “Tables For Two: Atla,” June 5 & 12, 2017]

7. The slanted early-morning sun amid the pillars colors the sides of bread trucks moving slowly on their deliveries. [Ian Frazier, “Drive Time,” August 28, 2017]

8. Now she seemed slight, fine-boned, almost translucent—it was hard to imagine her surviving a sea of forearms, iPhones, and gropey hands. [Nick Paumgarten, “Singer of Secrets,” August 28]

9. Even when she’s performing small steps, or no steps, you can still feel, across the auditorium, that astonishing engine, humming along like an Alfa Romeo, at the base of her spine. [Joan Acocella, “Dance: Alfa Romeo,” June 19, 2017]

10. I nibbled a small pie: it tasted like pumpkin, but with a weedy aftertaste, which brought back Proustian memories of high school. [Lizzie Widdicombe, “High Cuisine,” April 24, 2017]

11. When I went back again a few days later, the studio floor was littered with discarded paintbrushes, dozens of them, some still oozing paint—I got bright orange on one of my shoes. [Calvin Tomkins, “Troubling Pictures,” April 10, 2017]

12. His punch lines are not punched at all but flicked as casually as cigarette butts. [Anthony Lane, “Across the Divide,” June 26, 2017]

13. This is the “seashore at evening,” where lithesome mermaids on motorcycles whiz by, their “leather-clad calves” united with a “noir chassis.”  [Dan Chiasson, “Merry War,” September 4, 2017]

14. It causes the wasp-waisted barmaids in strappy green minidresses to grunt audibly as they muddle handfuls of cherries, and scoop ice as if shovelling a driveway. [Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: Fishbowl,” May 29, 2017]

15. Smeared, apocalyptic guitar riffs buoy Bryan Funck’s grim, screeching vocals, which invoke classic black-metal singers while sidestepping any hint of Dungeons and Dragons. [“Night Life: Thou,” January 9, 2017]

16. I’ve imagined a whole film just about the waitress who describes the chorizo and eggs in “Midnight Run.” [Patton Oswalt, “Deep Cut,” September 4, 2017]

17. Actually, the culprit was likely the Slow Reveal, which encourages anything but: a syrupy accelerant in a bisected brass pineapple, the round belly of the bottom half balanced on the stiff fronds of the top half. [McKenna Stayner, “Bar Tab: Super Power,” February 27, 2017]

18. They play a high-octane strain of rock and roll that’s best described as ripping, advancing a thread of brawny, pissed-off fight music hybridized by groups like the Dwarves and Fear. The effect is ideally experienced while pogo-dancing around a room of diaphoretic night owls. [“Night Life: Hank Wood and the Hammerheads,” July 24, 2017]

19. There’s usually sports on the TV, but the broad array of neighborhood bargoers watch indifferently; there are conversations to be had in big, gossipy groups, cold beer to be sipped, flirtations to be advanced in sly increments. [Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: Salud,” September 11, 2017]

20. Shroud-like disguises figure into her work from subsequent decades, too, counterbalanced by absurdly tailored pieces, including cinched whirlpools of deconstructed menswear and gingham frocks deformed by asymmetrical humps. [“Art: Metropolitan Museum: Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between,” September 4, 2017]

Enough already! Time to let go. Be off with you, old New Yorkers. Down to the basement you go. The new year’s first issue beckons. There’s a piece in it by Peter Schjeldahl I want to read. Let’s get started.

October 6, 2014 Issue

Quick comments on seven items in this week’s issue:

1. Emma Allen’s “Bar Tab: Blind Barber” – After dark, glowing barber pole, clandestine entrance, men draped with striped sheets, Mr. High Fade, Smoke & Dagger, Bellevue morgue, “the man under the clippers” – this noir capsule is like a surreal prose poem. I lapped it up and wished for more.

2. Jennifer Gonnerman’s “Before the Law” – This piece angered me. What a poor excuse for a defense lawyer! Gonnerman reports that in the three years Browder was in Rikers, his legal aid lawyer Brendan O’Meara never once made the trip out to the jail to see him. I find that appalling. Regarding Gonnerman’s piece on artistic grounds, I liked the way she steps into the narrative frame in the final section (“One afternoon this past spring, I sat with Browder in a quiet restaurant in lower Manhattan”). Her use of “I” turns cold facts into personal experience.

3. Masha Gessen’s “The Weight of Words” – This absorbing piece expresses exactly what I felt as I read Ulitskaya’s “The Fugitive” when it appeared in the May 12, 2014 New Yorker, that it is “storytelling reduced to plot.”

4. Gerald Stern’s “The World We Should Have Stayed In” – Stern’s run-on, associative style, when it’s really cooking, jiving, jumping, moving, as it is in this amazing poem, is inspired. His inclusion of a meal at Weinstein’s (“chopped liver first or herring or eggs and onions, then / matzo-ball soup or noodle or knaidel, followed by / roast veal or boiled beef and horseradish / or roast chicken and vegetables, coleslaw /and Jewish pickles on the side and plates / of cookies and poppy-seed cakes and strudel”) had me licking my lips.

5. Calvin Tomkins’s “Into the Unknown” is pure delight. It’s the best Tomkins I’ve read in a long time. What makes it so good is the way it gets inside Ofili’s creative process. “It was a morning in June, and we were looking at a dark nine-foot-tall vertical painting called ‘Lime Bar,’ which he had been working on since April.” I find such sentences thrilling. “Into the Unknown” contains several of them. I enjoyed this piece immensely.

6. Kevin Canty’s “Story, With Bird” – This is my first exposure to Canty’s work. It’s impressive. I like its brevity and its realism (“The world divided itself into the drinking and the hangover, day and night, and we lived for the nights, the ones that ended in a blank space, half a memory to wake up to”). It describes a world that I was once part of. Maybe that, for me, is its chief attraction.

7. Joan Acocella’s “Lonesome Road” – A great review, where greatness means subtle, penetrating, direct, fresh. Acocella’s analysis of Robinson’s use of “point-of-view narration” is excellent.     

May 12, 2014 Issue

The pleasures of this week’s issue are many: Peter Schjeldahl on “No Problem: Cologne/New York, 1984-1989” (“Nostalgia-stirring photographs, which appear in the show’s catalogue, find many of the glamorous names achingly young and, often, conspicuously plastered”); Richard Brody on Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (“His painterly framings have a teeming simplicity, with action spilling in from the margins and up from the background, entangling the characters in a web of conflicting forces”); Hannah Goldfield on Bunker (“But these slips, like the strip club, are forgiven in light of the restaurant’s other charms, including the creamy tapioca pudding, spooned over coconut, palm seed, and jackfruit, and the skateboard propped up against the bathroom sink”); Lizzie Widdicombe’s “The End of Food” (“With a bottle of Soylent on your desk, time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad”); Sean O’Brien’s “Café de l’Imprimerie” (“All night I wait for you at the Café de l’Imprimerie”); Lee Siegel’s “Pure Evil” (“Nesbø’s books stand out for their blackness”); Keith Gessen’s “Waiting for War” (“One person’s little old grandfather fought in the Red Army to liberate Ukraine from the Nazis; another person’s little old grandfather fought in the U.P.A. to liberate Ukraine from everyone, Nazis and Soviets both. These historical narratives are very difficult to reconcile, and neither side has done a good job trying”); D. T. Max’s “Green Is Good” (“The silver Patagonia fleece jacket he wore accentuated the perception that he was someone you were more likely to meet on the chairlift at Telluride than chained to a power-plant fence”); Riccardo Vecchio’s exquisite wallpaper-and-naked-old-women illustration for Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s “The Fugitive”; Jill Lepore’s “Away From My Desk” (“Leisure may be over, but that’s only because when your office is a cloud it follows you everywhere”); Joan Acocella’s “Selfie” (“Because Blackburn’s positions are so clear, his prose is clear. It is also unostentatious”); Anthony Lane on Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (“We expect its austerity to fend us off, but no; it gathers us in and forbids us to look away”). In its sheer intelligence, wit, and craft, this is a brilliant New Yorker. I enjoyed it immensely. 

December 16, 2013 Issue

Maybe I’m just in a pre-Christmas funk, but I find this week’s New Yorker remarkably uninspiring. Maybe it’s the price of those spicy Red Snappers at The King Cole that turned me off. Sixty dollars for two of them, according to Shauna Lyon’s “Bar Tab.” Obscene! Or maybe it’s the dull prospect of plowing through two pieces on Washington politics (Evan Osnos’s “Strong Vanilla” and “Ryan Lizza’s “State of Deception”). Do I want to read about Cuvier’s proof of extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Lost World, Part One”) or “The mystery surrounding a copy of Galileo’s pivotal treatise” (Nicholas Schmidle’s “A Very Rare Book”) or what happens when God first unleashes Satan on Job (Joan Acocella’s “Misery”) or Britney Spears’s latest career move (Sasha Frere-Jones’s “Brit Pop”)? No, no, no, and definitely no. I’ve got better things to do, like shovel the snow from in front of the woodshed door. But there’s always a bit of nourishment in every New Yorker, no matter how unpromising its contents may first appear. This week, I found it in David Denby’s marvelous “Grand Scam,” a review of David O. Russell’s American Hustler. In a parenthesis worthy of the Master herself (Hail Kael!), Denby writes, “In a dizzying touch, suits hanging on a garment conveyor whirl past them as they kiss.” Ah, the surreal reality of that garment conveyor! I love it. Thank you, Mr. Denby. With one sentence, you breathe life into a moribund New Yorker.  

GOAT Collage #1

From three months’ worth of The New Yorker’s vast, rich, layered, and loaded sensorium, “Goings On About Town” (GOAT), here’s an assemblage of choice (semi-surrealistic) quotations: In the mornings, mothers with children and scooters in tow line up behind subway-bound suits for dollar cups of Stumptown coffee – no lattes here, only drip (Andrea K. Scott, “Tables For Two: Jeffrey’s Grocery,” January 10, 2011); Exercising a tribal right passed down for generations, the Blackfeet artist Lyle J. Heavy Runner will paint a twenty-five-foot-tall tipi in a bleeding-buffalo-skull design at the Brooklyn Museum, as part of the exhibition “Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains” (“On The Horizon,” January 17, 2011); David Cossin was the star soloist in an energetic and – it must be said – splashy performance of Tan Dun’s “Water Concerto,” which employs tubs of water as percussion (Alex Ross, “Critic’s Notebook: Jersey Boy,” January 24, 2011); Instead, there’s a different kind of magic, as he lets Jackson’s vocals – drenched in echo and other effects, but still filled with the same strange baby-doll ferocity – loose on sexy, brassy covers of Bob Dylan’s “Thunder on the Mountain,” Dinah Washington’s “Teach Me Tonight,” and more (Ben Greenman, “Critic’s Notebook: Kinda Fonda Wanda,” January 24, 2011); With her tall body and her long, grave, gorgeous face, she truly does look like a messenger from the beyond (Joan Acocella, “Critc’s Notebook: Vestal Virgin,” January 31, 2011); You’re likely to end up slumped in your lounge chair, gazing at the bongos (Lizzie Widdicombe, “Tables For Two: Bohemian,” February 7, 2011); Nostalgia cascades (Peter Schjeldahl, “Critic’s Notebook: Getting Clocked,” February 14 & 21, 2011); At regular intervals, a semi-transparent section of a rear wall slides open, and out come Lo’s ornate, succulent creations, sparked by her blended heritage (Mike Peed, “Tables For Two: Annisa,” February 14 & 21, 2011); It was a knotty time to make art, and Benglis literalized it in tangles of painted and glitter-flecked cotton bunting, which gave way to elegant arabesques of pleated metal and Zen-punk wonders in glass and ceramic (Andrea K. Scott, “Critic’s Notebook: Making A Splash,” February 28, 2011); If you like hand-pulled noodles, as much for their simplicity as for their artistry, you’d do best to stay south of Canal (Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Hung Ry,” February 28, 2011); There is an ingenious beer ice cream, made with the clove-y Bavarian Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier Dunkel, and beignets are like the Platonic ideal of childhood carnival-truck zeppole (Amelia Lester, “Tables For Two: Riverpark,” March 7, 2011); This is what Southern funk music looks like now: no big-time bling, only ambition and raw nerve, denim short shorts and chili dogs (“Art: Galleries – Chelsea: Michael Schmelling,” March 7, 2011); In the roofless remains of schools, blackboards and painted walls display fading alphabets and numbers for the edification of a stray goat (“Art: Galleries – Chelsea: Juan Manuel Eschavarria,” March 21, 2011); Birdcages and dog crates in storage become a meditation on the modernist grid, as does a shrinelike arrangement of vases (“Art: Galleries – Chelsea: Jonas Wood,” March 21, 2011); A Tuesday-evening special of fried chicken holds the promise of spice, but it requires getting to the Carroll Street F stop well before 8 P.M. (Silvia Killingsworth, “Tables For Two: Seersucker,” March 21, 2011); Skip the scoop and kick back with a carmel-nut lager from Laos – or a house cocktail, like the Phuket Fizz, made of vodka, Thai basil, and fresh pineapple, as low key a pleasure as Kin Shop itself (Andrea K. Scott, “Tables For Two: Kin Shop,” March 28, 2011).

Credit: The above artwork is by Olimpia Zagnoli; it appears in The New Yorker (January 17, 2011) as an illustration for “On The Horizon.”

Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #7: Joan Acocella's "Piecework"

I like Joan Acocella’s work when it stays close to the writing under review, analyzing the “how” of it. For example, in “Heaven’s Gate” (The New Yorker, September 11, 2006), she says,

A book [Alice McDermott’s After This] so drenched in compassion: how does McDermott keep it this side of sentimentality? Sometimes she doesn’t – one or two scenes hurt your teeth – but mostly she does, in several ways.

And then, in the best paragraphs of the piece, Acocella shows us the “several ways” (e.g., “In After This, she’s back to realism, but her language has changed – it tumbles out, freer, more elliptical”).

In “Finding Augie March” (The New Yorker, October 6, 2003; included in her excellent 2007 collection Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints), a review of the Library of America’s Novels 1944-1953, by Saul Bellow, she follows a quotation from The Adventures of Augie March with this inspired simile:

Such sentences occur on almost every page. They are like hall closets; you open them and everything falls out.

I’m awed by Acocella’s writing purely as writing – the way it blends description and analysis. Here are a couple of examples:

Despite O’Hara’s antimetaphysical bent, many of his poems have a kind of dome of glory that rises up over the minutiae of his days. (“Perfectly Frank,” The New Yorker, July 19, 1993; collected in Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints)

I think she [Paula Fox] needed to be, and that these repellent creatures – the warty snake, the tapeworm coiling to the very rim of the toilet bowl – may be images of how, after becoming the little gray ghost that she learned to be as a child, she finally extruded that, with horror, and moved forward, empty at first, into art. (“From Bad Beginnings,” The New Yorker, May 16, 2011)

My favorite Acocella passage – an analysis of Sybille Bedford’s writing style – occurs in her terrific “Piecework” (The New Yorker, April 18, 2005; included in Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints), a review of Bedford’s memoir Quicksands. Acocella, in the piece’s most interesting passage, looks at Bedford’s 1953 travel classic A Visit to Don Otavio. She says:

All of this is told with a tart, fresh empiricism. Here are the book’s opening sentences:

    The upper part of Grand Central Station is large and splendid like the Baths of Caracalla.
    “Your rooms are on Isabel la Católica,” said Guillermo.
     “How kind of you,” said I.
     “Pensión Hernández.”
     “What is it like?”
     “The manager is very unkind. He would not let me have my clothes when I was arrested. But you will have no trouble.”

We never find out why Guillermo got arrested, or even who he is, but this little exchange is a perfect introduction to Bedford’s style: speed, omission, the sharp bite of event, without the tedious explanation.

It’s a sublime quote, followed by a line of brilliant descriptive analysis. I remember reading it and thinking, Yes! That’s the way to do it, with “speed, omission, the sharp bite of event, without the tedious explanation.” On the basis of Acocella’s wonderful review, I went out and bought a copy of A Visit to Don Otavio. It is a terrific book. I count it among my favorites.

Today, in at least partial payment of my debt to Acocella for bringing Don Otavio to my attention, I'm pleased to name her marvelous “Piecework” to my “Top Ten.”

Credit: The above artwork is by Fido Nesti; it appears in The New Yorker, January 7, 2008, as an “On The Horizon” illustration for the event “Eat, Drink & Be Literary,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

May 16, 2011 Issue

This week’s New Yorker brims with inspired details, e.g., Laurent Cilluffo’s ingenious “On The Horizon” illustration for The New York Philharmonic concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, David Remnick’s Talk piece “Exit Bin Laden” that reprises the unforgettable “severe clear” opening line of his great “September 11, 2001” (The New Yorker, September 24, 2011), the closing sentence of Nick Paumgarten’s brilliant “The Names” (“A graphic representation of the computational armature, color-coded on a laptop screen, brings to mind Tetris, but the sight of the names themselves, inscribed in bronze, linked together by happenstance and blood, calculus and font, is a little like the faint silhouette of a cosmic plan, or else the total absence of one”), John Seabrook’s Proustian moment in his excellent “Snacks for a Fat Planet,” when the taste of a potato chip triggers a childhood memory (“For some reason, the taste reminded me of the chips my mother sometimes packed in my lunchbox when I was a little kid”), the erotic jolt of Judith Thurman’s “bare-breasted disheveled girls staggered down the runway in gorgeously ravaged lace, sooty tartan, and distressed leather” (“Dressed To Thrill”), the amazing final line of Joan Acocella’s Paula Fox book review “From Bad Beginnings” (“I think she needed to be, and that these repellent creatures – the warty snake, the tapeworm coiling to the very rim of the toilet bowl – may be images of how, after becoming the little gray ghost that she learned to be as a child, she finally extruded that, with horror, and moved forward, empty at first, into art”). The whole magazine is a feast for the eye and the mind. I devoured it. And when I finished, I thought, How incredibly lucky we are to have a magazine that contains such felicities! New Yorker without end, amen!

December 13, 2010 Issue

This week’s “Goings On About Town” (GOAT) is a cornucopia of verbal and visual pleasure, brimming with succulent details such as English Beat’s “punky edge,” Angie Wang’s stunning “Nellie McKay” portrait, “neo-fusion mashup” at Iridium, Warhol’s “tossed-off party pics,” Giacometti’s Montparnasse studio “overflowing with plaster dust,” a beautiful color picture of Rauschenberg’s 1955 “Short Circuit (Combine),” Joan Acocella’s “battle of the ‘Nutcracker’s,” Richard Brody’s memorable “depicts to the limits of consciousness” in his eloquent “Critics Notebook” tribute to “Shoah,” Andrea Thompson’s impeccably rhythmed “Whitewashed brick walls and green patterned wallpaper have the spare beauty of a homestead” in her superb “Tables For Two” review of Northern Spy Food Co., Bruce Diones on Cher (“her voice still has the roughness that can sandpaper the dullest lines to sharp finish”), and Laurie Rosenwald’s ingenious “On The Horizon” illustration, “Picasso’s guitars, at MOMA.”

Some of these great GOAT details triggered pleasant memories of past New Yorker pieces. For example, Joan Acocella’s mention of the possibility that the mice in Ratmansky’s “Nutcracker” will be “truly nasty-looking, with red eyes and yellow teeth” called to mind Arlene Croce’s “Baryshnikov’s ‘Nutcracker’” (The New Yorker, January 17, 1977), in which she describes the mice in Nureyev’s “Nutcracker”: “His mice were rats who tore off the heroine’s skirt.” Croce’s piece is included in her 1982 collection, Going to the Dance.

The illustration of Rauschenberg’s “Short Circuit (Combine)” took me back to Calvin Tomkins’ Robert Rauschenberg profile “Moving Out” (The New Yorker, February 29, 1964). I first read it twenty years ago in Tomkins’ 1965 collection The Bride and the Bachelor. It contains some great descriptions of Rauschenberg working, including this detail: “From time to time he paused to replenish a tall glass of vodka and orange juice.”

And Richard Brody’s powerful “Critic’s Notebook” on Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah,” in which he says the film “has transcended the cinema to become the primary record of the extermination of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War,” brought to mind Pauline Kael’s controversial 1985 “Shoah” review (The New Yorker, December 30, 1985), in which she dares to criticize Lanzmann’s technique, e.g., “Lanzmann’s closeups can be tyrannically close – invasions of the face.” Kael’s review is included in her 1989 collection Hooked.

Last week at newyorker.com, Brody posted a scathing critique of Kael’s “Shoah” review (see “‘Shoah’ At Twenty-Five,” December 7, 2010). In his piece, Brody comes perilously close to calling Kael’s review anti-Semitic. He says:

So when Kael charges that the movie ‘doesn’t set you thinking’ and adds ‘When you come out, you’re likely to feel dazed, and confirmed in all your worst fears,’ it’s clear that she simply doesn’t know what to think about it – and so, falls back on her own prejudices.

He also says, “Pauline Kael’s misunderstandings of “Shoah” are so grotesque as to seem willful.”

Kael faced this type of criticism back in 1985 when she wrote the review. According to Craig Seligman, in his book Sontag & Kael (2004), Alfred Kazin considered Kael’s objections to the film and found her "incapable of responding to the material.” Seligman says that Leon Wieseltier also strongly objected to Kael’s review. He quotes Wieseltier as saying that her dissenting view of the film is a “dissenting view about the film and the catastrophe.” And Seligman quotes another angry objector, the film critic J. Hoberman, as saying, “Imagine, he [Lanzmann] actually found anti-Semitism in Treblinka. If he’s not tied up again, he could probably find it in The New Yorker.”

Seligman correctly points out that “Kael was reviewing a film – she wasn’t reviewing the Holocaust.” He says that Kazan and Wieseltier “ignore the core of Kael’s argument, which is that “Shoah” fails as a film.” He says, “To deduce from her misgivings about “Shoah” that she viewed the Holocaust with insufficient gravity is malignantly unfair. (And, by the way, untrue.)” Regarding the implications of Hoberman’s statement, Seligman says, “That sentence has haunted me ever since I first read it, in 1986. Could it possibly mean what it appears to mean – that Kael’s review is anti-Semitic?” Seligman concludes that Hoberman’s charge is “an accusation of astonishing coarseness.”

I agree with Seligman. Richard Brody’s statement against Kael falls into the same category as J. Hoberman’s; to borrow Seligman’s words, it is an accusation of astonishing coarseness.

Credit: The above portrait of Nellie McKay is by Angie Wang; it appears in “Goings On About Town” in this week’s New Yorker.