Julian Lucas's "A Real Gas"

Illustration by João Fazenda, from Julian Lucas's "A Real Gas"

This is just a quick note to spotlight Julian Lucas’s delightful “Talk of the Town” story "A Real Gas," in this week’s issue. It’s a mini-profile of Carlita Belgrove, also known as the Famous Stove Lady. She’s an ingenious repairer of old stoves. Lucas visits her at her workshop in Mount Vernon. He writes,

She was sanding down an L-shaped knob for a client in the Hamptons, who’d hired her to modernize his nineteen-thirties Magic Chef. Behind her was an Aladdin’s cave of more than a hundred and fifty venerable gas ranges, some with polished chrome fixtures and others nearly rusted through. There were Chambers, Garlands, Crowns, and a hulking, buttercup-yellow Roper that resembled a muscle car. In a world going electric, the Stove Lady keeps their flames alive: “Nobody—not nobody, anywhere—does what I do.”

Lucas also accompanies her on a house call in Long Island to fix a stove called the Magic Chef, “a six-burner with an extra side oven shaped like a rolltop desk.” Restoration of stoves is a great subject. I enjoyed this piece immensely. 

Best of 2020: The Critics

Illustration by Chloe Cushman, from Anthony Lane's "Plotting a Course"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2020 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Anthony Lane's “Folies à Deux,” June 1, 2020 (“To see Coogan and Brydon being waited upon by unmasked servers, who carry the plates with bare hands, is to yearn for the touchstones of a mythical past. As one kindly waitress inquires, in a lull between courses, 'Do you want to continue?' Yes, if we can. Forever”).

2. James Wood's “Reward System,” September 14, 2020 (“At those moments when Gyasi’s prose is summoned to intense specificity, it smears into cliché: ‘On the nights when he would slink in through the back door, coming down from a high, reeking to high Heaven’ ”).

 3. Peter Schjeldahl's “Off the Wall," November 16, 2020 (“Bevelled edges flirt with object-ness, making the works seem fat material presentations, protuberant from walls, rather than pictures. But, as always with Gilliam, paint wins”).

 4. Anthony Lane's “Plotting a Course,” December 14, 2020 (“Could Susan be the first person on record to discuss her distant sexual history while playing Monopoly and Scrabble, and, if so, does a threesome count as a triple-word score?”). 

5. Julian Lucas's “Death Sentences,” September 21, 2020 (“Forget Susan Sontag’s dictum that diseases shouldn’t have meanings. Guibert inhabited AIDS as though it were a darkroom or an astronomical observatory, a means for deciphering the patterns in life’s dying light”).

6. Dan Chiasson's “Suspended Pleasures,” September 7, 2020 (“The Airstreams and roadsters, the delis and coffees are there whenever and wherever we want to experience them, and they can be reanimated on demand”).

7. James Wood's “Enigma Variations,” August 24, 2020 (“A sparse realism scars the pages—Leonard, abandonment, the phone call, a North Dakota hospital”).

 8. Leo Robson's “The Art of the Unruly,” July 6 & 13, 2020 ("As she invokes a world of pounding hearts and thumping ears and watering mouths, she exhibits a refreshing freedom from embarrassment, an indifference to the concept of overkill").

9. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Target Practice,” February 17 & 24, 2020 (“He sneaks whispery formal nuances into works whose predominant effect may be as subtle as that of a steel garbage can being kicked downstairs”).

10. Dan Chiasson’s “A Trick of the Senses,” January 20, 2020 (“This is the core feature of Hass’s work, in my view: an Etch A Sketch method that allows the surface of the completed poem to be erased and revised, with traces of previous attempts, along with gaps for when the lightning strikes”).

September 21, 2020 Issue

My favorite piece in this week’s issue is Julian Lucas’s “Death Sentences,” a review of Hervé Guibert’s writings on his battle with AIDS. Two passages in particular stand out:

1. Forget Susan Sontag’s dictum that diseases shouldn’t have meanings. Guibert inhabited AIDS as though it were a darkroom or an astronomical observatory, a means for deciphering the patterns in life’s dying light.

2. Perhaps it’s this mischievous affirmation of life’s mess and sensuality, even in the face of death, that will define Guibert’s contribution to the literature of illness. Rejecting its taboos, he scaled AIDS’ very long flight of steps and fearlessly recorded what he saw on the climb.

That last line is inspired!

Postscript: Another excellent essay on Guilbert is Wayne Koestenbaum’s “The Pleasure of the Text” (Bookforum, June/July/August, 2014; retitled “On Futility, Holes, and Hervé Guibert,” in Koestenbaum’s recent Figuring It Out). Koestenbaum says,

Futility and botched execution are the immortal matter of Guibert’s method. Futility and botched execution—combined, in Guibert’s work, with finesse, concision, and a heavy dose of negative capability, which includes curiosity about the worst things that can befall a body—are undying aesthetic and spiritual values, worth cherishing in any literature we dare to call our own.