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. 

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”).

On Joyce Carol Oates's "Acceleration Near the Point of Impact"

Joyce Carol Oates (Photo by Richard Avedon)

I find myself still thinking about Joyce Carol Oates (thanks to Leo Robson’s recent New Yorker piece). I woke this morning with the title of her poem “Acceleration Near the Point of Impact” in my mind. I first read it forty-eight years ago in Esquire. Here’s the poem:

the needles are starved, brown
fire-hazards warned of in the papers
but the yew tree rises miraculous
red and green ornaments
at its peak the hand-sized angel

again the release of dirty snow
the melting rush of sewers
the church bells’ ambitions
a Sunday of parades

rockets, ten-cent bombs
end of summer sales
bins of heaped-up bathing suits
sandals and shoes with cork heels

and tactile November skies
by minutes and inches pushing us
into history

What does it mean? I’m not sure. I think it’s about the onrush of time. I love the title – “Acceleration Near the Point of Impact.” It’s like a phrase from a horrific accident report indicating intent to injure, possibly suicide. Oates repurposes this chilling forensic expression, applying it to time’s current, flowing faster and faster as it sweeps us to our deaths.

July 6 & 13, 2020 Issue

I always enjoy Leo Robson’s book reviews. His “The Art of the Unruly,” in this week’s issue, is excellent. It’s an assessment of Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel Night, Sleep, Death, The Stars. Robson says it’s “enormous and frequently brilliant.” He views it as an instance of what he calls Oates’s “counter-aesthetic” – her style of “rousing roughness.” He says,

Her dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them set in western New York, forgo an air of cool mastery in favor of a kind of cultivated vulnerability, an openness to engulfment. Human existence, in her handling, seems a primarily somatic enterprise, and her greedily adjectival prose can sometimes read like a sort of dramatized phenomenology. Even on a bustling city street, her characters can come across as frontierspeople, or toilers on a polar expedition. 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.

I like that “greedily adjectival prose.” I wish Robson had provided an example of it. He also refers to Oates’s “sentences both snaking and staccato,” but, again, no examples. In one of his best lines, he describes Oates’s introduction of a character as “the syntactic equivalent of a four-car pileup,” and this time he follows up with a quotation to prove his point:

Just a glance at Thom McClaren, tall and rangy-limbed, sandy-haired, handsome face now just perceptibly beginning to thicken, in his late thirties—(Virgil often stared, when [he believed] Thom wasn’t aware of him)—you could see that Thom was one of those persons who feels very good about himself, and his self-estimate is (largely) shared by those who gaze upon him.

As Robson points out, the brackets are Oates's.

I confess I haven’t read any of Oates’s novels. But I devour her book reviews. They brim with artful quotation and illuminating commentary: see, for example, “In Rough Country” (The New York Review of Books, October 23, 2008) and “The Treasure of Comanche County” (The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005).

Robson says that among contemporary American fiction writers, Oates “possesses a strong claim to preëminence.” She’s also one of our best critics.

Best of 2017: The Critics

Riccaardo Vecchio, "Bill Knott" (2017)

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2017 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. James Wood, “The Other Side of Silence,” June 5 & 12, 2017 (“What animates his project is the task of saving the dead, retrieving them through representation”).

2. James Wood, “All Over Town,” November 27, 2017 (“In ‘The Waves,’ Woolf returns, at regular intervals, to painterly, almost ritualized descriptions of the sun’s passage, on a single day, from dawn to dusk: wedges of prose like the divisions on a sundial”).

3. Alex Ross, “Tank Music,” July 24, 2017 (“Gusts buffeting the exterior created an apocalyptic bass rumble; lashes of rain sounded like a hundred snare drums”).

4. Peter Schjeldahl, “Full Immersion,” July 31, 2017 (“Cradled in a hammock the other day, I couldn’t imagine anywhere in the world I would rather be, tracking subtle variations in the changing slides: for example, a matchbook first closed, then open, then burning, then, finally, burned”).

5. Dan Chiasson, “The Fugitive,” April 3, 2017 (“He is, at his best, a poet of home-brewed koans, threading his philosophical paradoxes into scenes of slacker glamour”).

6. Claudia Roth Pierpont, “The Island Within,” March 6, 2017 (“Bishop, who complained of the ‘egocentricity’ of a confessional poet like Sexton, found deliverance in gazing steadily outward”).

7. Anthony Lane, “Pretty and Gritty,” March 27, 2017 (“ ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is delectably done; when it’s over, though, and when the spell is snapped, it melts away, like cotton candy on the tongue”).

8. Adam Kirsch, “Pole Apart,” May 29, 2017 (“But, where Eliot often used this kind of moral X-ray vision to express contempt and disgust for the world, Milosz had seen too much death to find skulls profound”).

9. Adam Gopnik, “A New Man,” July 3, 2017 (“The stoical stance and the sensual touch: that was Hemingway’s keynote emotion, and his claim to have learned it from Cézanne looks just”).

10. Leo Robson, “The Mariner’s Prayer,” November 20, 2017 (“If irony exists to suggest that there’s more to things than meets the eye, Conrad further insists that, when we pay close enough attention, the “more” can be endless”).

11. Louis Menand, “The Stone Guest,” August 28, 2017 (“Crews is an attractively uncluttered stylist, and he has an amazing story to tell, but his criticism of Freud is relentless to the point of monomania”).

12. Emily Nussbaum, “Tragedy Plus Time,” January 23, 2017 (“Despite the breeziness of Breitbart’s description, there was in fact a global army of trolls, not unlike the ones shown on ‘South Park,’ who were eagerly ‘shit-posting’ on Trump’s behalf, their harassment an anonymous version of the ‘rat-fucking’ that used to be the province of paid fixers”).

November 20, 2017 Issue

It’s great to see Leo Robson back in the magazine. His last piece was “Doings and Undoings,” October 17, 2016 (on Henry Green), and the one before that was “Delusions of Candor,” October 26, 2015 (on Gore Vidal) – both excellent. His “The Mariner’s Prayer,” in this week’s issue, is a review of two books on Joseph Conrad: Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World and J. Hillis Miller’s Reading Conrad. He calls Jasanoff’s book “a special case of privileged-access criticism,” i.e., criticism that draws on Conrad’s life to illuminate his work. This contrasts with “Miller’s favored critical mode,” which Robson describes as deconstructionist. Still, he says, The Dawn Watch and Reading Conrad, “have one area of overlap – an almost complete indifference to everything that Conrad published after 1910.” Robson writes,

It’s surprising that neither gives more space to “Under Western Eyes,” a novel crowded with enigmas and transmuted personal history. But to ignore “ Chance” (1914) is to miss a crucial clue about Conrad’s sensibility—and his aversion to what he saw as the sea stigma.

Reading Robson’s absorbing piece, I recalled George Steiner’s “An Old Man and the Sea” (The New Yorker, April 23, 1979), in which Steiner rips Frederick R. Karl’s Joseph Conrad: Three Lives, calling it, among other things, a “turgid leviathan,” “composed in a style of the texture of ageing jello.” Steiner refers to Conrad’s “veiled, implicit way of conveying physical action.” This gets at what is, for me, a major stylistic weakness of Conrad’s writing – his oblique, muffled tone. Robson, in his piece, doesn’t touch on Conrad’s muted style, except to note his use of “philosophical digression” and his preferred method of transforming material “from particular to general.”   

Robson describes Saul Bellow as “the most Conradian novelist in recent American literature.” I disagree. Bellow’s writing brims with exuberant specificity. It’s the exact opposite of Conrad’s foggy obliqueness.  

Best of 2016: The Critics

Illustration by John Gall

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2016 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. James Wood, “Scrutiny,” December 12, 2016 [“Her narrative is lit by lightning. Hideous, jagged details leap out at us: the old, child-filled car swerving off the road and plunging into dark water; the trapped children (the youngest was strapped into a car seat); Farquharson’s casual—or shocked—impotence at the crime scene (his first words to Moules, when he arrived, were ‘Where’s your smokes?’); the slack, defeated, anguished defendant, weeping throughout the trial; the wedding video of the happy couple, Gambino gliding ‘like a princess in full fig, head high,’ and Farquharson, mullet-haired, ‘round-shouldered, unsmiling, a little tame bear’; the first guilty verdict, Farquharson’s vanquished defense lawyer standing ‘like a beaten warrior . . . hands clasped in front of his genitals’ ”].

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Seriously Funny,” May 16, 2016 (“Jumbled heads share a bottle, which a single hand lifts and pours out, under a table that is topped with a stuffed olive, a cigarette emitting an arabesque of smoke, and a huge salami, its sliced end textured with psychedelic dots of color”).

3. Dan Chiasson, “Cross Talk,” November 21, 2016 [“His sound effects are exquisite: the clusters of consonants (hard ‘c’s, then ‘b’s and ‘p’s) and the vowels so open you could fall into them, the magisterial cresting syntax, the brilliant coupling of unlike words (‘iceberg-Golgotha’)”].

4. Anthony Lane, “In the Picture,” June 6 & 13, 2016 (“Since her quest for conflict was a natural reflex, bred in the bone, even her most outlandish pictures come to seem like self-portraits: windows transmuted into mirrors”).

5. James Wood, “Making the Cut,” June 6 & 13, 2016 (“It looks like tidied-up Joyce (a version of stream of consciousness), but it is really broken-up Flaubert: heavily visual, it fetishizes detail and the rendering of detail”).

6. Peter Schjeldahl, “Insurance Man,” May 2, 2016 (“He came slowly to a mastery of language, form, and style that revealed a mind like a solar system, with abstract ideas orbiting a radiant lyricism”).

7. Dan Chiasson, “Mind the Gap,” April 18, 2016 (“The passage is slyly mimetic of the painter’s process, his “succession” of brushstrokes suspended, like the word “succession,” when he reaches “success.” The halting sentence fragments are like synaptic flashes as the image passes from “palette” to “color,” from color transformed (“into” this or “into” that) to the eye and then to the gallery, where, aeons later, dust motes intervene”).

8. Alex Ross, “Stars and Snow,” February 22, 2016 (“At the end, the music seems on the verge of resolving to G major, but an apparent transitional chord proves to be the last, its notes dropping out one by one. Underneath is the noise of paper being scraped on a bass drum—“like walking in the snow,” the composer says. At Carnegie, there was a profound silence, and then the ovation began”).

9. Leo Robson, “Doings and Undoings,” October 17, 2016 (“Green remained in London, responding to air raids, frequenting jazz clubs, falling serially in love, socializing with other firemen—and writing one of his best novels, the charged, ornate, and wrenching Caught, which amounted to a virtual live feed of all that activity”).

10. James Wood, “Floating Island,” March 21, 2016 (“But, humanly speaking, one is always interested in the surplus, the secretive, the unrecovered margin, all those mysterious dimensions of personality which escape or contradict a person’s professional function; and the original writer seeks them out and imagines them onto the page”).

Credit: The above illustration, by John Gall, is from Peter Schjeldahl’s “Insurance Man” (The New Yorker, May 2, 2016).

October 17, 2016, Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is a tussle between three sparkling reviews: Leo Robson’s “Doings and Undoings”; Dan Chiasson’s “Hell of a Drug”; and Peter Schjeldahl’s “Drawing Lines.”

In “Doings and Undoings,” Robson brilliantly assesses Henry Green’s oeuvre, describing his style as “terse, intimate, full of accident and unnerving comedy, exquisite though still exuberant, sensual and whimsical, reflexively figurative yet always surprising, preoccupied with social nuance, generational discord, and sensory phenomena while maintaining an air of abstraction, as reflected in those flighty gerund titles.” The piece contains two bravura analytical moves: (1) a comparison of Green’s Loving with Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (“Green was an obsessive cinemagoer, and Loving, in its plot and setting, has strong resemblances to Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), which concerns upstairs-downstairs antics at a French villa over a shooting weekend”); (2) a tracing of Green’s originality back to his youth when his family home was turned into a hospital for convalescent officers:

Green wrote that he “began to learn the half-tones of class,” and then prevaricates: “or, if not to learn because I was too young, to see enough to recognize the echoes later when I came to hear them.” And he learned something even more valuable: how to listen, to surrender, to make himself a vehicle or channel. The soldiers, he recalled, “found in me a boy who looked on them as heroes every one and who enjoyed each story of blood and cruelty they had to tell.”

My favorite sentence in “Doings and Undoings” is Robson’s description of Green’s Caught:

During the early years of the Second World War—the so-called Phoney or Bore War, then the Big Blitz—while his wife, Dig, and son, Sebastian, were living in the countryside, Green remained in London, responding to air raids, frequenting jazz clubs, falling serially in love, socializing with other firemen—and writing one of his best novels, the charged, ornate, and wrenching Caught (1943), which amounted to a virtual live feed of all that activity.

That “which amounted to a virtual live feed of all that activity” is superb!

Dan Chiasson, in his excellent “Hell of a Drug,” reviews Frances Wilson’s Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey. He writes,

Wilson’s book is on a collision course with her subject. This is always the case with biographies of great autobiographers. Somehow one needs to figure out how to do more than tidy up after the subject’s mind has swept, cyclone-like, through the details of his life.

My favorite sentence in “Hell of a Drug” is “The details of his life were like carrousel horses, disappearing around the bend and reappearing, in his visions as in his writing, with fresh intensity and vividness.”

In “Drawing Lines,” Peter Schjeldahl reviews the Guggenheim Museum’s new Agnes Martin retrospective. Schjeldahl has written at least one previous piece on Martin’s work – his great “Life Work” (The New Yorker, June 7, 2004), in which he memorably describes Martin’s 2003 masterpiece The Sea: “Scored, alternately continuous and broken horizontal lines cut to white gessoed canvas through a white-bordered square mass of tar-black paint.” God, I love that! Can Schjeldahl top it? I wondered, as I began reading his new piece. It turns out he comes mighty close with this beauty:

The show starts with a late climax: “The Islands I-XII” (1979), a dozen paintings in acrylic that at first glance appear almost identically all-white but which deploy differently proportioned horizontal bands and pencilled lines. Admixtures of light, almost subliminal blue cool some of the bands. The design stops just short of the sides of the canvas. When you notice this, the fields of paint seem to jiggle loose, and to hover. If you look long enough—the minute or so that Martin deemed sufficient for her works—your sensation-starved optic nerve may produce fugitive impressions of other colors. (At one point, I saw green, and then I didn’t.) It helps to shade your eyes. This causes tones to darken and textures to register more strongly. Looking at Martin’s art is something of an art in itself. Motivated by continual, ineffable rewards, you become an adept.

"Admixtures of light, almost subliminal blue cool some of the bands" – how fine that is.

I enjoyed all three of these reviews immensely. I'm particularly struck by Robson’s idea that Loving is at least partially sourced in Renoir's The Rules of the Game. For this reason, his “Doings and Undoings” is this week’s Pick of the Issue.

Best of 2015: Criticism

Here are my favorite critical pieces of 2015 (with a choice quote from each selection in brackets):

1. James Wood, "The Art of Witness," September 28, 2015. (“What sets his writing apart from much Holocaust testimony is his relish for portraiture, the pleasure he takes in the palpability of other people, the human amplitude of his noticing.”)

2. Dan Chiasson, "Out of This World," April 13, 2015. (“His work is replete with the transfigured commonplace, bits of the world reclaimed in his daily imaginative raids: an ‘Atari dragonfly’ on the Connecticut River, a joint smoked on a courthouse lawn, a trip to the gym, a Tyvek windbreaker.”)

3. Peter Schjeldahl, "Shades of White," December 21 & 28, 2015. [“A warm-white painting, ‘Untitled’ (1973), jumps out in the show like a sunflower on fire—if, that is, you have spent enough time for your perception to adjust, like eyes in the dark, to the pitch of excruciating discrimination that Ryman demands.”

4. Kathryn Schulz, "Rapt," March 2, 2015. (“Over and over, her writing takes you by surprise: no sooner have you registered the kitchen than, whoa, there’s the snow leopard, its huge Himalayan paws leaving prints on the tile and half a domestic shorthair hanging from its mouth. I will never again not have pictured that, and, with apologies to my cat, I am glad.”)

5. Charles McGrath, "The People You Meet," April 27, 2015. (“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.”)

6. Judith Thurman, "Silent Partner," November 16, 2015. (“Through their decades of vicissitudes, he referred to their marriage as ‘cloudless’—even to his mistress.”)

7. Alexandra Schwartz, "The Unforgotten," October 5, 2015. (“Turning to invention to get at deeper realities of experience is fiction’s righteous mission, and Honeymoon performs it beautifully. But truthfulness isn’t the same as the truth.”)

8. Alex Ross, "Eyes and Ears," February 9, 2015. (“Last season, the Dark Horse Consort performed music of the Low Countries under the wide, sad, searching eyes of Rembrandt, who seemed ready if not to sing along then to deliver an approving grunt.”)

9. Leo Robson, "Delusions of Candor," October 26, 2015. (“He didn’t stop to clarify, but rigor was beside the point; the Vidalian bon mot was about the speaker, not about the subject.”)

10. Anthony Lane, "Good Fights," January 5, 2015. (“Dear God, the drinking.”)

Postscript: Compiling the above list, I limited my choice to one selection per writer. If I hadn't, Wood, Chiasson, and Schjeldahl would've predominated.

Credit: The above portrait of Primo Levi, by Jillian Edelstein, is from James Wood’s "The Art of Witness," The New Yorker, September 28, 2015.

October 26, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. I’m pleased to see André Carrilho back in the magazine after a lengthy absence. His portrait of Jeb Bush for Ryan Lizza’s "What Would Jeb Do?" is an eye-catcher. Carrilho has produced some of the magazine’s most inspired illustrations. See, for example, his portrait of Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, for Sasha Frere-Jones’s "Show Runners" (June 27, 2011) and his depiction of Paul Auster for James Wood’s "Shallow Graves" (November 30, 2009) 

2. Dina Litovsky’s photo illustration for Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Timna" beautifully captures the wonderful kubaneh-filled clay flowerpot that Killingsworth mentions in her delectable piece.

3. What to make of Meghan O’Rourke’s "Unforced Error"? Of this much I’m sure – it’s great, even better than her superb "My Aunts" (The New Yorker, July 20, 2009), one of my all-time favorite poems. “Unforced Error” is more complex than “My Aunts.” Like “My Aunts,” it celebrates life. But in “Unforced Error,” failure to see death in the midst of that life is considered a mistake. The combination of disparate images and thoughts is ravishing: “I made a mistake. Now I have a will. It says when I die / let me live. A white shirt, bare legs, bones beneath. / Numbers on a board. A life can be a lucky streak, / or a dry spell, or a happenstance. / Yellow raspberries in July sun, bitter plums, curtains in wind.” That final line is very fine – a form of still life/nature morte. “Unforced Error” is death-haunted. My take-away: Don’t take life for granted.

4. I strongly disagree with the view expressed in Masha Gessen’s "The Memory Keeper" that “the border between journalism and literature is inviolable.” One of this blog’s main premises is that no such boundary exists, and that fact pieces such as Ian Frazier’s "Blue Bloods," Burkhard Bilger’s "Towheads," Lauren Collins’s "Angle of Vision," William Finnegan’s "Dignity," Raffi Katchadourian’s "Transfiguration," Dexter Filkins’s "Atonement," to name just a few recent examples, are as artful, arresting, and meaningful as any novel or short story.

5. The most absorbing piece in this week’s issue is Nicholas Schmidle’s "Ten Borders," which reconstructs the harrowing, dogged, courageous journey of a Syrian refugee named Ghaith from his hometown of Jdeidet Artouz (“Across the street, a sedan was spewing flames. Body parts littered the road”) to Bar Elias (“Ghaith met the smuggler at a restaurant, and paid him five hundred dollars for the plane ticket and the fake passport”) to Beirut (“The officers discovered Ghaith’s Syrian passport in his backpack and arrested him”) to a Beirut jail (“One day, Ghaith watched, horrified, as a pregnant prisoner fell to the floor, blood pooling around her”), back to Jdeidet Artouz (“He felt imperilled whenever he left the house”), then to Istanbul (“After several days, Turkish smugglers herded Ghaith and the others onto buses”), then to Mersin (“Ghaith hitched a ride to the center of Mersin in the back of a produce truck, among piles of oregano, mint, and parsley”), then to Alanya (“Eventually, they were dropped off late one night at a gas station near Alanya, a tourist town on the Turkish Riviera, two hundred and twenty miles west of Mersin”), then via boat into the Mediterranean (“Water slopped over the gunwales and a gaseous odor filled the cabin”), then back to the Turkish Riviera (“Police officers arrived and stretched crime-scene tape around a swath of the beach”), then to Mersin (“In mid-June, Bilal learned that yet another smuggler from Mersin, known as Abu Omar, was running rubber dinghies from Izmir, on Turkey’s western coast, to Lesbos, a Greek island fifteen miles away”), then to Izmir (“At eight o’clock, Turkish smugglers hustled them onto a bus; along the way, they collected another group of refugees, many of whom had to squat in the aisles”), then via rubber dinghy to Lesbos (“The refugees cut the motor and the raft floated to shore”), then to Moria (“They were dropped off at a refugee center that resembled a prison: high fences, watchtowers, concertina wire”), then on an overnight ferry to Athens (“He and Bahaa stood on the deck, watching the sun set on the terra-cotta roofs of Mytilene, Lesbos’s capital”), then via train to Evzonoi, then by foot to Gevgelija (“The Macedonian police collected Ghaith and his friends in a paddy wagon and took them back to the Greek border”), then, following the railroad tracks, trekking to a village five-stops north of Gevgelija, where he and dozens of other refugees boarded a train going north; then disembarking at the last stop before the Serbian border; then trekking to Preševo; then via bus to Belgrade (“Ghaith took a shower to wash off the mud caked behind his ears”); then via smuggler’s van to Vienna (“Ghaith, Bahaa, and Bilal crouched on the floor, so that they couldn’t be seen through the windows”); then via train to Salzburg; then via taxi to Munich; then via train to Copenhagen, and then to Malmö, crossing into Sweden on the Øresund Bridge. It’s an amazing journey, with many close calls and memorable experiences along the way. Schmidle is to be commended for the skillful, detailed way he’s reported it.

6. I read Leo Robson’s "Delusions of Candor" with interest. James Wood, in his recent Slate interview, mentions Robson as one of the critics he regularly reads. He says Robson is “extremely good on fiction.” “Delusions of Candor” is the first Robson piece I’ve read. It’s a review of two books on Gore Vidal – Jay Parini’s Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal and Michael Menshaw’s Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal. Robson describes Vidal’s style as “Olympian detachment, patrician hauteur.” This strikes me as exactly right. I’m not a fan of Vidal’s writing. But I did enjoy Robson’s review, especially his argument that Parini “wants to give us the real Gore, but he keeps on falling for the pose.” I like the way he uses passages from Anais Nin’s diary describing Vidal as “lonely,” “hypersensitive,” “insecure,” contrasting her view with the image of the “strapping, self-assured, untouchable Vidal” that Parini presents in his book. Argument, for me, is a key element of a stimulating book review. Robson appears adept at it. I enjoyed his “Delusions of Candor” immensely.