Best of 2018: The Critics

Chris Gash, illustration for Alexandra Schwartz's "Margin of Error"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “No Escape,” November 19, 2018 (“Speaking of color, a room in which many of Warhol’s multihued “Flowers” of the sixties adorn his chartreuse-and-cerise “Cow Wallpaper,” from the same period, is like a chromatic car wash. You emerge with your optic nerve cleansed, buffed, and sparkling”).

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” February 5, 2018 (“Each photograph shoulders aside its neighbors and stops you dead: a glittering nocturnal view of a West Side high-rise above a soulfully trusting Italian donkey, a naked young man and an expanse of unquiet Hudson River waters, William S. Burroughs being typically saturnine and a young man placidly sucking on his own big toe, a suavely pensive older man and a pair of high heels found amid trash in Newark, a dead seagull on a beach and a Hujar self-portrait. The works have in common less a visual vocabulary than a uniform intensity and practically a smell, as of smoldering electrical wires”).

3. Peter Schjeldahl, “Performance,” October 1, 2018 (“A frontal, tumultuous scrum of two big cats, three horses, and five Arabian hunters threatens to burst from the canvas. Claws, hooves, teeth, and scimitars contend. Primary colors blaze. Black resounds. It’s a dazzling picture, but Delacroix’s open competition with Rubens, who was denied a riposte by virtue of being two centuries deceased, gives it the air of an elephantine bagatelle”).

4. Anthony Lane, “Unusual Suspects,” April 2, 2018 [“James Wong Howe, a king among cinematographers, used VistaVision on ‘The Rose Tattoo’ (1955), and there’s a portrait of him with a similar camera, which towers above him on its wheeled crane, and which he holds by a cable, as if leading a velociraptor through Jurassic Park”].

5. James Wood, “Departure Lounge,” October 1, 2018 (“There is the utopian theory of mobility and endless curiosity, and there is our daily reality, which is composed of a billion familiar details, most of them indescribable—the rooms we sit in, and the dimmer rooms we were once raised in; the streets we live on, and the old streets we grew up on, which truly exist now only in our heads. There is the desirable horizon, but there is also the furrowed field, which we know so well and which has made us who we are”).

6. Dan Chiasson, “Anybody There?,” April 23, 2018 (“On Giphy, you can find many iconic images from ‘2001’ looping endlessly in seconds-long increments—a jarring compression that couldn’t be more at odds with the languid eternity Kubrick sought to capture”).

7. Lidija Haas, “The Disbelieved,” June 4 & 11, 2018 (“She warns that ‘nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.’ This idea implies an injunction against interpretation and against narrative shaping that’s all but impossible for a writer on the subject to obey”).

8. Thomas Mallon, “Shots in the Dark,” May 28, 2018 (“With flashbulbs, and even their riskier, flash-powder antecedent, he was able to own and preserve the instant when—Fiat lux!—he spun the world a hundred and eighty degrees”).

9. Andrew Marantz, “Friends in High Places,” January 8, 2018 [“In the Fox News studio, the fresh tweets were displayed in bold type on a thirty-foot-wide screen, Trump’s larger-than-life Twitter avatar peering, Rushmore-like, into the middle distance. (Presumably, the real Trump, in the Presidential bedroom, peered back, an elderly youth gazing into a shallow pool)”].

10. Alexandra Schwartz, “Margin of Error,” October 29, 2018 (“His John, by turns petty, aggressive, and self-pitying, looms a head above Radcliffe’s Jim, pouring whiskey and slinging insults, plus the occasional fist, as the younger man stands his ground, piously pelting him with inaccuracy after inaccuracy”).

Two Interesting New Critics

Alberto Savinio, "Self-Portrait as an Owl" (1936)

I enjoy critical writing immensely. “The Critics” is my favorite section of The New Yorker. It’s always a pleasure to discover new critics – new to me, that is. Two such discoveries I’ve made recently are Lidija Haas and Gini Alhadeff. Haas’s “The Disbelieved” (The New Yorker, June 4 & 11, 2018) is a brilliant review of Porochista Khakpour’s “Sick,” a chronicle of Khakpour’s experiences with Lyme disease. Haas says that Khakpour “resists the clean narrative lines of many illness memoirs—in which order gives way to chaos, which is then resolved, with lessons learned and pain transcended along the way.” I like the way Haas makes a theme of this resistance. She quotes Susan Sontag’s warning in Illness as Metaphor that “nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one,” then takes issue with it: “This idea implies an injunction against interpretation and against narrative shaping that’s all but impossible for a writer on the subject to obey.” She sees this longing for narrative logic and simultaneous distrust of it as a function of illness itself: “Pain and suffering are what they are – they resist meaning and the narratives that make it.” She talks about Sick’s “paranoid logic and spiralling, dizzying structure.” The more she says about this intriguing book, the more I want to read it – a sure sign of a great review.

Another sign is a review that seduces me to read about an artist I didn’t even know existed. Such a piece is Gini Alhadeff’s “Against Seriousness” (The New York Review of Books, May 10, 2018), a review of an exhibition of Alberto Savinio’s paintings at the Center for Italian Modern Art, New York City. The piece begins magnificently:

Alberto Savinio, the hidden spring of metaphysical modernism, lives on in his Self-Portrait as an Owl (1936). His face, with its marked eyebrows, dark eyes, thin lips, and air of melancholic diffidence, sketched in swirling feathers, resembles that of his brother, Giorgio de Chirico, who did a pencil drawing of the two siblings—or Dioscuri, as they liked to call themselves, after the mythical twins Castor and Pollux—at the start of their working life in Paris, one as a musician, the other as an artist. In Self-Portrait, Savinio wears a dark suit, and his shapely hand, the thumb hooked over a waistcoat button, takes up one fifth of the image. The scarf wound around his neck partly conceals a feathered chest. 

I read that and just kept going right to the end, devouring Alhadeff’s wonderful descriptions of Savinio’s surrealism. For example:

In one of these, My Parents (1945), his mother and father have become stone armchairs, very expressive ones, with just one eye each. The mother’s chest looks pubescent above an exposed ribcage, her arms replaced by a rolled upholstery trim, her head the skull of a camel or a horse. The father is headless, an expansive chest grafted onto an armchair with one immense, powerful eye staring out of it. The shadows they cast consist of dense handwritten lines that narrate a brief story of their lives: “My mother was called Gemma, she sang with a beautiful mezzo-soprano voice.”

“Against Seriousness” brims with such descriptions. I enjoyed it enormously.

Lidija Hass and Gini Alhadeff – two critics I look forward to reading more of. 

Postscript: I see Alhadeff has a piece on William Eggleston in the June 7 New York Review of Books. It’s tempting to read it online. But I’ll wait for the print version.