Sven Birkerts' Inane "The McPhee Method"

I’ve just finished reading Sven Birkerts’ “The McPhee Method” (Los Angeles Review of Books, November 20, 2017). What a tepid, piffling, silly, cockeyed, vacuous review. The piece is riddled with inanities. For example:

1. Birkerts’ comparison of McPhee’s writing with “mansplaining” (“But there is this one all-important difference between the mansplainer and John McPhee”). According to Birkerts, that “one all-important difference,” is that the mansplainer imposes his explanations, whereas McPhee “deploys his wiles of craft to have the reader not looking to escape, but rather to have her be saying, ‘Really? Tell me more.’ ”  But for that one difference – the ability to hook the reader’s attention – McPhee would be a mansplainer, as would, apparently, every journalist, male or female, who sets out to report on a particular subject. As I understand the term, “mansplaining” means explaining something to someone, characteristically by a man to a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing. It’s totally inapplicable to McPhee’s innovative factual reporting, which David Remnick describes as “the best of what has been in The New Yorker” (“Notes From Underground,” The New York Review of Books, March 2, 1995).

2. Birkerts’ obsessive use of “context” to define McPhee’s compositional process. He uses it six times: “Context creates interest; the right disposition of detail creates context. The McPhee method”; “And each subject receives his best attention. It has been given deep establishing context, and then strategically staged for us”; “but possibly because it is self-reflexive, as opposed to outwardly directed, it lacks the slow and purposeful accretion of context which has always been McPhee’s greatest strength”; “His impulse to elaborate detail is as strong as ever, but for some reason the vital accompanying context has lost its vitality”; “Even the most gifted maker of contexts and supplier of explanations, the most cunning of raconteurs, must push hard against the universal distraction”; “We come back to interest and attention, to the idea that the interesting is what stands out, and that the art is to make the subject stand out — to create the context that will allow the particulars to connect in a provocative way.” “Context” is Birkerts’ word, not McPhee’s. It’s opaque, abstract, inert; it doesn’t illuminate the writing process the way, say, “structure” does. “Structure” is McPhee’s touchstone – his organizing principle. Here, from McPhee’s Draft No. 4, is one of my favorite passages from his description (with accompanying diagrams) of the structure of his great “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977):

One dividend of this structure is that the grizzly encounter occurs about three-fifths of the way along, a natural place for a high moment in any dramatic structure. And it also occurs just where and when it happened on the trip. You’re a nonfiction writer. You can’t move that bear around like a king’s pawn or a queen’s bishop. But you can, to an important and effective extent, arrange a structure that is completely faithful to fact.

3. Birkerts’ opinion that McPhee’s structural analyses are “tedious” (“Still, if McPhee is instructive on the more generalized aspects of structure, he gets tedious, when he starts to offer up examples from his own work”). This is not a fan’s response. If you’re a fan of McPhee’s work, as I am, you’ll find his notes on how he worked out the structures of some of his greatest pieces exhilarating. Birkerts’ jaded response makes me wonder why he chose to review McPhee’s Draft No. 4 in the first place.

4. Birkerts erroneous statement that one of McPhee’s subjects is weightlifting (“He has taken on: oranges, Bill Bradley, the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, Alaska, Russian art, canoes, weight lifting, nuclear engineering, the geological history of our continent — have I missed anything?”). This is a major gaffe, in my opinion, showing Birkerts has no clue what he’s talking about.

For a warmer, much more appreciative and accurate review of John McPhee’s Draft No. 4, see Parul Sehgal’s “The Gloom, Doom and Occasional Joy of the Writing Life” (The New York Times, September 13, 2017).

Fact v. Post-Fact

Photo by Victor J. Blue

Stephen Marche, in his “David Shields’s Reality Hunger in the Age of Trump; or, How to Write Now” (Los Angeles Review of Books, August 5, 2017), claims, “Nobody believes that journalists are communicating reality.” What? Nobody believes Luke Mogelson, in his extraordinary “The Avengers of Mosul” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2017), is communicating the reality of war against ISIS? Nobody believes Ben Taub, in his brilliant “We Have No Choice” (The New Yorker, April 10, 2017), is communicating the reality of the African refugee crisis? Nobody believes Danielle Allen, in her searing “American Inferno” (The New Yorker, July 24, 2017), is communicating the reality of her fifteen-year-old cousin’s descent into crime, prison, and eventual death? What are these pieces – imitations of reality? No, they’re the thing itself – life as it actually is. Marche is right to complain about writers’ “willingness to blur fact and fiction.” He calls it “profoundly willfully stupid.” But he fails to allow for the abundance of great factual reporting still being written today. His rant against “post-fact” writing is too sweeping. 

Credit: The above photo by Victor J. Blue is from Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2017).       

Daniel Soloman's "Industry, Ingenuity, and Fracture: On John McPhee"

Daniel Soloman, in his "Industry, Ingenuity, and Fracture: On John McPhee" (Los Angeles Review of Books, July 24, 2015), treats McPhee’s collective works as a “moral history.” He says, “McPhee’s work can, in fact, be read as a moral history of American society and its institutions.” Soloman appears addicted to the word “moral.” He uses it seven times in his piece: “moral history,” “moral core,” “moral burden,” “moral tale,” “moral story,” “moral consequences,” “moral question.” He seems to view McPhee’s work not as art but as a set of moral instructions. I disagree with this approach. It detaches the “messages” of McPhee’s stories from the only medium in which they can live, the medium of their language. Soloman refers to McPhee’s “impressive craft,” but expresses no delight in it. His method is insufficient to McPhee’s exquisite artistry.

“But You Can’t Move That Bear”: Why Narrative Construction in Nonfiction Is Less Artificial Than in Fiction (Contra McCallum-Smith)

I enjoyed Susan McCallum-Smith’s “Geoff at Sea” (Los Angeles Review of Books, September 1, 2014). But something she says about factual writing bothers me. She equates its narrative structure with that of fiction. She says, “Narrative construction in nonfiction is no less artificial than in fiction, but that does not necessarily imply that Dyer — with his coy self-deprecation and flâneur facade — is more manipulative or his intent less true.” No less artificial than in fiction – is this true? I don’t think so. Reading McCallum-Smith’s observation, I thought of John McPhee’s classic “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977; Book I of McPhee’s great Coming into the Country, 1977), which begins in the middle of a canoe trip down the Salmon River in the Brooks Range of Alaska. The first part is written in the present tense. The writing comes to the end of the journey and then it flashes back to the beginning of the trip. After that, it’s in the past tense, and the piece ends with McPhee in the canoe, somewhere relatively early in the journey, seeing a grizzly bear. The piece makes a circle, enacting its title. In an interview in The Paris Review (Spring 2010), McPhee describes how he conceived “The Encircled River” ’s brilliant structure:

But once I started writing, I had to tell a story. It’s the story of a journey. Within that journey certain things happened, such as an encounter with a big grizzly. That grizzly encounter was a pretty exciting thing, and it happened near the beginning of the trip. That was somewhat inconvenient structurally, because it’s such a climactic event. But you can’t move that bear, because this is a piece of nonfiction writing.

But what if you started telling the piece of writing further down the river, I wondered. That way, when you get to the end of the trip, you’re really only halfway through the story. What you do then is switch to the past tense, creating a flashback, and you back up and start your trip over again. By the time you get to that bear, that bear is at the perfect place for the climax. That’s what’s exciting about nonfiction writing. In this case, it’s a simple flashback, but it also echoes all these cycles of the present and the past.

But you can’t move that bear – right there is the rub, nonfiction’s ironclad rule – you can’t mess with the facts. It’s what makes nonfiction real – much realer than fiction, in my opinion. Fiction writers are under no such constraint. They don’t have to worry about making their story conform to the way things actually happened. Andrew O’Hagan, in his review of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Vol. I, 1907-22, talks about the gap “between what Ernie wanted to happen and what actually happened to him – a vacuum that could only be occupied by myth” (“Issues for His Prose Style,” London Review of Books, June 7, 2012). O’Hagan provides this example:

Hemingway was rejected by the regular army. He was giving out chocolate for the Red Cross when the mortar exploded that damaged his legs. (The subjective correlative in a Farewell to Arms is the basin of macaroni and the wine. That’s how fiction works.)

Nonfiction takes its “plot” from real (as opposed to imaginary) life. As McPhee says in his Paris Review interview, structure in a fact piece “arises organically from the material once you have it.” This, to my mind, is what makes nonfiction’s narrative construction, contrary to McCallum-Smith’s view, far less artificial than fiction’s.

Credit: The above artwork is by Stephen Doyle (photographed by Grant Cornett); it appears in The New Yorker (January 14, 2013), as an illustration for John McPhee’s “Structure.”

The 9/11 Memorial: Gopnik v. Filler

Adam Gopnik, in his "Stones and Bones" (The New Yorker, July 7 & 14, 2014), is critical of the fountains that mark the footprints of the North and South Towers at the Michael Arad-designed National September 11 Memorial, New York City. He calls them “crashing double sinks” (“The crashing double sinks seem unsuited to the necessary reticence of an effective memorial”). He says,

Although officially described as “reflecting pools,” they are not pools, and they leave no room for reflection. Wildly out of scale with the rest of the site in their immensity, they are subterranean waterfalls – two huge sinks spilling chlorinated water from their edges, which then flows up and over a smaller platform at their center, and down the drain, only to rise and be recycled. Their constant roar interrupts any elegiac feeling that the lists of engraved names of the dead which enclose them might engender.

Contrast this with Martin Filler’s effusive view, as expressed in his memorable “A Masterpiece at Ground Zero” (The New York Review of Books, October 27, 2011):

As one nears the pools, walking across the light-gray granite paving stones installed by Walker, the murmur of rushing water rises from the cascades that pour Niagara-like down all four sides of the sunken fountains. The sound becomes louder and louder, until it reaches such a steady crescendo that the noise of the surrounding city, even from the construction going on very close by, is drowned out completely.

The veil-like flow of water down the dark-gray granite-clad sides of the recirculating pools is a feat of hydraulic engineering achieved by the installation of weirs—downward-curving comb-like spillways—set all around the upper perimeter of the giant squares. Looking down into the equilateral thirty-foot-deep pits, one sees yet another, far smaller square recessed even more deeply at the midpoint, bringing to mind a simplified, monochromatic version of Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square series. With that last, centered quadrangle, the water vanishes into nothingness.

The propulsive aural and visual excitement of the three-story-deep waterfall and its mysterious disappearance captures and holds your attention in a way most unusual for the static medium of conventional architecture. That distraction makes one’s next perception all the more shocking, as you focus on the names of the victims, incised into the continuous tilted rim of bronze tablets that surround each pool.

The initial perspective provided by the cascades mimics a technique employed in classical Japanese gardens, through which one’s gaze is briefly diverted by a change in paving, screening, or some other element to dramatize a coming transition. Here, after you take in the diaphanous waterfalls, you discover spread out before you at waist level the names, the names, the names. Nearly three thousand victims—not only those lost at the World Trade Center, but also those who died at the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania—are memorialized with their names inscribed in Hermann Zapf’s classic Optima typeface of 1952–1955 (an elegant, slightly flaring sans-serif font), with the letters cut through the bronze so they can be backlit after dark. This is a typographic tour de force.

Filler calls the Memorial “a sobering, disturbing, heartbreaking, and overwhelming masterpiece.” His beautiful piece inspires me to visit the Memorial and see it with my own eyes.

But even without viewing it firsthand, I think I see an error in Gopnik’s description. He says that the pools “are not pools, and they leave no room for reflection.” The above aerial photograph, used to illustrate Benjamin Anastas’s "Atrocity Exhibition" (Los Angeles Review of Books, July 24, 3014), an absorbing account of Anastas’s recent visit to the Memorial and Museum (he calls the Museum a “mindfuck”), shows one of the Memorial pools beautifully reflecting a wedge of brilliant sunlight and the tops of at least two trees. This is reflection in the sense of a surface throwing back light without absorbing it. As Filler points out, the abstract nature of the pools also invites meditative reflection: “But of course it is precisely the abstract nature of Arad’s design, which eschews all representational imagery, that will allow visitors to project onto it thoughts and interpretations of a much more individual nature than if the memorial had been laden with pre-packaged symbols of grief.”

Who is right – Gopnik or Filler? Although the validity of Gopnik’s view is seriously undermined by his erroneous representation of the pools as non-reflecting, I’ll reserve judgment until I’ve seen the Memorial myself. I hope to do so later this year.

Abdellatif Kechiche's "Blue Is the Warmest Color"

I’ve yet to read a review that does full justice to Abdellatif Kechiche’s brilliant Blue Is the Warmest Color. Lorrie Moore, in her “Gazing at Love” (The New York Review of Books, December 19, 2013), fails miserably. She says, “Girl meets girl. Girl loses girl. There’s not much else going on here for three hours.” Really? Since when is the depiction – in detail after inspired detail, close-up after intimate close-up – of a young woman’s initiation into a blazing relationship, the eventual flame-out and breakup of which pitches her into a desolation she may never recover from, “not much”? Anthony Lane, looking at those same three hours, said, “We are left wanting more” ("Blue Is the Warmest Color," newyorker.com). That’s exactly how I felt. I haven’t cared this much about a movie character’s fate in a long while. 

Merve Emre, in her excellent "Feeling Blue: On Abdellatif Kechiche's 'Blue Is the Warmest Color' " (Los Angeles Review of Books, October 25, 2013), says, “What’s extraordinary about Blue Is the Warmest Color is how through its particularity, the film makes Adèle’s blue bruised psyche sharply and essentially human.” Through its particularity – yes, that’s exactly how Kechiche does it. And he does it using Adèle’s face, too. Lane says, “The film is, to a compelling degree, the history of that face – tearful, sniffing, puffed with dismay, spotted and blotchy on a cold day, suddenly ravishing, and reddening in embarrassment or lust” ("New Love," The New Yorker, October 28, 2013). Even Moore agrees with this. She writes, “The close-ups of the young, still-forming face of Exarchopoulos show that the director knew precisely what he had when he cast her.” Moore is hung up on the film’s sex scenes. She writes,

From a narrative perspective the most perplexing problem with these sex scenes is that they mute and obscure the actresses, who otherwise, in many other parts of the film, offer their intelligent faces and voices to the screen in subtle and moving ways. In visual media the body is often deeply inexpressive compared to the heart’s great canvas—the face. The sex between these characters, as is true of most carnality, causes the interesting parts of these women’s personalities to recede.

I’m not sure Moore is right about this. Pauline Kael, in her classic review of Last Tango in Paris, wrote, “The sex in Last Tango in Paris expresses the characters drives” (“Tango,” Reeling, 1977). The same can be said about the sex in Blue Is the Warmest Color. On this point, I’ll let Anthony Lane have the last word:

The movie has gained a certain notoriety for its unabashed view of her sexual encounters; those desires, however, are not set apart like islands, but folded into the landscape of her life, more of which is probably spent in the classroom and the kitchen than in the bedroom.

Lane’s and Emre’s pieces are superb. But they lack the crackling excitement of Kael’s “Tango.” They’re a bit subdued. Maybe it’s no longer cool for critics to rave about movies the way Kael raved about Last Tango (“I’ve tried to describe the impact of a film that has made the strongest impression on me in almost twenty years of reviewing”). Well, I’m not above raving about Blue Is the Warmest Color. It’s the most realistic character study I’ve ever seen. I can’t get it out of my system. To paraphrase Emre’s great closing line, Adèle’s truth has become mine: being without blue is no way to be.

Heer's Heresy

Jeet Heer’s “Fire in the Hole: The New Yorker’s In-House Radicals” (Los Angeles Review of Books, August 2, 2012) gives William Shawn a bum rap. In his piece, Heer refers to “the interminable torpor produced by William Shawn’s editorial dotage of the 1970s and 1980s,” and to Shawn’s “perverse late-life preference for producing a sleep-inducing publication.” To appreciate just how wrong-headed Heer’s assessment is, consider that during the ’70s and ’80s The New Yorker published, among other great pieces, Robert A. Caro’s “The Power Broker,” Pauline Kael's "Raising Kane," C. D. B. Bryan’s “Friendly Fire,” Susan Sheehan’s “Is There No Place on Earth for Me?,” Anthony Bailey's "The Edge of the Forest,” Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” John McPhee’s “Coming into the Country,” Kenneth Tynan’s “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” Saul Bellow’s “A Silver Dish,” William Maxwell’s “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” Janet Malcolm’s “The Impossible Profession,” Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” Bill Barich's "Laughing in the Hills," Joseph Brodsky's "Flight from Byzantium." And this is just scratching the surface of The New Yorker’s rich content during the Shawn era. Clearly, these pieces, no matter what else might be said of them, aren’t “sleep-inducing”; they don’t produce “interminable torpor.” Quite the opposite; they are among the seventies’ and eighties’ most exciting, stimulating, brilliant writings. They were all shepherded into print under William Shawn’s ingenious editorship. 

Credit: The above portrait of William Shawn is by Edward Sorel; it appears in The New Yorker (July 2, 2012) as an illustration for John McPhee's "Editors & Publisher."

Fact/Truth/Creativity

A special shout-out to Lee Gutkind for his observation yesterday in the Los Angeles Review of Books that “it’s possible to write terrific nonfiction narrative and stay steadfast to both truth and fact. One can be creative and truthful simultaneously. It just takes a lot more work” (“Doing A D’Agata,” March 19, 2012). Yes, factual writing is the more challenging art form. It’s refreshing to see this point being made. Writing a fact piece is, in a way, like writing a sonnet: the rule of the form must be obeyed. And the rule that governs factual writing is that the facts can’t be messed with. Everything else – design, voice, perspective, syntax, choice of detail, etc. – is fair game. As the great New Yorker writer John McPhee said in his Paris Review interview: “With nonfiction, you’ve got your material, and what you’re trying to do is tell it as a story in a way that doesn’t violate fact, but at the same time is structured and presented in a way that makes it interesting to read” (The Paris Review, Spring, 2010).

Credit: The above artwork is by Henrik Kubel; it appears in The New York Times Sunday Book Review (February 26, 2012), as an illustration for Jennifer B. McDonald's "In the Details."

Renata Adler's "The Perils of Pauline": Classic Low Snark

Last year, I posted an article in which I said there’d never been a more wrong-headed interpretation of Pauline Kael’s work than Louis Menand’s “The Popist: Pauline Kael.” I was wrong. That distinction belongs to Renata Adler’s vile "The Perils of Pauline" (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980; included in Adler's 2001 collection Canaries in the Mineshaft under the title "House Critic"). I’d forgotten about Adler’s piece. However, as a result of reading a couple of reviews of Brian Kellow’s Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (2011), namely, Nathan Heller’s "What She Said" (The New Yorker, October 24, 2011) and Richard Schickel’s "Hell To Sit Next To" (Los Angeles Review of Books, November 30, 2011), which mention Adler’s article, my memory of it was quickly rekindled.

I recently reread “The Perils of Pauline.” It’s a lengthy review of Kael’s 1980 collection When The Lights Go Down. Its basic approach is a snarky attempt to reduce Kael’s work to caricature. It asserts that Kael “has, in principle, four things she likes,” that she “has an underlying vocabulary of about nine favorite words,” that her writing consists of a “repertory of devices,” e.g., “the mock rhetorical question,” “the hack carom,” “the structure of spite,” and so on. Most of her claims have been ably rebutted by, among others, Craig Seligman, in his Sontag and Kael (2004). Seligman quotes Adler’s “four things she likes” passage and calls it “grotesque.” I agree. He says her “prissiness is embarrassing.” I agree. But when he writes, “Despite the occasional shoddiness of Adler’s tactics, I wouldn’t accuse her of the bad faith she imputes to Kael,” I demur. Adler knows exactly what she’s doing. Like an overzealous prosecutor, she twists the evidence, quotes out of context, and exaggerates the alleged crime. And what exactly, in Adler’s view, is the alleged crime? It’s that Kael is profane, raucous, lewd and loud. These are the very qualities I admire about her writing. I’m not alone in liking them. Laurie Winer, in her excellent “Taste is the Great Divider” (Los Angeles Review of Books, December 2, 2011) writes:

Adler’s slam echoed the complaints of critic John Simon, who described Kael as a Russian count might describe a clever serf: “She is a lively writer with a lot of common sense, but also one who, in a very disturbing sense, is common.” Adler complained of Kael’s “vulgarity,” and she listed what she thought of as Kael’s worst phrases, among them, “tumescent filmmaking” and “plastic turds.” It’s hard not to laugh now at Adler’s discomfort, at her long lists of Kael’s crimes. It’s also hard not to see this attack as the age-old battle between the keepers of good taste and the antic comic spirit, with Adler taking the role of Margaret Dumont and Kael appearing as Groucho Marx. In the long run, of course, Groucho always wins.

Kael, in her wonderful review of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (“The Greening of the Solar System,” The New Yorker, November 28, 1977; collected in When The Lights Go Down), says, “Close Encounters is so generous in its feelings that it makes one feel maternal and protective; there’s also another side of one, which says, ‘I could use a little dirty friction.’ ” Right there is the side of Kael I love.

Credit: The above portrait of Renata Adler is by David Levine.

Franzen's Flaws

Victoria Patterson, in her “Not Pretty” (Los Angeles Review of Books, February 25, 2012), calls Jonathan Franzen’s depiction of Edith Wharton, in his “A Rooting Interest” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2012), “mean-spirited and off-key.” She says Franzen’s piece contains “a strange negative slanting of Wharton’s biography and a peculiarly misplaced concentration on her physical appearance.” Patterson’s critique strikes me as valid. I disliked Franzen’s piece for a slightly different reason. He doesn’t provide any quotations from Wharton’s work. He’s so focused on plot analysis, he omits any examination of her writing as pure writing. He tells us that Wharton’s “a born writer,” but he doesn’t show us her writing. John Updike, in the foreword to his great Picked-Up Pieces (1976), formulated a sort of poetics of book reviewing. One of his “rules” is “Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the reviewer’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.” Franzen might reply that “A Rooting Interest” isn’t a book review; it’s his attempt to answer “What to make of Edith Wharton, on her hundred-and-fiftieth birthday?” But in addressing that question, Franzen summarizes the plots of three of Wharton’s novels (The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence), tracing what he perceives to be her preoccupation with female beauty. In my opinion, he should’ve provided at least a “taste,” as Updike says, of each of these works. His failure to do so is another aspect of his “peculiarly misplaced concentration” (to borrow Patterson’s words) on Wharton’s looks, rather than on her writing.

Credit: The above portrait of Edith Wharton is by Thierry Guitard; it appears in The New Yorker (April 16, 2007) as an illustration for John Updike's "The Changeling."