June 2, 2025 Issue

Louis Menand, in his absorbing “Strong Opinions,” in this week’s issue, gets a lot of things right about William F. Buckley, Jr. He calls him an “overgrown preppie.” I’d go further – he was a snob. He says, “Debate was his preferred medium of exposition, and he would take on anyone who could talk back to him.” This is true; it’s what drew me to his writing back when I was in my early twenties. Menand’s description of Buckley – “And the rumpled, rubber-faced manner, the popping eyes, the languorous drawl, the charmingly wicked grin he flashed when he thought he had scored a kill—Buckley was a show unto himself” – is bang on; it made me smile in recognition. But Menand seems to underestimate Buckley as a writer. Granted, he says of Overdrive (published in The New Yorker, in 1983), “Still, Buckley knew how to turn a phrase, and Overdrive is written with panache.” But overall, he appears to view Buckley more as an entertainer than a writer – “a show unto himself.” 

My view is that Buckley was an excellent writer. My best evidence is his brilliant essay “On Experiencing Gore Vidal,” which originally appeared in the August, 1969, Esquire, and was later included in his 1970 collection The Governor Listeth. It’s a fascinating account of what Menand calls “the Buckley-Vidal fiasco” that occurred live on ABC TV during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Menand describes what happened:

The 1968 Convention was, of course, the scene of the Chicago police clash with antiwar protesters, and the riots became a subject for Vidal and Buckley’s debate. At one point, Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” and got the reaction he hoped for. “Now listen, you queer,” Buckley shouted. “Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face and you’ll stay plastered.” Vidal stared at Buckley during this outburst with the expression of a cat that has just swallowed a very large canary. He could barely believe his luck. They were contracted to do one more night on the air; ABC separated them with a curtain.

I didn’t see this broadcast. But, as a result of reading Buckley’s riveting piece, I feel as if I have. Buckley details the history leading up to the confrontation. Near the beginning, he says,

At this point my mind moved to Gore Vidal, and the dismal events of the summer of 1968, when he and I confronted each other a dozen times on network television, leading to an emotional explosion which, it is said, rocked television. Certainly it rocked me, and I am impelled to write about it; to discover its general implications, which are undeniable and profound; to probe the question whether what was said – under the circumstances in which it was said – has any meaning at all beyond that which is most generally ascribed to it, namely, excessive bitchery can get out of hand. But first the narrative.

I am impelled to write about it – right there, I think, is the sign of a true writer. The piece is extraordinary – piquant, detailed, analytical. The use of “faggot” and “faggotry” is offensive and unforgiveable. But in the end, the piece surprises. Buckley apologizes.

But now I’m having second thoughts. Having just finished re-reading “On Experiencing Gore Vidal,” I’m appalled by Buckley’s prejudice against gays. He had a distinctive style – provocative, needling, venomous. Too bad he used it to express such rotten views. 

December 10, 2018 Issue

Louis Menand, in his “Faking It,” in this week’s issue, says,

There have always been writers who cheated on the pact. A case most people know is that of James Frey’s 2003 memoir of recovery from addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine, “A Million Little Pieces.” The book was hugely popular, but it turned out to be partly fabricated, something Frey was forced to admit on television under the interrogation of Oprah Winfrey, who had chosen “A Million Little Pieces” for her book club and thereby made it a best-seller.

The “pact” that Menand refers to is the “autobiographical pact,” which he defines as “the tacit understanding that the person whose name is on the cover is identical to the narrator, the ‘I,’ of the text.” But in the case of A Million Little Pieces, it wasn’t Frey’s identity that was in issue; it was his fabrication of its contents. Frey represented fiction as fact. This isn’t a breach of the autobiographical pact; it’s much more serious than that. It’s a violation of the ironclad injunction governing all nonfiction: Don’t mess with the facts. John McPhee, in his Draft No. 4, puts it this way: 

It is sometimes said that the line between fiction and nonfiction has become blurred. Not in this eye, among beholders. The difference between the two is distinct.

Interestingly, Menand, in his piece, identifies “three traditional lines of defense” for books like A Million Little Pieces:

1. The surrogacy defense – “This is the theory that, although a particular event recounted in the book may not have happened to the author, it happened to someone. Such a book, then, is really the life story of a group. The memoirist should be understood as representing all African-American men in the era of Jim Crow, or all indigenous people in Guatemala. Experiences common to the group are therefore legitimately represented as happening to a single, quasi-allegorical figure.”

2. The higher-truth defense – “This is the argument that fabrications and exaggerations in books like these are in the service of more fully conveying ‘what it is really like’ to be Guatemalan or in recovery or whatever the theme of the life story happens to be. 'A Million Little Pieces' tries to capture the experience of recovering from addiction. Readers don’t care whether these things literally happened to James Frey, because they didn’t buy the book to find out about James Frey. They bought it to learn about addiction and recovery. James Frey’s job as a writer is only to convey that experience.”

3. The literature professor’s defense – “Forget about whether the story ‘truly’ happened to some ‘real’ person—a philosophical rabbit hole. We are judging words on a page. Either they work for us or they don’t.”

I find these arguments unconvincing. McPhee speaks for me. So does Janet Malcolm. In the Afterword of her great The Journalist and the Murderer, she says,

The writer of nonfiction is under contract to the reader to limit himself to events that actually occurred and to characters who have counterparts in real life, and he may not embellish the truth about these events or these characters.

No philosophical rabbit hole there.

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”).

August 28, 2017 Issue

This week’s New Yorker is loaded with good things to read and think about. First and foremost – Ian Frazier’s terrific “Drive Time,” a personal history piece on the pleasure he gets from driving in New York City. “For me,” he says, “the dreamy part of metro-driving happens when the traffic is light and every highway on my phone’s congestion map glows green.” But often the traffic isn’t light. He reports that he was recently involved in a seven-car pileup on the Garden State Parkway. His detailed account of that experience is one of the highlights of the piece. My favorite part is his description of an early-morning drive he takes from his New Jersey home, across the George Washington Bridge, into the Bronx (“The slanted early-morning sun amid the pillars colors the sides of bread trucks moving slowly on their deliveries”), across the Harlem River on the Madison Avenue Bridge, into Manhattan on the F.D.R. Drive (“cruising by the high-rises and the hospitals of the Upper East Side and under the tower of the United Nations”), across the Brooklyn Bridge (“maybe the most glorious bridge in the world, its cables radiating from their junction points at the top of its towers like beams of light”), into Brooklyn, up the ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, onto the Belt Parkway to J.F.K. Airport, then, via the Belt Parkway, back to Brooklyn, up the ramp to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, across the bridge, onto the Staten Island Expressway, then across the Goethals Bridge and onto the New Jersey Turnpike, at which point, Frazier writes,

Here is the best part of the route, because when the landing patterns at Newark Airport are configured in a certain way the planes coming in fly parallel to the turnpike and directly above it. If everything is in synch, I can be motoring up the highway among lanes of cars and trucks (the turnpike is busy at any hour) with the freight-train tracks on the right and all the earthbound vectors lining up as an incoming jet roars overhead, outdistances everybody, diverges to the left, and sets down on a shimmery runway. The music on the radio can be helpful here; I’ve found that a big, anthemic prog-rock song makes a good accompaniment. Every tristate-area driver should experience this cool convergence once in a while.

After that, Frazier takes the I-78 west, Garden State Parkway north to Exit 151, then west on Watchung Avenue, south on Grove Street, and he’s home—“five boroughs, four major bridges, two airports, two states, and back in time for breakfast.”

Quite a trip! I enjoyed it immensely.

Other absorbing pieces in this week’s issue: Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Content of No Content” (“If Amazon has its way, even artisanal cheese will soon be delivered by drone”); Nick Paumgarten’s “Singer of Secrets” (“Now she seemed slight, fine-boned, almost translucent—it was hard to imagine her surviving a sea of forearms, iPhones, and gropey hands”); Louis Menand’s “The Stone Guest” (“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”); and James Wood’s “Entanglement Theory” (“Øyehaug’s text enacts what Barthes theorizes, exalting an ‘object’ that is itself just a sentence—while also registering some brief flash of consciousness, some small explosion of longing, that, like Anna Bae’s discovery in Rimbaud’s biography, seems true to our own experience of passionate reading: jouissance, to be precise”).  

July 31, 2017 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Ben Taub, in his superb “We Have No Choice” (The New Yorker, April 10, 2017), followed the ordeal of a Nigerian teen-ager trying to reach Europe via a vast people-smuggling network of forced labor and sex work. It ended in a migrant camp on the outskirts of Messina, Sicily. Now, in “The Wrong Man,” Taub continues his brilliant reporting on the refugee crisis, this time focusing on the overzealous prosecution of an Eritrean man whom Sicilian prosecutors wrongly believe to be a kingpin of East African human smuggling. The piece takes us deep inside the corrupt Sicilian justice system, showing prosecutors twisting and misinterpreting the evidence. Taub is a digger; he writes the kind of first-person experiential journalism I relish (e.g., “One afternoon in Palermo, I had lunch with Francesco Viviano, a sixty-eight-year-old Sicilian investigative reporter who says that he has been wiretapped, searched, or interrogated by the authorities ‘eighty or ninety times’ ”). “We Have No Choice” is his masterpiece; “The Wrong Man” is a close second.

2. I’m indebted to Louis Menand for pointing out, in his “The Defense of Poetry,” that Michael Robbins’s new book, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music, contains an “admiring chapter” on Pauline Kael. Kael’s writing is, for me, a touchstone. After I read what Robbins has to say about her, I’ll post my response here.

3. My favorite sentence in this week’s issue is Peter Schjeldahl’s “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” (“Full Immersion”). 

Rothko's Harvard Murals

Mark Rothko's Harvard Murals, Holyoke Center, 1964

A special shout-out to Louis Menand for his terrific "Watching Them Turn Off the Rothkos" (“Cultural Comment,” newyorker.com, April 1, 2015), on the restoration of Mark Rothko’s Harvard murals, “Panel One,” “Panel Two,” and “Panel Three,” originally installed, in 1964, in the penthouse of Harvard University’s Holyoke Center, now hanging in the Harvard Art Museums, and revivified through the use of what’s known as “compensating illumination.” Menand explains:

Five digital projectors have been programmed to light the canvases so that the original colors reappear. At four o’clock every day, the projectors are turned off one by one, and the colors revert to (mostly) muddy blacks and grays. You can still see the bones of the murals, the formal architecture—Rothko’s floating blocks, made to resemble portals in these pieces—but the glow is gone. As one observer put it, when the lights go off, comedy turns into tragedy.

Menand says that the restoration story gets people hooked “because it raises ancient and endlessly fascinating philosophy-of-art questions. In this respect, the restored murals are really a new work, a work of conceptual art. To look at them is to have thoughts about the nature of art.”

Well, maybe. Could it also be that to look at them is to experience the exhilaration and pleasure of reading red on maroon, purple-black on purple, and maroon on pink? Menand is a tad too thinky. But he’s onto a great subject.  

April 28, 2014 Issue

Is Adam Begley’s Updike worth reading? That was the question on my mind as I began reading Louis Menand’s "Imitation of Life," a review of Begley’s book, in this week’s issue. The answer appears to be yes. Menand says, “Writing was what the man was about, and the writing is what Begley focuses on. Updike is a highly literate illumination of a supremely literate human being.”

Updike was a “supremely literate human being” who disliked literary biographies. Some of his severest criticism is found in his reviews of biographies of Eliot, Fitzgerald, Cheever, Graham Greene, and Dorothy Parker, among others. His view was that writers’ lives are “poured into books, not deeds” (“This Side of Coherence,” More Matter, 1999). He deplored biographies that dish “the dirt, the lowdown” (“This Side of Coherence”).

The one exception he made is for biographies that enable us “to partake again, from another angle, of the joys we have experienced within the author’s oeuvre, in the presence of a voice and mind we have come to love” (“On Literary Biography,” Due Considerations, 2007). The supreme example of this kind of biography is George D. Painter’s Marcel Proust (1959). Updike admired Painter’s book enormously. In “On Literary Biography,” he wrote, “Lovers of Proust will be inevitably drawn to Painter because it is more of the same, mirrored back into reality.”

Based on my reading of Menand’s “Imitation of Life,” I’d say that Adam Begley’s Updike sounds like it’s mostly in the Painter category. Menand says that Begley’s Updike “is essentially an extended essay in biographical criticism, an insight into the man through the work and the work through the man.”

I wish Menand had provided at least one extended quotation from Begley’s Updike so that I could form my own impression of Begley’s writing. But he says enough to persuade me that Begley’s book is worth a look.

Postscript: Pick of the Issue this week is Justin Quinn’s delightful "Recession Song," celebrating the medicinal and spiritual benefits of sage (“Sage is just the thing / for snakebite, bee sting / and keeping the bad at bay”). It’s a classic poem, beautifully rhymed, artfully lineated, specific, vital, and complete. It went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker poems. 

October 21, 2013 Issue

Louis Menand, in his “The Norman Invasion,” in this week’s issue, says of Norman Mailer, “His most interesting innovation as a journalist was the reporter as character, the practice of treating himself as a participant in the events he was covering.” Well, there were lots of journalists before Mailer who, writing in the first person, inserted themselves as participants in their stories (e.g., George Orwell, John Reed, James Agee, A. J. Liebling). The innovation that Menand must be referring to is Mailer’s odd habit of writing about himself in the third person. See, for example, “Miami and the Siege of Chicago” (“His first afternoon in Miami Beach was spent by the reporter in Convention Hall. He stepped up on the speaker’s podium to see how it might feel, nosed into the jerrybuilt back room back of the podium where speakers would wait, and Press be excluded, once the convention was begun”); The Armies of the Night (“Mailer looked him over covertly to see what he could try if the Marshall went to work on him. All reports: negative. He would not stand a chance with this Marshall – there seemed no place to hit him where he’d be vulnerable; stone larynx, leather testicles, ice cubes for eyes”). In “St. George and the Godfather,” he calls himself Aquarius (“Interviewing Eagleton on the afternoon of the morning of his resignation as Vice-Presidential candidate, Aquarius finds him changed from the diffident politician who perspired before the television cameras on the night of his nomination and looked too furtive, too nervous, too quick-tongued, too bright, too unsure of himself and finally too modest to be Vice-President”).

I confess that even though I love these works, I find Mailer’s objectification of himself artificial. I wish he’d used the “I” point of view, as he did in his great “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” an account of the first Patterson-Liston fight (“Naturally I got into a debate with Cus D’Amato and a young gentleman named Jacobs, Jim Jacobs as I remember, who was built like a track man and had an expression which was very single-minded”).

Few writers have pondered the use of point of view more than Mailer. In his “The Last Draft of The Deer Park,” he says, “The most powerful leverage in fiction is point of view.” Mailer was partial to the third-person perspective. Why? Because, as he points out in the Preface to Some Honorable Men (1976), a collection of his political convention pieces, there’s advantage to observing the observer: “So our best chance of improving those private charts of our own most complicated lives, our unadmitted maps of reality, our very comprehension, if you will, of the way existence works – seems to profit most if we can have some little idea, at least, of the warp of the observer who passes on the experience.”

Mailer’s innovation was his insertion of himself, not as “I,” but as “He,” “Mailer,” “Aquarius” – a third-person observer-participant – in his reportage. It’s an approach that’s ultra-objective. Mailer splits himself – there’s Mailer, the narrator, and “Mailer,” the character. I keep wondering as I read his “third-person” pieces, why not just drop the objective pose and speak naturally in the “I”? I’m aware of Janet Malcolm’s contention that “the ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention” (The Journalist and the Murderer, 1990). But I submit that it’s less an invention than Mailer’s “Mailer.”