September 1 & 8, 2025

Pick of the Issue this week is Alexandra Schwartz’s “Going Viral.” It’s a profile of writer Patricia Lockwood. I’m a fan of Lockwood’s literary criticism. Her “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019), an evisceration of John Updike, is one of my all-time favorite reviews, not because I enjoy seeing Updike shredded, but because Lockwood’s voice in that piece is so brilliantly original and compelling. Schwartz describes Lockwood’s style superbly. She says, “Across genres, her calling card is her unmistakable voice, which sasses and seduces with quick wit and cheerful perversity, pressing the reader close to her comic, confiding ‘I.’ ” She also says, in a line that made me smile, that Lockwood “writes with the impish verve and provocative guilelessness of a peeing cupid.” 

Schwartz delves into Lockwood’s personal life – her battle with Covid (“Her memory had crumbled; she could barely read”), her father (“a guitar-shredding, action-movie-obsessed Midwestern Catholic priest”), her “adolescent misery,” her husband (“forty-four, bald and athletic, with the calm, capable demeanor of Mr. Clean’s laid-back little brother”), her Savannah apartment (“The apartment was in a state of dorm-room disorder: dishes scattered on the kitchen island, books stacked on the coffee table and crammed together on trinket-laden shelves”), her fascination with stones and gems ("She owns three different kinds of blowtorches"), her dosing herself with a quadruple espresso every morning before she starts writing, and so on. Do I need to know all this stuff in order to appreciate Lockwood’s writing? No. But it’s all interesting. I like the ending with Lockwood on the beach, flashing her breasts at two men flying overhead in a helicopter. 

Reading Schwartz’s absorbing piece, I thought of the theory recently espoused by the critic Merve Emre that the writer’s “I” is fiction. In “Going Viral,” Schwartz shows a writer who is, in person, every bit as wild, idiosyncratic, and complex as she is on the page. Schwartz authenticates Lockwood's “I.” 

The First Person Is Real (Contra Merve Emre)

Merve Emre (Photo from The New York Review of Books)

Merve Emre, in her profoundly wrongheaded “The Illusion of the First Person” (The New York Review of Books, November 3, 2022), argues that the “I” in personal essays is a fiction. She says, 

Most essayists and scholars who write about the personal essay agree that its “I” is, by necessity and choice, an artful construction. Watch, they say, as it flickers in and out of focus as a “simulacrum,” a “chameleon,” a “made-up self,” a series of “distorting representations” of the individual from whose consciousness it originates and whose being it registers. 

She goes further. She contends that individual subjectivity, on which the “I” is based, is also fiction. She writes,

What if individual subjectivity were as much a fiction as the “I” with which it so prettily speaks? What if stressing the artifice of the first person were, as Louis Althusser argued, a strategy for masking “the internal limitations on what its author can and cannot say”? What if the real limitation of the genre were its glittering veneer of expressive freedom, of speaking and writing as a self-determining subject? What if no performance of stylish confession or sly concealment could shake this ideology loose? What if these performances only intensified the enchantments of subjectivity?

My answer is that, if all these “what ifs” were true, the personal essay would die. It would no longer be a firsthand account of lived experience. To me (this is my own individual subjectivity speaking), the “I” of the personal essay authenticates the experience it describes. It’s what makes that experience real. For example:

I try to be the best-dressed person in the infusion room. I wrap myself up in thrift-store luxury and pin it together with a large gold brooch in the shape of a horseshoe. The nurses always praise the way I dress. I need that. Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins.

After the infusion is done, I sit up until I fall over. I don’t give up until I give up. I try to win all the board games, remember all the books any of us have read, stay up late. Terrible things are happening in my body. Sometimes I will say it to my companions: “Terrible things are happening inside of me.” Finally, forty or forty-eight or sixty hours later, I can’t move and there is nothing to take for the pain, but, trying to be obedient to medicine and polite to my friends, I take something for the pain.

That’s from Anne Boyer’s brilliant “The Undying” (The New Yorker, April 15, 2019), her memoir of her experience fighting triple-negative breast cancer. “Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins.” How I love that sentence! Subjective to the bone. Is it fake? Come on! It’s presented in the magazine as “personal history,” i.e., as fact. There’s no doubting the authenticity of her experience. And, I submit, there’s no doubting the authenticity of her “I.” She is who she represents herself to be. How do I know? Because her “I” is part of her glorious style. And her style is who she is. 

Here's another example, this from one of my favorite personal essays – Edward Hoagland’s “Of Cows and Cambodia” (included in his great 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River):

During the invasion of Cambodia, an event which may rate little space when recent American initiatives are summarized but which for many of us seemed the last straw at the time, I made an escape to the woods. The old saw we’ve tried to live by for an egalitarian half-century that “nothing human is alien” has become so pervasive a truth that I was worn to a frazzle. I was the massacre victim, the massacring soldier, and all the gaudy queens and freaked-out hipsters on the street.

That’s from the essay’s remarkable opening paragraph. Whose “I” is that if not Hoagland’s? No one else writes that way. His style is as identifiable as a fingerprint. Subjectivity is at the heart of it. He has his own distinctive way of looking at things. His use of the first person to express himself is as natural to him as breathing. I can’t imagine him writing any other way.

Take another example. This is from Aleksandar Hemon’s wonderful “Mapping Home” (The New Yorker, December 5, 2011), his account of leaving Sarajevo and learning to live in Chicago. He writes,

I was still working for Greenpeace at this point, walking different city neighborhoods and suburbs every day, but every night I came back to the Edgewater studio I could call my own. I was beginning to develop a set of ritualistic practices. Before sleep, I would listen to a demented monologue delivered by a chemically stimulated corner loiterer, and occasionally muffled by the soothing sound of trains clattering past on the El tracks. In the morning, drinking coffee, I would watch from my window the people waiting at the Granville El stop, recognizing the regulars. Sometimes I’d splurge on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway (now long gone) that offered a $2.99 all-you-can-eat deal to the likes of me and the residents of a nursing home on Winthrop, who would arrive en masse, holding hands like schoolchildren. At Gino’s North, where there was only one beer on tap and where many an artist got shitfaced, I’d watch the victorious Bulls’ games, high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar. I’d spend weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theatre. I often played with an old Assyrian named Peter, who owned a perfume shop and who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and forced me to resign, would make the same joke: “Can I have that in writing?” But there was no writing coming from me. Deeply displaced, I could write neither in Bosnian nor in English.

I think it’s just plain common sense to interpret Hemon’s “I” as signifying Hemon himself. If it isn’t Hemon, who is it? Who is splurging on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway? Who is watching the Bulls’ games at Gino’s North, “high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar”? Who is spending weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theatre. Some ideal version of himself? I don’t think so. Hemon isn’t into writing ideal versions of himself. On the contrary, his aim is to bring us as close as he can to his immigrant experience. The piece is represented as fact, and I think it is fact, every word, including Hemon’s “I.” The onus is on Emre to prove otherwise. Invoking Adorno doesn’t cut it. 

Another example:

I had written about movies for almost fifteen years, trying to be true to the spirit of what I loved about movies, trying to develop a voice that would avoid saphead objectivity and let the reader in on what sort of person was responding to the world in this particular way.

That’s Pauline Kael, from her wonderful “The Movie Lover” (The New Yorker, March 13, 1994). There’s no chameleon here, no glittering veneer. Individual subjectivity exists. It thrives! It’s the key to great writing, nothing less. 

One more example:

I do not take notes as I read. I dog-ear—verso-top, recto-bottom—and underline sentences and paragraphs. I create a document and type out every underlined sentence and paragraph, sorted by book. Then I create a second document and sort the sentences and paragraphs by subject. The process of doing this usually gets me to a preliminary articulation of the argument I want to make, its beginning and its end, its arc, and its subclaims. I handwrite outlines in a very haphazard way, on the backs of bank statements and other stray envelopes strewn across my worktable. 

Seven “I”s. Who do they belong to? Answer: Merve Emre: see “Educate, Entertain, Scold, Charm: Merve Emre, interviewed by Lauren Kane” (The New York Review of Books, April 16, 2022). Is it really her? Perhaps those “I”s are just made-up versions of herself. But I don't think so. I think it’s really her in full individualist subjective mode. Writing outlines on the backs of bank statements? How bourgeois!   

Mid-Year Top Ten (2023)

Photo by Maxim Dondyuk, from Luke Mogelson's "Underworld"

Time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

1. Luke Mogelson, “Underworld,” May 29, 2023 (“On the Zero Line, there was only enough water for drinking, not for washing, and the men’s cracked fingernails and thickly calloused palms were so encrusted with dirt that it seemed to have become part of them”);

2. Luke Mogelson, “Trapped in the Trenches,” January 2 & 9, 2023 ("In the grainy, green world of the phosphor screen, the stars gleamed like bioluminescent plankton. Herring and Rambo moved deliberately between the black silhouettes of trees, many of which had been splintered and contorted by artillery. I was looking at a tilled field to our left when a shimmering tail arced overhead, collided with another streaking light, and radiantly detonated. Herring said that it was a Russian missile intercepted by an anti-aircraft weapon"); 

3. Burkhard Bilger, “Soul Survivors,” June 5, 2023 (“His voice was hoarse with loss, accompanied only by finger snaps and a glimmering electric guitar, like rain in a gutter”);

4. Burkhard Bilger, “Crossover Artist,” April 3, 2023 (“A modicum of noise is essential to any instrument’s sound, it turns out. Reeds rasp, bows grind, voices growl, and strings shimmer with overtones. In West Africa, musicians attach gourds to their xylophones and harps to rattle along as they play. Music, like most beautiful things, is most seductive when impure”);

5. Jackson Arn, “Early Bloomer,” May 8, 2023 (“With O’Keeffe’s works on paper, however, scrutiny is like oxygen. These are images so dense with detail that the poster treatment would ruin them. ‘No. 12 Special’ (1916) is like a glossary of the footprints that charcoal can leave on paper: thin, slashing lines; plump, leisurely ones; smears pressed into the grain of the page with a rag or a fingertip. No matter how carefully you study these grace notes, you never forget the melodious whole: a bouquet of spirals dragging their tails behind them, refusing to be decoded”);

6. Jill Lepore, “Pay Dirt,” March 20, 2023 (“There are more than two hundred mail-order seed companies in the United States, and, if you’ve ever ordered from any of them, chances are that your mail has been swollen with catalogues, their covers of radicchio red, marigold yellow, and zinnia pink peeking out from beneath the annual drab-gray crop of tax documents and the daily, dreary drizzle of bills, solicitations, and credit-card offers”).

7. Lauren Collins, “Pins and Needles,” March 27, 2023 (“The most memorable looks were the most demotic: shrunken puffers, blasted-out jeans, a leather gown spliced from old handbags, a series of hooded sweatshirts paired with tap pants so paltry that you could almost feel the goosebumps on the models’ scraggy legs”).

8. Rebecca Mead, “Dutch Treat,” February 27, 2023 (“Perhaps she is thinking of neither love nor work, and is instead reflecting on how the slow, perpetual flow of milk serves as an endless measure of time—just as it appears to us now, as we regard her in her reverie”);

9. Merve Emrie, “Marvellous Things,” March 6, 2023 (“But the sheer loveliness and good humor of the vignettes transform each sliver of Mr. Palomar’s life into an expansive state of being. The rhythm of the waves, a flock of starlings, the blue veins in cheese, sunlight rippling on the sea—they hold a beauty and a mystery that Mr. Palomar contemplates with such intensity that he turns them into little universes of meaning unto themselves”);

10. Helen Shaw, “Out of Focus,” February 27, 2023 (“His pieces gleam with a baked Southern California palette: jacaranda light, golf-course-green carpeting, and the parents’ burnished, teak-dark tans”). 

Best Cover

Mark Ulriksen's "About Time" (April 10, 2023)

Best "Talk of the Town" Story

Nick Paumgarten, “Ein Berliner,” June 12, 2023 ("The party that night began at ten, which meant more like midnight. Oontz, oontz, oontz, oontz. The projections of Marquardt’s portraits flashed on the walls, apparently to the beat but in random sequences. The revellers seemed unsure whether to watch or to dance. In the hall, Mosbeck, the gallerist, pulled on cotton gloves and rehung one of the eighties prints, which had been knocked off the wall by the heavy thud of the kick drum. Marquardt, now in a black skirt (Auch die Nacht ist Dunkel), took in the scene and said, “I am happy.” Then he went with Paetke to hang out by the entrance, as though he were working his own party. 'Ja, I am at the door,' he said. 'Maybe this is the normal situation' ”).

Best Illustration

Keith Negley's illustration for Idrees Kahloon's "Border Control" (June 12, 2023)

Best "Goings On About Town" Note

Johanna Fateman, “At the Galleries: Helen Frankenthaler,” April 3, 2023 ("The show proves that Frankenthaler, who died in 2011, at the age of eighty-three, was still at the height of her powers in her sixties—a mercurial colorist moving between pours and the palette knife, translucent washes and clotted impasto. The oceanic drama of the eight-foot-wide “Poseidon,” from 1990, is achieved with layered pools of thinned-out acrylic color in aqua and fog. A flat brush loaded with orange has been dragged across the surface, leaving a fiery trail").

Best Photo

Ross Landenberger's photo for Charles Bethea's "Special Sauce" (April 17, 2023)

Top Five newyorker.com Posts

1. Karl Ove Knausgaard's “Thomas Wågström’s Pictures of the Living and the Lifeless," April 26, 2023 ("All photographs are about transience. This lies in the very nature of photography, since everything in the world is continually changing, and what a photo depicts vanishes the next instant, or becomes something else. One could say that all photography is about loss. But one could also say the opposite: photographs salvage something from time, as from a burning house");

2. Ed Caesar, “Cormac McCarthy’s Narrative Wisdom,” June 14, 2023 ("I wonder why, then, on hearing the news of his death last night, I found myself momentarily overcome. Perhaps because I met McCarthy first in a peculiarly receptive period, and perhaps because the provenance of my relationship with his writing leads me back through the decades of my own life. And perhaps because, looking again in the old books, I find so much pleasure in the authority of his voice, and the wisdom that flames out from his pages, and it is painful to imagine that such a fire has been extinguished");

3. Jackson Arn, “The World-Changing Trees of Vincent Van Gogh,” June 5, 2023 ("It’s hard to study one of van Gogh’s motifs without misrepresenting him. He wasn’t really obsessed with cypresses or irises or sunflowers; he was obsessed with the world and burned through it, one object at a time. He kept painting and drawing. The world kept fluttering away");

4. Rivka Galchen, “What Is a Weed?,” May 26, 2023 ("The weed tasted like carrot? Like okra? Like broccoli, almost precisely");

5. Luke Mogelson, “Revisiting Portland’s ‘Summer of Rage,’ ” June 20, 2023 ("The diluted tones, high contrasts, and red-pupilled figures in “Protest City” combine to create a throwback aesthetic that also feels familiar. Dundon was initiated into photography as a high schooler, in the nineteen-nineties, by taking pictures of his friends skateboarding. Many people who grew up around that time will notice, in his work, the influence of skate magazines like Thrasher or Big Brother. This shows in Dundon’s raw, unflattering style of composition but also in his specific preoccupations: wanton vandalism, cheap tattoos, explicit graffiti—abrasions and abandon. This is not just the world of far-left activism. It is the world of wild, angry—and mostly white—urban and suburban youth").

Best Sentence

“No. 12 Special,” from 1916, is like a glossary of charcoal’s capabilities: thin, slashing lines; plump, leisurely ones; smears pressed into the grain of the page with a rag or a fingertip. – Jackson Arn, “Art: ‘Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time’ ” (May 15, 2023)

Best Paragraph

It was pitch-black in the cellar. Even when three of us sat with our knees drawn up, the fourth person could fit only by standing next to the ladder. In the claustrophobic space, I could feel Herring debating what to do. He was lighting a cigarette when a loud whooshing noise, like a cascade of water, roared toward us. “Down!” Herring barked, though there was nowhere farther down to go. I bowed my head and pressed my palms into the dirt floor, which quaked as three successive impacts left a ringing in my ears. – Luke Mogelson, “Trapped in the Trenches” (January 2 & 9, 2023)

Best Detail

You could hear his ski-parka opera coats rustling through the narrow corridors. – Lauren Collins, “Pins and Needles” (March 27, 2023)

Best Description

Gin tends not to agree with me, and yet I couldn’t help but steal sips of a friend’s orange-blossom Negroni, a cold and viscous concoction that lingered on my tongue and in my memory (I can taste it now!), the intoxicating, floral perfume of the orange-blossom water achieving thrilling alchemy with the herbal gin, bitter Aperol, and sweet vermouth. – Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Eyval” (March 13, 2023)

Best Question

How much is too much? Try “Babylon,” the latest film from Damien Chazelle. Within five minutes, we realize that excess is in the air—and, indeed, all over the camera lens, in the form of elephant dung. The ensuing half hour, an excursion into the orgiastic, brings us a woman peeing onto the bloated belly of a partygoer, alpine hills of cocaine, and a dwarf using a giant phallus as a pogo stick. Still to come: a movie producer walking around in the desert, at night, with his head stuck in a toilet seat, and, by way of a bonne bouche, toward the end of the feast, a guy who consumes live rats. Happy now? – Anthony Lane, “Top of the Heap” (January 2 & 9, 2023)

Seven Memorable Lines

1. The courthouse has a way of visiting indignities on all but the robed. – Ben McGrath, “Upstairs, Downstairs” (April 17, 2023)

2. They’ll be red-fleshed and globe-shaped and fist-size and grubby and hairy, and I usually roast them. – Jill Lepore, “Pay Dirt” (March 20, 2023) 

3. Action and description were everything. – Ed Caesar, “Cormac McCarthy’s Narrative Wisdom” (June 14, 2023)

4. She knows just how to get her characters through the doorway and into a scene—all that they have to do, in order to sign their own moral death warrants, is start talking.  – James Wood, “Desperately Normal” (February 13 & 20, 2023) 

5. Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream. – Rebecca Mead, “Dutch Treat” (February 27, 2023)

6. Plucking out a puckered leathery lime and eating it whole, sticky and sour, left me feeling as lucky as if I’d found the baby in a king cake. – Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Eyval” (March 13, 2023)

7. O’Keeffe is nobody’s idea of a comedian, but the Strand trio could almost be a prank: the great black-and-white photographer gets thrown into a smeary rainbow dunk tank. – Jackson Arn, “Early Bloomer” (May 8, 2023)

March 6, 2023 Issue

Merve Emre, in her absorbing “Marvellous Things,” in this week’s issue, extols the work of Italo Calvino. She calls him “the most charming writer to put pen to paper in the twentieth century.” That may be so. I’ve tried reading him, but never got very far. He’s too dreamy, too schematic for my taste. He’s a fabulist; I’m a realist. But there’s no doubt he could write. In his first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), he provides this description:

The old towns on the Ligurian coast grew up in times when those parts were infested by Moorish pirates; built to resist siege, they are as close and dense as pine-cones; their deep narrow alleys, called carrugi, are spanned by arches propping the tops of the houses, with dark vaulted arcades and flights of cobbled steps running far below …

That “they are as close and dense as pine-cones” is inspired! 

Emre’s comments on Calvino’s Mr. Palomar (1985) are compelling. She says of the book’s concluding vignette:

In the final vignette, “Learning to be dead,” Mr. Palomar tries to imagine the most obscure thing: the world after his death:

“If time has to end, it can be described, instant by instant,” Mr. Palomar thinks, “and each instant, when described, expands so that its end can no longer be seen.” He decides that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think of being dead. At that moment he dies.

It is a terribly funny and terribly bleak ending. Yet even here one finds a flicker of hope. If each of the twenty-seven vignettes is an instant in his life, and if each instant, when described, expands forever, then at the moment Mr. Palomar dies he lives. And if he lives forever we need never reconcile ourselves to a world without him in it.

Emre calls Mr. Palomar “Calvino’s most affecting work.” Her review spurs me to give him another try. 

January 23, 2023 Issue

Merve Emre, in her "Everyone's a Critic," in this week’s issue, bashes literary scholars. She calls them deformed. She quotes John Guillory’s new book, Professing Criticism: “If there is a thesis that unites the essays in Professing Criticism, it is that professional formation entails a corresponding ‘déformation professionnelle.’ ” She argues that academia has ruined literary criticism. She says that in university, criticism is "more interested in its own protocols than in what Guillory calls 'the verbal work of art.' "  

Well, all I can say in response is that, in a lifetime of reading, some of the best criticism I’ve read is by university scholars. Examples:

Sandra M. Gilbert’s Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 1972 (Gilbert taught at Queens College of the City University of New York, at Sacramento State College, at California State College, Hayward, and at St. Mary’s College of California);

Bonnie Costello’s Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 1991 (Costello is Associate Professor of English at Boston University);

Roland Barthes’ New Critical Essays, 1980 (Barthes was professor at the Collège de France);

James Wood’s Serious Noticing, 2019 (Wood is a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University);

Helen Vendler’s The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, 2015 (Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University);

B. J. Leggett’s Larkin’s Blues, 1999 (Leggett is Distinguished Professor of Humanities and professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville);

Dan Chiasson's One Kind of Everything, 2007 (Chiasson teaches at Wellesley College);

Bożena Shallcross’s Through the Poet’s Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky, 2002 (Shallcross is an associate professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Chicago);

Eleanor Cook’s Elizabeth Bishop at Work, 2016 (Cook is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Toronto);

Robert Hass's What Light Can Do, 2012 (Hass teaches at the University of California);

Michael Wood's The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, 1994 (Wood is Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University).

I'm just scratching the surface here. These literary scholars are interested in the verbal work of art, deeply so. I enjoy their writing immensely. 

Best of 2022: The Critics

Illustration by Toma Vagner, from Anthony Lane's "Living for the City"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “Going Flat Out,” May 16, 2022 (“Gorgeous? Oh, yeah.” | “Swift strokes jostle forward in a single, albeit rumpled, optical plane. See if this isn’t so, as your gaze segues smoothly across black outlines among greenery, blue water and sky, and orangish flesh”);

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “All Together Now,” April 11, 2022 (“Red Abstract / fragment” (1968-69) is a lyrical verse text typewritten on a brushy red ground and scribbled with restive cross-outs, revisions, and notes. Its meanings dance at the edge of comprehension, but with infectious improvisatory rhythms.” | “Where art is concerned, death need be no more than an inconvenience, and, as in the case of Pritchard, being all but invisible may turn out to have been merely a speed bump”);

3. Peter Schjeldahl, “Scaling Up,” June 13, 2022 [“The distinguishing test, for me, is scale, irrespective of size: all a work’s elements and qualities (even including negative space) must be snugged into its framing edges to consolidate a specific, integral object—present to us, making us present to itself—rather than a more or less diverting handmade picture.” | “Inexhaustibly surprising smears, blotches, fugitive lines, and incomplete patterns feel less applied than turned loose, to tell enigmatic stories of their own”);

4. Peter Schjeldahl, “Dutch Magus,” October 3, 2022 [“Janssen’s expert citations of parallels in music for Mondrian’s art are a treat and a revelation for a musical doofus like me. Janssen likens the artist’s frequent motif, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, of paired horizontal black bands to the bass line running under the saxophone cadenzas of Armstrong’s group and others. (Thereby alerted, I see and spectrally hear it.) If, in Janssen’s telling, one dynamic recurs throughout Mondrian’s aesthetic adventuring, it is rhythm, incipient even in his youthful renderings from nature. Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral. Thought, if any was needed, followed touch”];

5. Peter Schjeldahl, “Stilled Life,” October 10, 2022 (“Then there are the still-lifes of remarkably unremarkable windowsill miscellanies: some random fruit and bits of studio gear transfigured by a happenstance of daylight”); 

6. James Wood, “By the Collar," April 11, 2022 (“These public events have the irresistible tang of the actual, and around them O’Toole—who has had a substantial career as a journalist, a political commentator, and a drama critic—beautifully tells the private story of his childhood and youth. But because the events really happened, because they are part of Ireland’s shameful, sometimes surreal postwar history, they also have the brutishly obstructive quality of fact, often to be pushed against, fought with, triumphed over, or, in O’Toole’s preferred mode of engagement, analyzed into whimpering submission. His great gift is his extremely intelligent, mortally relentless critical examination, and here he studies nothing less than the past and the present of his own nation”);

7. Anthony Lane, “Living for the City,” February 14 & 21, 2022 (“ 'The Worst Person in the World' strikes me as believable, beautiful, roving, annoying, and frequently good for a laugh. Like most of Trier’s work, it also takes you aback with its sadness, which hangs around, after the story is over, like the smoke from a snuffed candle”);

8. Alex Ross, “Moonlight,” January 31, 2022 (“Chopin’s Nocturne No. 7, in C-sharp minor, begins with a low, ashen sound: a prowling arpeggio in the left hand, consisting only of C-sharps and G-sharps. It’s a hollowed-out harmony, in limbo between major and minor. Three bars in, the right hand enters on E, seemingly establishing minor, but a move to E-sharp clouds the issue, pointing toward major. Although the ambiguity dissipates in the measures that follow, a nimbus of uncertainty persists. Something even eerier happens in the tenth bar. The melody abruptly halts on the leading tone of B-sharp while the left hand gets stuck in another barren pattern—this one incorporating the notes D, A, and C-sharp. It’s almost like a glitch, a frozen screen. Then comes a moment of wistful clarity: an immaculate phrase descends an octave, with a courtly little turn on the fourth step of the scale. It is heard only once more before it disappears. I always yearn in vain for the tune’s return: a sweetly murmuring coda doesn’t quite make up for its absence. Ultimate beauty always passes too quickly”);

9. Merve Emre, "Getting to Yes," February 14 & 21, 2022 ("From these two sentences, a whole history of literature beckons - a sudden blooming of forms and genres, authors and periods, languages and nations. Why is 'dressingown,' like 'scrotumtightening,' a single retracting word, as if English were steadying itself to transform into German?");

 10. James Wood, "The Numbers Game," December 19, 2022 ("There have always been two dominant styles in Cormac McCarthy’s prose—roughly, afflatus and deflatus, with not enough breathable oxygen between them"). 

Nothing Fictional About It (Contra Merve Emre)

John McPhee (Photo by Yolanda Whitman)

The critic Merve Emre argues that the “I” of the personal essay is a fiction and that individual subjectivity is an illusion: see her recent “The Illusion of the First Person” (The New York Review of Books, November 3, 2022). She makes a similar point in her absorbing “The Act of Persuasion” (The New York Review of Books, April 21, 2022), a review of Elizabeth Hardwick’s work:

In her essays, Hardwick reproved and indulged the temptation to fictionalize. How could she help it? Between the person and the page lies the prism of fiction, always. No genre can avoid it. Even criticism, if it is to speak of the lives and works of the dead, must bring the dead to life—the words of the past distilled in the words of the present. 

Well, the writers I admire most (e.g., John McPhee, Ian Frazier, Edward Hoagland) write in the first person major. They’re subjective to the bone. They write about what they want to write about, and say what they want to say. They get their words as close as they can to the solidity, the materiality of the world they’re noticing. There’s no “prism of fiction.” There is the prism of sensibility. We see the world refracted through the prism of who they are. That’s the secret of their art. There’s nothing fictional about it.  

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.