Best of 2021: The Critics

Illustration by Toma Vagner, from Alex Ross's "Grinding Bass"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2021 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “Who’s We?,” October 25, 2021 (Typically snugged into the cellophane wrappers of packs of cigarettes the artist has smoked, they are singly—and all together—exquisite, achieving feats of formal and coloristic lyricism by way of used chewing gum, scraps of fabric, metal fragments, feathers, thread, and very much whatnot. The works convey a homing instinct for beauty in the humblest of materials, and in the most democratic of citizenly activities: walking in the city”).

2. James Wood, “The Accursed,” April 19, 2021 [“Technically, it’s a combination of free indirect style (third-person narration pegged to a specific character) and what might be called unidentified free indirect style (third-person narration pegged to a shadowy narrator, or a vague village chorus)”]. 

3. Peter Schjeldahl, “Movements of One,” February 1, 2021 (“Morandi drains our seeing of complacency. He occults the obvious”).

4. James Wood, “Connect the Dots,” October 4, 2021 (“Every so often, a more subtle observer emerges amid these gapped extremities, a writer interested merely in honoring the world about him, a stylist capable of something as beautiful as ‘the quick, drastic strikes of a bow dashing across the strings of a violin,’ or this taut description of an Idaho winter: Icicles fang the eaves’ ”).

5. Peter Schjeldahl, “Home Goods,” February 15 & 22, 2021 ("As a mot juste for ‘The Progress of Love,’ I nominate ‘silly’ ”).

6. Alex Ross, “Grinding Bass,” December 13, 2021 ("The music is amorphous, engulfing, gelatinous, ferocious. Some passages evoke a subterranean machine revving up, grinding as it ascends toward the surface; others suggest tiny creatures excavating a cavernous space. Climaxes have a rancid beauty, the beauty of catastrophe and collapse").

7. Nathan Heller, “The Falconer,” February 1, 2021 (“Reducing the world, as on the canvas or the page, is a process of foreclosing on its fullness, choosing this way and not that one, and how you make those choices reveals everything about the person that you are”).

8. Rachel Syme, “On the Nose,” February 1, 2021 (“I knew I loved the smell of violets—their chalky, chocolate undertones. Or I thought I knew. Sitting down at my keyboard, I began to waver. Was it more like talcum powder and linden honey? Or like a Barbie-doll head sprinkled with lemonade?”).

 9. Anthony Lane, “Feel the Power,” July 5, 2021 (“The acting is of a soaring ineptitude; the deeper Diesel emotes, the more he resembles a man who dabbed too much wasabi on his tuna roll”). 

10. Adam Gopnik, “Fluid Dynamics,” April 12, 2021 (“For her fond biographer, Frankenthaler’s art delights the eye, as it was designed to, and that’s enough. Enough? It’s everything”).

March 7, 2016 Issue

Reviewing A. O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism, in this week’s issue, Nathan Heller sets the tone by quoting from George Orwell’s bleak “Confessions of a Book Reviewer”: “In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing-gown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter among the piles of dusty papers that surround it.” This crushed figure in a dressing gown is Orwell’s image of the book-reviewer. Heller calls him “Orwell’s hack.” Heller’s next move is to quote Gore Vidal: “I can’t name three first-rate literary critics in the United States.” Heller doesn’t take issue with Orwell’s seedy portrayal of the book reviewer. He doesn’t question the validity of Vidal’s observation. It seems that the inference he wants us to make is that book reviewing is a low business and that all book reviewers are hacks. A bit later in his piece, Heller says, “Reviewers write with skill, but so do lots of tax-accountant bloggers.” Then he quotes from Scott’s book (“Will it sound defensive or pretentious if I say that criticism is an art in its own right?”) and says,

It does sound a little defensive, though one understands the impulse. When Duke Ellington composed “The Queen’s Suite,” he was working from the blank page; he brought a previously unimagined musical offering into the world. Orwell’s hack, by contrast, produces his review by standing shakily on other works.

I enjoy reading criticism more than any other form of writing. My heroes are Pauline Kael, John Updike, Helen Vendler, Janet Malcolm, and Whitney Balliett – all of whom wrote stylish, subtle, perceptive, writerly criticism for The New Yorker in the seventies, eighties and nineties. Vidal said he couldn’t name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I just named five. And the tradition of superb writerly New Yorker criticism continues today – James Wood, Peter Schjeldahl, Dan Chiasson, Judith Thurman, Anthony Lane, Alex Ross, Joan Acocella, Richard Brody, Andrea K. Scott. They speak to art in its own language.  

Heller, in his disappointing piece, asks “What’s the point of a reviewer in an age when everyone reviews?” Substitute James Wood, Peter Schjeldahl, or any of the other New Yorker critics I’ve mentioned, for Heller’s generic “reviewer,” and the cogency of his question vanishes.

The problem with Heller’s perspective is that he disregards inspired writing as a key ingredient of great criticism. In his cynical view, it seems, all critics are hacks.

February 1, 2016 Issue

What do Allen Ginsberg, Rudyard Kipling, Marie Antoinette, Gloria Steinem, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Jacques Derrida, James Joyce, Lewis Mumford, Fiorello LaGuardia, Marcel Proust, Walter Kirn, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Steve Carell have in common? Answer: they all appear in Nathan Heller’s dazzling essay "Air Head," in this week’s issue. 

“Air Head” is a delicious inflight cocktail of ideas – a review of Christopher Schaberg’s The End of Airports (“a wandering but well-fuelled study of air travel’s fading profile in our digitally transported age”), an epistemological argument (“The battle between jet planes and smart phones isn’t about speed or glamour. It’s about ways of knowing”), a social theory (“The airborne class and those who brushed against it came to represent what we might call 'encounter thought': a way of processing the world which grew from easy geographic leaps and happenstantial connections”), a literary theory (“what made the New Journalism new was its vigor as a literary life-style movement, based largely on the idea that professional process—the getting there, the rips between the coasts—was part of the essential story, too”), and two potent shots of personal history, the second of which begins, “The worst air logistics I’ve ever encountered were en route to a reporting assignment in Monaco—a destination with a gloss of antiquated glamour foreign to me, and a project that suggested I’d been dropped into another traveller’s life,” and ends nineteen lines later with this gorgeous passage:

To our right, the hills fell away, revealing a full moon. The Mediterranean gaped beneath it, wide and textured like the skin of an old person’s cheek. I rolled the window down, certain that I was watching something people were not supposed to see: the world undressing itself, changing color, wiping off its makeup with a moonlight-hued layer of cream. A breeze came up, jasmine and silk trees, and we followed it down toward the water. Every switchback offered a new view. I arrived at my destination and reported my piece, but, when I think of that week, what’s sharpest in my memory is the slow sunset descent to Portugal, the woman cradling a baby whom she did not know, the brightness of the moon on the sea long past midnight. Anyway, it was better than the fast flight home. 

That “I rolled the window down, certain that I was watching something people were not supposed to see: the world undressing itself, changing color, wiping off its makeup with a moonlight-hued layer of cream” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired. I enjoyed it immensely.

September 1, 2014 Issue

An intriguing form of book review is emerging at The New Yorker, one that uses personal history as a springboard for discussion of new books. This week’s issue contains two such pieces – Nathan Heller’s "Poison Ivy" and Adam Gopnik’s "Heaven's Gaits." In “Poison Ivy,” Heller talks about his college experiences as a lead-in to his consideration of William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. I read the opening line – “I went to college early in this century, when the drug of choice on campus was sleep deprivation” – and I was hooked. I don’t agree with everything Heller says in the piece (he scoffs at Deresiewicz’s humanist vision of university education, calling it “brochure balladry”), but I was charmed by his personal approach, particularly this line:

Once, I woke up at my desk—or, more precisely, on my desk, face down, arms splayed out, murder-in-the-study style—with a caffeine-induced cramp freezing my left leg and the imprint of a notebook spiral winding down my cheek.

Gopnik’s “Heaven’s Gaits” looks at two books, Matthew Algeo’s Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk Was America’s Favorite Spectator Sport and Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking. Neither book appeals to me. But the final section of the review, a description of Gopnik’s own affinity for walking around New York City, is a beauty. Gopnik writes,

You could walk anywhere. Saturday all day, Sunday all day, I’d tramp through the lower-Manhattan neighborhoods. The differences, architectural and social, among Tribeca and SoHo and the East Village, to name only contiguous areas, were distinct and vivid and nameable then: cast-iron buildings shading off into old egg- and paper-carton factories sweetly interrupted by small triangular parks, and edging over, as you walked east, into poor-law tenements that were just being reclaimed by painters.

Autobiographical critical pieces, such as Heller’s “Poison Ivy,” his earlier, wonderful "Semi-Charmed Life" (The New Yorker, January 14, 2013), Gopnik’s “Heaven’s Gaits,” and James Wood’s brilliant "On Not Going Home" (London Review of Books, February 20, 2014), constitute an interesting new trend in book reviewing. I hope it continues.

June 30, 2014 Issue

I traversed the pages of this week’s issue feeling mostly boredom. I couldn’t care less about what’s next for xx. Ditto re living the Fitbit life. Ditto re Ted Cruz. Nathan Heller’s profile of Richard Linklater is mildly interesting, but I missed the subjectivity that characterized his wonderful “Semi-Charmed Life” (The New Yorker, January 14, 2013). I didn’t read “The Pink House” (I’m allergic to fiction). I didn’t read Hilton Als’s piece (I’m allergic to theatre, too). Caleb Crain on Stephen Crane - what a tedious slog! That leaves Anthony Lane’s review of Clint Eastwood’s Jersey Boys. Lane’s tonic, blunt verdict – “Jersey Boys is a mess” – made me smile. It perfectly matched my mood. 

October 14, 2013 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue that I enjoyed most is Nathan Heller’s “Bay Watched.” It took me a few minutes to warm to it. I’m not much interested in tech business. But Heller’s experiential, subjective approach – his liberal use of “I” (“One day, I took Highway 1 from San Francisco down along the beaches and the eucalyptus forests to meet Timothy C. Draper, a fifty-something third-generation venture capitalist, at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay”) – drew me in. He writes lovely, rhythmical, textured lines (“Passing down Cole Street and Irving Street and through the weft of avenues out to the park, I used to watch the urban landscape changing: five-and-dimes would become food shops; restaurants and cafés stood where bakeries and fabric stores had been. By night, candles flickered on the tables of big-windowed wine bars. Men in bright sneakers and women in boots spilled into the fog. A swell of humming conversation, wine, perfume, and roasting garlic trailed them through the open doors. If promises were made to those of us who started to grow up then, I thought, they came from the glow and freedom of those boom-time nights.”). And his syntax is succulent (“‘So the cost to build and launch a product went from five million’ – his marker skidded across the white board – ‘to one million’ – more arrows – ‘to five hundred thousand’ – he made a circle – ‘and it’s now to fifty thousand.’”). Even though his material – entrepreneurial culture – is exceedingly denatured, he still takes time to notice fog (“It was the kind of day that kicks aside the quilt of summer fog, and every detail of a northern coast of the bay showed clearly in the late afternoon light”) and shade (“It was breezy, and it smelled of jasmine, and the movement of palm leaves overhead stippled everything with small feathers of shade”). Heller is a wonderfully sensual writer. There’s a line in his “Semi-Charmed Life” (The New Yorker, January 14, 2013) - “The skin above her collarbone had the clean, smoky, late-October smell of candle wax” – that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker sentences. I’m pleased to see he’s joined the magazine as a staff writer. I look forward to more of his delicious writing. 

The Compositional Value of Ephemera

It’s interesting to read Nathan Heller’s “Hello Laptop, My Old Friend” (“Page-Turner,” newyorker.com, January 18, 2013) and learn how he composed the beautiful opening section of his “Semi-Charmed Life” (The New Yorker, January 14, 2013). Heller refers to “the evocative power of cast-off material.” He says,

In a recent issue of the magazine, I wrote about people in their twenties and some books that focus on their plight. The piece begins with an account of some weeks I spent in Iceland, in my own early twenties, and in working on that passage I relied on both memory and record. I’m a pack rat when it comes to correspondence and ephemera: I still have every substantive note or e-mail I’ve sent or received since the start of college—perhaps even earlier—plus pamphlets, birthday cards, maps, Playbills, boarding passes, brochures, brittle magazines, and fancy hardbound notebooks that I’ve started in the hope of reinventing myself as someone who writes in fancy hardbound notebooks. Who’d have thought that a map of businesses in pre-crash Reykjavík would one day help me write a book review? Not my twenty-two-year-old self, certainly. And yet that map, like many notes and e-mails from those weeks, was crucial in reëntering a particular experience years later—not just to tell the story to readers but to reclaim it as a memory of my own.

Reading Heller’s post, I recalled Ian Frazier’s description of his approach to composing his great Family (1994): “My method in writing this memoir was to look for artifacts that suggested narrative” (“Looking for My Family,” included in Inventing the Truth, edited by William Zinsser, 1998).

Frazier’s and Heller’s approach shows the compositional value of ephemera – “the evocative power of cast-off material.”

Credit: The above illustration is from Nathan Heller’s “Semi-Charmed Life” (The New Yorker, January 14, 2013). 

January 14, 2013 Issue

One of the key elements of John McPhee’s superb writing style is its expressiveness of structure. As William L. Howarth says, in The John McPhee Reader (1976), “Structural order is not just a means of self-discipline for McPhee the writer; it is the main ingredient in his work that attracts his reader.” In his wonderful “Structure,” in this week’s issue, McPhee shows how he discovered this “main ingredient.” The pivotal development occurred in 1966, after he’d completed all his research for a piece on the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey. He says, “I had assembled enough material to fill a silo, and now I had no idea what to do with it.” After two weeks struggling with writer’s block, “fighting fear and panic,” he finally hit on an organizing principle. He says,

At last it occurred to me that Fred Brown, a seventy-nine-year-old Pine Barrens native, who lived in a shanty in the heart of the forest, had had some connection or other to at least three-quarters of those Pine Barren topics whose miscellaneity was giving me writer’s block. I could introduce him as I first encountered him when I crossed his floorless vestibule – “Come in. Come in. Come on the hell in” – and then describe our many wanderings around the woods together, each theme coming up as something touched upon it. After what turned out to be about thirty thousand words, the rest could take care of itself. Obvious as it had not seemed, this organizing principle gave me a sense of a nearly complete structure….

The piece he wrote is the classic “The Pine Barrens” (The New Yorker, November 25 & December 2, 1967), a work I fondly recall first encountering in 1976, when I bought a slim paperback edition of it. I have it with me now as I write this. Its subtle craftsmanship gives no hint that it caused McPhee such compositional angst. But “Structure” confirms “The Pine Barrens”’s centrality in the development of McPhee’s technique (“Structure has preoccupied me in every project I have undertaken since”).

Of “Structure”’s many pleasures – cool diagrams of some of McPhee’s finest pieces (“A Roomful of Hovings,” “A Forager,” “Travels in Georgia,” “A Fleet of One,” “Tight-Assed River”), practical writing tips (“If you have come to your planned ending and it doesn’t seem to be working, run your eye up the page and the page before that. You may see that your best ending is somewhere in there, that you were finished before you thought you were”), an illuminating discussion of chronology versus theme – the most piquant is the chance to partake again, from another angle, of the joys I’ve experienced within McPhee’s resplendent oeuvre, in the presence of a voice and mind I’ve come to love.

Postscript: Another piece in this week’s issue that deserves a special shout-out is Nathan Heller’s absorbing “Semi-Charmed Life,” a survey of books on “twentysomething culture.” I particularly enjoyed the opening section, a limpid remembrance of a month Heller spent in Reykjavik when he was twenty-two (“My life at that time was full of passing relationships: people I knew for days, or even hours, and who posed for Polaroid-like snapshots in my memory which outlast many of the long-exposure images I’ve collected since”). I like the way Heller moves from personal history to critical analysis and back again. His method generates several gorgeous lines (e.g., “The skin above her collarbone had the clean, smoky, late-October smell of candle wax”). Writing this descriptive, personal, and sensuous infuses criticism with fresh potential.