December 11, 2023 Issue

What to make of Parul Sehgal’s “Turning the Page,” in this week’s issue? It’s a survey of several recent memoirs by or about critics, including Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet (on life with her father, Peter Schjeldahl), and Robert Boyers’ Maestros & Monsters (on his long association with Susan Sontag and George Steiner). I’m a fan of the work of Schjeldahl, Sontag, and Steiner. The key word here is “work.” I don’t give a damn about their personal lives. Whether they were rotten parents or fickle friends is immaterial to me. It’s their work that matters. That was Flaubert’s belief; it’s mine, too. Occasionally, a memoir appears that is itself a work of art. Paul Theroux’s Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998), on his friendship with V. S. Naipaul, is an example that immediately comes to mind. Are Calhoun’s and Boyers’ books in that league? Sehgal doesn’t say. She doesn’t comment; she doesn’t quote. She’s flying at a ridiculously high altitude. Come down to the ground, Sehgal. Get some ink on your hands.

Postscript: As for Sehgal’s notion that the work of critics like Kael, Schjeldahl, and Sontag is a form of “unselfing” – “the ability to channel someone else” – that’s just crazy! Kael would hoot if she read that. She didn’t channel anyone but herself. Same for Schjeldahl and Sontag. That’s what made them such great stylists. To paraphrase Kael, unselfing is for sapheads. 

July 10 & 17, 2023 Issue

Parul Sehgal, in her absorbing “Tell No Tales,” in this week’s issue, surveys the literature of the “story skeptics” - writers and scholars who resist the “magic of storytelling.” She writes,

Meanwhile, the story skeptics trace how we have learned to live—as Jonathan Gottschall writes in “The Story Paradox”—in “unconscious obedience” to the grammar of story. Story lulls. It encourages us to overlook the fact that it is, first, an act of selection. Details are amplified or muted. Apparent irrelevancies are integrated or pruned. Each decision is an argument, each argument an imposition of meaning, each imposition an exercise of power. When applied to history, it is a process that the late scholar Hayden White termed “emplotment”—in which experience is altered when squeezed into even the most rudimentary beginning-middle-end structure. Memoirists are increasingly conscious of the toll that such arcs exact. The American poet Maggie Smith, in her new book, “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” notes wryly, “It’s a mistake to think of my life as plot, but isn’t this what I’m tasked with now—making sense of what happened by telling it as a story?” 

Well, all writing is selection. Nevertheless, I agree with Sehgal that it’s a mistake to think of life in terms of story. Our lives are not like novels. It’s delusion to think they are. So … how to represent life if not by narrative? What is the alternative to story? Sehgal proposes “swarm”:

Swarm, not story: when a heroine in Elena Ferrante’s work loses the plot or floats free from it, it is that very word she reaches for—“swarm.” “Frantumaglia”—a jumble of fragments—is what Ferrante titled a collection of her nonfiction writing, deploying an expression that her mother would use to describe being “racked by contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart.” A swarm possesses its own discipline but moves untethered. Nothing about the notion of a swarm comforts or consoles. It doesn’t contain, like a story. It allows—contradiction, dissonance, doubt, pure immanence, movement, an open destiny, an open road.

That appeals to me. Another alternative is form-finding. Galen Strawson defines it as follows:

Storytelling is a species of form-finding, and the basic model for it, perhaps, is the way in which gifted and impartial journalists or historians report a sequence of events. Obviously they select among the facts, but they do not, we suppose, distort to falsify them, and they do more than merely list them in the correct temporal order, for they also place them in a connected account. Storytelling of this sort involves the ability to detect - not invent - developmental coherencies in the manifold of one’s life. It’s one way in which one may be able to apprehend the deep personal constancies that do in fact exist in the life of every human being - although this can also be done by form-finding without storytelling. [“A Fallacy of Our Age,” included in Strawson’s 2018 essay collection Things That Bother Me]

Parul Sehgal's "Bloodlines": Two Objections

Illustration by Anagh Banerjee, from Parul Sehgal's "Bloodlines"

Two objections to Parul Sehgal’s absorbing “Bloodlines” (The New Yorker, January 2 & 9, 2023):

1. Sehgal's definition of literature is too restrictive. She says, “A sturdy consensus long held that the fullest account of 1947 could be found not in facts and figures—not in nonfiction at all—but in texts like “Tamas,” in literature.” That “not in nonfiction … but in literature” grates. Surely we’re at a point now when literature can be given a more capacious meaning, one that includes, say, Thoreau’s Walden, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia – just to name three nonfiction works that quickly come to mind.

2. Sehgal gives novels way too much credence. She overlooks or disregards their fictionality. She says, “This is the work of the novel: to notice, knit, remember, record.” Okay, but what about its most defining ingredient – imagination? Novels are works of fiction. As Peter Brooks says in his Seduced by Story (2022), "One must use fictions always with the awareness of their fictionality." To treat them as fact is a recipe for delusion. It is delusion. 

Janet Malcolm's "Nobody's Looking at You"

I see Janet Malcolm has a new essay collection out called Nobody’s Looking at You. Malcolm is one of my favorite writers. I first encountered her work in 1976, when I read her transfixing New Yorker review of an exhibition of photographs by the team of Nina Alexander and Herta Hilscher-Wittgenstein. I’ve been reading her ever since. Her new book contains several New Yorker pieces, including her superb “Performance Artist” (September 5, 2016). That’s the one where she says of pianist Yuja Wang, “She looked like a dominatrix or a lion tamer’s assistant. She had come to tame the beast of a piece, this half-naked woman in sadistic high heels. Take that, and that, Beethoven!”

Parul Sehgal, in her “Janet Malcolm, a Withering Critic, in a Nostalgic Key” (The New York Times, February 5, 2019), says of Nobody’s Looking at You, “There is stirring, beautifully structured writing here.” I look forward to reading it.

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).

Double Bliss: John McPhee's "Draft No. 4"

Remember Warren Elmer in John McPhee’s superb “The Survival of the Bark Canoe” (The New Yorker, February 24, 1975)? He’s the guy in the bow of Henri Vaillancourt’s canoe who shouted, “You God-damned lunatic, head for the shore!” Well, it turns out that’s not exactly what Elmer said. What he really said, according to McPhee, in his fascinating new book, Draft No. 4, is “You fucking lunatic, head for the shore!” But in 1975, when the piece was written, “fucking” was still a shocker. New Yorker editor, William Shawn, wouldn’t allow it in the magazine. And, as McPhee points out,

There were no alternatives like “f---” or “f**k” or “[expletive deleted],” which sounds like so much gravel going down a chute. If the magazine had employed such devices, which it didn’t, I would have shunned them. “F-word” was not an expression in use then and the country would be better off if it had not become one. So Warren Elmer said “fucking” on Caucomgomoc Lake, but the quote in The New Yorker was “You God-damned lunatic, head for the shore!”

Remember McPhee’s question about the fat gob behind the caribou’s eye in his great “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977)? Removed from its context, it’s one of the most delightfully surreal lines ever to appear in The New Yorker:

To a palate without bias – the palate of an open-minded Berber, the palate of a travelling Martian – which would be the more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye?

In Draft No. 4, McPhee describes Shawn’s queasy response to the above-noted question:

There was in those days something known as “the Shawn proof.” From fact-checkers, other editors, and usage geniuses known as “readers,” there were plenty of proofs, but this austere one stood alone and seldom had much on it, just isolated notations of gravest concern to Mr. Shawn. If he had an aversion to cold places, it was as nothing beside his squeamishness in the virtual or actual presence of uncommon food. I had little experience with him in restaurants, but when I did go to a restaurant with him his choice of entrée ran to cornflakes. He seemed to look over his serving flake by flake to see if any were moving. On the Shawn proof beside the words quoted above, he had written in the wide, white margin – in the tiny letters of his fine script – “the pop tart.”

Draft No. 4 brims with such stories. “It’s McPhee on McPhee,” as Parul Sehgal says in her “The Gloom, Doom and Occasional Joy of the Writing Life” (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, September 13, 2017). In other words, it’s double bliss – an enthralling tour of some of McPhee’s finest works, conducted by the Master himself. I’m enjoying it immensely.

Cheever's Exhilarating, Self-excoriating, Disheveling Journals

Parul Sehgal, in her wonderful “Remains of the Day” (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, July 30, 2017), a review of Christa Wolf’s diary One Day a Year: 2001-2011, writes,

For Wolf, time is fugitive (“History often seems to me like a funnel, down which our lives swirl, never to be seen again”), but her book is a sieve, a way to snare what can be caught, those strings of seeming banalities — that gherkin, an odd detail from a dream, how her husband learns to roll up her surgical stockings for her when she falls asleep in front of the television, that she suddenly needs surgical stockings in the first place.

I like Sehgal’s image of Wolf’s diary as a sieve, “a way to snare what can be caught.” Diary-writing is an undervalued literary form. Sehgal is one of the few critics who appreciate it. A few years ago, she wrote a memorable piece on The Journals of John Cheever (1991), calling it a “disheveling, debauching book,” “even a dangerous book: it invites you to contemplate — even embrace — your corruption” (“A Year in Reading,” The Millions, December 16, 2011). She says,

I love this Cheever, so lust-worn, fatigued, wise. The Cheever who observes, “I prayed for some degree of sexual continence, although the very nature of sexuality is incontinence.” But I love him more when he’s cross, crass, and ornery. When he’s querulous and moaning for “a more muscular vocabulary,” his face on a postage stamp, a more reliable erection. When he carps about his contemporaries (Calvino: “cute,” Nabokov: “all those sugared violets”). But Cheever the ecstatic, who merges with the mountain air and streams, who finds in writing and sex a bridge between the sacred and the profane and is as spontaneous and easy as a child — he is indispensable.

Geoff Dyer, in his “John Cheever: The Journals” (included in his excellent 2011 essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition), suggests that The Journals of John Cheever “represents Cheever’s greatest achievement, his principal claim to literary survival.” I agree. Excerpts from Cheever’s journals appeared in The New Yorker (“From the Late Forties and Fifties,” August 6 & 13, 1990; “From the Sixties,” January 21 & 28, 1991; “From the Seventies and Early Eighties,” August 12 & 19, 1991). They’re among the magazine’s most inspired writings. Someday, I’ll post a more detailed appreciation of them.

January 21, 2013 Issue

James Wood, in his “Reality Effects” (The New Yorker, December 19 & 26, 2011) says, “The contemporary essay has for some time now been gaining energy as an escape from, or rival to, the perceived conservatism of much mainstream fiction.” I agree. The essay is the ideal medium of expression. Some of the best writing appearing right now is in the essay form (e.g., Zadie Smith’s “North West London Blues,” Elif Batuman’s “The View from the Stands,” John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Unknown Bards,” Aleksandar Hemon’s “Mapping Home,” Jeremy Denk’s “Flight of the Concord,” Peter Hessler’s “Identity Parade,” Iain Sinclair’s “Upriver,” Chang-Rae Lee’s “Magical Dinners,” Geoff Dyer’s “Poles Apart,” Keith Gessen’s “Polar Express,” Nicholson Baker’s “Painkiller Deathstreak,” Colson Whitehead’s “A Psychotronic Childhood,” on and on, a surging river of extraordinary writing). Wood himself is handsomely contributing to the essay’s renaissance. His “The Fun Stuff” (The New Yorker, November 29, 2010; included in his great 2012 collection The Fun Stuff) and “Shelf Life” (The New Yorker, November 7, 2011); retitled “Packing My Father-in-Law’s Library” in The Fun Stuff) are wonderful personal essays. Parul Sehgal, in her appreciative review of The Fun Stuff, describes “Packing My Father-in-Law’s Library” as a “self-portrait at slant angle” (“The Wayward Essay,” The New York Times, December 28, 2012). This week’s New Yorker contains a new piece by Wood, called “Becoming Them.” It, too, is a “self-portrait at slant angle.” The angle is Wood’s mirror view of himself as a reflection of his father. He writes,

Sometimes I catch myself and think self-consciously, You are now listening to a Beethoven string quartet, just as your father did. And, at that moment, I feel a mixture of satisfaction and rebellion. Rebellion, for all the obvious reasons. Satisfaction, because it is natural to resemble one’s parents, and there is a resigned pleasure to be had from the realization. I like that my voice is exactly the same pitch as my father’s, and can be mistaken for it. But then I hear myself speaking to my children just as he spoke to me, in exactly the same tone and with the same fatherly melody, and I am dismayed by the plagiarism of inheritance. How unoriginal can one be?

Noting one’s familial resemblance may not be original, but some of Wood’s particulars are remarkable (e.g., “I sneeze the way he does, with a slightly theatrical whooshing sound”). His description of his aging mother’s deteriorated living conditions, when his father had to be hospitalized, includes this memorable detail: “the carpet under the dining table was littered with oats, like the floor of a hamster’s cage.”

In his personal essays, Wood appears more relaxed, less forceful than he is in his critical pieces. His lines are shorter; his syntax simpler; his style plainer. Also, reality, realism, the real, the really real, etc., which so preoccupy his criticism, don’t figure in his personal pieces. It seems that, writing his personal history, he’s content to let reality speak for itself. What we’re seeing, I think, is a great writer in the process of adjusting his style to represent the felt texture of his personal experience.