May 5, 2014 Issue

This week’s issue contains three excellent pieces: Yudhijit Bhattacharjee’s “A New Kind of Spy”; Patrick Radden Keefe’s “The Hunt for El Chapo”; and Rachel Aviv’s “Prescription for Disaster.” What I like about them is the way the authors, writing for the most part in the first-person minor, occasionally enlarge their “I” ’s role to take the measure of their main characters. For example, in “A New Kind of Spy,” Bhattacharjee tells the story of how a Chinese-American engineer, Greg Chung, became the first American to be convicted of economic espionage. Most of the piece is a reconstruction of events of which Bhattacharjee has no personal knowledge. It’s based on interviews with, among others, F.B.I. agent Kevin Moberly, who investigated the Chung case. But in the piece’s brilliant last section, Bhattacharjee’s narrative “I” is more present. He writes,

Chung did not respond to my requests to visit him in prison, but Ling [Chung’s wife], who was never accused of a crime, reluctantly took my phone calls. One afternoon, I parked at the end of Grovewood Lane and walked to the iron gate in the Chungs’ driveway. There were cobwebs on the buzzer. The front yard was full of weeds, and an overturned wheelbarrow near the garage apparently hadn’t been used for years.

Thus begins the part of “A New Kind of Spy” that, for me, gives the piece the lived character of experience.

Similarly, in “Prescription for Disaster” ’s final section, Rachel Aviv deftly moves from first-person minor to first-person major in order to gauge firsthand Stephen Schneider’s innocence or lack thereof. She writes,

Schneider’s friends say that he was too trusting, a justification that I viewed with skepticism until Schneider began talking about the prison culture. “It’s surprising how nice these inmates are,” he told me. “It’s almost unbelievable, the camaraderie. People act like they’re in gangs, but I can’t say I ever felt I was in jeopardy. The blacks associate with whites, the whites with Mexicans.

And in his riveting “The Hunt for El Chapo,” Keefe’s low-key, reportorial first person becomes slightly more visible when he stops to comment on a curious facet of his narrative – Guzmán’s betrayal by two of his closest aides. Keefe writes,

I was impressed, initially, by the speed with which the marines had elicited leads from these subordinates, both of them ex-members of Mexico’s special forces who had been hardened by years in the cartel. One U.S. law-enforcement official told me that it is not unusual for cartel members to start coöperating as soon as they are captured. “There’s very little allegiance once they’re taken into custody,” he said.

But when I raised the subject with a former D.E.A. agent who has spoken to Mexican counterparts involved in the operation, he had a different explanation. “The marines tortured these guys,” he told me, matter-of-factly. “They would never have given it up, if not for that.”

Bhattacharjee, Aviv, and Keefe could’ve written wholly in the first-person minor, but their stories wouldn’t have been as effective. By artfully expanding their “I” ’s role, at crucial junctures, they personalize their reports, converting fact into experience.  

February 8, 2010 Issue

I read this issue cover to cover. Here’s what I liked most in Goings On About Town (GOAT) and The Talk Of The Town (TOTT): Yola Monakhov's photo of a girl in green tights suspended in golden light, the blurb about Glasslands Gallery (“this charming, skuzzy venue”), the gorgeous pink-and-brown Eric Ogden photo “Gents” (Is that Penelope Cruz peering out of the men’s washroom?), Nick Paumgarten’s Tables For Two review of Le Relais de Venise L’Entrecote (“The heart leaps at the sight of a waitress, tongs in hand, offering an extra helping of fries. Yes, please.”), and John Seabrook’s story about meeting J. D. Salinger. Salinger’s “Nervy girl! Nervy girl” quote in Seabrook’s piece is strangely memorable. What was he really saying? Obviously, Seabrook and his girlfriend interpreted it as less than approving, because they decided to sleep in separate bedrooms.
Moving into the heart of the magazine, I devoured Jon Lee Anderson’s “Neighbor’s Keeper,” a valuable, gritty eyewitness account of what’s happening in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. The articles by Patrick Radden Keefe (“The Trafficker”) and Kelefa Sanneh (“Revelations”) were interesting enough, but neither contained a really inspiring sentence. Radden Keefe accomplishes the essential task of a good New Yorker reporter: he personally enters the frame of his report and shows us what he finds out. When Radden Keefe says, “One day in November, I drove to the headquarters of the D.E.A.’s Special Operations Division, in a generic office park outside Washington, D.C.,” he moves his piece to the level of real journalism. The same cannot be said for Sanneh, who narrates his piece with what Pauline Kael would call "saphead objectivity." Did he actually visit Tonex’s studio in Lemon Grove? Maybe it’s implicit that he did, but he doesn’t actually say so; his “I” doesn’t enter the story, and that’s a failure of the piece, in my humble opinion. I noticed the same failing in Carlo Rotella’s article (“Class Warrior”) in last week’s issue. For me the highlight of the magazine this week is John McPhee’s “The Patch.” I’m an avid reader of McPhee’s writings. I have all his books. “The Patch,” in which McPhee miraculously blends memories of his dying father with pickerel fishing, is among his finest pieces. If you want to know my idea of what an inspired sentence is, here is one from “The Patch”: “In the repetitive geometries of The Patch, with its paisley patterns in six acres of closed and open space, how did I know it was the same gap?” The specificity of McPhee’s writing is so rich that a sentence, such as the one I just quoted, when lifted from its context, is as gorgeously abstract as anything by DeLillo. The last item in this week’s issue that I wish to comment on is John Lahr’s “The Pathfinder.” Lahr is, in my estimation, a great writer. Even though he moves in and writes about a realm – theatre (or, better still, as Pauline Kael says, theatuh) – that I’m not all that crazy about. I still read him for his glorious writing. His article on the comedian Roseanne Barr (“Queendom Come”) is one of the all-time great New Yorker profiles, right up there with Kenneth Tynan’s Johnny Carson piece (“Fifteen Years of the Salto Motale”). I found “The Pathfinder” stimulating. When Lahr writes that “His [Shepard’s] pieces were abstract flights of illuminated feeling, like the work of the jazz greats – Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Nina Simone – he heard at the Village Gate, more vectors of energy than maps of psychology,” he whets my appetite for a viewing of one of Shepard’s plays. I mean, hey! I love Monk and Mulligan. Maybe Shepard’s work is the crowbar I need to open my mind to the theatuh. My final comment this week is with regard to Mark Doty’s poem “Pescadero,” which I found delightful. Many years ago, Doty’s work was the target of one of Helen Vendler’s cruelest New Yorker reviews (“Comic and Elegiac,” April 8, 1996). Vendler comparatively analyzed two books of poetry, one by August Kleinzahler (“Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow”) and the other by Doty (“Atlantis”). She quickly lets us know which poet she prefers: “Kleinzahler’s poems seem to me far more lively on the page than Doty’s.” She says, “Mark Doty can perform an accomplished description … but then he wants to sermonize.” Of one of his poems, she says his rhythm “seems inert.” She refers to “Doty’s plaintive didacticism.” And she concludes: Kleinzahler’s approach is “the better choice.” I’d never seen two poets compared like this before, one chosen, one rejected. I found myself feeling sorry for Doty, who is the author of one of my favorite New Yorker poems, “A Green Crab’s Shell” (September 11, 1995). But Doty didn’t let Vendler’s attack get to him. He continued to write, and in 2008 won a National Book Award for “Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems.” “Pescadero” is a description of goats (“The little goats like my mouth and fingers, / and one stands up against the wire fence, and taps on the fence board / a hoof made blacker by the dirt of the field, / pushes her mouth forward to my mouth, / so that I can see the smallish squared seeds of her teeth, / and the bristle-whiskers”). I love writing like this. It’s like a highly detailed journalistic fragment or snapshot that Doty lets stand as a portrait in miniature of life in the California town named in the poem’s title. Such a profusion of good things in this issue! But I will have to leave it at that for now.