Best of the Decade: Second Thoughts

Photo by George Steinmetz, from Lauren Collins's "Angle of Vision"

Well, I’m midway in my “Best of the Decade” series and I’m having second thoughts about it. I now think it was folly to attempt it. There are just too many great pieces to choose from. Boiling the selection down to twelve has been agony. I’ve had to be absolutely ruthless. Many wonderful pieces have been excluded.

I’m going to continue with the series. But when I’m finished, I intend to provide an alternate list of twelve more pieces – all of which are deserving of “Best of Decade” status. That won’t do justice to all the New Yorker pieces I cherish, but at least it will help mitigate the severity of the selection process.

As for the list I’m currently working on, here are the six picks I’ve made so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

7. Lauren Collins’s “Angle of Vision” (“In dreams—mine, at least—flying is like swimming. But the air was crisp and thin, not viscous, as I’d imagined it. I didn’t have to make my way through it; it made its way through me. Being upright in the air feels like being upside down on the ground. My spine stretched. I felt like I’d be an inch taller when I touched down. In twenty seconds, my feet thudded into the valley floor”);

8.  Joseph Mitchell’s “Street Life” (“Another thing I like to do is to get on a subway train picked at random and stay on it for a while and go upstairs to the street and get on the first bus that shows up going in any direction and sit on the cross seat in back beside a window and ride along and look out the window at the people and at the flowing backdrop of buildings. There is no better vantage point from which to look at the common, ordinary city—not the lofty, noble silvery vertical city but the vast, spread-out, sooty-gray and sooty-brown and sooty-red and sooty-pink horizontal city, the snarled-up and smoldering city, the old, polluted, betrayed, and sure-to-be-torn-down-any-time-now city”); 

9. Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden” (“During the next four minutes, the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered”);

10. Robert A. Caro’s “The Transition” (“Whirling in his seat, Youngblood shouted—in a ‘voice I had never heard him ever use,’ Lady Bird recalled—‘Get down! Get down!’ and, grabbing Johnson’s right shoulder, yanked him roughly down toward the floor in the center of the car, as he almost leaped over the front seat, and threw his body over the Vice-President, shouting again, ‘Get down! Get down!’ ”);

11. Elif Batuman’s “The Memory Kitchen” (“Near the beekeeper’s table, a farmer was selling live turkeys. There were seven or eight of them sitting on a row of crates, occasionally nodding their heads and gurgling, like members of a jury”);

12. Tad Friend’s “Thicker Than Water” (“The wave caught them from behind and lifted them until they were surfing its face. They hung there for five seconds—their port gunwale tilting overhead, the Yamaha outboard whirring in the air—as if time were taking a breath. Jason still believed that they’d shoot the barrel and make it out. Then the starboard gunwale hit sand, and with fantastic power the wave lifted the boat and hurled it onto the sandbar upside down. All that was visible of Jabb from above was a strip of maroon-painted hull”).

Best of the Decade: #10 Robert A. Caro's "The Transition"

Photo from Robert A. Caro's "The Transition"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #10 pick – Robert A. Caro’s “The Transition” (April 2, 2012). It’s a riveting account of the events of November 22, 1963 – the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon B. Johnson became President. 

Caro puts us squarely there in the car with Johnson when Kennedy is shot:

Whirling in his seat, Youngblood shouted—in a “voice I had never heard him ever use,” Lady Bird recalled—“Get down! Get down!” and, grabbing Johnson’s right shoulder, yanked him roughly down toward the floor in the center of the car, as he almost leaped over the front seat, and threw his body over the Vice-President, shouting again, “Get down! Get down! ” By the time the next two sharp reports had cracked out—it was a matter of only eight seconds, but everyone knew what they were now—Lyndon Johnson was down on the floor of the back seat of the car. The loud, sharp sound, the hand suddenly grabbing his shoulder and pulling him down: now he was on the floor, his face on the floor, with the weight of a big man lying on top of him, pressing him down—Lyndon Johnson would never forget “his knees in my back and his elbows in my back.”

I read that passage back in 2012, when the piece first appeared; I’ve never forgotten it. Its thereness is mesmerizing. The same is true of at least two other scenes in this transfixing piece: LBJ and Lady Bird waiting in “a small white room” at Parkland Memorial Hospital, communicating only with their eyes as they wait for news of Kennedy’s condition (“There was more waiting. ‘Lyndon and I didn’t speak,’ Lady Bird Johnson recalled. ‘We just looked at each other, exchanging messages with our eyes. We knew what it might be’ ”), and – another reference to eyes – LBJ aboard Air Force One, in the President’s stateroom, about to be sworn in as President, requesting Jacqueline Kennedy’s presence: 

One witness was still missing, the most important one. As Judge Hughes recalled, he told her that “Mrs. Kennedy wanted to be present and we would wait for her.” To O’Donnell and O’Brien he said, “Do you want to ask Mrs. Kennedy if she would like to stand with us?” When they didn’t respond at once, the glance he threw at them was the old Johnson glance, the eyes burning with impatience and anger. “She said she wants to be here when I take the oath,” he told O’Donnell. “Why don’t you see what’s keeping her?”

The old Johnson glance – right there is Caro’s theme: the return of Johnson’s old self. The piece’s title has a double meaning: the transition of power from Kennedy to Johnson; and the immediate transformation of Johnson – from the despondency he felt about his powerlessness as Vice-President (“For more than a year now, the desolation Lyndon Johnson felt about his position had shown in his posture—in the slump of his shoulders—and in his gait, the slow steps that had replaced the old long Texas stride with which he had walked the corridors of Capitol Hill, and in his face, on which all the lines ran downward, his jowls sagging, so that reporters mocked in print his ‘hangdog’ look”) to a “man with the instinct to decide, the will to decide.” Caro writes,

And the hangdog look was gone, replaced by an expression—the lines on the face no longer drooping but hard—that Jack Brooks described as “set.” Lyndon Johnson’s oldest aides and allies, the men who had known him longest, knew that expression: the big jaw jutting, the lips above it pulled into a tight, grim line, the corners turned down in a hint of a snarl, the dark-brown eyes, under the long black eyebrows, narrowed, hard, piercing. It was an expression of determination and fierce concentration; when Lyndon Johnson wore that expression, a problem was being thought through with an intensity that was almost palpable, a problem was being thought through—and a decision made. That expression, set and hard, was, his aide Horace Busby said, Lyndon Johnson’s “deciding expression,” and that was his expression now. To Lady Bird Johnson, looking up at her husband, his face had become “almost a graven image of a face carved in bronze.”

Robert A. Caro’s “The Transition” is one of the most absorbing New Yorker pieces I’ve ever read. 

Best of 2019: Personal History

Bianca Bagnarelli's illustration for Anne Boyer's "The Undying"

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Personal History” pieces of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Anne Boyer, “The Undying,” April 15, 2019 (“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”).

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “77 Sunset Me,” December 23, 2019 (“Oddly, or not, I find myself thinking about death less than I used to. I thought that I might be kidding myself in my explorations of the subject while my life stretched ahead of me to an invisible horizon. But no. The thinking cut channels in which I now slip along. They involve acceptance. Why me? Why not me? In point of fact, me”). 

3. Dan Piepenbring, “The Beautiful One,” September 9, 2019 (“As the credits rolled, he rose without a word, skipping down the stairs and out of the theatre, his sneakers shining laser red in the darkness”).

4. Nick Paumgarten, “The Symptoms,” November 11, 2019 (“In the following weeks, my skull felt as though someone had draped a towel over it and was pulling down on all four corners, or maybe cinching tight a bank robber’s stocking”). 

5. Robert A. Caro, “Turn Every Page,” January 28, 2019 (“There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself. I loved going through those files, making them yield their secrets to me”).

6. Kathryn Schulz, “The Stack,” March 25, 2019 (“Some people love books reverently—my great-aunt, for instance, a librarian and a passionate reader who declined to open any volume beyond a hundred-degree angle, so tenderly did she treat their spines. My father, by contrast, loved books ravenously. His always had a devoured look to them: scribbled on, folded over, cracked down the middle, liberally stained with coffee, Scotch, pistachio dust, and bits of the brightly colored shells of peanut M&M’s”).

7. James Marcus, “Blood Relations,” March 11, 2019 (“There would be no closure, no healing. I would simply adjust myself to a new and severely depleted reality”).

8. Jill Lepore, “The Deadline,” July 8 & 15, 2019 (“Upstairs, one of the skylights blew open and the rain came pouring in, onto the wedding dress I’d sewn from a bargain bolt, brocade”).

9. Héctor Tobar, “The Assassin Next Door,” July 29, 2019 (“When it was over, I walked through the aromatic ruins of an incinerated liquor store, its floor a syrupy mess of broken glass, green and amber”).

10. Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Hereafter, Faraway,” June 10 & 17, 2019 (“Then his camera captures us from behind, me clinging to my mother’s hand as we walk toward a rendezvous with our future selves”).

January 28, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Robert A. Caro’s superb “Turn Every Page,” in which he takes us behind his great biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson, parts of which have appeared in The New Yorker (see, for example, his riveting “The Transition,” April 2, 2012), and describes some of his research experiences. If that sounds dry, it isn’t. It’s one of the most absorbing pieces I’ve read in a long time. Caro offers research tips (“turn every page”; “the importance of sense of place”), and he illustrates them with fascinating stories:

I requested Box 13 in the LBJA “Selected Names” collection and pulled out the file folders for Herman. There was a lot of fascinating material in the files’ two hundred and thirty-seven pages, but nothing on the 1940 change. George’s correspondence was in Box 12. There were about two hundred and thirty pages in his file. I sat there turning the pages, every page, thinking that I was probably just wasting more days of my life. And then, suddenly, as I lifted yet another innocuous letter to put it aside, the next document was not a letter but a Western Union telegram form, turned brown during the decades since it had been sent—on October 19, 1940. It was addressed to Lyndon Johnson, and was signed “George Brown,” and it said, in the capital letters Western Union used for its messages: “you were supposed to have checks by friday . . . hope they arrived in due form and on time.”

Even as a junior congressman, Johnson wielded power. That Western Union telegram led Caro to the source of it.

What I enjoyed most about Caro’s piece is the writing as pure writing. Caro is a master plain English stylist – vigorous, definite, specific, concrete, concise. Here, for example, is his description of his first sighting of the Texas Hill Country where Johnson grew up:

Looking back on my work on Johnson, I think I realized on my very first drive into the Hill Country—or should have realized—that I was entering a world I really didn’t understand and wasn’t prepared for. I still remember: you drove west from Austin, and about forty-one miles out you came to the top of a tall hill. As I came to the crest of that hill, suddenly there was something in front of me that made me pull over to the side of the road and get out of the car and stand there looking down. Because what I was seeing was something I had never seen before: emptiness—a vast emptiness. I later found out that it’s a valley, the valley of the Pedernales River. It’s about seventy-five miles long and fifteen miles across.

When I stood there looking down on it that first time, for a few minutes I didn’t see a single sign of human life in that immense space. Then something happened—a cloud moved from in front of the sun perhaps, and suddenly in the middle of this emptiness the sun was glinting off a little huddle of houses. That was Johnson City. When Lyndon Johnson was growing up in that town, three hundred and twenty-three people lived there; when I arrived, there were only a few hundred more. As I stood on that hill, I realized that I was looking at something, was about to drive down into something, unlike anything I had ever seen before, in its emptiness, its loneliness, its isolation.

No big fancy words – just plain language. And yet they evoke a vivid picture. E. B. White, in his (and William Strunk’s) The Elements of Style (1972), says, “The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.” Robert A. Caro’s writing exemplifies this approach perfectly. 

April 2, 2012 Issue

Of the many great writers who have contributed to The New Yorker during its eighty-seven year history, one of the greatest is Robert A. Caro. I base my opinion solely on the eight portions of Caro’s extraordinary biography of Lyndon Johnson that have been published in the magazine. I haven’t read The Power Broker (1974), his Pulitzer Prize-winning book about Robert Moses, which was excerpted in four parts in The New Yorker. This week, Caro’s ninth Johnson piece, “The Transition,” appears in the magazine. It is riveting! It puts the reader directly inside the Vice-Presidential convertible, one car away from the Presidential limousine, at the moment President Kennedy is shot (“The loud, sharp sound, the hand suddenly grabbing his shoulder and pulling him down; now he was on the floor, his face on the floor, with the weight of a big man lying on top of him, pressing him down – Lyndon Johnson would never forget 'his knees in my back and his elbows in my back'"). It puts the reader directly inside the curtained cubicle in Parkland Hospital at the moment Johnson is told that Kennedy is dead (“As he stood in front of that blank wall, the carnation still in his buttonhole, there was a stillness about him, an immobility, a composure that hadn’t been seen very much during the previous three years”). And, unforgettably, it puts the reader directly inside Air Force One as Johnson is sworn in as President (“The Judge held out the missal. He put his left hand up – the hand, mottled and veined, was so large that it all but covered the little book – and raised his right hand, as the Judge said, ‘I do solemnly swear …’”).

I can’t remember when I last read as intensely as I read Caro’s “The Transition.” I devoured it. I wished it wouldn’t end. I didn’t look up from the pages until I finished it. And when I was finished, I felt dazed, almost as if I’d been in Dallas that fateful Friday, November 22, 1963, and experienced firsthand those bewildering, nightmarish events.