On Matisse's "Woman with a Hat": Fine vs. Clark

Zachary Fine, in his absorbing “Matisse’s Ugliest Painting” (newyorker.com, August 31, 2026), says of Henri Matisse’s “Woman with a Hat” (1905), “The painting looks like a box of melted saltwater taffy that’s been churned together and encouraged to express itself as a chic fungus.” He says that he still can’t reconcile himself to “the shock of its ugliness.”

Fine tells us why he finds it ugly. He says,

The painting is filled with inconsistencies and bizarre compensatory moves. Its attitude can be summarized by a single square inch at the base of Amélie’s neck, where one finds eight colors in competition: orange, yellow, blue, white, teal, apricot, pale brown, and some black, as underdrawing.

He goes on,

Matisse takes every opportunity to disturb passages of chromatic balance. The red hair that connects with the green of Amélie’s temple? It’s interrupted by a few strokes of magenta, to increase the tension. The blue of the hat’s brim? A splash of teal agitates its roundness. While some of the color contrasts do articulate planar shifts, such as the candy-stripe lips (red for upper, pink for lower), many of the touches are arbitrary splotches that neither bolster a shape nor set another off. I have to imagine that Matisse was tickled by his decision to put a large tract of green in front of Madame’s face and, instead of extending it all the way to her throat, suddenly introduce a purple goatee.

He says,

The aspect of the painting that troubles me most, though, is the sleeve of Amélie’s dress. Fauvism was supposedly characterized by the phasing out of the Neo-Impressionist tache, or uniformly pointillist stroke—abundant in “Luxe, Calme et Volupté” and “The Port of Abail”—in favor of broader patches of color, but the green sleeve, with its cobra-headed cuff, is a creepy disturbance to the brushwork elsewhere. Compared with the thick smudges of white on the fan that Amélie is holding, or the broad, lush strokes of the background, the sleeve is fidgety. None of its marks seem to maintain their integrity for more than an inch or two without being fretted or spoiled. There’s a slight air of death around it, as if the arm is deteriorating in front of us.

This is good provocative criticism. Some of the descriptions make me smile, e.g., “chic fungus,” “anxious smear job.”  

But is Fine right? Is “Woman with a Hat” ugly? T. J. Clark, in his brilliant “Madame Matisse’s Hat” (London Review of Books, August 14, 2008; included in his great 2025 collection Those Passions), says no. He doesn’t say so expressly, but it’s implicit in his ravishing descriptions of the painting. Consider this passage:

What sort of dress is Parayre wearing? What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder? How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it? Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper? How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms? It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves. And the glove in the centre – close to us, apparently – is resting on a green vertical, capped with a curlicue of purple. Sometimes in the literature she is said to be sitting with her hand resting on the arm of a chair. I wonder. I see no other sign of chair-ness hereabouts, except maybe the blunt diagonal of blood red propping up Parayre’s elbow. She could as well be holding a metal-tipped cane, or a parasol. What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak? Is it a handkerchief? If it is, the material appears to be sticking to the glove as opposed to being held by the hand inside it. Or is it a great limp flower? But never has a shape been less like any specific botanical specimen. Presumably the strip of yellow, orange and red that crosses the body towards the bottom is meant as a belt. In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?

That “What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?” is inspired! Clark is amazed by the colors. He doesn’t dismiss them as “arbitrary splotches” as Fine does. Instead, he attempts to interpret them: 

All the same, some colours occur only once, at crucial junctures. Look at the purple curlicue I pointed to earlier, between the hand and cane; or the exact shade of green chosen for the bar of shadow (if that is what it is) across Parayre’s brow; or the kind of purpled mauve, more opaque and decisive than any of its many near relatives, that opens up the space at the front of her throat. The painter wants us to see the subtlety, and also the wilfulness, of his variations on a theme, or his seeing of different things in the same light; but then he also expects us to register the decisive leap out of the established scale. He wants us to notice, and to gasp at, his suddenly seeing how to fix, or transfix, a singular optical fact. Nothing will prepare us, or will have prepared the painter, for the final dab of yellow on the tip of Parayre’s nose – but the whole picture hangs on it. Nothing could be more hardworking, more investigative and empirical, than the way her mouth is drawn. First there were two plain strips of red and pink – bars at the top of an abstract ladder of colour, pink for the chin, green for the recession above it, pink again for the underlip, and flaring red for the upper one. But then this abstraction of sensuality had to be made into a particular mouth. A tentative, half-transparent line of greyed mauve was put over the red to the left, as if trying to inscribe on top of it more of a Cupid’s bow. And a bolder, more opaque dab of mauve was put next to the pink of the lower lip, giving the left side of the mouth a shape. And was this the point at which the amazing, inorganic green of the shadow under the nose was strengthened, so as to intensify the play of complementaries? Did the pear drop of yellow occur as part of this process? Was it maybe thrown up by the business of getting the other greens and yellows to keep the mouth – the mouth’s wounded sensuality – from running away from the rest of the face? (Of course the mouth runs away with the picture. The picture turns on it. But for that very reason it had to be held down, and held back. It had to be intensely, naively correct.)

I love that “Nothing will prepare us, or will have prepared the painter, for the final dab of yellow on the tip of Parayre’s nose – but the whole picture hangs on it.” Clark is clearly entranced by this painting. He says he finds it both “chilling” and “exhilarating.” 

Clark mainly focuses on Madame Matisse’s face and body. Of the hat, he says,

The hat is splendid, but slightly crushing. It casts an implacable green shadow straight along Parayre’s forehead, and its blue all but annihilates the red of her hair. But the hat is abstract: the painter does not seem interested in making its extravagance palpable.

Fine accords more significance to the hat than Clark does. He sees it as the embodiment of Matisse’s “project.” He says, 

In “Femme au Chapeau,” at least a third of the composition is chapeau—and this particular hat is more of a mangled fruit basket, in which nothing is decipherable. The purple tongue sticking out of the top might belong to an iris, and the lobes of reddish orange could be an apple, but they likely aren’t. We’re looking through the eyes of someone who doesn’t want to actually see the hat. Matisse’s project was to wrench the appearance of things, particularly their colors, away from reality, and to let them entertain a new internal correspondence guided by his expressive whims.

Fine calls the hat “a mangled fruit basket.” Clark calls it “a crazy bird’s nest of pleasures and promises.” Both images wonderfully express the sensuousness that, for me, is the essence of this great painting. 

Postscript: The above illustration is Henri Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905)

Love Rekindled, Subscription Renewed

Illustration by Diego Mallo

Is there life without The New Yorker? Yes, of course, but it’s a pallid, diminished life. 

And so today, after a long month of no New Yorkers, I renewed my subscription. Gradually I’ll begin to blog about the magazine again, maybe not every issue, just the pieces that really grab me. 

I’m still angry at Trump for trying to crush the Canadian economy. Nevertheless, there are many admirable aspects of American life. The New Yorker is one of them. I was crazy to think I could live without it.

Postscript: Cassandra Wilson 1955 - 2026

Cassandra Wilson (Photo by Hiroyuki Ito)

I see in the Times that Cassandra Wilson has died. She’s one of my favorite jazz singers. What a voice! Low and smoky. Gary Giddins, in his New Yorker review of her superb 2008 album Loverly, said this:

Wilson has always thrived on rhythmic complexity, but her best work, including “Loverly,” balances it with melodic, harmonic, and verbal nuances that transform evergreens into personal deliberations, frequently underscored with an ironic eroticism. 

Giddins identified three of her attributes as a singer: “the husky timbre, which favors her lower register; an affinity for melodic embellishments replete with sighs and moans; and a canny back-of-the-beat rhythmic attack.”

I’d add a fourth: interpretive genius. Her renditions of “Skylark,” “I’m Old Fashioned,” “Lover Come Back to Me,” “Last Train to Clarksville,” “Wichita Lineman,” “O Sole Mio,” “Black Orpheus,” to name just a few, are brilliant. Her version of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” is magic. Once heard, never forgotten. She’s gone now – way too soon. Her albums will live on. She joins Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald as one of the greatest jazz singers of all time. 

July 20, 2026 Issue

The pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are:

1. Taran Dugal’s “Bar Tab: Folk.” Here’s a sample: 

The guests ordered the Mangalorean, named after the chef Jay Kumar’s birthplace, an Indian city on the Arabian Sea: a sublime, sweet, velvety mix of rum, pineapple, lime, and coconut cream infused with amchur, a tangy spice made from unripe mangoes. 

2. Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Fro-Yo Fever.” Here’s a taste:

You’ll do far better if you walk to Eighty-eighth and Madison and dip into the small, cool Madison Fare, a specialty-foods-and-candy storefront opened, in 2022, by the chef Amin Kinana, whose frozen-yogurt creations are, by my estimation, unreserved works of art. The yogurt itself is dense and almost puckeringly sour, and oh, my God, the toppings. They’re some of the most spectacular toppings I’ve ever encountered, an array of ritzy, globe-spanning garnishes that evoke the posh worldliness of peak-era Dean & DeLuca: snowy cubes of Turkish delight, cinnamon-dusted pecans, bitter cocoa nibs, pistachio knafeh, vibrant edible flowers, honey on the comb, actual honest-to-goodness raspberry coulis.

Photo by Lanna Apisukh, from Helen Rosner's "Fro-Yo Fever"

3. Dan Chiasson’s “One Last Thing,” a review of Franz Wright’s posthumous Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments. Chiasson writes,

Celan’s shattered “neversongs” taught Wright important elements of his own style: the lines narrowing as they approach silence, like water disappearing down a drain; the clauses and multisyllabic words split like cordwood by line breaks; the pressurized neologisms picking up where available vocabulary runs out of road; the rich, sometimes asphyxiating details that make a beeline into the senses.

4. Zachary Fine’s “Go East,” a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition “Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy.” Fine’s commentary on the paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme is excellent. Here’s a sample:

Gérôme is the rare artist who’s easy to like and to hate. Every painting is a model of academic crispness and polish, filled with visual cues and prearranged emotional payoffs. “The Snake Charmer,” on loan from the Clark, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, shows a naked boy wrapped in an enormous snake while an old man plays a flute. We’re brought into the scene via the boy’s illuminated buttocks, and conducted to the background, where a crew of ten soldiers gawk at the spectacle. To the right, there’s a guy with a beatific smile who seems to be enjoying more than the snake, an enormous gun propped vertically between his legs. Tabulate the number of stiff objects in the painting (gun, stick, flute, sabre, etc.) and you’ll see that the whole thing is a festival of phallic abundance. Just in case you forget to feel aroused, Gérôme reminds you to.

And another:

How do we account for the beauty of “Bashi-Bazouk” (1868-69)? The subject is just a man with a colorful headdress. Bashi-bazouks were a feared paramilitary outfit in the Ottoman Army, known for cracking skulls, and yet the sitter is a paragon of calm, not violence. He’s almost certainly a civilian whom Gérôme put in a costume. There’s a rifle on his shoulder, but it’s not shooting anytime soon; if anything, the mouth of the gun feels like a chimney inside the painting, letting out invisible puffs of psychological smoke. All the exquisite details—the man’s glowing salmon-pink tunic, the cherrylike tip of his headdress, the fluffy tassels—are an excuse for pure visual stimulation. 

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk (1868-69)

Rachel Aviv's New Book "You Won't Get Free of It"

I see in the Times that Rachel Aviv has a new book out – You Won’t Get Free of It. It’s a collection of Aviv’s New Yorker writings, including her unforgettable piece on the revelations by Alice Munro’s youngest daughter that she'd been sexually abused by her stepfather as a child, and that Munro stayed with the abuser even after he was convicted of the assault. That piece, from which the book takes its title, is one of the most rigorous dissections of family trauma that I’ve ever read. The Times’ reviewer, Melanie Thernstrom, asks, “Can a profile of the writer Alice Munro and her troubled family life be as rich, as complicated, as real as Munro’s own stories are?” She answers,

The stunning title essay in Rachel Aviv’s new collection, “You Won’t Get Free of It,” shows it can. Munro’s stories often feature family secrets that are hiding in plain sight, glimpsed and forgotten, divulged and disavowed. Aviv reveals the shocking autobiographical root of this motif: Munro’s second husband, Gerry, abused her youngest daughter, Andrea, starting when she was 9. (He steadfastly maintained that his stepdaughter was a “Lolita” who had a crush on him.) When Andrea finally told Munro as a young adult, her mother stayed with Gerry, sacrificing her relationship with her daughter.

Yes, the piece is stunning. I was stunned by it when I read it in The New Yorker (see my post here). It’s a meticulous, sensitive, brilliant analysis – well worth preserving between hard covers. 

July 6 & 13, 2026, Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is William Finnegan’s absorbing “No Return.” It’s an account of the trial of Thomas Plamberger, held in February of this year, at the Innsbruck Regional Court, in western Austria. Plamberger was charged with homicide by gross negligence in the death of his girlfriend, Kerstin Gurtner, during an attempt to climb Grossglockner, Austria’s tallest mountain. 

I like reporting pieces about trials. This Plamberger case is a strange one. What makes it strange is the trial procedure. Finnegan calls it “oddly simple” and he’s right. Perhaps it’s too simple. There’s a judge, a prosecutor, a defendant, and a defense lawyer – the four basic elements of almost any civilized trial. But the judge in this case, Norbert Hofer, who is a specialist in “mountain, avalanche, climbing, cable-car, and ski accidents,” appears to have imposed on himself a curious limitation. He wants to run the trial in a single day. That is, he wants to hear all the evidence, render his verdict and, if necessary, impose sentence all in one single day. Why the rush?

The second weird aspect of this trial is the way the evidence is presented. Witnesses are not sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It seems the judge does most of the questioning. Sometimes his questions were not as probing as they should’ve been. At one point, Finnegan writes,

There were many disturbing parts of Kerstin’s story left unpursued. The autopsy had yielded an official cause of death: hypothermia. There were signs of a viral infection, and she had taken ibuprofen. But nothing was said about her injuries, even though Thomas had mentioned them. Mathias had described bloodstains. Whose? From what wound? Why had Thomas and Kerstin taken the Stüdlgrat? That was a central question, never asked. Where were their headlamps after midnight? Extreme cold drains batteries, but at least one headlamp was back on at 1:30 a.m. How did Kerstin end up where she was found? Did Thomas lead her there or find her there? Why on earth was she still wearing her backpack?

There were many disturbing parts of Kerstin’s story left unpursued – why? A young, inexperienced climber was left on a brutal mountain to die. Every effort should be made to determine what happened. A trial is a search for truth in a welter of contradictions and inconsistencies. That’s what makes them so fascinating. But in this case, inexplicably, the judge seemed to be in a hurry. Yes, in the end, he zeroed in on the most telling pieces of evidence – Plamberger’s failure to turn back when the weather turned nasty, his failure to make an emergency call, his leaving Gurtner tied to a near-vertical gray rock on a steep part of the mountain – and found Plamberger guilty. But his sentence – a five-month suspended sentence and a fine of nine thousand six hundred euros – was woefully inadequate. 

Finnegan, in his piece, does the job that Judge Hofer should’ve done. He methodically reviews all the evidence. His point about the bivouac bag strikes me as particularly damning: 

Why didn’t Thomas unpack the bivouac bag from her backpack, the thermal blanket? His explanation was that he’d forgotten in the stress of the moment: “I didn’t even think about the bivouac bag.” He added, “I don’t know why she didn’t say anything to me about it.” So the oversight was her fault. She was hypothermic, but she should have said something.

Based on Finnegan’s report, the evidence overwhelmingly points to Plamberger’s gross negligence. He should’ve been sentenced to time in prison. Instead, he received a love tap from a judge who was part of the Austrian climbing fraternity.

Christoph Niemann's Jazzy Cityscapes

I love this drawing by Christoph Niemann. I first saw it in the June 7 & 14, 2025, New Yorker, in a feature titled “Sketchbook: An Artist’s View of New York City.” To me, it’s one of the most original, beautiful, arresting artworks the magazine has ever published. I love the semi-abstract way the city is evoked – exquisite vertical and horizontal strokes of purple and gray ink saturating brilliant white paper. It’s a new form of drawing, is it not? It seems spontaneous, I could be wrong. Maybe it took days or even weeks to complete. But it has the look of fluidity, spontaneity, jazz. Yes, that’s it. It’s the visual equivalent of jazz. 

Niemann’s “Sketchbook” collection includes several other drawings that are almost as good, e.g., the marvelous green-and-gray “Scaffolding in lower Manhattan” and the stunning gray-and-white “Downtown Brooklyn.” But for sheer visual pleasure (arousal of eyesight), that gorgeous purple-gray-white cityscape can’t be beat. 

10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #2 Geoff Dyer's "Poles Apart"

Photo by George Steinmetz, from Geoff Dyer's "Poles Apart"

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is Geoff Dyer’s superb “Poles Apart” (April 18, 2011). 

In this great piece, Dyer tells about his visit to two remote land-art sites – Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field,” near Quemado, New Mexico, and Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake, Utah. He structures his piece in two parts with an “Intermission” in between, consisting of four brief notes. 

The first part, titled “New Mexico,” describes Dyer’s “Lightning Field” experience. He’s at the site with his wife Rebecca, plus four others – Steve, Anne, Ethan, and Cristina. Here’s the first paragraph:

We came to a place that seemed like nothing much: a homesteader’s cabin and a windmill, in the middle of a vast nowhere. The windmill must have been turning, because the wind was sprinting across the plateau. The sky was not just clear or blue. It was as if we’d ended up in a future where there was no atmosphere, no sky—nothing to insulate earth from cosmos. Scrub extended into the distance and in the distance were mountains, but even the things that were near were far off. The land was camouflage-colored, the dust reddish brown. Near the cabin but still quite distant, almost invisible, were sticks stuck randomly in the ground—some in the far distance as opposed to the near distance, but none in the very far distance, where we could not have seen them even if they had been there.

I find that an appealingly weird beginning – almost as if Dyer is pretending to be an alien from outer space, trying to make sense of this strange place where he’s landed. He’s divested himself of all preconceptions, all prior knowledge. “We came to a place that seemed like nothing much: a homesteader’s cabin and a windmill, in the middle of a vast nowhere.” Seemed – key word. What are those sticks stuck in the ground? Dyer’s next paragraph brings us closer:

The air was thin, cold; the sun was hot on our faces. When the wind subsided, as it did every few minutes, it was still and quiet. As we walked toward the sticks, it became clear that there were more of them than we’d realized, though it was difficult to say how many, because many were hard to see and some were not seeable at all, and it is probably only in retrospect, once we understood that their being invisible was part of their function, that we knew they were there. The sticks, it became evident, once we got close to them, were not sticks but poles: polished steel, shining in the sun, three times my height, and as sharply pointed as javelins. They were two inches in diameter and cold to the touch. If they had been wooden sticks, they could have been stuck there thousands of years ago, but because they were stainless steel they were obviously of more recent provenance. Hundreds of years from now they would still gleam like the promise of a future.

What are these poles? What’s their purpose? Do they have meaning? Where are we? Dyer still hasn’t named the place. He and his companions convene at the cabin:

I was the last man in and could see the other members of our expedition sitting on the wooden porch in wooden rockers and on wooden benches, getting drunk on champagne, watching me walk toward them. It was the kind of hut you see people inhabiting in photographs from the nineteen-thirties by Walker Evans. What had seemed noble but squalid then seemed idyllic now, a boutique hotel, practically, especially with the champagne and laughter.

There’s that word “seemed” again. I love the infusion of champagne and laughter into the narrative. It comes as a relief. These guys are human! The reference to Walker Evans made me smile. Dyer is a fan of his work (see his brilliant The Ongoing Moment), and so am I. 

In the evening, Dyer continues to observe the poles. He writes,

As the sun began to drop toward the horizon, the poles sprouted shadows and the tips sparkled as if stars were perched on them. There were so many competing perspectives that they complicated each other and cancelled each other out. The poles were still slender, but they’d acquired bulk, solidity. There were far more of them than we had thought, and it became obvious that they were not scattered randomly but had been planted in rows. If you positioned yourself next to one and looked past it, you could see a dozen more, glowing, like a fence that let everything through—everything being the sunlight and the wind. The sun was sinking fast and everything began to change. The silver poles glowed goldly. There was a clear demarcation now between the area where there were poles and the area where there were none, even though the poles were arranged so sparsely as to have made the distinction imperceptible at first.

For the first time, Dyer mentions religion: “There was a sense—all the more palpable in such a remote and empty place—of something gathering. Absence had given way to presence. We were in the midst of what may once have been considered a variety of religious experience.”

The next two paragraphs are among my favorites of the piece:

The sky blackened after only a few minutes and we retreated indoors. We ate quesadillas and drank dark wine and looked at the flames of the pellet-burning stove as if it were a television. The vastness outside made the interior of the cabin seem the coziest place on earth, like an igloo.

Later, we went outside again, into the huge night. The poles were gone, but we knew they were there. The sky was nothing but a dome of stars. We were no strangers to the firmament, but none of us had seen anything like this. The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away. The constellations were complicated by passenger jets, blinking planes, flashing satellites. It was like rush hour in the era of interplanetary travel. The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight.

That “The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away” is inspired. The last line – “The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight” – is among the most beautiful that Dyer has ever written.

Next morning, at sunrise, “the tips of the poles began to twinkle.” And then, as the sun emerged into view, “the poles stood stark and golden, even more sharply defined than they had been the evening before.” Dyer considers their meaning:

Places like Stonehenge had been designed with the solstice in mind, may even have been celestial calendars, attempting to synch man’s experience on earth with the heavens. None of that was relevant here. The placement of poles referred to nothing other than itself. Thousands of years of study would confirm that there was no intended relation between the poles and the equinox, the transit of Venus, or lunar eclipses. What was here was entirely man-made and appealed only to man.

I relish that last line. Dyer is grappling with the meaning of the place. At this point, he drops the “seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees” approach and names the place he’s experiencing:

We were—as many of you will have guessed by now—near Quemado, New Mexico, at “The Lightning Field,” by Walter De Maria (completed in 1977). The answer prompts another question—why the subterfuge of inconceivable ignorance?—which can best be answered with further questions. Most visitors who come to see De Maria’s masterpiece these days know roughly what they are in for. But what if we came to “The Lightning Field” and had to try to work it out for ourselves, with no art-historical backup? Asked about the consequences of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai is said to have replied, “It’s too soon to tell.” That’s the response that comes to mind when pondering the significance of the great land-art projects of the late nineteen-sixties and seventies.

The key word here, for me, at least, is “response.” Dyer is trying to get at how he responds to “The Lightening Field.” He’s working through his responses:

There’s a lot of space, but, even as a figure of speech, there’s no room for God. “The Lightning Field” offers an intensity of experience that for a long time could be articulated only—or most conveniently—within the language of religion. Nothing about “The Lightning Field” prompts one to genuflect. Rigorously atheistic, geometrically neutral, it takes the faith and the vaulting promise of modernism into the wilderness. Part of the experience of coming here is the attempt to understand and articulate these responses.

Near the end of the “New Mexico” segment, Dyer describes how he and his companions accessed the “Lightning Field” site:

You leave your cars at Quemado and are taken up, in a van, at two-thirty in the afternoon. The drive takes half an hour, so you arrive at the least impressive time of the day. As we approached, a groan of disappointment swept through our party: we didn’t know exactly what we were expecting, but we expected more. And then you get it, but gradually, in an experience of space that unfolds over time. A narrative is at work.

“An experience of space that unfolds over time” is an excellent description of Dyer’s response to “The Lightning Field.” His writing enacts it. 

The next section of “Poles Apart” is called “Intermission.” It consists of four brief notes on landscape. In Note 1, Dyer remembers an area in a recreation park called the Hump, where he played when he was a kid. He says, “It was the first place in my personal landscape that had special significance.”

In Note 2, he considers how certain places in the landscape “develop a special quality.” He offers the example of a piece of land that becomes a fertility site, how it eventually falls into disuse and ruin, and how, even as a ruin, it retains “what D. H. Lawrence called ‘nodality.’ ” This idea of nodality appears again in the piece’s third section on the “Spiral Jetty.” 

In Note 3, Dyer remembers a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he saw a painting by Elihu Vedder called “The Questioner of the Sphinx” (1863), showing “a dark-skinned traveller crouched by the head of a sphinx that emerges from the sand in which it has been submerged for centuries.” Dyer describes it as “an early depiction of the post-apocalyptic world: one could easily imagine that it’s not the head of the sphinx poking above the sand but the torch of the Statue of Liberty, “Planet of the Apes” style.” He says, “We study the painting closely: a depiction of the effort to work out what certain marks on the landscape mean; what they are trying to tell us; what we go to them for.” 

Note 4 tells about D. H. Lawrence’s experience of New Mexico – “ ‘the greatest experience from the outside world’ that he had ever had.” Note 4 functions as a segue to Part 2 of “Poles Apart” – “Utah.” Dyer writes,

In the American West you can travel hundreds of miles and calculate your arrival time almost to the minute. We turned up for our rendezvous in Quemado at two o’clock on the dot. From Quemado, we drove four hundred and sixty miles to Zion, Utah, and got there exactly in time for our dinner reservation at eight-thirty. Our itinerary was as precise as De Maria’s measuring.

From Zion, we were going to drive north to the “Spiral Jetty.”

Part 2 differs conceptually from Part 1. In Part 1, Dyer’s focus is on the experience of “The Lightning Field.” The journey to the site is secondary and is covered in a few lines near the end of the piece. In contrast, Part 2 is a road trip that ends at “Spiral Jetty.” Dyer writes,

We drove north—Rebecca and I—toward Salt Lake City. No need for a compass. Everything screamed north: the gray-and-white mountains looming Canadianly in the distance, the weather deteriorating by the hour. Opting for directness instead of scenery, we barrelled up the featureless expanse of I-15. Most of what there was to see was traffic-related: gas-station logos, trucks the size of freight trains, snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder. Then Salt Lake City, doing its level best to come and meet us before we got anywhere near it—and reluctant to say goodbye even when we were well beyond. 

That “snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder” is inspired! I read it fifteen years ago when the piece appeared in The New Yorker. It’s stayed with me ever since. Every time I see a piece of tire on the road, I think of Dyer’s vivid phrase – “snakeskin shreds of tire.” 

They spend the night in Ogden, Utah. Dyer rereads Lawrence’s essay on Taos, New Mexico. He quotes a passage which begins “Taos pueblo still retains its old nodality.” Dyer comments, “Like Vedder’s painting, this bit of writing—analytical, hypnotic, profound—tells us much about the power that some places exert. In their different ways, both De Maria and Smithson were attempting to create nodality.”

The next day, Dyer and Rebecca continue their pilgrimage to “Spiral Jetty.” Dyer writes,

We had been given enigmatically precise directions on how to find the “Spiral Jetty”—“Another .5 miles should bring you to a fence but no cattle guard and no gate”—only to find that the route was discreetly signposted. The gravel road was corrugated, washboarded. We jolted and rattled at fifteen miles an hour, past calves the size of big dogs, and cows the size of cows, all of them black and resigned-looking. The sky slumped over a landscape that gave constant reminders of Britain, that Dartmoor feeling of worn-down ancientness. Seagulls, too. Wordsworth might have had this place in mind when he coined the phrase “visionary dreariness.” Suddenly, there was a single brown cow and, to the south, in a gap between low, dull hills, a pale glow. Light bouncing off the salt flats? That was where we were headed.

We drove more and more slowly as the potholes and trenches increased in width, depth, and frequency. The road continued to deteriorate until it finally gave up any claims to being a road. We left the cocoon of the car and began walking. There’d been no signs for a while, but there were, allegedly, three things to look out for as markers: an abandoned trailer, an old Dodge truck, and—interestingly—an amphibious landing craft. No sign of any of them. But that glow we’d noticed earlier? It wasn’t just the reflection on the lake; the sky itself was brightening. To our left, the lake looked congealed, like a dead ocean on a used-up planet. There was a faint smell of sulfur. It was the kind of location that might have been scouted for the closing scenes of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” where the shining sea turns out to be just a further extent of desolation. Protruding from the lake’s edge were the remains of some kind of enterprise, long since aborted. Was that the “Spiral Jetty”? If it was, then it was in far worse shape than we’d anticipated, not exactly a spiral and barely a jetty at all. I remembered that there had recently been a certain amount of debate on this score: whether to try to preserve the jetty, to raise it up and stop it from disappearing again, or just to leave it to its own devices, to gracefully decay and commend itself to the shallow-looking deep. But, no, it couldn’t be that far gone. We kept walking in that state of foiled uncertainty: had we already had the experience we were eagerly anticipating?

No. Because there it was, a ring of black rocks—not white, and far smaller than expected, but exuding unmistakable “Spiral Jetty”-ness.

I’m tempted to keep quoting. I think I will. This is an eminently quotable piece:

We walked toward the circles of stone and could see that these circles were actually part of an unbroken spiral. We were no longer coming to the “Spiral Jetty.” We were at the “Spiral Jetty,” waiting for the uplift, the feeling of arrival—not just in the getting-there sense but in the way Lawrence experienced it at Taos Pueblo. And it sort of happened. The weather had been quietly improving. The sky, in places, had turned from lead to zinc. Patches of blue appeared. And now, for the first time that day, the sun came out. There were shadows, light, a slow release of color.

We clambered down to the jetty—there was no path—through a slope of black rocks, where someone had fly-tipped an exhausted mattress. The jetty extended in a long straight spur before bending inward. The water was plaster-colored, slightly pink, changing color as it was enfolded by the spiral, at its whitest in the middle of the coil.

Dyer’s response to “Spiral Jetty” is fascinating. He says,

Compared with Angkor and the Pyramids, the jetty has aged at the rate of housing projects put up in a hurry. It had existed for only forty years and already it looked ancient. Which, actually, is the best thing about it. It’s fast-tracked to become a contemporary incarnation of Vedder’s sphinx. “The Lightning Field” looks perpetually sci-fi; in next to no time the “Spiral Jetty” had acquired the bleak gravity, the elemental aura, of prehistory. 

He invokes Lawrence’s notion of nodality:

The sky continued to open up. With the sound of birds and lapping water, it was lovely now—in a subdued, melancholy sort of way. It felt desolate, but this was not a place of abandoned meaning. It had retained—or generated—its own dismal nodality.

“Poles Apart” shows Dyer extracting meaning from two great works of land art – Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field” and Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty.” It’s one of his best essays. 

Postscript: “Poles Apart” is included in Dyer’s excellent 2016 collection White Sands. Part 1 “New Mexico” is titled “Space in Time”; Part 2 “Utah” is titled “Time in Space.”

Tables for Two Tango: BOOM!

Photo by David Williams, from Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: Zauo"

Hannah Goldfield and Helen Rosner are essentially positive critics. They love writing about great restaurants. They rarely write about bad ones. But when they do, look out! They pull no punches. It’s fun to see them in vinegary mode. How do they express distaste? We shall see. Today, I’ll consider two of their most acid reviews – Goldfield’s “Zauo” (November 26, 2018) and Rosner’s “La Boca” (November 9, 2025). 

What do I mean by “acid”? Try this zinger: “Muddy-tasting flounder sashimi had a texture that might be best described as ‘rigor mortis.’ ” That’s from Goldfield’s review of Zauo, a Japanese restaurant in Manhattan, where diners catch their own fish from indoor tanks before having a chef prepare it on the spot. She writes, 

No matter how you feel about eating fish, eating at Zauo is a disaster. Where to begin? The endearing Japanese ritual of restaurant staff emphatically greeting all customers feels perverted here: every time someone catches a fish, employees are required to cheer, chant, and strike a taiko drum, resulting in an endless dystopian cacophony.

She catches a rainbow trout (“I grimaced as it flopped around, taking its last breaths, in the net used to scoop it out of the water”). The kitchen prepares it. Here’s her description of the result:

Did it have “a simple flavor with a touch of sweetness”? It was hard to say after half of it had been simmered in soy sauce to a bony mush, the other half grilled in salt until chewy and served with its head still on, propped up with a wooden stake like a Big Mouth Billy Bass about to sing. 

Goldfield’s concluding paragraph makes me smile:

Not even the supplementary appetizers and sides offered solace: edamame was slimy and saltless; a pile of seaweed salad arrived, for some reason, atop a bed of droopy green lettuce. If Zauo has one redeeming quality, besides a cheerful and accommodating staff, it’s the bathrooms. There are water tanks here, too—atop beautiful Toto toilets, with blissfully heated seats.

The staff and the toilet seats – these are Zauo’s only redeeming features. 

The tagline of Helen Rosner’s “La Boca” review is “The Argentinean chef Francis Mallmann is notorious for his love of cooking over open flames. With his New York début, he fizzles out.” How does he fizzle out? Rosner tells us:

Maybe it’s the lack of heat: La Boca is beautiful, and expensive, and charismatic, but it is also very bad. I ate there on three occasions, marvelling each time at the gulf between the appealing scene in the dining room, which offers live music at dinnertime and floods of sunlight during lunch, and the astonishing insipidity of what was on my plate. Virtually every dish was a disappointment, sometimes disconcertingly so. Empanadas, an essential avatar of Argentinean cuisine, arrive filled either with bland, greasy ground beef studded with slippery hunks of hard-boiled eggs, or with an oregano-infused Vermont cheddar that congeals almost immediately into a waxy blob. Their appeal is marginally lifted by an accompanying llajua sauce, which I know as a fiery, chile-based Bolivian salsa fresca, but which here seems to consist of grated tomatoes—just grated tomatoes, with hardly any salt.

“Virtually every dish was a disappointment, sometimes disconcertingly so.” That’s an abnormally negative comment for Rosner to make. She usually finds something to praise. But not at La Boca. Here’s her next paragraph:

If you’d like a steak—this is an Argentinean restaurant, after all—the options reflect Mallmann’s characteristic preoccupation with scale. There is, for instance, a thirty-two-ounce rib eye for two hundred and thirty-five dollars, and something called the Tower, which a server hyped up as a dramatic vertical assembly of beef-tenderloin slices interleaved with crispy smashed potatoes. Upon arrival, it was the anticlimax of the year, the meat mushy and flavorless, the potatoes so thin as to be nearly translucent, with the chewy toughness of a dehydrated banana peel. And what a tower—three inches high, more broad than tall, slumping glumly in a puddle of oddly oily jus. The menu’s centerpiece is the parrillada, a traditional Argentinean mixed-grill platter, here featuring a carnivorous quartet of lamb chops, branzino fillets, giant prawns, and a plump New York strip served on the grates of a grand, urn-shaped tabletop grill (unlit, purely for the vibes). It’s a nice steak—a solidly nice one. I was so surprised, and relieved, to at last find something at La Boca that was straightforwardly unobjectionable, that I started to laugh, and then nearly aspirated my bite of meat and choked to death, though I can’t fault the restaurant for that. What I can fault it for is the fact that I had requested the meat medium rare—I’d had a pleasant little exchange about it with our server, who shared happily that that’s how the chef prefers it as well—but it arrived medium well. The rest of the parrillada was fine: the lamb chops tender, the branzino crisp-skinned, the prawns gigantic. Despite their technically precise preparation, everything in the array is grossly underseasoned, though the dish does come with a tiny cup of chimichurri, peculiarly un-garlicky and unsalty, and two tiled lines of Mallmann’s famous “domino potatoes.”

Rosner knows something about Mallmann’s domino potatoes. “I’ve cooked these potatoes before,” she says. “The potatoes’ unique shape is achieved by hacking the sides off each one to make a tight-cornered rectangular brick, then slicing it thinly and pressing down to fan the pieces out like Ricky Jay spreading a deck of cards. The potatoes are baked in oodles of clarified butter, until the outsides are golden, the corners of each thin slice crisping and curling, the interiors silken.” But that’s not what she’s served at La Boca. She writes, 

The version served at La Boca—which is available as a stand-alone side dish, as well, with a pouf of arugula—was barely recognizable as the same dish. The slices of potato were thick and pallid; instead of crisp they were sticky with their own starch. Another side dish that Mallmann is famous for—humitas, an Andean preparation of fresh sweet corn slow-cooked with milk—is served in a metal ramekin, which might be why it had the tinny undertones of creamed corn straight from the can. Does the great chef know what’s going on here? Does he like it?

“Mushy and flavorless,” “chewy toughness,” “grossly underseasoned,” “thick and pallid” – these are annihilating descriptions. And that last bit about the corn dish tasting like it came “straight from the can” is the coup de grâce. Rosner obliterates La Boca. And she’s not done:

Every single dish I tried was under-salted—a common complaint, it seems, as I noticed, on my final visit, that saltshakers had been set out on every table. Squat little silver sentries that clashed with the room’s motif of gold, they seemed like quiet admissions of defeat.

Bottom line: “I don’t want to go back to La Boca, and I can’t in good conscience recommend that anyone else eat there.” 

Goldfield and Rosner aren’t by nature harsh critics. They seek pleasure and love describing it. They prefer tossing bouquets to lobbing grenades. But on the rare occasion when they do the latter – BOOM! 

June 29, 2026 Issue

Colson Whitehead is primarily known for his novels. I realize that. He’s won two Pulitzers for them, so why not? But to me, he’s the writer of the brilliant The Colossus of New York (2003) – a vivid, lyrical, ruminative portrait of New York City. It’s one of my favorite books. I call it a portrait. But it’s actually unclassifiable. Its subtitle is “A City in Thirteen Parts.” That’s a pretty good capsule of the book’s essence.

Reading Julian Lucas’s absorbing profile of Whitehead in this week’s New Yorker, I was curious to see if he mentions Colossus. I didn’t have to wait long. Eight paragraphs in, Lucas writes, “More than twenty years ago, he described New York as a city that ‘multiplies when you’re not looking.’ ” Lucas doesn’t say so, but that’s a quote from Colossus: 

The New York City you live in is not my New York City; how could it be. This place multiplies when you’re not looking. We move over here, we move over there. Over a life-time, that adds up to a lot of neighborhoods, the motley construction material of your jerry-built metropolis.

Later in his piece, Lucas refers to the book expressly:

He pivoted to a book of essays, drawing its title, “The Colossus of New York” (2003), from one of the sci-fi monsters of his childhood movie nights. They’re playful, intimate sketches, each sentence an errant transmission from the city’s collective consciousness. In the essay “Port Authority,” Whitehead eavesdrops on the dreams of eager new arrivals; in “Morning,” on the unspoken indignities of the daily commute. “You are a New Yorker when what was there is more real and solid than what is here now,” he writes in the introduction. Later, he adds, “New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.”

Lucas goes on to say of Colossus, “The slim volume marked the beginning of a transformation, though several years passed before it ramified.”

Lucas concludes his illuminating piece with another quote from Colossus. He writes,

What’s a novel but a big score of details burgled from the world? And what’s a novelist but a fence, furnishing imaginary scenes with choice pieces of reality while obscuring their provenance? Over the years, it becomes clear that he does what he does not just for the money, or even for the thrill, but because it makes him part of the churn, a safe for the secrets of a city so quick to change that, as Whitehead writes in “Colossus,” “we can never make proper goodbyes.”

Lucas gives The Colossus of New York its due. I laud him for doing so.  

Postscript: Mark Singer 1950 - 2026

Mark Singer (photo by Neilson Barnard)

I see in the Times that Mark Singer has died: “Mark Singer, Longtime Writer for The New Yorker, Dies at 75.” The Times piece rightly says that he “extended the magazine’s franchise of rich reporting and witty prose about offbeat, complicated and quintessentially American characters.” It quotes New Yorker editor David Remnick: “He came out of the tradition of A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell and Calvin Trillin, which is to say he combined meticulous reporting and a very distinctive comic voice, which is extremely rare.” This is well put. 

Singer was also a master of the “Talk of the Town” story. See, for example: 

“Man vs. Mouse” (“He arranged ‘a Maginot Line of glue traps’ and set out a pizza box with a mouse-size hole and, inside, pieces of mozzarella and pepperoni surrounded by glue traps. This yielded maddening footage of Horace entering the pizza box and, moments later, sauntering out”); 

“Sleight of No Hands” [“Somehow—Jay’s biography, though it comes as close as any source to explaining the how of how, still leaves a reader at the intersection of belief and disbelief—he did magic (specialty: cups-and-balls), played several instruments (dulcimer, trumpet, flute), trick-shot with pistols, demonstrated exquisite ball control at skittles, danced the hornpipe on his leather-encased stumps, married four times, and sired fourteen children (proof, as Jay noted in Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, of ‘one fully operative appendage’)”];

“Bank Shot” [“When he arrived at Eyebeam, the immediate challenge was to center the logo of American Eagle Savings Bank on the cover of Theories of Business Behavior, by Joseph William McGuire (formerly in the collection of the Cloud County Junior College Library, of Concordia, Kansas)”];

“All-Nighter” (“Or does it refer to stuff that’s really, really hard to follow, especially when certain brainiacs insist on reading their turgid prose in a monotone that makes us doubt our very existence, because, Jesus, why doesn’t this guy in the gray turtleneck occasionally look up and, you know, smile?”);

“Risky Business” (“ ‘As soon as they started moving the bulls out of the pens into the bucking chutes, I could see Bushwacker go from docile to this’ – he pantomimed a bull pawing the ground – ‘and I thought, This bull knows’ ”).

Singer’s Mr. Personality (1989), one of the most beautiful collections of New Yorker writing ever published, contains twenty-five  of his “Talk” pieces, including such classics as “Yabba-Yabba, Doodle-Doodle” (in which Mr. Blatford memorably says, “You get your change from a change machine, put your dog in the Doggie Washer, do your yabba-yabba, doodle-doodle – you know, whatever you do while you’re waiting in a Laundromat – and then go home with a clean dog”) and “Pigeon Mumblers” (“Some Greenpoint pigeon mumblers who are familiar with Killer’s irascible moods say that if he really put his mind to it, he could probably hatch a baseball”).

In a future post, I’ll consider Singer’s literary legacy in more detail. For now, I just want to pay my respects to him. He's a New Yorker great. 

June 22, 2026 Issue

I know the focus of Ian Frazier’s “Talk of the Town” story in this week’s issue is the new ICE prison in Newark. He vividly describes it: 

Delaney Hall, a thousand-bed privately owned ice prison in Newark, is in the city’s industrial lowlands. Its address, 451 Doremus Avenue, makes it seem like an entity with physical limits, but that’s not how it looks to passersby, unless they are in the air, taking off from or landing at Newark Airport. Delaney Hall occupies tens of thousands of square feet enclosed in chain-link fencing that bulges outward like the front end of a whale, if you can imagine a whale also crisscrossed with razor wire. To a person at ground level, Delaney Hall seems to go on forever.

He describes the incredibly loud noise of the place, too:

When the trucks pass the crowd that is protesting the treatment of the detainees the facility now holds (it is the largest ice prison on the East Coast), some of the drivers honk in support. The horns are incredibly loud. Now and then, a driver will blast his horn for what seems like minutes. Amid the protesters facing off with the ice agents, the volunteers there to help the detainees, the banks of media cameras on tripods, the planes and helicopters overhead, the pipelines, train tracks, telephone poles, and the vast bulk of the prison itself, a long blast from a truck sounds satisfying and right.

But the part of the story that resonates with me is the last paragraph, when Frazier’s attention shifts from the prison and the protesters and the noise to the pond next to the prison visitor’s parking lot. He writes,

Doremus Avenue and the warehouses and tank farms and truck lots and junk yards along it are not far from the Passaic River. This is swampy Jersey, as opposed to hilly Jersey. Next to the prison visitors’ parking lot, a small catchment pond holds runoff. The lawn around the pond had been mowed without anybody picking up the trash beforehand. Two Canada geese and six gangly brown-suède goslings walked among the refuse, while in the near distance the truck horns and the protesters’ chants rose up. The geese had been there off and on for days.

Frazier has a keen eye for urban nature. In the midst of pandemonium, he notices the pond and the geese carrying on life as best they can. I think he draws inspiration from them. They’re a welcome relief from all the man-made chaos happening right next door. 

Postscript: David Hockney 1937 - 2026

David Hockney in his studio, 1978 (photo by Snowdon)

I see in the Times that David Hockney has died: “David Hockney, Who Restored the Human Form to Art, Dies at 88” (The New York Times, June 12, 2026). He’s perhaps best known for his “pool paintings,” e.g., A Bigger Splash (1967), Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool (1966), Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1971). Rebecca Mead says of them, “They capture a kind of carefree milieu that manages to be suggestively hedonistic while being almost Edenic in the loving treatment of male nudity” (“David Hockney’s Hidden Depths” (newyorker.com, June 16, 2026).

My favorite Hockney is California Art Collector (1964). Julian Bell, in his “More Light!” (The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2017), describes it brilliantly:

In California Art Collector (1964), it is the unfamiliar luxury of long-fiber carpets, as much as that of private swimming pools, that seems to have snagged his attention. Patches of wavy, watery brush rhythms ruffle the creamy primer at the base of the six-foot canvas, abutting other, denser paint patches—notably the chunky white and buff of an armchair fabric with floral patterning and the flamboyance of a carnation-pink wall. Between armchair and wall, we see the green of the collector’s dress surmounted by her head in profile, which turns to commune with a modernist sculpture while behind it another head, that of another sculpture, turns to face the opposite way.

Bell continues:

Patches abutting, or patches laid side by side on a warm accommodating ground: these are ways that Hockney’s pictures are often pieced together. They become floors on which rugs have been strewn. Hockney displays a childlike delight in setting one type of content against another. In California Art Collector, floral chintz against green velour, the three discrete color blocks of that modernistic snowman, the stage-prop rainbow wedged between wall and distant pool; or in Hockney’s subsequent pictures of California pools, grids against undulations, translucent splashes against dense sun-soaked blues.

(Unfortunately, no decent reproduction of California Art Collector exists on the internet.)

I also love Hockney’s landscapes, e.g., Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio (1980), Nichols Canyon (1980), and the astonishing Garrowby Hill (1998) for their ravishing color combinations and ingenious multipoint perspectives. 

David Hockney, Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio (1980)

Hockney was also a creative photographer. His photocollages are inspired! See, for example, his spectacular The Scrabble Game (1983). Lawrence Weschler said of it:

And the extraordinary thing about this collage is that it lends itself to that kind of second-guessing—it opens out onto that kind of storytelling. Indeed, it simultaneously tells a story and presents a group portrait. Dozens of hands, eyes, faces, a spinning board at countless angles: and yet at all times a recognizable picture of a group of three—implicitly four—individuals (five if you count the cat) engaged in an immediately recognizable activity. (“True to Life,” The New Yorker, July 9, 1984) 

In trying to determine just exactly what it is that draws me to Hockney, I return to Rebecca Mead’s word “hedonistic.” His pictures express pleasure – the pleasure of color (the "flamboyance" of that carnation-pink wall) and texture (that “floral chintz against green velour”) and light (those California pools, “grids against undulations, translucent splashes against dense sun-soaked blues”). 

David Hockney, The Scrabble Game (1983)

10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #3 Berton Roueché’s "Janine"

Illustration based on photo from hotelsafloat.com

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is Berton Roueché’s leisurely “Janine” (October 22, 1984). 

In this immensely enjoyable piece, Roueché travels to the heart of Burgundy aboard the passenger barge Janine. The hundred-and-sixty-mile trip takes six days. He starts in Lyon, goes up the river Saône, through the Canal de Bourgogne, and ends in Dijon. We meet Janine’s captain and crew. We meet the other passengers. We get a tour of the barge:

The Janine has an open forward deck (furnished with white iron garden chairs and matching parasoled tables), which opens into a red plush salon, a small bar, and a dining room with six tables, each of them seating four. Aft of the dining room (I later learned) is the galley, and aft of that, up some steep steps, is the pilothouse. The cabins are below— at the waterline, in fact—and all of them have names reflective of the region. I was assigned to Beaune. There were two small, head-high windows (with the river lapping almost to the sills), two narrow bunks, arranged foot-to-foot in an L formation, and a small closet. There was a plastic bottle of Evian mineral water on the washstand, a red rosebud in a vase on a shelf, and three framed reproductions of lifelike fruit and flower arrangements by Redouté on the walls. I stowed away my luggage and went back up on deck. Most of my fellow-passengers were already there, sitting or standing and chattering cocktail-party talk. Two or three idlers watched with interest from the street above the seawall and the quay. A pretty, dark-haired, blue-eyed, hugely smiling French girl (named Bernadette) passed among us with a tray of tall glasses of kir.

The trip gets underway:

We were moving. We had cast off and were sliding away from shore. The party chatter faltered. The Saône at Lyons is a beautiful river, and I stood and watched it reveal itself as we reached midstream and gently chugged upriver through a green allée, between orderly rows of leafy plane trees that lined the gray stone quays. Beyond the trees were rows of apartment houses—dusty yellow and faded orange, with tall windows flanked by faded blue shutters—in the formal style of the middle nineteenth century, and rising beyond the apartments were the delicate towers and spires and belfries of churches. The party chatter began again. We crept under a bridge. A racing scull appeared in the distance. It came skimming closer. And closer. And suddenly darted for shore, to sit there bucking and bouncing in our wake. The women from Michigan smiled and waved. The oarsman hunched his shoulders and looked away. The sky to the west brightened into a sunset blaze. A star came out. 

I love that detail about the racing scull. Roueché writes simply, but vividly – in the tradition of Chekov and Hemingway. Yes, he’s that good. His words call up pictures. Here’s his description of a pretty stretch of river between Tournus and Chalon-sur-Saône:

There was a feel of deep and peaceful country, but it was country ordered by man. The rows of plane trees, the poplar allées, even the patches of woods and the meadows of grazing sheep, had a look of arrangement, of traditional design. There were swans floating here and there along the riverbanks, geese grazing in the sheep meadows. A heron flapped from shore to shore. A flock of some cootlike ducks dived under our bow. A couple on horseback—a man and a woman in immaculate riding clothes—appeared on the left bank and cantered away on a path among the poplars. A village appeared on the right: thirteen stone houses, some long and low, some tall and thin, but all of them the color of yellowy autumn leaves, all of them with faded blue shutters, all of them roofed with rusty-black tiles—strung out in a tight little row behind a column of shapely plane trees, above a long stone quay.

The river journey features side-trips to a vineyard, an ancient abbey, a prestigious restaurant, an outdoor market. Sometimes, after the Janine ties up, Roueché goes for walks. Here, he walks Mâcon:

There were big wrought-iron planters spaced along the seawall, with geraniums and begonias in brilliant bloom. There was a large park with gardens and shade trees. Across the Saône I could see another old stone seawall and an orderly mass of forest. Mâcon is not a village. It is a town— an industrial town—with a population of almost forty thousand, and it has been an important river port for centuries. Walking under the trees and past the flowering planters, and looking out at the bright-green water, I thought of the river towns I had known at home, and their dingy and desolate waterfronts.

The meals are très French and très delicious. Day 2 of the trip, here’s dinner on the Janine:

It began with a soup: a mussel bisque. The main course was roast veal with a sauce au poivre. There was a green salad with a port-wine vinaigrette, and a selection of cheeses. Dessert was two Bavarian creams, apricot and vanilla, with a purée of whortleberries. With the roast we drank a Côte du Rhône. The white wine—golden green and smelling faintly of hazelnuts—was a Saint-Véran. When I went down to my cabin, I found a bedtime snack on my pillow: a chocolate thin-mint.

That "golden green and smelling faintly of hazelnuts" is very fine.

My favorite part of “Janine” is the last part, Day 6, when the barge enters the Canal de Bourgogne: 

We had come through half a dozen locks on the Saône, but they were modern locks, of generous size, lined with steel and equipped with great steel sluice gates that were opened and closed by a lockkeeper at a console in a control tower high overhead. The Canal de Bourgogne is a nineteenth-century canal, and its gates are operated by levers and wheels turned entirely by human weight and muscle. We crawled into a slot only inches wider than the Janine and with hardly a foot of clearance fore and aft. We sat for minutes deep down between two walls of dripping stone. There was the sound of rushing water. We began to rise. The earth slopes gently up to Dijon from the Saône at Saint-Jean-de-Losne. This was the first of twenty-two lifts, which would raise us a total of a hundred and ninety feet. We rose slowly, slowly, as slowly as an ancient freight elevator. My eyes came even with the top of the lock wall, with the top of an iron bollard. We kept rising. The lock-keeper’s house appeared, a small stone square with a red tile roof and a life preserver in a glass case. Above the door was a sign: “Écluse St.-Jean-de-Losne-Duon 29.4 km. St.-Jean-de-Losne 0 km.” We came gently to rest. The lockkeeper, a woman, was working a long iron lever. She was a burly figure in a long dress and a thick sweater. The canal stretched straight ahead, a boulevard of shining water lined with poplars, on a kind of causeway ten feet or more above the surrounding countryside. 

Roueché has breakfast. By the time he’s finished, the barge is moving into its second lock, Écluse Viranne. He can see the next lock in the distance. He says, “The towpath beckoned. It would be an easy walk.” He and several of his fellow-travellers leave the Janine, still sitting in the lock, and set off along the path. Roueché writes,

We walked in the dappled shade of the poplars. It was a countryside of plowed autumn fields and still, green pastures and scattered groves and flocking rooks and, far away, the clustered rooftops of a village. The canal was a deep, oceanic green. Its grassy banks were abloom with wildflowers: something blue that looked like chicory, something pink that looked like thistle, something yellow that looked like asters, and a delicate lavender flower that I had never seen before but somehow recognized on sight—an autumn crocus. We reached the next lock (Écluse Brazey) well before the Janine and walked on. 

Back on the Janine, Roueché goes through Écluse Beauregard and Écluse Longvic. The piece ends sensuously:

We passed a barge headed down-canal. It was a family barge—a load of gravel forward, and a cabin with white curtains at the windows just aft of the pilothouse. Its name was lettered on the stern: Espérance. We climbed through Écluse Romelet. There was a sudden rise of apartment buildings up ahead on the right. On the left were what looked like warehouses. The canal ran unchanged between its rows of trees, beside the grassy banks and the towpath. But the country was giving way. Beyond the apartments was a tract of identical little white houses with identical geranium gardens. Beyond the warehouses were storage tanks: “ESSO.” “TOTAL.” “MOBIL.” “ELF.” We climbed through Écluse Colombières. The canal still had its flanking trees, but the grassy banks had become a quay, and the towpath was now a street. Steep-roofed buildings rose up all around us. I became aware of a smell in the air. It was a pleasant smell, and a familiar smell. It was a smell I knew very well. But it was a smell I had never smelled in the open air before. And then I realized. This was Dijon. The smell was the smell of mustard.

A delectable conclusion to a delectable piece. Pure pleasure!