September 2, 2024 Issue

When I read a book review, I want to know two things: what the book's about and how it’s written. For me, the “how” is more important than the “what.” I’ll read a stylishly written book on almost any subject. These days, New Yorker reviewers rarely address form. The only exception is James Wood. Case in point is Kathryn Schulz’s “Living Under a Rock,” in this week’s issue. It’s a review of Marcia Bjornerud’s Turning to Stone. Schulz beautifully describes it: 

In its pages, what Bjornerud has learned serves to illuminate what she already knew: each of the book’s ten chapters is structured around a variety of rock that provides the context for a particular era of her life, from childhood to the present day. The result is one of the more unusual memoirs of recent memory, combining personal history with a detailed account of the building blocks of the planet. What the two halves of this tale share is an interest in the evolution of existence—in the forces, both quotidian and cosmic, that shape us.

This is the kind of book I’d be interested in reading. What is the writing like? Schulz offers a hint:

Bjornerud is a good enough writer to render all of this perfectly interesting. She has a feel for the evocative vocabulary of geology, with its driftless areas and great unconformities, and also for the virtues of plain old bedrock English. (“There is nothing to be done in bad Arctic weather but wait for it to get less bad.”) 

That’s it, that’s all she says regarding the book’s prose. Not even one extended quotation to give the reader a taste of Bjornerud’s style. 

The best New Yorker book reviewers – John Updike, V. S. Pritchett, George Steiner, Helen Vendler, Whitney Balliett, Janet Malcolm – were all great quoters. Now only James Wood continues the practice. All the rest are so in love with their own voices, they’d rather paraphrase than quote. It’s a great loss.  

Is Painting Describable?

Camille Pissarro, Cabbage Field, Pontoise (1873)

V. S. Pritchett, in his absorbing “Malraux and Picasso” (Lasting Impressions, 1990), said, “Painting and sculpture cannot be translated into words. One art cannot evoke another.” Is this true? I don’t think so. The easiest way to disprove it is to adduce T. J. Clark's wonderful art writings. Clark ingeniously explores difficult artworks. Here, for example, is an excerpt from his descriptive analysis of Pissarro’s Cabbage Field, Pontoise (1873):

Light is coming down from a whitened sky, pink just beginning to appear in it – coming from behind the hill (whose crest has a few houses just visible among trees), so that the hill is silhouetted, but with light humming in the foreground, flooding everywhere, muting the high silhouettes, picking out feathery edges of foliage on the lower trees and the plump leaves in the cabbage patch. There are three peasants in the fields: a woman with a basket, a man in blue and a further faint figure far back to the right in a shadowed clearing. The emptiness of the air above the field closer to us – the coloured emptiness – is a tour de force of illusion. The man in blue alerts us to the presence of a haze, almost a ground mist, of very light blue-purple all round him, seeping towards the woman with the basket. And there is a ghostly blue halo behind the tree above him. The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth. There are many such wonders. 

Things emerge from the evening light only gradually: it is the light that is striking, not the ghosts of trees. The edge of visibility is a world of its own. Push towards the unnoticeable in vision, therefore, and if necessary the unpaintable: that seems to be Pissarro’s self-instruction. Look at the dark leafless tree in the picture’s left foreground, drawn dark on dark against the hill and the house. How did Pissarro do it? How did he see it as paintable in the first place? Or look at the light caught in the trees on top of the hill, and the final flourish of touches that establish the sparser tree standing on its own between the houses, its dark greens scrawled liquid on pink. [“Strange Apprentice,” London Review of Books, October 8, 2020; retitled "Pissarro and Cézanne" in Clark’s excellent 2022 collection If These Apples Should Fall]

I love that passage. It expands my appreciation of Pissarro’s great art. But note that “How did Pissarro do it?” Clark acknowledges the difficulty of what he’s doing. Perhaps Pritchett is partially right; a one-for-one equivalence of painting and words may not be possible. But one art can certainly evoke the other. Clark’s brilliant, subtle writing shows the way.

In Praise of Journalism (Contra Dirda)

Michael Dirda, in his absorbing review of James Salter’s new novel All That Is, says, “Robert Phelps once told me that the true test of one’s devotion to a writer is a willingness to collect his or her journalism” (“‘The Glory of Certain Moments in Life,’” The New York Review of Books, June 6, 2013). I’ve never felt that way. For me, it’s the opposite: it’s a writer’s journalism that I prize; I have to force myself to read his or her fiction. The way I look at it, fiction is merely a tune-up for the creation of the really important stuff – journalism. For me, Hemingway’s 1933 Esquire piece “Marlin Off the Morro: A Cuban Letter” is one of the best things he ever wrote. The same goes for Mailer’s 1968 Harper’s article “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” Pritchett’s 1956 Holiday Magazine travelogue, “South America,” Brodsky’s 1986 New York Review of Books memoir “In a Room and a Half,” Nabokov’s 1972 Saturday Review essay, “Inspiration,” Zadie Smith’s 2008 New Yorker memoir, “Dead Man Laughing,” Seamus Heaney’s 1978 Irish Times essay, “Full Face,” Martin Amis’s 1993 New Yorker essay, “Don Juan in Hull,” Joyce Carol Oates’s 1987 Art & Antiques essay, “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings,” John Updike’s 1972 Horizon essay, “Remembrance of Things Past Remembered,” Margaret Atwood’s 2002 Globe and Mail piece, “Of Myths and Men.” I could go on and on. Far from being a “test of true devotion,” a great writer’s journalism is often the source of my deepest reading pleasure. 

Credit: The above portrait of Norman Mailer is by David Levine.

April 9, 2012 Issue

Over the years, The New Yorker has run a number of excellent critical pieces on Albert Camus, including A. J. Liebling’s “The Camus Notebooks” (February 8, 1964), John Updike’s “In Praise of the Blind, Black God” (October 21, 1972), and V. S. Pritchett’s “Albert Camus” (December 20, 1982). Now, Adam Gopnik’s “Facing History,” in this week’s issue, joins the distinguished list. It’s interesting to compare them. Liebling’s review is the most admiring (“He was not only a great writer but a great man, almost before he ceased being a boy”). Updike’s is the most analytical and, to me, the most interesting [“Technically, the third-person method of A Happy Death, frequently an awkward vehicle for alter egos (see the sensitive young man light his cigarette; now let’s eavesdrop on his thoughts), becomes the hypnotic, unabashed first-person voice of The Stranger”]. Pritchett’s piece is the most biting (“He was entangled in the fierce and barren quarrels about political and moral commitment during and after the Second World War, and allowed himself to appear as a hero of the Resistance from the beginning, though in fact he did not join it until eight months before the liberation”). Gopnik’s “Facing History” is the most normalizing (“Responsibility, care, gradualness, humanity – even at a time of jubilation, these are the typical words of Camus”). Gopnik says, “His watchwords were anxiety and responsibility.” Contrast this with Pritchett’s quotation from Patrick McCarthy’s biography Camus: “‘Anonymity’ and ‘amputation’ remain, McCarthy writes, ‘the watchwords of Camus’ art.’” For Updike, Camus’s watchwords were “Love, despair, silence, mother, nature.” I agree with Updike. The silence he refers to links with what Camus described as his “profound indifference.” Both Updike and Pritchett concentrate on Camus's indifference. Curiously, it appears to escape Gopnik’s notice.

Gopnik’s description of Camus as “the Don Draper of existentialism,” contrasts with Pritchett’s observation: “His famous novel L’Étranger (The Outsider) seemed to put the bleak halo of existentialism above his head, although, as he said and Sartre feelingly agreed, he was no existentialist.”

Gopnik appears to downplay Camus’s tuberculosis. He refers to it as merely “a bout of tuberculosis” (“he was a strong swimmer and, until a bout of tuberculosis sidelined him, an even finer football player”). However, Pritchett, in his piece, assigns Camus’s illness major significance. He says, “The tuberculosis seems to have been responsible for his euphoric excesses, his sexual promiscuity, his gallows humour, and his obsession with death.” He further comments: “At the age of sixteen, he had become tubercular. The disease never left him; it is at the heart of his ‘indifference,’ and the almost too vivid sense of the instants of hope.”

I crave stylistic analysis. Unfortunately, except for a brief description of the tone of Camus’s Combat editorials (“He struck a tone not of Voltarean Parisian rancor but of melancholic loft”), Gopnik provides very little of it. He seems much more interested in Camus’s ideas than he is in the way Camus expresses those ideas. But, as Gopnik himself points out, many of the principles that Camus believed in (e.g., liberty, equality, fraternity) weren’t new. It’s Camus’s unique way of expressing them that was new. That’s what I respond to when I read him, and want to understand. What I’m saying isn’t new either. It’s a variation on Alexander Pope’s clear-eyed remark, “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” For example, consider this line from Camus’s beautiful “Summer in Algiers” (1936):

And when, having suddenly interrupted the cadenced beat of the double paddle’s bright colored wings, we glide slowly in the calm water of the inner harbor, how can I fail to feel that I am piloting through the smooth waters a savage cargo of gods in whom I recognize my brothers?”

This is an expression of fraternity with his “brothers,” the Algierian youth, many of them Arab, with whom he grew up. All his life, he felt near them. But what delights me about this sentence is its surprising combination of "cadenced beat," "bright colored wings" and "savage cargo of gods." How did Camus conceive it? Liebling, in his excellent “The Camus Notebooks,” offers a clue. He points out that the spoken language of Camus’s people in Algiers “took over not only words but constructions from Italian and Spanish and, most of all, the colloquial Arabic of North Africa. Liebling says:

Camus savored and cherished this language; “Carnets” is full of examples affectionately jotted down, so the book has almost a bilingual flavor – lost, naturally, when it is turned into English. Camus had from the first – in addition to a remarkably pure, poetic French style, learned at school and from reading – a command of this street language of Algiers, learned in the street. That gave him an arresting change of pace.

I find this fascinating. That Camus's style is at least partially sourced in Algierian street language is a point well worth developing. Perhaps there's a study already in existence. If so, I would appreciate knowing about it.

Janet Malcolm's Chekhovian Ambiguity

I’m pleased to see that my favorite New York Times critic, Dwight Garner, has chosen Janet Malcolm’s Iphigenia in Forest Hills as one of his “top ten” books of the year (see “Dwight Garner’s Picks for 2011,” The New York Times Sunday Book Review, December 11, 2011). A substantial portion of the book appeared in The New Yorker (May 3, 2010). In his piece, Garner says:

Ms. Malcolm’s book, set in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, casts a prickly moral and intellectual spell. It’s about a young woman, accused of murdering her husband, who seems to be plainly guilty. Yet she wins the author’s, and our, sympathies. Ms. Malcolm puts her book’s animating enigma this way: “She couldn’t have done it, and she must have done it.” This book has the eerie elegance of a Chekhov short story.

That “eerie elegance of a Chekhov short story” is brilliant! Geoffrey O’Brien, in his illuminating review of Iphigenia in Forest Hills (“The Trial,” The New York Review of Books, April 28, 2011), also notes Malcolm’s Chekhovian approach to her subject. He quotes a statement made by Judge Robert Hanophy during Mazoltuv Borukhova’s trial (“Somebody’s life was taken, somebody’s arrested, they’re indicted, they’re tried and they’re convicted. That’s all this is”), which Malcolm uses as an epigraph to introduce the book, and says:

In opposition to this cut-and-dried dismissal of any residual impulse to probe deeper, she juxtaposes the words of a prospective, ultimately unselected juror: “Everything is ambiguous in life except in court” – an observation of a sort in which Malcolm’s books abound, posted like warning signs to the reader to beware of the astringent clarity of each separate element as it come sinto view. We want the elements to add up to a satisfying and coherent story. But as Anton Chekhov wrote – in a letter quoted by Malcolm in Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (2001) – responding to a reader who had complained of the writer’s having evaded a proper explanation of his protagonist’s motives: “We shall not play the charlatan, and we will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything.”

In support of O’Brien’s point, I would also refer to Malcolm’s description of the psychologist Igor Davidson, one of the few compassionate figures in the book:

Davidson introduced an element into the hearing that had been entirely absent from it: ambiguity. Alone among the participants, Davidson spoke as if he were in touch with life as it exists outside the courtroom, where everything isn’t always this or that, but can be both.

V. S. Pritchett, in his review of The Letters of Anton Chekhov (“A Doctor,” included in Pritchett’s 1979 essay collection The Myth Makers), quotes from a letter that Chekhov wrote to his friend and editor, Alexei Suvorin, attacking him for the anti-Semitic articles Suvorin published at the time of the Dreyfus affair and the trial of Zola. The quotation, which could serve as another epigraph for Iphigenia in Forest Hills, is as follows: “Zola is right, because the writer’s job is not to accuse or persecute but to stand up even for the guilty once they have been condemned and are undergoing punishment.”

Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #9: V. S. Pritchett's "A Form of Conversation"

V. S. Pritchett was a voracious, omnivorous, ingenious book reviewer. From 1952 to 1988, he wrote seventy “Books” pieces for The New Yorker. He reviewed everything – novels, stories, memoirs, diaries, studies, notebooks, travelogues, letters - on and on. I enjoyed his pieces immensely and looked forward to reading them in the magazine. The ones I relished most were his reviews of writers’ letter collections. The deep pleasure he took from exploring a thick volume of, say, Lord Byron’s Letters or Tolstoy’s Letters was readily apparent in the verve and piquancy of his prose. I want to include one of Pritchett’s letters reviews in my “Top Ten,” but I confess I’ve had difficulty choosing from such an embarrassment of riches. There are at least six candidates: “Two Bears in a Den,” a review of Tolstoy’s Letters (The New Yorker, August 21, 1978); “A Form of Conversation,” a review of “The Letters of Evelyn Waugh” (The New Yorker, December 22, 1980); “Turgenev” (The New Yorker, August 8, 1983); “Conrad” (The New Yorker, January 9, 1983); “E. M. Forster” (The New Yorker, April 2, 1984); “The Last Letters of Henry James” (The New Yorker, August 20, 1984). By the way, none of these six excellent reviews is found in Pritchett’s Complete Collected Essays (1991). In fact, of the forty-nine reviews that Pritchett contributed to The New Yorker in the period April 26, 1976 to March 21, 1988, only sixteen are included in the Complete Collected Essays. The Complete Collected Essays’ claim that “Collected here are all the literary essays V. S. Pritchett has written over his long and brilliant career” is incorrect. Pritchett’s Complete Collected Essays is glaringly incomplete.

In the end, I settled on “A Form of Conversation” as the representative Pritchett review on my “Top Ten” list. What decided me is the extraordinary “Easter sense” passage from one of Waugh’s letters that Pritchett quotes in his piece:

One must distinguish between uses of “new.” There is the Easter sense in which all things are made new in the risen Christ. A tiny gleam of this is reflected in all true art. Every work of art is thus something new.

I read that quote (thirty-one years ago!) and it carried straight into my memory. I’m not at all religious, but I’ve never forgotten it. I don’t agree with it. It’s a conservative view, positing that only art that’s continuous with tradition is “true art.” But in its expression – that “Easter sense in which all things are made new” – it’s incredibly beautiful. It’s a wonderful quotation, the clinching detail in a magnificent review.

Credit: The above artwork is by Fido Nesti; it appears in The New Yorker, January 7, 2008, as an “On The Horizon” illustration for the event “Eat, Drink & Be Literary,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Pritchett's Precision

In preparation for a post I’m planning called “Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 – 2011,” I’ve been rereading some of V. S. Pritchett’s work. Between 1949 and 1988, he wrote seventy New Yorker book reviews. They are among the glories of the art of book reviewing. I don’t think it’s correct to say, as Roger Angell said, that Pritchett “was not a stylist” (“Marching Life,” The New Yorker, December 22, 1997). I think he was a great stylist. Maybe what Angell meant is that he didn’t write fancily. And that’s true, he didn’t. His style was plain, but it was clear and sharp – “sharp as horseradish,” as he himself said about Chekhov’s humor (in his brilliant essay “A Doctor,” included in his 1979 collection The Myth Makers) – sharp in terms of both precision and pungency. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

On Camus: “His senses responded to the harsh mountain landscape, the stony plateau, and the desert that was another sea; to the clear sunlight, the brassy heat, and the seductive silence of the evenings. The deep sense of “indifference” in him responded to the indifference of nature, but not in a Northern, Wordsworthian way; there was nothing “deeply interfused” here. Each stone or tree was an object: his visual sense of the “things” of landscape is intense in all his writing. Mortality was a presence as unanswerable as a rock.” (“Albert Camus,” The New Yorker, December 20, 1982)

On Tolstoy: “He is the absolute patriarch. He toils as an artist, as a teacher, as a farmer, and in bed. His family toils for him. His wife obeys – and also learns from him the deadly habit of diarizing and counter-diarizing. His intellect growls away, and he exacts as much from himself as he exacts from others.” (“Two Bears in a Den,” The New Yorker, August 21, 1978)

On Byron: “Byron is a good letter writer because whether he is scoffing, arguing, or even conducting his business affairs, he has a half-laughing eye on his correspondent; although he can turn icily formal, he has mainly a talking style of worldly elegance and is spontaneously the half self of the moment, for not only he but everyone else knew the duality of his nature. The whole person can be deduced from what he dashingly offers. His character is a springboard from which he takes a dive into what he has to say about himself for the moment, bringing other people to half life in the splash.” (“Byron,” The New Yorker, June 2, 1980)

On Henry James: “The spell of the letters really lies in their idiosyncrasy. They are communings with himself as much as with friends. They are also talking letters. They are written in his dictating period, and he writes as one listening to his own voice as it leads him on, watching his words float on the air, and delighting in the studied mischief of his hesitations and parentheses. He always evokes the friend to whom he is writing. His enormous privacy flowers. His lonely room fills up with voices; he carries his friends down the happily rambling stream of consciousness.” (“The Last Letters of Henry James,” The New Yorker, August 20, 1984)

Lean, simple sentences composed of concrete, precise words that evoke vivid images and sensations – “stony plateau,” “brassy heat,” “his intellect growls away,” “his enormous privacy flowers,” “icily formal,” etc. - govern the style of the above-quoted passages, and are among the hallmarks of Pritchett’s brilliant way of writing. The sentence “Mortality was a presence as unanswerable as a rock,” in the Camus passage above, is exemplary of that clear, sharp quality I mentioned earlier.

Credit: The above photo of V. S. Pritchett is by Cecil Beaton; it appears in The New Yorker (December 22, 1997) as an illustration for Roger Angell’s “Marching Life."