May 10, 2010 Issue

The item in this week’s issue that I wish to discuss is Calvin Trillin’s “Incident in Dodge City.” No one is more exuberantly subjective in his writing than Trillin, except – and this is a big exception – when he writes his “Annals of Crime” pieces. When writing about crime, Trillin totally banishes “I” from his narrative. For example, in “Incident in Dodge City,” at no time does he actually say he went to Dodge City to cover the story. Of course, there is such a thing as inference, and I think it can be reasonably inferred from, say, Trillin’s description of Bonilla’s sentencing hearing, that he was actually there and that his description is based on personal observation. But it could also be the case that he’s working from transcripts and other second-hand reports. Such inference would be unnecessary, of course, if Trillin had chosen to let us know what he’s up to the way, say, Janet Malcolm does in her “Iphigenia in Forest Hills.” Another aspect of Trillin’s strict use of third-person narrative to tell his story is that the source of some of his quotations is unclear. Here’s the way Trillin typically writes quotation in the story: “‘In a sense, we have two communities,” Jim Sherer, a former mayor who is one of the people encouraging Hispanics to participate in the life of the city, said recently.” Who did Jim Sherer say that to? Calvin Trillin? Maybe, but it’s not clear. I compared Trillin’s approach to crime writing with the way Mark Singer, who also wrote some crime stories for the magazine’s “U.S. Journal” series, approached it. For the most part, Singer keeps himself out of sight and writes mainly in the third-person. But when he quotes someone who spoke to him, he doesn’t hesitate to say so. For example, here’s a passage containing a quotation in his great “Who Killed Carol Jenkins?” (January 7, 2002): “When I asked the prosecutor, Steve Sonnega, for a prognosis, he said, ‘I think we’re making progress. I’m not willing to say how much, because I really don’t know. I think people think that if this case is going to be solved, now is the best time.’” I think Singer’s approach is preferable, but I confess that in Trillin’s case, and only in his case, it is fascinating to see the drastic lengths this usually ebullient subjective writer goes to in removing any hint of his personal self from the narrative. Reading “Incident in Dodge City,” I had the thought that in dissolving himself the way he does to tell Bonnilla’s story, Trillin is an artist. His aim, like Chekhov’s, is total objectivity.

May 3, 2010 Issue

By far the most interesting article in this week’s issue is Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia In Forest Hills.” The story’s tagline – “Anatomy of a murder trial” – sums it up all right, but doesn’t really capture the eerie, twisted, deeply unsettling nature of the piece. The message I took from the story is that the American judicial system is rotten to the core and should be avoided at all costs. In other words, unless you want to get burned, stay away from court. Malcolm all but states this explicitly when she analyzes Borukhova’s counterclaim in the divorce action. In the counterclaim, Borukhova demands child support, spousal maintenance, medical insurance, life insurance, occupancy of the marital apartment, return of wedding gifts, etc. Malcolm says, “These demands diminish her; they put her autonomy in question. She was a practicing physician. She could have done what other able-bodied women do who divorce and wish to avoid entanglement with a troublesome mate. They walk away with nothing. But something impelled Borukhova – perhaps her early experience of authoritarianism – to remain in the dangerous game that she could’ve chosen not to play." "The dangerous game” would’ve made a good alternative title for this piece. In fact, at one point, Malcolm goes so far as to equate the American judicial system with “state control as powerful and arbitrary as that of the of the old Soviet regime.” And she makes a powerful case for it, showing the two judges (Judge Sidney Strauss, who presided over the divorce hearing, and Judge Robert Hanophy, who was in charge of the murder trial) to be tyrants, and the lawyers, particularly the crazed David Schnall, who was the court-appointed legal guardian of Borukhova and Mallayev’s young daughter, Michelle, as manipulative, flawed, at times incompetent, individuals. When I say “powerful,” “crazed,” “manipulative,” “flawed,” “incompetent,” obviously I’ve accepted Malcolm’s version of the trial. I would plead guilty to that. I found Malcolm’s piece utterly convincing as a portrait of a nightmarish justice system. I liked her refusal to accept the prosecution’s narrative or any narrative, for that matter. In this, I think she is exceptional. Most court reporters just go with the flow; it’s the easiest thing to do. But Malcolm resists. She is known for her distrust of narrative. “Our lives are not like novels,” she says in her great “Six Roses ou Cirrhose?” (The New Yorker, January 24, 1983). In “Iphigenia In Forest Hills,” she once again demonstrates this fundamental truth.

April 26, 2010 Issue

At first I didn’t think the selection of Saul Bellow’s letters published in this week’s New Yorker would be all that interesting. It wasn’t until after I read Martin Schneider’s post at Emdashes (“Some Quick Hits on a Recent Issue,” April 23, 2010) that I gave them even a second thought. Schneider said, “The letter Saul Bellow wrote to Philip Roth on January 7, 1984 (not available online), is pretty fantastic, even if his appellation for the poor journo who crossed him, ‘crooked little slut,’ is a bit unfortunate.” I decided to check out this letter for myself, and ended up reading the whole damned collection. I enjoyed them, and I learned a few things too. For example, the way Bellow employs both a semi-colon and a question mark in the same sentence (“Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter?”). For the most part, Bellow’s letters are written in short, choppy sentences. There’s little evidence of what Joan Acocella memorably described as “the grand, cascading sentences” of The Adventures of Augie March (see Acocella’s “Finding Augie March,” The New Yorker, October 6, 2003, later reprinted in her great Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints). Yet, the letters contain perceptions that stayed with me after I finished reading them. That observation about the death of a parent, for example: “I found myself saying to her daughter Rosanna that losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces – down to that last glassy splinter.” When I read that, I instantly thought of my own parents, both turning eighty this year. And I remembered that Bellow had opened his wonderful short story “A Silver Dish" (The New Yorker, September 25, 1978) with a question about the death of a father: “What do you do about death – in this case, the death of an old father?” Now, I want to reread that story. In fact, the selection of letters in this week’s issue has whetted my appetite for more Bellow. After all, he is, as James Wood says, “probably the greatest writer of American prose of the twentieth century – where greatest means most abundant, various, precise, rich, lyrical” (see Wood’s “Saul Bellow’s Comic Style” in his collection The Irresponsible Self).

April 19, 2010 Issue

Reading this incredibly rich “Journeys” issue is like gobbling up (say) five bowls of Haagen Dazs dulce de leche ice cream, one right after the other. Three of my favorite writers are present: Alec Wilkinson (“The Ice Balloon”), Peter Hessler (“Go West”), and Burkhard Bilger (“Towheads”). Lauren Collins, who is verging on becoming one of my favorites, is also represented (“Angle of Vision”). Elif Batuman contributes a delightful piece called “The Memory Kitchen.” And there are reviews by Jill Lepore, Dan Chiasson, Lauren Collins (showing signs of Updikean prolificness), and Peter Schjeldahl that I consider to be “must” reads, either because of the writing, as pure writing, or because of the subject matter. But before I discuss any of the foregoing, I’m going to single out some GOAT “details” that I found particularly delectable: Sasha Frere-Jones’s “Snoop’s sense of words landing is unerring”; Andrea Thompson’s “And then, finally, there’s a glimpse of the flirt behind the name: affogato, served ‘adult’”; and this beautifully rhythmed passage from a capsule review of Eileen Quinlan’s photographs – “still-lifes of mirrors and their reflections, mesh representation and abstraction so seamlessly that the distinctions dissolve.” I also like the Demetrios Psillos’s lime-black (with ravishing red dabs) illustration accompanying Hilton Als’s “Critic’s Notebook” column.

Okay! Those were just appetizers. Now for the main course. And what a feast it is! I’ll proceed in the order I followed when I read the magazine. First up is Batuman’s wonderfully titled "The Memory Kitchen." This is my first encounter with Batuman’s writing. Let me say instantly that I loved it – I loved the theme (to quote the tag line: “A chef recovers the foods that Turkey forgot”), I loved the opening lines (“To get to the restaurant Ciya Sofrasi from the old city of Istanbul, you take a twenty-minute ride to the Asian side of the Bosporus. On a cold Monday night last November, a friend persuaded me to make the trip with him”), I loved the visit to the turkey farm in Bozburan. Most of all, I loved the writing – this description of turkeys, for example: “There were seven or eight of them sitting in a row of crates, occasionally nodding their heads and gurgling, like members of a jury.” I confess I worried a bit when early in the story, Batuman says, “Food, I should clarify, has never played a large role in my mental life.” I wondered, what kind of piece is this going to be when the writer does not relate to food sensuously. But it rapidly became apparent that I had nothing to worry about. Batuman’s piece may not get at the taste and texture of food the way (say) M. F. K. Fisher does, but what she lacks in sensuousness, she more than makes up for in her exploration of the workings of what she calls “collective food memory” – her true subject. For example, here’s her description of the mnemonical experience of eating kisir at Musa Dagdeviren’s restaurant Ciya Sofrasi: “The bitter edge of sumac and pomegranate extract, the tang of tomato paste, and the warmth of cumin, which people from the south of Turkey put in everything, recalled to me, with preternatural vividness, the kisir that my aunt used to make.” I could go on and on extolling the virtues of this great article. Suffice it to say, I’m hugely impressed with Batuman’s writing and I look forward to reading lots more of it in the magazine.

Another tremendous piece this week is Lauren Collins’s "Angle of Vision." I’m rapidly becoming a Collins devotee. (See my effusions a few weeks ago regarding her lovely "Check Mate.") What I like about her work is her unhesitating willingness to write in the “I” – to present her stories as personal experiences. “Angle of Vision” is an example par excellence of her subjective approach where she not only profiles paraglider flyer/photographer George Steinmetz; she actually straps on a paraglider (Steinmetz calls it a “flying lawn chair”) and flies it herself, reporting back on what it felt like: “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.” “Angle of Vision” is a big, gorgeous multi-paneled mural of a story. Time jumps around. The opening section introduces us to Steinmetz on expedition in southeastern Algeria. Collins is there with him. The next piece describes the paraglider and how Steinmetz uses it to take aerial photographs. The third part (the Sefar flight) cuts back to Algeria and shows us Steinmetz and his crew attempting unsuccessfully to photograph an isolated plateau. The fourth part takes us back to the Sahara and talks about the Tuareg people. The fifth section takes us back to the expedition in Algeria and shows us Steinmetz discovering a prime camera subject – the high dunes of Tin Merzouga. Here’s Collins’s wonderful description of the dunes: “Their parabolic swells and eskered spines, splitting shadow, reminded me of horseshoe crabs. In the fading light, the sand turned from the color of paprika to a blood-orange shade and then to an iridescent purple, like eyeshadow, eventually deepening to a chocolaty brown.” That “eskered spines” is inspired! The sixth part is a biographic sketch of Steinmetz and an overview of his photographic accomplishments. The seventh section takes us to Steinmetz’s home in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, where Collins joins him and they review some of Steinmetz’s photos. Collins’s description of Steinmetz’s aerial shot of the fortified village of Beni Isguen is worth quoting: “Captured at sunrise, in warm light, the houses were the color of seashells. At sunset, they were bleached out, shards of bone. Their roofs, invisible from the street, had been painted in aquas and turquoises, so that from above, they looked like swimming pools.” The eighth and final section of “Angle of Vision” is a mini-history of flying. It concludes memorably with Collins’s own twenty-second paraglider flight.

The foregoing is my separation of Collins’s story into its constituent parts. As she’s written it, there’s no sectioning, no numbering; the whole thing flows seamlessly from the first scene to the last. I’ve taken time to describe its structure because I like how it starts out by plunging us directly into action, into Steinmetz’s desert expedition. Only after we’re caught up in Steinmetz’s struggles in the desert, do we receive the background facts about him, his work, his flying machine, etc. The classic template for this type of narrative structure is, of course, John McPhee’s “Travels in Georgia” (The New Yorker, April 28, 1973). See also McPhee’s great “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977). I wonder if Collins has used this particular structure in any of her previous pieces. I’ll have to check.

And with that, I’m going to have to quit for now. There are so many other aspects of this amazingly good issue that I would like to discuss if time permitted, chief amongst which is Burkhard Bilger’s "Towheads." I will conclude for now by saying that this particular “Journeys” issue is one of the best editions of the magazine I’ve read in a long time. It’s right up there with the September 5, 2005 “The Food Issue” – my all-time favorite New Yorker. That’s the one that contains, among other succulent items, Judith Thurman’s “Night Kitchens,” John Seabrook’s “Renaissance Pears,” and Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men.” Maybe someday, I’ll do a retrospective review of that issue and try to put in words why I think it’s so great.

April 12, 2010 Issue

Kelefa Sanneh’s “Beyond The Pale” in this week’s issue is a cool – perhaps too cool – review of three books on “whiteness.” I count at least ten instances in this piece where Sanneh, instead of expressing outrage in the face of racism, opts for a cooler response: (1) the reference to an overtly racist Glenn Beck quote as an example of Beck’s “adventurous thoughts and memorable language”; (2) the description of Henry Louis Gates’s arrest as “one of the summer’s most entertaining reality shows”; (3) his suggestion that “often the most appropriate answer to the question [what do you mean by white culture?] is a joke or a series of jokes”; (4) his description of the congresswoman Helen Chenowith-Hage’s veiled racist comment as an “ingenious euphemism”; (5) his question – “Should we pretend to be surprised?” – in response to the whiteness of Tea Party membership; (6) his question – “But what of it?” in response to the observation that American politics has been segregated for decades; (7) his description of a passage in James Baldwin’s “On Being White … And Other Lies” as being “marvelously splenetic”; (8) his quip about a racist statement by Hippocrates (quoted in one of the books under review - Nell Irvin Painter’s “The History of White People”), which wittily recycles the Chenowith-Hage quotation: “the warm-climate community, a few millennia ahead of schedule”; (9) his sarcasm about the connection the craniologist Johann Kaspar Lavater made between whiteness and weakness: “It is a delicate race, always on the verge of being overrun or adulterated, dethroned or debunked”; (10) the astonishing rationalization of Leigh Anne Tuohy’s racist rant in the movie “The Blind Side,” telling a black man to stay in his own neighborhood, as “refreshing, because there’s no trace of anxiety in her white identity.” Sarcasm, irony, jokiness, breeziness, rationalization – these apparently are the appropriate responses to racism today. Baldwin’s “splenetic” reaction, “marvelous” as it is, is now considered old hat. Gates’s outrage at being arrested in his own home by a white cop is mere entertainment. The message here seems to be: no matter what, stay cool. Personally, I prefer a little anger, politically incorrect though it may be. I think Baldwin’s outrage is more than just marvelous; it’s effective. And the same goes for Gates’s fierce indignation. It’s still possible to be “intellectual” and yet at the same time bring a little heat: see Gates’s great “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man” (The New Yorker, October 23, 1995).

April 5, 2010 Issue

“I suppose” is one of Calvin Trillin’s signature moves for jump-starting his travel stories: “I suppose I could say that we decided to take a house in the South of France for a month because …” (“Hanging Around in Uzes”); “I suppose you could say that we went to Guadeloupe one cold winter as a gesture of support for its efforts to celebrate female chefs” (“A Woman’s Place”). This week in the magazine, Adam Gopnik tries it out in his piece “No Rules!”: “I suppose I would have an easier time deciding if the Paris-based French food-guide-and-festival group that calls itself Le Fooding is going to be able to accomplish all that it has to set out to accomplish – which seems to be nothing less than save the preeminence of French cuisine from going the way of the Roman Empire, the five-act tragedy, and the ocean liner – if I had an easier time defining what it is and truly hopes to do.” As a hook, does that work for you? It doesn’t for me. For one thing, it’s too convoluted. For another, it’s too abstract. Like a good cook, Trillin keeps it simple. I pushed myself to read “No Rules!”. I found myself not enjoying it much. It wasn’t always this way with Gopnik’s writing, was it? There was a time when I clipped his articles from the magazine and saved them in a folder. I think that folder still exists somewhere, buried in a box of old clothes, photo albums, etc. in our basement. I remember one early piece – it was about an old guy who spent all his time hanging out at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel. It contained some great descriptions of the hotel, including this dandy (I looked it up on-line just now in the New Yorker archives): “he would … enter the hotel under the long, sloping green-and-white striped awning that extended all the way from the driveway, above Sunset Boulevard, to the main entrance.” And I remember the pleasure I experienced reading his writings about (in no particular order) Audubon, shaker furniture, Joseph Cornell and Times Square, to name but a few. Unfortunately, he diluted that pleasure when he wrote what has to be one of the silliest comments the magazine ever published. I’m referring to Gopnik’s “Blame Canada” (March 2, 2002), in which he sketched a Canada I hardly recognized. Among other crazy things, he said, “The Mounties are there in their bright-red uniforms to say, ‘Shoot if you want, we'd rather talk.’” Well, like most generalizations, this one breaks down as soon as you start discussing specific cases. I know of Mounties who would not hesitate, and who have not hesitated, to meet fire with fire. Gopnik’s taint is his penchant for generalizing. Take “No Rules!” for example, where he says sweepingly, “In America and England, you are what you think about eating.” Is that really the case? What about all those straitlaced investors, lawyers and accountants who are devoutly conservative in their values, but who regularly dine at all those great creative little restaurants we read about in Tables For Two? I find more and more that Gopnik’s writing lacks specificity. There isn’t one memorable concrete sentence in “No Rules!”, unless you count his description of Zoe Reyners (“an exquisite, nervous blonde in white linen with a distinct resemblance to the young Brigette Fossey”). What’s happened to the writer who noticed that long, sloping green-and-white striped awning at the Beverly Hills Hotel? Perhaps he’s losing his touch. And yet … and yet, I can’t give up on him. Every now and then he produces a pearl. For example, three years ago in a piece called “New York Local” (September 3 & 10, 2007), he wrote this opening line: “Twelve-thirty on a beautiful summer day, and the chicken committee of the City Chicken Project is meeting at the Garden of Happiness, in the Crotona neighborhood of the Bronx.” Now that’s what I call a hook! It’s why I keep reading Gopnik.

March 29, 2010 Issue

Who is The New Yorker’s best fashion writer? I think it’s still Judith Thurman, but Lauren Collins is coming up fast on the inside. Take her “Check Mate” (September 14, 2009), for example. Dig that “tufting scarps of millstone grit” in her opening paragraph. My test for inspired fashion writing is simple; it’s the same one James Wood uses when he’s fondling narrative detail: palpability. Here’s Collins’s description of a Burberry tote bag: “It was made of yellow leather, pale as sorbet, and its surface had been shaved, or chiffonaded, so that it appeared to be covered in thousands of eyelashes.” Now I ask you, is that not one of the loveliest, most palpable things you’ve ever read? Alas, Collins is not in this week’s “The Style Issue.” Thurman is. Her “Face It” didn’t do much for me. The best thing about it is the red-pink-orange Laurie Rosenwald illustration. That and Thurman’s magnificent subjectivity. Her “I” is never very far away from her subject, and I love that. In “Face It,” she takes us with her into an aircraft lavatory and lets us watch her put cream on her face. Not just any cream; its “Boot’s No. 7 Protect & Perfect Intense Beauty Serum,” don’t you know. Thurman gets a smile from me when she says, “I started to protect and perfect myself in the plane’s lavatory, despite a long-standing personal security procedure – I never look in the mirror by that merciless light.” Okay, that’s funny, but it doesn’t pass the test. Where’s the palpability? There’s a smidgin of it in Rebecca Mead’s flyweight “The Prince of Solomeo,” a profile of Brunello Cuicinelli, a sweater maker who lives in a cashmere cocoon of unreality on a mountain top in Umbria. Here’s the smidgin: “In cream-colored velvety corduroy pants and an oatmeal-colored cashmere sweater, he had the plush and contented aspect of a pampered cat.” I confess I could not relate to this pampered puss in the least. Consequently, I only skimmed the rest of the article. Call it palpability; call it tactility; whatever, I’m still in search of it and the magazine this week is damn short of it – which for a so-called “style issue” is surprising, nay, shocking! Let’s look in Alexandra Jacob’s “Fashion Democracy,” shall we? Nope, not there, either, unless you count her marvelous parenthetical “At barneys.com, one must navigate the Clipper around a cone-headed mannequin.” I really like that, but it’s more surreal than it’s palpable, and right now for me it’s either palpable or it’s nothing. Might Patricia Marx’s “Four Eyes,” have what I’m looking for? It contains lots of great eyeglass descriptions, that’s for sure. Consider this beauty: “Some of the riches include sunglasses with taxicab-yellow visors over the lenses; aqua butterfly frames with rhinestones your bubbe might have worn in Miami; folding silver wire rims from the twenties; and a pair of circular specs from the eighteen hundreds whose temples end in loops so that the wearer can pin them to his wig.” But let’s face it: if you’re looking for descriptive texture (and we are, we are), glasses are not where it’s at. For sheer palpability, fabric description is unbeatable. And no one writes fabric better than Judith Thurman. Here’s a sample from her great 2005 Chanel piece, “Scenes From A Marriage”: “the ivory cocktail suit of spun-sugar bouclé, with a dissolving hem; the romantically tiered evening dress of black tulle, with a trompe l’oeil cummerbund of silver threadwork and rhinestones.” I don’t know about you, but I find that “spun-sugar bouclé” in combination with the “dissolving hem” pretty damn ravishing. And I don’t even know what bouclé is. Forget palpability; edibility is the real test.

March 22, 2010 Issue

I’m a sucker for demolition descriptions; there’s a dandy in this week’s issue: “The section, nine tons of steel and concrete, suddenly tilted forward and sank through the air, a giant concrete berg calving from the Yankee glacier. It thundered on impact, and the subway platform quaked. The field, excavators and all, disappeared in a cloud of dust. After a couple of minutes, the dust gave way to the sight of a dead upper deck on the ground; a rack of girders poked out of the concrete like the ribs of an animal carcass” (Nick Paumgarten, “The Pull”). Other highlights in the magazine this week: Sasha Frere-Jones’s “one of those glorious splinter-thin moments”; Ben McGrath’s “pillow in the shape of the S.S. Normandie”; Jeffrey Toobin’s “great swaths of Supreme Court precedent”; Lawrence Wright’s “proletarian informality.” And then we come to Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Everybody Have Fun” – a review of several books on the societal implications of happiness research – my Pick of the Week. I related to Kolbert’s piece; it touched on something a friend and I had argued about when we were in Cuba a couple of weeks ago. She’d commented that Communism seemed to be working for the Cubans because, as a people, “they appear to be happy.” I found myself snapping back: “What choice do they have? Would you choose to give up all your comforts of home and come live here?” She replied that she found the absence of consumerism in Cuba refreshing and that maybe we could learn from Cubans. At that point, I accused her of having a double standard: the Cuban way of life was okay for Cubans, but not for her. We ended up agreeing that neither of us had a sufficient understanding of how things really worked in Cuba. Little did I know (until I read Kolbert’s piece) that what we’d been arguing about has a name: “the paradox of the happy peasant.” Kolbert explains the phrase by quoting Carol Graham: “Higher per capita income levels do not translate directly into higher happiness levels.” In other words, as Kolbert notes, “the relationship between money and well-being turns out to be a lot less straightforward than is generally assumed.” So maybe my friend is right? Maybe Cubans should be left to enjoy their relative contentment? I’m still not convinced, because as Amartya Sen, an economist quoted by Kolbert, points out, “The grumbling rich man may well be less happy than the content peasant, but he does have a higher standard of living.” I recall pointing out to my friend the higher standard of living we enjoy in Canada. And I recall her chilling rejoinder: “At what cost?” In the end, this is Kolbert’s point, too. She concludes her stimulating review with some environmental logic that I find irrefutable: even if escalating consumption leads to increased happiness – a big “if,” as Kolbert’s piece makes clear - trashing the planet is still wrong.

March 15, 2010 Issue

I’m fascinated by the strategies that great writers use to make fictional reality appear real – sometimes so real that it appears to be, in John Updike’s memorable phrase, “the thing itself.” One such strategy, powerfully advocated by the realist critic James Wood, is free indirect style. Wood, in his How Fiction Works (2008), describes its effect: “The narrative seems to float away from the novelist and take on the properties of the character, who now seems to ‘own’ the words. The writer is free to inflect the reported thought, to bend it around the character’s own words.” Wood has long admired this style. In “What Chekhov Meant by Life” (included in Wood’s 1999 essay collection The Broken Estate), Wood says of Chekhov, “He sees the world not as a writer might see it but as one of his characters might.” In “At Home in the World” (The New Yorker, February 5, 2001), he says, “In Tolstoy’s fiction, as in Chekhov’s, reality appears as it might appear not to a writer but to the characters.” At the same time as Wood has advanced this notion of fictional reality, he has argued against (rightly, in my opinion) magical realism (see “Toni Morrison’s False Magic” in The Broken Estate), and what he aptly calls “hysterical realism,” a style of writing “not to be faulted because it lacks reality – the usual charge – but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself” (see “Hysterical Realism” in his 2004 collection The Irresponsible Self).

Now, in a piece called “Keeping It Real,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, Wood trashes “the rather lazy stock-in-trade of mainstream realist fiction,” including “such basic narrative grammar” as “the cinematic sweep, followed by the selection of small, telling details,” “the preference for the concrete over the abstract,” vivid brevity of character-sketching,” and several other mainstays of conventional fictional narrative. “Keeping It Real” is a review of two realist works: David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto and Chang-Rae Lee’s new novel, The Surrendered. Wood pans them both. He says of Shields’s book, which is an argument for realism, that, “His complaints about the tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken.” But he goes on to say that Shields’s “unexamined promotion of what he insists on calling “reality” over fiction, is highly problematic.” Wood provides only one extended quote from Reality Hunger, and based on my reading of it, I would have to say that it’s hard to judge whether Wood’s use of “rant” and “imprecise and overwrought” to describe the book is fair or not.

With respect to the other book under review, Lee’s The Surrendered, Wood provides only snippets of quotation. So again it’s difficult for me to form my own impression regarding the quality of its writing. Apparently it’s a far-ranging narrative (Manchuria, 1934, the Korean War, 1950, New York City, 1986, and ending with a pilgrimage to Italy). Wood says it is “utterly conventional,” “stagy, even bookish, a livid libretto.” But he also says it has many scenes that are “piercingly evoked” and that it is “spacious in design and reach.” In what are perhaps the most memorable words of the review, Wood calls The Surrendered “this slabbed magnificence.” He doesn’t say whether it or any part of it is written in free indirect style. Given Wood’s intense fondness for such a style, I suspect that if there were any evidence of it in the book, Wood would have mentioned it, and that he wouldn’t have been so quick to condemn the novel as “utterly conventional.” I confess I’m not familiar with Lee’s writing. But Wood’s review has aroused my curiosity about it. I see there are several stories by Lee in The New Yorker archive. I intend to access one or two of them and check out for myself what kind of fiction writer he is.

March 8, 2010 Issue

This is a pretty rich issue. I read it through and then took it to Cuba with me, thinking I'd reread a couple of the articles, this time more slowly in order to absorb the nuances. As it turned out, Judith Thurman's piece "Walking Through Walls" is the only one I looked at, and I made it only about one-third of the way into its sunscreen-stained pages. It's not one of her best, anyway. There aren't any what I'd called inspired sentences, not like in (say) her great "The Absolutist," in which she describes a Balenciaga gown as having one seam, "like the axis of an elm leaf." "Walking Through Walls" is a profile of the performance artist Marina Abramovic. Thurman does a good job describing some of Abramovic's major performances, but the self-infliction of pain at the core of practically every piece is off-putting to say the least. So the problem I had with Thurman's article was really my problem. "Walking Through Walls" contains one memorable detail: the black Citroen van, "which figured in their performance of ideal couplehood." Thurman says the car "miraculously survived the beatings it took, and is part of the MOMA retrospective." If I lived in New York, I'd definitely go see it.

March 1, 2010 Issue

When I turned to Larissa MacFarquhar’s “The Deflationist,” which bears the tagline, “How Paul Krugman found politics,” I thought Oh boy, this is going to be a wearisome slog. Then I read the first paragraph and found myself hooked. But not for long. This is one of the most boring pieces ever to appear in the magazine. Krugman and his wife come across as drone-like careerists. Maybe MacFarqhuar intended that effect. Maybe I’m just tired of politicians and economists and all their empty rhetoric. Maybe I’m feeling some of that Tea Party disaffection that Ben McGrath so ably wrote about in the magazine a couple of weeks ago (“The Movement,” February 1, 2010).

McGrath has a piece in the current issue, which I’m pleased to turn to now. “Strangers on the Mountain” is this week’s Pick Of The Issue. I read it quickly. You might almost say I skimmed it, touching down now and then for a closer read, and when I came to the last part – the section that begins, “Harold Dennison pleaded guilty to weapons charges …” – I slowed down to absorb the writing. Then I turned back and reread the whole piece, taking pleasure in the way it’s structured and in various inspired sentences. (Example: “After more than a mile of steep, winding incline, of the sort that strains an old Honda Civic, I had to slow to let a family of wild turkeys pass.”) If I’m not mistaken, McGrath is forging his own recognizable journalistic style. He throws a lot into his articles, lots of facts, people, and places, churning in a fast-paced narrative. His stories don’t sit still; they’re alive on the page. There’s a fizz in his prose I really enjoy.

February 15 & 22, 2010 Issue

I want to get a mule. I haven’t always had this desire. In fact, before I’d read Susan Orlean’s wonderful “Riding High” in this week’s double issue, I didn’t know mule from donkey. It was the same regarding chickens. After I read, Orlean’s “The It Bird” in the magazine (September 28, 2009), I wanted to get some chickens. This wish was recently reinforced by my trip to Cuba, where it seems every backyard is full of chickens (and roosters). Orlean’s writing style seduces me every time. She’s a master of what I call naturalness. Her opening lines hook me every damn time. For example, here’s how she starts “The It Bird”: “If I had never seen Janet Bonney reenact the mouth-to-beak resuscitation of her hen Number Seven, who had been frozen solid in a nor’easter, then was thawed and nursed back to life – being hand-fed and massaged as she watched doctor shows on TV – I might never have become a chicken person.” I read that opener, and I just kept going. Before I knew it, I’d devoured a whole article about chickens, and enjoyed every word.

Orleans makes writing look easy. The whole piece just seems to pour out, following its own logic. But there are descriptions that only Orelans can pull off. For example, here she is describing some mules at an auction: “a few dozen yearlings, still wide-eyed and whiskery; a score of experienced teams, with high-gloss rumps and bunchy muscles; dozens of riding mules, their ears waggling as they trotted around the stockyard ring.” I love that “high-gloss rumps and bunchy muscles.” Nabokov couldn’t have written it any better. Here’s another example: “Next in the ring was a chestnut mule with a bristling blonde mane and the sleepy, watchful gaze of a bank guard.” Orlean’s piece is endlessly quotable.

Another great thing about Orlean’s work is that it’s true journalism. She goes to interesting places, observes what’s happening, and writes interestingly about it. When, in “Riding High,” she says, “Last year, I went to the Reese Brothers’ November auction, and sat in the auctioneer’s booth with Dickie Reese and J. B. Driver, the auctioneer,” I think to myself, Hey this is cool! What a cool place to go! I find such sentences thrilling. I’m happy to be along with her. The same is true for a line like this: “I wandered around the stalls, the soft sounds of snuffling and chewing and the occasional thump of a hoof as it hit the wood floor filling the air, and then made my way over to the auction ring.” This is reality, “the thing itself,” as Updike would say. And it just goes to show that you don’t have to go to Tehran or Moscow and meet with dictators in order to write an interesting piece. A trip to Dickson, Tennessee, to see a mule auction is just the ticket, thank you very much. Orleans without end, amen!