Janet Malcolm's "Forty-one False Starts" - Part I

The best pieces in Janet Malcolm’s recently published Forty-one False Starts are, for me, the four photography reviews – “The Genius of the Glass House,” “Good Pictures,” “Edward Weston’s Women,” and “Nudes Without Desire.” Interestingly, two of them, “Edward Weston’s Women” and “Nudes Without Desire,” begin with a discussion of pubic hair. In “Edward Weston’s Women,” Malcolm artfully links the visibility of “a few wisps of pubic hair” in a Weston nude with Weston’s audacious statement (in a letter to the Museum of Modern Art) that pubic hair “has been definitely a part of my development as an artist … that it has been the most important part, that I like it brown, black, red or golden, curly or straight, all sizes and shapes,” to launch one of her favorite subjects – Weston’s love affairs and their impact on his work. In “Edward Weston’s Women,” she writes,

Weston’s erotic and artistic activities are so tightly interwoven that it is impossible to write of one without the other. It is known (from Weston’s journals) that most of the women who posed for his nudes and portraits – arguably his best work – slept with him (usually after the sitting) and were sources for him of enormous creative energy.

Weston’s women fascinate Malcolm. In one of her first New Yorker photography pieces, “Two Photographers” (The New Yorker, November 18, 1974; re-titled “East and West,” and included in her superb 1980 collection, Diana & Nikon), she vividly describes Weston’s Charis (1925):

A photograph of Charis shows a girl in a black beret and a sweater straddling a ladder-back chair, her elbows outthrust and her chin resting on the junction between her wrists; her brow is furrowed, she is staring into the middle distance, and her slip is showing. The composition is striking in its symmetries of legs, arms, and chair posts and ladders, and in the deployment of blacks, grays, and whites. Equally striking is, “the thing itself,” as Weston called the object of his quest for realism – in this case, the relationship between the model and himself.

Edward Weston, "Charis" (1925)

Malcolm further says, in “Two Photographers,” that Weston’s portrait of Charis, “with its comical pose and the girl’s mock-serious gaze, expresses the playfulness and courtliness of the relationship between the young woman and the older man.”

But, interestingly, in another essay, written shortly after “Two Photographers,” Malcolm’s appreciation of Weston’s work appears to sour. The piece, called “Assorted Characters of Death and Blight” (included in Diana & Nikon), is a review of a Weston retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. She writes,

Weston’s major works (most done in the 1920’s and 1930’s) are the nudes, vegetables, shells, clouds, and landscapes that have been transformed – sometimes almost beyond recognition – into pure, cold, perverse, unmistakable Weston abstractions.

Note Charis’s absence from the list of “Weston’s major works.” Had she forgotten about it? She does refer to a nude portrait of Charis (Nude, Oceano, California, 1936):

A well-known photograph of Charis stretched out face-down on the sand – one of Weston’s most apparently straight-forward nudes – has an attenuation, a starfish-like quality of inanition that is evocative of death and sleep rather than of lovemaking.

Malcolm saw the MoMA retrospective as a “corrective” to the thinking that Weston’s art was sourced in his erotic interaction with his models. In “Assorted Characters of Death and Blight,” she says:

The picture of Weston that emerges from these sources [Weston’s Daybooks and Ben Maddow’s Edward Weston: Fifty Years] – of a vital and virile romantic who lived a life of physical simplicity and emotional richness in warm climates with one beautiful woman after another; who had the courage to leave his wife and children and go to Mexico with his mistress, Tina Modetti; who finally found the love of his life in his second wife, Charis; who enjoyed the friendship of such artists and intellectuals as Diego Rivera, José Orozco, Robinson Jeffers, and Ramiel McGehee – is at curious odds with the static, indrawn, remote, and sometimes even morbid character of the photographs.

Yes, but it’s not at odds with the portrait of Charis that Malcolm so glowingly described in “Two Photographs.” Curiously, she fails to point this out. Her view of his achievement has turned inexplicably icy. In one of the essay’s most pointed lines, she says, “Stieglitz’s blurry view of the Flatiron Building on a snowy day is surely a more literal rendering of ‘the thing itself’ than Weston’s razor-sharp close-up of a halved artichoke.”

Edward Weston, "Charis, Lake Ediza" (1937)

Malcolm must’ve been sitting on a sharp tack when she wrote that piece. Obviously, it isn’t her view today. In “Edward Weston’s Women,” she reverts to her initial position. She writes, “His nudes can indeed be characterized as ‘passionate collaborations,’ in which Weston’s passion for a certain kind of beauty and a woman embodying that beauty come together with an almost audible bang.” And she says, “Charis Wilson is the foremost of these collaborators.” She describes another “Charis” picture, Charis, Lake Ediza (1937):

This photograph, however Wilson remembers the circumstances of its making, is indeed sensual, probably the sexiest of all of Weston’s pictures of her. She sits with her legs spread and her hands crossed over the inner thighs. That she is wearing trousers and high lace-up boots only adds to the sexiness, you could even say dirtiness, of the picture. The face, wrapped in a scarf as a Bedouin might wrap it, stares at the viewer and beyond him. It is a very young face, perhaps a little sullen, certainly not unaware of the provocativeness of the pose, but refusing to register it. One’s eye goes back and forth between the hands and the face, alternating between the hands’ downward direction and the face’s straight-ahead one. I don’t know of another photograph that puts the eye through such paces.

Malcolm calls Charis, Lake Ediza “extraordinary.” In “Nudes Without Desire,” another of the excellent photography essays in Forty-one False Starts, Malcolm says, “Edward Weston pursued the nude genre more assiduously – and, I think, more brilliantly – than any other practitioner.” And with that, Malcolm’s revision of her acrid opinion in “Assorted Characters of Death and Blight” is complete.

(This is the first part of a four-part review of Janet Malcolm’s Forty-one False Starts.)

June 3, 2013 Issue

It’s interesting to compare two pieces in this week’s issue – Nicholas Schmidle’s “In the Crosshairs” and Nick Paumgarten’s “The Manic Mountain.” Both are about men, action, and violence. Both are absorbing, gripping, bravura pieces of writing. “In the Crosshairs” tells the story of Chris Kyle, “one of the deadliest snipers in American history,” murdered on a Texas rifle range. “The Manic Mountain” is about Ueli Steck, “one of the world’s premier alpinists,” and his involvement in a nasty brawl with Sherpas on Mount Everest. Both are empathetic and sensitive, withholding judgement, refusing to take sides, probing the violent incidents they describe (the murder, the brawl) for meaning beyond mere sensationalism. If there’s a villain in “In the Crosshairs,” it’s the Dallas Veterans Affairs Medical Center for failing to properly treat Kyle’s killer’s post-traumatic stress disorder (P.T.S.D.) (“The V.A. is a sclerotic and overwhelmed bureaucracy”). And “The Manic Mountain” seems to suggest that the underlying cause of the Sherpas’ attack on Steck stems from their frustration with the guiding companies (“Everst has evolved into a seasonal society dominated by the interests of the commercial guiding companies, which for the most part are owned and operated by foreigners”).

However, in terms of style, the two pieces differ from each other in at least two ways. First, “In the Crosshairs”’s writing is plainer. The sentences are shorter, simpler. Schmidle’s style is quintessentially factual. A Schmidle sentence is sturdy, Shaker-like. Here are three typical samples from “In the Crosshairs”: “The point man, a twenty-eight-year-old named Marc Lee, began climbing the stairs”; “For all his bravado, Kyle had a compassionate side”; “They loaded up Kyle’s truck and went to pick up Routh.” Paumgarten’s style is richer. He writes a longer line; he uses figuration. Here, for example, is his description of Steck at a climbing gym:

He followed a progression of blue handholds, then orange, then pink, hopping down to the mat each time, brushing the talc from his hands on his shorts and peering up at the wall, his head tilted as though the wall were a language he was trying to remember.

That “as though the wall were a language he was trying to remember” is very fine.

Secondly, Schmidle’s “I” is less prominent than Paumgarten’s is. Schmidle keeps himself in the background. His pieces are sprinkled with “told me,” but other than that, he’s not much in evidence. An exception is the last section of “In the Crosshairs,” which begins, “In early May, I flew to northern Texas to see Raymond and Jodi Ruth.” I found that sentence thrilling. Finally, I thought, we glimpse the guy who’s telling this story. On the other hand, Paumgarten is gloriously subjective. His voice on the page is more distinctive than Schmidle’s. He injects more of his own personality into his writing. For example, there’s a humorous passage in “The Manic Mountain” where Paumgarten “growls” at the Eiger’s North Face:

I drove up from Interlaken one afternoon to have a look, and seeing it for the first time from the road leading up to Grindelwald, I found myself growling back at it. It was the bigger bear: a nasty shaded rampart of limestone and ice, nearly six thousand vertical feet from bottom to top, bedevilled by avalanches, falling rocks, sketchy verglas (thin ice), and sudden storms that can pin a climber for days.

I’m not pitting these two styles against each other. I like them both. Schmidle’s efficiency and specificity occasionally yield strikingly beautiful lines, such as “During the next four minutes, the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered” (“Getting Bin Laden,” The New Yorker, August 8, 2011). But when Paumgarten does something like growling at a mountain, he makes me smile. That’s a little bonus of his writing that I appreciate.

Second Thoughts: I want to clarify what I said above. Schmidle is a plain-style writer, but his “In the Crosshairs” is anything but plain. It’s an intricate, elaborate canvas, with a wealth of memorable detail worked into it (e.g., the “red crusader’s cross” tattooed on Kyle’s arm, the crawfish - “some live, some cooked” - that Rury stuffed down Kyle's shorts, New Mexico's “tumbleweed expanses,” the “knobby” tires on Kyle’s F-350, the “grooves in the sand around Littlelfield’s fingers”). It connects the Iraq war with Chris Kyle with P.T.S.D. with Eddie Ray Routh with Texas gun culture with murder on a rifle range. It makes the killer’s life as much a tragedy as the victim's. It’s an astonishing piece of work. It would make one hell of a great movie.

May 27, 2013 Issue

“Change the World,” in this week’s issue, marks George Packer’s welcome return to first-person narrative. The piece’s opening sentence signals the reversion: “In 1978, the year that I graduated from high school, in Palo Alto, the name Silicon Valley was not in use beyond a small group of tech cognoscenti.” I read that and I inwardly cheered: Welcome back, George! “Change the World” is about a group of “Silicon Valley moguls,” including Mark Zuckerberg, who’ve formed a political advocacy group. In Silicon Valley’s world, this is a groundbreaking development. Like his hero, George Orwell, Packer is an inveterate tracker of political currents (in the Introduction of his 2009 collection Interesting Times, he writes, “My ambition as a journalist is always to combine narrative writing with political thought”). He’s fascinated by Silicon Valley’s libertarianism, particularly its emphasis on less politics. He vividly showed this in his previous Silicon Valley piece, “No Death, No Taxes,” The New Yorker, November 28, 2011, a profile of billionaire techie, Peter Thiel (“Escaping from politics is a libertarian’s right and a billionaire’s privilege”). Packer is allergic to Thiel’s anti-political thinking. Near the end of “No Death, No Taxes,” he writes, “The next great technological revolution might be around the corner, but it won’t automatically improve most people’s lives. That will depend on politics, which is indeed ugly, but also inescapable. The libertarian worship of individual freedom, and contempt for social convention comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up.” Packer further develops this theme in “Change the World,” where he says, “Technology can be an answer to incompetence and inefficiency. But it has little to say about larger issues of justice and fairness, unless you think that political problems are bugs that can be fixed by engineering rather than fundamental conflicts of interest and value.” However, in “Change the World,” he’s got a fresh actuality to consider – the rise of FWD.us, the Silicon Valley political-advocacy group organized by Zuckerberg and other fat Valley plutocrats to push for immigration reform. You can tell that Packer has mixed feelings about this development. On the one hand, he shows that the motivations of FWD.us’s founders are (to borrow Marc Andreessen’s memorable phrase, quoted by Packer) “relentlessly self-interested.” On the other hand, he sees the Valley’s decision to enter the political arena in order to effect change as an advance on its heretofore escapist libertarian thinking. In the last sentence of his piece, he says, “But if Silicon Valley’s idea of itself as a force for irresistible progress is running up against the unlovely reality of current American politics, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It might mean that the industry is growing up.”

“Change the World” is a brilliant pointillist construction of a variety of glinting materials - talks with Silicon Valley leaders and thinkers (e.g., Marc Andreessen, Joe Green, Reid Hoffman, Gavin Newsom, Joshua Cohen) visits to various locations (e.g., Apple University, a private club called Founders Den, Andreeseen’s office on Sand Hill Road, a café in San Francisco’s Mission District), quotes from various publications (e.g., a London Review of Books article by Rebecca Solnit, Alexandra Lange’s The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism, Gavin Newsom’s Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government). My favorite passage in “Change the World” is Packer’s description of the Woodside School Foundation gala, which, in its over-the-top extravagance, could be the Silicon Valley equivalent of Jay Gatsby’s decadent East Egg parties:

I attended it two years ago, when the theme was RockStar, and one of Google’s first employees sat at my table after performing in a pickup band called Parental Indiscretion. School benefactors, dressed up as Tina Turner or Jimmy Page, and consuming Jump’n Jack Flash hanger steaks, bid thirteen thousand dollars for Pimp My Hog! (“Ride through town in your very own customized 1996 Harley Davidson XLH1200C Sportster”) and twenty thousand for a tour of the Japanese gardens on the estate of Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and the country’s highest-paid chief executive. The climax arrived when a Mad Men Supper Club dinner for sixteen guests – which promised to transport couples back to a time when local residents lived in two-thousand-square-foot houses – sold for forty-three thousand dollars.

Money is, of course, a major source of power, but it isn’t the only one. Journalism, when it’s written as effectively as Packer writes it, in “Change the World,” is a potent influence, too.

May 20, 2013 Issue

When I saw, on newyorker.com, that Ian Frazier had written an article about “mycelium-based packing material,” I thought uh oh, this could be trouble - the first piece by my favorite writer I may not like. I should’ve known better. Frazier is incapable of writing anything – even a story about packing made of fungus – that isn’t vivid, absorbing, and artful. His “Form and Fungus,” in this week’s issue (“The Innovators Issue”), is excellent. It does contain a fair amount of chemistry [e.g., “A polymer is a compound or a combination of compounds consisting of structural units (molecules of styrene, for example) that repeat”]. But this is leavened by Frazier’s humor. At one point, he says, parenthetically, “high-school chemistry, don’t fail me now.” As the chemistry passages piled up, I thought, Wow, Frazier is really getting into this. And then I remembered from reading Frazier’s wonderful Family (1994) that his father was a chemical engineer. Not long after that link occurred to me, Frazier himself says, in “Form and Fungus,” “My father, who was a chemical engineer at a research lab, used to bring home samples of substances never before seen on the planet – strange milky plastics as brittle as ice or as slick and pulpy as squid.” “Form and Fungus” connects with other Frazier works, as well. For example, the reference to the “serious problem” with Styrofoam recalls Frazier’s memorable “Styrofoam” description in “The Toll” (The New Yorker, February 11 & 18, 2013): “Everywhere, like dirty snow, little clumps and crumbs of Styrofoam congregated on the rocks and covered the matted ground.” And, when he says, in “Form and Fungus,” that he told Burt Swersey about his invention of “a device to remove plastic bags from trees,” I smiled because it brought to mind his terrific “Bags In Trees” trilogy (included in his 2005 collection Gone To New York). 

Often in a Frazier piece, a so-called incidental moment generates an inspired description. Such is the case in “Form and Fungus.” On his way to Ecovative’s factory, in Green Island, New York, he stops to take a view of the Mohawk River from an old railway bridge:

Whenever I visit the company, I like to stop first at an abandoned railroad bridge at the north end of Green Island. The branch of the Mohawk that the bridge spans has carved low bluffs from the island’s four-hundred-million-year-old shale. The bluffs resemble stacks of very thin, reddish-black crêpes. All river confluences are glorious. Canoes full of Iroquois Indians travelled past here, and fur traders, and soldiers, and surveyors for the Erie Canal. The canal turned left near this point, followed the Mohawk’s shale valley westward, tapped into the Great Lakes, and made the fortune of New York City. Here, as at all confluences, wildlife congregates. In the early morning, it’s an amphitheatre of birdsong, while Canada geese add their usual commotion. So many crows show up in the evenings that they plague the town of Green Island, and the mayor has to scare them away with a blank pistol.

Frazier is writing a story about the invention of mycelium-based packing material. But he still has time to notice and appreciate an abandoned railway bridge, the Mohawk River, shale, bluffs, birdsong, Canada geese, crows, and a pistol-toting mayor. That’s why I cherish his work.

May 13, 2013 Issue

Raffi Khatchadourian’s “The Chaos of the Dice,” in this week’s issue, features the kind of opening line I devour: “In order to meet Falafel, the highest ranked backgammon player in the world, I took a Greyhound bus to Atlantic City, and then hopped a jitney to the Borgata Hotel.” I read it and immediately think Hey, this sounds cool. I’m with you. Let’s go! What makes it even more delectable is that it’s a significant departure from Khatchadourian’s essentially “objective” style, in which “I” rarely appears. There’ve been exceptions, most notably the wonderful “The Plume Hunter” section of his great “The Gulf War” (The New Yorker, March 14, 2011), which begins, “A hundred and fifty miles southwest of the wellhead, the Pisces, a NOAA research vessel, was searching for under-sea plumes of oil. It was late on a September night, and in the darkness I climbed up to the bridge.” I find it thrilling when the writer steps into the narrative frame like that. It authenticates the experience being described.

“The Chaos of the Dice,” a profile of a backgammon hustler named Falafel, contains several sharp descriptions (e.g., “He moved his checkers in abrupt jabs, then touched the pieces as if to confirm their solidity”). But, as a whole, it isn’t as satisfying as Khatchadourian’s intricate, woven, tapestry-like “Reporter At Large” pieces - “The Gulf War,” “No Secrets” (June 7, 2010), and the masterly “Transfiguration” (February 13, 2012). I find characters with names like Falafel, The Bone, Genius, Sweet Pea, Elementary, The Terminator, Russian Paul, and Fat Nick a bit too Runyonesque to be totally credible. I’m sure they exist - I’m not questioning the piece’s accuracy. But, like Liebling’s Jollity Building gang (in his 1942 The Telephone Booth Indian), their raffishness seems a tad too cute. I prefer the intense factuality of Khatchadourian's incomparable Reporter-At-Large style, with a few pinches of first-person observation thrown in for added piquancy.

Postscript: Debra Nystrom’s poem “Pronghorn,” in this week’s issue, is a vivid piece of nature description (“bleached grass bending east in wind, lifting up / sometimes then bending again like the fur / of bigger animals a hand might’ve just passed over”). I enjoyed it immensely.    

May 6, 2013 Issue

I want to compare Ben McGrath’s “Oddball,” in this week’s issue, with his earlier “Project Knuckleball” (The New Yorker, May 17, 2004). Both pieces are about that “rare specialist,” the knuckleballer. “Project Knuckleball” is a group portrait of “the knuckleball bunch” – the relatively few pitchers over the years “who have entrusted their livelihoods, at one point or another, to the vagaries of the knuckleball.” The heart of the piece is McGrath’s depiction of Tim Wakefield (“Tim Wakefield was not supposed to be a major-league pitcher”). McGrath vividly describes how Wakefield salvaged his career by learning to throw the knuckler. One of the piece’s major themes is the knuckleball’s career-saving aspect. Regarding knuckler Charlie Zink, McGrath writes, “Zink’s reincarnation story, set in the summer of 2002, is similar to Wakefield’s, only more vivid.”

“Oddball” is also a “reincarnation story.” It’s a profile of the ace knuckler, R. A. Dickey. McGrath calls Dickey’s story a “redemption narrative.” But unlike “Project Knuckleball,” which is totally admiring of the knucklers it describes, “Oddball” seems edgier. The piece’s tagline sets the tone: “Is R. A. Dickey too good to be true?” McGrath seems to subtly suggest he is. For example, early in the piece, he says, “Conspicuous cosmopolitanism can be its own form of vanity, especially in a sport with a culture as lethargic as baseball’s.” Later, he describes this moment:

While riding in the car with Dickey, I picked up what looked like an ordinary baseball card that was resting on the console of the transmission. The name and picture on the front of the card were unfamiliar to me. “Oh, man, that’s a story,” Dickey began, and flicked his wrist against my arm, commanding my full attention.

That “and flicked his wrist against my arm, commanding my full attention” is brilliant. The card leads to a story, told by Dickey, about God saying to him that he should attend the wake of the man depicted on the card. Dickey attends the wake. He says, “And when I stepped in there, and it registered with the wife and aunt and uncle who I was, they just started, like, bawling, weeping, and I was just in a place where I felt this need to console her.” That’s when I wrote in the margin, “Bit much.” It’s not that the story is unbelievable. It’s that Dickey appears to be trying to manipulate McGrath’s impression of him. But, to his credit, McGrath is writing his own story, and Dickey’s saintly posing is part of it. Darren Oliver’s pithy “Look at him, trying to be all serious,” in the piece’s penultimate paragraph, says it all. “Oddball” is an excellent illustration of one of journalism’s fundamental principles: the writer, not the subject, shapes the narrative.

I prefer “Project Knuckleball.” The part describing McGrath’s experience catching knuckleballs is inspired! 

April 29, 2013 Issue

One of the most intimidating observations I’ve ever read about writing is John Updike’s theory “that if a short story doesn’t pour smooth from the start, it never will” (Foreword to The Early Stories, 2003). Nothing I’ve ever written, including this blog, has ever “poured smooth.” For me, writing is struggle. This is one of the reasons I enjoy reading John McPhee’s pieces on “The Writing Life.” They show a master writer flat on his back on a picnic table, “staring up into branches and leaves, fighting fear and panic, because I had no idea where or how to begin a piece of writing for The New Yorker” (“Structure,” The New Yorker, January 14, 2013). His absorbing and entertaining “Draft No. 4,” in the magazine’s current issue, contains this solacing revelation: “Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall.” This from the creator of such consummately crafted pieces as “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977), “Atchafalaya” (The New Yorker, February 23, 1987), and “Season on the Chalk” (The New Yorker, March 12, 2007). “To feel doubt is part of the picture,” McPhee says. This is reassuring to hear; I frequently feel doubt about my writing ability. It’s comforting to hear a gifted writer like McPhee candidly describe his own struggles. Other pieces in his “The Writing Life” series are “Progression” (The New Yorker, November 14, 2011) and “Editors & Publisher” (The New Yorker, July 2, 2012).

April 22, 2013 Issue

Burkhard Bilger’s “The Martian Chronicles” and Ben McGrath’s “The White Wall,” both in this week’s terrific Journeys Issue, translate epic journeys into vivid prose. It’s interesting to compare their approaches. Bilger’s piece is about the landing of NASA spacecraft, Curiosity, on Mars. McGrath’s article chronicles the running of the 2013 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Both are descriptive marvels. For example, in “The Martian Chronicles,” Bilger describes Curiosity’s landing system, known as the Sky Crane, as follows:

The Sky Crane was a splayed, skeletal thing, with rocket thrusters for legs and cables spooling out of its belly. It looked like a robotic spider. The rover was more of a camel, with a knobby-kneed chassis and a long, many-jointed neck, surmounted by a binocular head. It was powered by a nuclear generator and bristled with lasers, scoops, cameras, and mechanical claw.

And here, in “The White Wall,” is McGrath’s depiction of musher Lance Mackey:

He had the lean face of a hound, a long braided ponytail, and kinetic energy that was almost feral. His neck, so taut that it resembled a system of ropes and pulleys, had an imprinted circle on its right side, as though he’d swallowed a key ring – the result of surgery, ten years ago, to remove a softball-size cancerous growth.

Both pieces are suspenseful: Will Curiosity’s newfangled Sky Crane (“‘A cockamamie device,’ one NASA researcher called it”) work? Will veteran musher Mitch Seavey (“a bit of a prickly character”) win the race? (I was rooting for him.) Of course, “The Martian Chronicles” contains more science (e.g., “Biologists now believe that cyanobacteria, which produce oxygen through photosynthesis, probably first appeared around 2.7 billion years ago, but the Great Oxygenation didn’t begin for nearly half a billion years”). But “The White Wall” has its complexity, too, comprehending a world of sled-dog racing detail (e.g., “Sled dogs consume as many as fourteen thousand calories a day while racing, but the abnormal weather had been threatening to wreak havoc with the athletes’ metabolisms. Into the soup went kibble, psyllium (for stool-strengthening), and a multivitamin, for the dogs fur”).

Both pieces are classic examples of New Yorker first-person reportage, in which the writer is a participant observer, e.g., “Late in the fall, during a rare lull in his work on the Mars program, Grotzinger and I took a drive to Death Valley – due east from his house in lush San Marino, across the front range of the San Gabriels, past Apple Valley and Barstow, and down into the great basin of the Mojave” (“The Martian Chronicles”); “Late in the morning, I had my first interaction with the kind of Iditarod fan who might fit the broader demographic that Dallas Seavey and Jim Keller were hoping to capture in their mainstreaming pursuit” (“The White Wall”).

Like some of John McPhee’s great pieces, “The White Wall” begins in medias res, on the third day of the race, with Dallas Seavey riding into Takotna on his sled. In contrast, the opening section of “The Martian Chronicles” (“There once were two planets …”) is statelier, more traditional, like the prologue of an epic narrative.

Which article contains the most inspired sentence? In terms of artful figuration, I like “On either side of the road, along the jagged crease of the San Andreas, the land rose and fell like crumpled butcher paper,” in “The Martian Chronicles.” But on the basis of capacity to surprise and delight, this combination from “The White Wall” is hard to beat: “‘I’ve never sunbathed on the Iditarod Trail before!’ a vet from New Zealand exclaimed, after stripping to her sports bra on the tarmac as she waited for a planeload of dropped dogs.”

Both pieces are extraordinary. I enjoyed them immensely. 

April 15, 2013 Issue

Is Terrance Malick’s The Tree of Life a great movie? David Denby thinks so. In his “Terrance Malick’s Insufferable Masterpiece” (included in his 2012 collection Do the Movies Have a Future?), he says,

Interminable, madly repetitive, vague, grandiose; an art-history Summa Theologica crossed with a summer camp documentary on the wonders of the universe; sexless yet sexist, embracing of everything in the world but humour (and is wit not as essential to our existence as air?) – Terrance Malick’s The Tree of Life is insufferable. It is also, astoundingly, one of the great lyric achievements of the screen in recent years and a considerable enlargement of the rhetoric of cinema – a change in technique which is also a change in consciousness. An insufferable masterpiece, then; a film to be endured in a state of enraged awe.

“Great” and “insufferable” strike me as contradictory. I agree with the “insufferable” part. This week, in the magazine, in a review of Malick’s latest vacuity, To the Wonder, Denby repeats his ambivalent verdict regarding The Tree of Life. He says, “The movie could be unbearable at times, but the center held. It’s a great film.” But he goes on to pan To the Wonder in terms that are, it seems to me, applicable to The Tree of Life. For example, he says, “A Malick sequence has now become a collection of semi-disconnected shots, individually ravishing but bound together by what feels like the trivial narcissism of Carribbean-travel ads on TV.” This perfectly expresses my opinion of The Tree of Life, except I would change “has now become” to “is.” Similarly, Denby’s “And someone might tell Malick that beauty isn’t enough” gets at the core of what is “insufferable” about Malick’s movies: their unrelenting, dreamy-soft pictorialism. In “Terrance Malick’s Insufferable Masterpiece,” Denby touches on this point when he asks, “Hasn’t he [Malick] narrowed life down only to those elements that can be etherealized?” More than the lack of dialogue, more even than the absence of humour, it’s this ethereal quality that saps Malick’s films of life’s juice and constitutes their most serious flaw. Pauline Kael was onto this thirty-nine years ago when she said of the protagonists of Malick’s first film, Badlands, “Kit and Holly are kept at a distance, doing things for no explained purpose; it’s as if the director had taped gauze over their characters, so that we wouldn’t be able to take a reading on them” (“Sugarland and Badlands,” The New Yorker, March 18, 1974; included in Kael’s brilliant 1976 collection Reeling). 

April 8, 2013 Issue

My April 8^th New Yorker is looking pretty battered. It’s been rolled up and stuffed in my backpack for three weeks while I roamed around northern Italy. I read it on my April 15 flight to Florence. It’s a rich, absorbing issue. Six pieces stand out:

1. Sarah Stillman’s “Up in the Air,” a Talk story about a “drone party” (“Druce’s drone, equipped with sonar, did not take flight but wobbled on the pavement like a drunken Jabberwock”);

2. Mark Singer’s “Thar She Blows,” a Talk piece about the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibit “Whales: Giants of the Deep” (“Three days before the exhibition opened, Professor Pou Temara, a specialist in Maori language and culture at the University of Waikato, in Hamilton, New Zealand, chanted a Maori blessing in a low monotone as he led a procession past displays of toothed and toothless whale skulls …”);

3. Jeremy Denk’s “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” a Personal History piece about Denk’s “piano student” experiences (“I couldn’t believe that, twenty years later, in this land of traffic lights and strip malls, we were both still carrying the memory of those two minutes of Bach”);

4. Hisham Matar’s “The Return,” an account of Matar’s return to Libya and his search for information regarding his father’s disappearance (“I remember the high eucalyptus trees in the front garden, their big and vivid shadows on the earth, black claws on the cars”);

5. Lizzie Widdicombe’s “The Bad-Boy Brand,” a profile of Vice Media and its hip C.E.O., Shane Smith (“We took a water taxi through the canals, past crumbling buildings and water-stained walls, and arrived at San Marco just as the floodwaters were rising. The area was swarming with tourists, and a narrow pathway of raised wooden planks was threaded precariously through the square. As the waters rose, the tourists crossed the square on the planks, shuffling in a long, two-person-wide line, like animals boarding Noah’s Ark”);

6. James Wood’s “Youth In Revolt,” a review of Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (“But it manifests itself as a pure explosion of now: it catches us in its mobile, flashing present, which is the living reality it conjures on the page at the moment we are reading”).

Of these six, my favorite is Widdicombe’s “The Bad-Boy Brand.” The last section, describing Smith and his crew wading through flooded Piazza San Marco (“The water was filthy, and occasionally a dead pigeon floated past”), is brilliant. Widdicombe’s “Rush” (September 13, 2012) was last year’s best Talk story. Her superb “The Bad-Boy Brand” may well be this year’s best feature. 

Interesting Emendations: Aleksandar Hemon's "Mapping Home"

When Aleksandar Hemon’s "Mapping Home" appeared in The New Yorker (December 5, 2011), I devoured it. I enjoy reading pieces about walking. In “Mapping Home,” walking is used as a way of coping with the “anxiety of displacement.” I used it the same way when I lived in Iqaluit, tramping the dusty gravel roads, the ancient Inuit footpaths, the tundra trails along the Sylvia Grinnell River. Like Hemon in Sarajavo, and later in Chicago, “I collected sensations and faces, smells and sights,” trying to comprehend the place, to know it (in Hemon’s felicitous words) “in my body.” “Mapping Home” is included in Hemon’s excellent new collection The Book of My Lives. It’s now called “The Lives of a Flaneur.” It’s as wonderful in the rereading as in the reading. There are a few differences between this version and the New Yorker original. One of my favorite passages – a description of Hemon’s wanderings when he returned to Sarajevo in 1997 – is slightly altered. Here’s the magazine version:

I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the odor of hard life and sewage—during the siege, people had often taken shelter from the shelling in their basements. I idled in coffee shops, drinking coffee that tasted like burned corn, instead of the foamy pungency I remembered from before the war. Everything around me was both familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant. (Emphasis added)

And here’s the book version:

I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the smell of hard life and sewage – during the siege, people had taken shelter from the shelling in their basements. I idled in coffee shops, drinking coffee that tasted unlike what I remembered from before the war – it was like burnt corn now. As a Bosnian in Chicago, I’d experienced one form of displacement, but this was another: I was displaced in a place that had been mine. In Sarajevo, everything around me was familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant. (Emphasis added)

Does it matter whether you say “odor” or “smell,” “burned” or “burnt”? Is the substitution of “unlike what I remembered from before the war” for “instead of the foamy pungency I remembered from before the war” significant? For me, it is. It’s fascinating to see a master wrier like Hemon reworking his composition. In another memorable passage, “residents of a nursing home on Winthrop” becomes “drooling residents of a nursing home on Winthrop” (emphasis added). In the original of his description of his weekend chess games at Rogers Park coffee shop, he writes, “I often played with an old Assyrian named Peter, who owned a perfume shop and who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and forced me to resign, would make the same joke: ‘Can I have that in writing?’” In the book version this is changed to “I often played with an Assyrian named Peter, who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and I offered to resign, would crack the same joke: ‘Can I have that in writing?’” Comparison of the two versions discloses several other changes as well. But I don’t want to make too much of these variations. Both versions are essentially the same. Both are superb. Both are consummate expressions of what it means to locate “a geography of the soul.”

Credit: The above portrait of Aleksandar Hemon is by Riccardo Vecchio; it appears in The New Yorker (December 5, 2011) as an illustration for Hemon’s “Mapping Home.” 

April 1, 2013 Issue

Steve Coll’s “The Spy Who Said Too Much,” in this week’s issue, is a marvel of concision, logic, and analysis. It’s an account of the chain of events that led to the imprisonment of C.I.A. officer John Kiriakou for disclosing classified information to the press. There’s not much enjoyment in reading about Kiriakou’s downfall. He’s not a clear-cut whistleblower hero. As Coll says, “one person’s whistle-blowing is another’s grandstanding gadfly.” It’s not clear which category Kiriakou falls in. The pleasure of Coll’s piece is in seeing how Coll neatly and clearly structures his narrative, using Kiriakou’s case to illustrate the challenges that the press faces in investigating the Bush Administration’s abusive interrogation methods. What I like most about Coll’s approach is his refusal to judge Kiriakou. After setting out the government’s rationale for prosecuting him, Coll says, in the piece’s most thrilling passage, “But one might ask a different question. Which matters more: Kiriakou’s motives and his reliability, or the fact that, however inelegantly, he helped to reveal that a sitting President ordered international crimes? Does the emphasis on the messenger obscure the message?” Right there, in the posing of those cogent questions, “The Spy Who Said Too Much” separates itself from conventionality (leaker brought to justice) and becomes significantly profounder – an argument for “torture accountability.”