November 10, 2014 Issue

There are four dandy “Talk” stories in this week’s issue: Tad Friend’s "Rembrandt Lighting," Ian Parker’s "Oldies But Goodies," Ian Frazier’s "Tracks," and Mark Singer’s "Showrunning." Friend’s piece is about a visit with the movie director Dan Gilroy, at the Steven Kasher Gallery, in Chelsea, as he sifts through a box of Weegee photographs from the forties. Gilroy uses the collection “to explain how Weegee – connoisseur of the blood-spattered corpse – had inspired his new film, Nightcrawler, about a feral loner who roams Los Angeles, filming scenes of mayhem for the local news.” Friend says Gilroy is “as thin and pale as dental floss, with a sepulchral face and milky-blue eyes.” The story brims with pungent details. At one point, Gilroy looks at the circular stamp (“Credit Photo by Weegee”) on one of the photos and says, “He used a Speed Graphic camera, had a ten-foot focus, and shot with flash to create what he called Rembrandt lighting.” I delight in the way this piece combines so many seemingly incongruous elements – “a human coyote who comes down from the hills to feed,” “a wild-eyed woman resisting being frog-marched by a man in a trenchcoat,” “Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh and Lady Decies, imperious in white furs,” the Metropolitan Opera, a horrific car accident, Marilyn Monroe – in such a concentrated frame. It’s like a surreal, noir prose poem.

Ian Parker’s “Oldies But Goodies” wonderfully describes an encounter with the ninety-three-year-old painter Wayne Thiebaud in an inspired setting – a table at Lady M, “on East Seventy-eighth Street, a minimally decorated boutique-y place selling ‘confectionary delights.’ ’’ The setting is inspired because Thiebaud is famous for his “confections” paintings. Although Parker doesn’t say so, Thiebaud also happens to be the creator of some of the New Yorker’s yummiest “Food Issue” covers. A couple of lines in the piece made me smile: “As Thiebaud put it, there are still days that start with the thought: This morning, I’d like to paint a pie”; “I was interested in the Americanism of gumball machines.” And there’s this arresting sentence, incorporating a Thiebaud quotation: “He also painted crudités, fanned out on a plate, such as ‘you see over and over at everything you go to, that same stuff, in a circle – a Kenneth Noland abstraction.’ ” For me, the best part of “Oldies But Goodies” is the ending, when Parker attentively picks up on a nearby conversation: “At the counter, a woman used the tone of someone choosing between careers to ask for help deciding between a strawberry cake and a banana cake. ‘It depends on whether you like strawberries or bananas,’ the sales assistant replied.” I like this ending because it shows a virtuoso Talk writer artfully using a seemingly stray bit of reality to help make his story.

Ian Frazier's “Tracks” tells about a plan to convert a three-and-a-half-mile section of abandoned railroad tracks in central Queens into a linear park called the QueensWay. It takes the reader on a tour of the site in the company of three proponents of the project (Andrea Crawford, Marc Matsil, and Andy Stone) and a “visitor” (stand-in for Frazier, who in accordance with Talk tradition, refrains from using “I”). One of the hallmarks of Frazier’s style is his superb urban nature description, and in this piece he notes a place “where now the trunk of a large tree grew over a rusted rail like a potbelly over a belt.” Another distinctive feature of Frazier’s writing is the list. In “Tracks” he lists the names of businesses near or under the elevated section of railway at the QueensWay’s southern end: “RC Forklift Co., R & H Industrial Fabricators, Punjabi Brothers Auto Repair, Arco Electrical Contractors, United Propane, Hart Truck Refrigeration, 3 Kings Collision.” There’s poetry in those names! My favorite part of “Tracks” is when, late in the afternoon, after Crawford, Matsil and Stone leave the site, Frazier “found himself walking there alone.” This, to me, is such a Frazierian thing to do – to go back, explore the tracks again by himself, see what impressions he might gather. Sure enough, his contemplation of  “the vaulted spaces beneath the elevated tracks” yields this beautiful detail: “Slabs of rusted corrugated iron wall off the spaces, coils of barbed wire discourage burglars, and curbside ailanthus trees shoot upward until they meet the track overhang, which causes them to curl out over the street.”

Like Frazier, Mark Singer has been writing Talk stories since 1974. He, too, is a master of the form. His Mr. Personality (1989), one of the most beautiful collections of New Yorker writing ever published, contains twenty-five Talk pieces, including such classics as “Yabba-Yabba, Doodle-Doodle” (in which Mr. Blatford memorably says, “You get your change from a change machine, put your dog in the Doggie Washer, do your yabba-yabba, doodle-doodle – you know, whatever you do while you’re waiting in a Laundromat – and then go home with a clean dog”) and “Pigeon Mumblers” (“Some Greenpoint pigeon mumblers who are familiar with Killer’s irascible moods say that if he really put his mind to it, he could probably hatch a baseball”). Singer’s “Showrunning,” in this week’s issue, is about Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist and executive director of the TV series Alpha House. Trudeau, sitting at a table in the “imprecisely named Excellent Dumpling House,” on Lafayette Street, after a day of jury duty, discusses “the difference between spending days alone drawing and being an executive producer responsible for a cast and crew of a hundred and twenty people and one bloodhound (Gil John Bigg’s look-alike best friend).” He tells about a theatre group he formed when he was seven years old:

I just rounded up all the neighborhood kids, and we put on these productions in our basement. I think even then I understood that I really didn’t have the performance gene. But I did have the impresario gene. I wrote the plays, I wrote the music, I did the scenery, I made the tickets, I directed, I manned the light board. For one of my birthdays, I asked for a curtain. My mother got red curtains that divided the basement in half. We packed the basement. There were some bunk beds down there. We turned those into balconies.

That last bit about turning the bunk beds into balconies made me smile.

So there you have it – four great Talk pieces by four great Talk writers. Proof, if proof is needed, that the Talk of the Town story, invented eighty-nine years ago by Harold Ross, is still vibrant.

James Ley On James Wood

James Ley, in his absorbing The Critic in the Modern World (2014), says of James Wood’s criticism, “His characteristic approach is to interpret a fictional work via an assessment of the author’s stylistic proclivities: his point of entry, the basis of his understanding, is the weave and texture of a writer’s prose.” This is well said. It gets at the quality that most draws me to Wood’s writing – his detailed analysis of what makes great writing great. It reminds me of what Helen Vendler said about Seamus Heaney’s critical writing: “The art of Heaney’s criticism is never to lose touch with the writing act” (“A Wounded Man Falling Toward Me,” The New Yorker, March 13, 1989). It’s Wood’s art, too. For example, in his superb "Late and Soon" (The New Yorker, December 12, 2012), a review of Per Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time, he quotes a couple of excerpts from the novel and says,

In the first passage, what is strange is not just the way the function of that linking “and” changes (sometimes “and” is used to connect sequential details; sometimes it is used to shift from one temporality to another) but also the way that information expands and contracts. We go from the precision and banality of the uncle with his 8-mm. camera to the almost placeless, blurred lyricism about the grey grandparents from an unnamed but “more puritanical town . . . standing windswept and grey on the quay.” There is something wonderful about the passionate reality with which, in the second excerpt, the narrator invests a liquid that is at first fictional but which becomes absolutely alive, a golden nectar flowing “in multiple streams.” Notice, too, that, in a spirit of free association, the narrator’s thoughts about the book are bound up with taste: golden Calvados to begin with, and then the bitter taste of the novel, which leads to the “bitter gift of pain” mentioned in the old hymn, and on to the “bitter gift” of the funeral.

I relish this kind of stylistic analysis. Wood provides it in almost every piece he writes. I wish Ley had devoted more of his study to consideration of Wood’s aesthetics. But, unlike Wood, Ley isn’t an aesthetic critic. His approach is metaphysical. He’s interested in Wood’s ideas – hysterical realism, fictionality, lifeness, etc. There’s nothing wrong with this approach. It illuminates Wood’s thinking. But it neglects an essential point: Wood’s strongest thought is in his style, the way he expresses himself. Ley knows this. At one point, he says, “The metaphysics of each critic is reflected in the texture of his writing.” Exactly. Ley’s study would’ve been much richer if he'd focused on examining “the weave and texture” of Wood’s splendid prose.

November 3, 2014 Issue

I find the pleasure quotient in this year’s Food Issue noticeably skimpier than in previous years. The prose is still delicious, but it’s used to express anxiety rather than food love. John Lanchester’s “Shut Up and Eat” sets the tone. He writes, “Most of the energy that we put into food, I realized, isn’t about food; it’s about anxiety. Food makes us anxious.” Other pieces in The Food Issue illustrate Lanchester’s point. Michael Specter, in his “Against the Grain,” writes about “gluten anxiety” (“Gluten anxiety has been building for years, but it didn’t become acute until 2011, when a group led by Peter Gibson, a professor of gastroenterology at Monash University and the director of the G.I. unit at the Alfred Hospital, in Melbourne, seemed to provide evidence that gluten was capable of causing illness even in people who did not have celiac disease”). Dana Goodyear, in her “Élite Meat,” says, “More than any other food, meat focuses cultural anxieties.” She goes on:

In the seventies, beef caused heart attacks; in the eighties and afterward it carried mad-cow. Recent decades have brought to light the dark side of industrial agriculture, with its hormone- and antibiotic-intensive confinement-feeding operations, food-safety scares, and torture-porn optics. The social and environmental costs, the moral burden, the threat to individual health—all seem increasingly hard to justify when weighed against a tenderloin.

And when pleasure is expressed, as it is in Adam Gopnik’s “Bakeoff,” it’s never whole-hearted. Gopnik undercuts his sensuous description of the Cronut’s taste (“intensely sweet, interestingly textured, almost unbearably rich in ‘mouth feel’ ”) with the later observation that it “sits right on the edge of being slightly sickening.” David Owen’s excellent “Floating Feasts,” an account of his cruise on the Royal Caribbean’s Oasis, includes a section on Norwalk virus.

And yet, there are pleasures in this anxiety-ridden Food Issue: Jiayang Fan’s “Bar Tab: Drunken Munkey” (“a Bollywood flick plays, the churidar-outfitted waitstaff deliver railroad chicken on placemats mapping British India”); the delightful last paragraph of Gopnik’s “Bakeoff,” in which he imagines Antonin Carême, the early nineteenth century chef, standing in line for a Cronut (“One sees him outside, waiting for hours, furiously scribbling new ideas for pièces montées—perhaps a triumphal procession in pastry, with a temple of Art and Appetite made of pretzel croissants, blessed by Love in the form of three or four crusty Cronut Cupids, smiling down, for novelty’s sake”); the superb noticing of “the milk coming out of a white rubber hose that was un-pinched when you lifted the metal paddle,” in Chang-rae Lee’s “Immovable Feast”; and – my favorite – Rivka Galchen’s wonderful description of the operation of an ice-cream bar vending machine, in her “Medical Meals” (“Mike and I would listen to each coin fall. Then came a whirring sound as the freezer chest opened slowly, like a vampire’s coffin. A robot arm descended, suctioned up glycerides on a wooden stick, then released the treasure into the dispensing slot of the machine. ‘I’m so glad I’m here,’ Mike would say”).

But none of the above is comparable to the double bliss of reading delicious prose describing delectable eats, e.g., Lauren Collins, in the 2012 Food Issue, writing that a bite of Poilâne miche “reverberates in the mouth for a few seconds after you’ve swallowed it, as though the taste buds were strings” (“Bread Winner,” The New Yorker, December 23, 2012). Next year, less anxiety and more food love, please.

October 27, 2014 Issue

Richard Preston hasn’t been on my radar for years. The last piece by him that I remember reading is “Climbing the Redwoods” (The New Yorker, February 14, 2005). But now here he is, in this week’s issue, with “The Ebola Wars.” It’s extraordinary! To say that it’s about how genomics research can help contain Ebola fairly describes its gist, but hardly does justice to the riveting life-and-death drama at its core, a drama that hinges on access to the experimental drug ZMapp, described by Preston as “a cocktail of three antibodies that seemed especially potent in killing Ebola.” The piece reads like a streak. Preston has a gift for figuration that turns complex phenomena into vivid images, e.g., on the size of one Ebola particle, he says, “If it were the size of a piece of spaghetti, then a human hair would be about twelve feet in a diameter and would resemble the trunk of a giant redwood tree.” He describes the look of an Ebola-infected cell as having the appearance of “a ball of tangled yarn.” Regarding microtubes of human blood serum, he says, “Each microtube was the size of the sharpened end of a pencil and contained a droplet of human blood serum, golden in color and no bigger than a lemon seed.” His description of how a DNA-sequencing machine works is amazing:

Using a pipette, a technician sucked up about a tenth of Gire’s Ebola droplet—an amount like a fleck of moisture on a wet day—and placed it on a glass slide known as a flow cell. The fleck of liquid contained the full library of code from the blood of the fourteen Ebola patients. The bit of water spread into channels on the flow cell, which sat in the mouth of an Illumina HiSeq 2500 machine, one of the fastest DNA sequencers in the world.

For the next twenty-four hours, the sequencer worked automatically, pulsing liquids across the flow cell, while lasers shone on it. On the surface of the flow cell, hundreds of millions of fragments of DNA had gathered into hundreds of millions of microscopic colored spots. The colors of the individual spots were changing as the process went on, and a camera took pictures of the changing field of spots and stored the data. Twenty-four hours later, the machine had finished reading Gire’s library of bar-coded fragments of DNA. The data were sent to the Broad Institute’s computer arrays, which assembled all the fragments into finished genetic code—it organized the vast pile of books in the library and placed the letters of all the books in their proper order on shelves. On Sunday, June 15th, Gire and Sabeti got word that the computers had finished their job. The result was twelve full genomes of Ebola virus—the Ebolas that had lived in twelve of the fourteen people.

Then Preston cuts from the Genomics Platform to the Ebola ward at Kenema hospital in Sierra Leone, and we are suddenly in hell:

Khan was inside the plastic Ebola ward, and the place was a mess. There were thirty or more Ebola patients in the ward, lying on cholera beds, and the floor was splashed with everything that can come out of the human body. Khan was making rounds, with one nurse, both of them wearing P.P.E.

The contrast between the two realities – the cerebral, stainless steel, high-tech Genomics Platform, on the one hand, and the ghastly, chaotic, plastic-walled Ebola ward at Kenoma hospital, on the other – is transfixing. The person who knits the two worlds together, who coolly moves between them is the research scientist Stephen Gire. Preston says that Gire is “tall and quiet, and there is an air of precision about him.” Preston’s prose enacts that precision. “The Ebola Wars” is astonishingly achieved.  

October 20, 2014 Issue

If you admire Peter Schjeldahl’s style, as I do, you’ll relish his “Shapes of Things” in this week’s issue. It’s his fourth essay on Matisse since he joined The New Yorker. The others are “Twin Peaks” (March 3, 2003), “Art as Life” (August 29, 2005), and “The Road to Nice” (July 26, 2010). Matisse is one of Schjeldahl’s touchstones. In “The Road to Nice,” he calls Matisse’s The Piano Lesson “my favorite work of twentieth-century art.” It’s fun to read Schjeldahl’s Matisse quartet and cherry-pick the best lines. In “Twin Peaks,” he says Matisse’s contours “are like the borders of wetness left by waves on the beach.” In “Art as Life,” he defines Fauvism as “a way less of seeing the world than of feeling it with one’s eyes.” In “The Road to Nice,” he notes “the black-contoured, zero-gravity, incredibly sumptuous ciphers of fruit” in Bowl of Apples on a Table and says, “Even close to a century after the fact, an ancestral voice in my head shrills, ‘You can’t do that in a painting!’ (But, guess what?).” That parenthesis is pure Schjeldahl. And in this week’s “Shapes of Things,” he says, “When Matisse is at his best, the exquisite friction of his color, his line, and his pictorial invention – licks of a cat’s tongue – overwhelm perception, at which point enjoyment sputters into awe.” Licks of a cats tongue – you can’t say that in criticism. (But, guess what?) Of the four pieces, my favorite is “The Road to Nice,” in which Schjeldahl audaciously compares Matisse’s The Piano Lesson to Hitchcock’s Psycho: “Like Psycho, The Piano Lesson unfolds the secret of its coherence by seemingly precipitous but precisely calibrated jumps and starts.” And the final paragraph, in which Schjeldahl says, “I’m just in a mood – enhanced, now, by the thought of the inexplicable, inchoately thrilling arc of black paint that slashes Matisse’s Portrait of Olga Merson (1911) from chin to left thigh – to insist on a hierarchy of sensations that favor the experience of being tripped cleanly out of ourselves and into wondering glee,” is elating. That “inexplicable, inchoately thrilling arc of black paint” is inspired. The whole sensuous, eloquent piece is inspired! It’s Matissean.

"Literature is just a fancy word for writing"

Philip Gourevitch (Photo by Andrew Brucker)

I applaud Philip Gourevitch’s recent post on newyorker.com in which he says “there is a kind of lingering snobbery in the literary world that wants to exclude nonfiction from the classification of literature—to suggest that somehow it lacks artistry, or imagination, or invention by comparison to fiction” ("Nonfiction Deserves A Nobel," October 9, 2014). Geoff Dyer made a similar observation in his 2001 review of Ryszard Kapuściński’s The Shadow of the Sun: “He [Kapuściński] is the victim of a received cultural prejudice that assumes fiction to be the loftiest preserve of literary and imaginative distinction” (“Ryscard Kapuściński’s African Life,” included in Dyer’s great 2011 essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition).

It’s time this prejudice was scrapped. As Gourevitch rightly says, “Every mode of expression has its formal demands. For writing that’s not fictive, that means fidelity to documentable reality; yet the best of it can only be done when the writer has an imagination as free as any novelist, playwright, or poet.” He concludes, “Literature is just a fancy word for writing.” I totally agree.

October 13, 2014 Issue

A special shout-out to the editors of this week’s “Money Issue” for including two excellent pieces on what James Agee, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, called “human actuality.” The “human actuality” in Lauren Hilgers’ “The Kitchen Network” is the hardscrabble existence of a twenty-nine-year-old Chinese immigrant named Rain, working twelve-hour shifts six days a week in a strip mall Chinese restaurant on Maryland’s Indian Head Highway. Hilgers conveys a deep interest in what is actual – the Fujianese village where Rain grew up, the way in which he was smuggled into the U.S., the Chinatown employment agencies, the restaurant where he works, the house he shares with five co-workers, even the way he thinks (“So, instead of conversation, Rain occupies himself with the math of a transient cook: the time it takes to clean the shrimp, the days before he can visit his girlfriend in New York, and the balance of his debts”).

The human actuality in Peter Hessler’s “Tales of the Trash” can be summed up in three words: women, money, and garbage. The way these three things are connected in Hessler’s piece is a revelation. Hessler’s subject is Sayyid Ahmid, a Cairo garbageman. Ahmid collects garbage from Hessler’s apartment. Occasionally, Hessler accompanies him on his rounds. Reading the first three sections, I thought the story was going to be about Cairo’s “informal economy.” As Hessler shows, “Cairo’s waste collection is shaped by tradition, not by laws and planning.” But in the following sections, after Hessler and his wife visit Sayyid in his home, the piece branches in a different direction, showing how Sayyid’s sexist views (e.g., he supports female circumcision) are a product of Islamic tradition that limits desire to males.

Considering these two pieces from a compositional perspective, I find myself slightly more partial to Hessler’s “Tales of the Trash.” Its mix of subjective and objective is richer. Both articles are absorbing. Both emphasize, in an Agee-like way, human particularity.

October 6, 2014 Issue

Quick comments on seven items in this week’s issue:

1. Emma Allen’s “Bar Tab: Blind Barber” – After dark, glowing barber pole, clandestine entrance, men draped with striped sheets, Mr. High Fade, Smoke & Dagger, Bellevue morgue, “the man under the clippers” – this noir capsule is like a surreal prose poem. I lapped it up and wished for more.

2. Jennifer Gonnerman’s “Before the Law” – This piece angered me. What a poor excuse for a defense lawyer! Gonnerman reports that in the three years Browder was in Rikers, his legal aid lawyer Brendan O’Meara never once made the trip out to the jail to see him. I find that appalling. Regarding Gonnerman’s piece on artistic grounds, I liked the way she steps into the narrative frame in the final section (“One afternoon this past spring, I sat with Browder in a quiet restaurant in lower Manhattan”). Her use of “I” turns cold facts into personal experience.

3. Masha Gessen’s “The Weight of Words” – This absorbing piece expresses exactly what I felt as I read Ulitskaya’s “The Fugitive” when it appeared in the May 12, 2014 New Yorker, that it is “storytelling reduced to plot.”

4. Gerald Stern’s “The World We Should Have Stayed In” – Stern’s run-on, associative style, when it’s really cooking, jiving, jumping, moving, as it is in this amazing poem, is inspired. His inclusion of a meal at Weinstein’s (“chopped liver first or herring or eggs and onions, then / matzo-ball soup or noodle or knaidel, followed by / roast veal or boiled beef and horseradish / or roast chicken and vegetables, coleslaw /and Jewish pickles on the side and plates / of cookies and poppy-seed cakes and strudel”) had me licking my lips.

5. Calvin Tomkins’s “Into the Unknown” is pure delight. It’s the best Tomkins I’ve read in a long time. What makes it so good is the way it gets inside Ofili’s creative process. “It was a morning in June, and we were looking at a dark nine-foot-tall vertical painting called ‘Lime Bar,’ which he had been working on since April.” I find such sentences thrilling. “Into the Unknown” contains several of them. I enjoyed this piece immensely.

6. Kevin Canty’s “Story, With Bird” – This is my first exposure to Canty’s work. It’s impressive. I like its brevity and its realism (“The world divided itself into the drinking and the hangover, day and night, and we lived for the nights, the ones that ended in a blank space, half a memory to wake up to”). It describes a world that I was once part of. Maybe that, for me, is its chief attraction.

7. Joan Acocella’s “Lonesome Road” – A great review, where greatness means subtle, penetrating, direct, fresh. Acocella’s analysis of Robinson’s use of “point-of-view narration” is excellent.     

September 29, 2014 Issue

One of the most impressive aspects of Dexter Filkins’s “The Fight of Their Lives,” in this week’s issue, is that it’s written from the field. The piece reports on the Kurds’ war against the barbaric Islamic State, also called ISIS. In the piece’s riveting opening section, Filkins interviews Kurdish army commander Najat Ali Saleh as the battle with ISIS rages nearby: “When I saw Saleh, on a recent visit, his men had just recaptured a village called Baqert. With mortars still thudding nearby, he exuded a heavy calm, cut by anger. I asked him if he’d taken any prisoners. “Only dead,” he said.”

ISIS is exceptional for its cult of sadism – the beheadings, crucifixions, tortures, rapes and slaughter of captives, children, women, Christians, and Shiites. The U.S. and its allies have publicly committed to degrading and ultimately destroying ISIS. But none of the Western powers are willing to commit ground troops to the battle. Apparently the only people willing to fight ISIS on the ground are the Kurds. They do so because, as Filkins explains, they’re defending a territory, Iraqi Kurdistan, that they’ve been fighting for decades to establish an independent state.

We want the Kurds to keep fighting ISIS. Our security depends on it. Yet, as Filkins points out, the U.S. is frustrating the Kurds, wanting them “to do two potentially incompatible things. The first is to serve as a crucial ally in the campaign to destroy ISIS, with all the military funding and equipment that such a role entails. The second is to resist seceding from the Iraqi state.”

“The Fight of Their Lives” ’s underlying message is clear: the U.S. should drop its “One Iraq” policy and throw its support solidly behind the Kurdish drive for independence. Filkins makes this point in his concluding section:

Peter Galbraith, the longtime diplomat and advocate of the Kurds, also served in East Timor and Croatia, regions that surmounted enormous difficulties to become separate states. He believes that once a people decide on independence almost nothing will dissuade them. “The desire to become independent is part of the consciousness of every Kurd,” Galbraith said. “They really feel like they are fighting and dying for something.”

“The Fight of Their Lives” says what needs to be said. The Kurds are entitled to their independence. It’s time for the U.S. and its allies to recognize the separate state of Kurdistan.

Postscript: Two of the best literary critics in the business are in this week’s issue – James Wood and Joyce Carol Oates. Wood reviews Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing; Oates reviews Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest. Both pieces are terrific. Both critics analyze at the level of language. For example, in his piece, Wood says of McBride,

But McBride’s language also justifies its strangeness on every page. Her prose is a visceral throb, and the sentences run meanings together to produce a kind of compression in which words, freed from the tedious march of sequence, seem to want to merge with one another, as paint and musical notes can.

Oates, in her review, pounces on this Amis sentence, “The Sonders have suffered Seelenmord – death of the soul,” and says, “The author of the novel, not the narrator of the chapter, wants to highlight certain phrases for the benefit of the reader, but the mannerism is as distracting as a nudge in the ribs.” I enjoyed these two reviews immensely.