Samanth Subramanian's "Followig Fish"

I relish Samanth Subramanian’s writing. He crafts the kind of sturdy, specific, plain-style sentence – first person, active voice, spiced with a hint of adventure or exoticism – that I devour. “One morning earlier this year, I took the Delhi Metro to an eastern suburb called Ghaziabad, where the Aam Aadmi Party is headquartered,” he writes, in his absorbing "The Agitator" (The New Yorker, September 2, 2013), and I instantly think, Okay, I’m with you. Let’s go! Subramanian’s wonderful Following Fish (2010), which I’ve just finished reading, brims with such lines:

One day, I accompanied Father Kattar to his home village of Veerapandiyapattinam, a community of roughly five thousand fishermen, forty-five minutes’ drive from Tuticorin and less than two kilometres from the temple town of Tiruchendur.

With nothing else to do, I began walking the promenade beside the River Mandovi, a procession of lemon-yellow and powder-blue walls across the road to my right, and moored riverboat casinos with names like Noah’s Ark and King’s Casino, dozing after the previous night’s excesses, to my left.

Climbing the few steps up into the temple – each rendered permanently sticky underfoot by the spilled juice of hundreds of smashed coconuts – I entered a small sanctum with two individual shrines.

Only on my final full day in Goa was I able to follow the second part of Alvares’ advice: to walk the beach from Calangute to Candolim.

In Veraval, thanks to Bapu, I wheedled my way for hours at a time into the yards of two master boat builders.

Following Fish is a brilliant, delicious travelogue, an account of Subramanian’s meanderings along “the long, magnificent necklace of India’s coastline,” exploring fish markets (“fisherwomen with toes reddened by fish blood squat behind cutters, little steel tubs of still-swimming catfish, and turmeric-smeared cuts of fish”), toddy shops (“This toddy had been tapped just a couple of hours earlier and was still so sweet that, when it was brought to our table, it managed to attract fruit flies out of nowhere”), eateries (“Out of the gloom, a waiter materialized and first brought me water in a squat, broad steel bowl, then a cool glass of the spiced kokum-coconut milk drink known as sol kadhi, and then a superb set lunch that sang of home: rice, fresh rotis, an elongated piece of fried fish, a bowl of curry, and a piece of curried fish”), beaches (“The beach had little sand to spare; the ground felt hard under my feet, not as if the sand had been packed by water but as if there were brick or clay just beneath”), and boat-building yards (“Here, a boy in his late teens was dipping strands of braided cotton into a mix of oil and resin, and then inserting the strands into the crevices between the planks with the help of a chisel and a mallet, pounding them into place until the crevices were full”).

My favorite chapter is “On seeking to eat as a city once ate,” in which Subramanian describes eating a meal in an old Mumbai “lunch home” or khanawal called Anantashram:

For the entirety of my meal, though, it was the curry that held my attention. It was more than anything else, a thick fish soup, flavoured heartily with mackerel, smooth with coconut, yellow with turmeric, tart with kokum, and finished with a flourish of tempered mustard seeds. I asked for a second helping of the curry, to go with the perfectly cylindrical serving of rice; of the curried mackerel itself, though, I was not a fan. It seemed to have given its all to its gravy and it now sat glistening but essence-less on the edge of my plate. When I rose after my meal, in fact, that remaining hunk of fish earned me a scolding from my waiter for not finishing my food.

Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish is a satisfying blend of stimulating travel and good eating. I enjoyed it immensely.  

"Mr. Hunter's Grave" - Fact, Fiction, or Faction?

Joseph Mitchell (Photo by Therese Mitchell)

It’s interesting to compare seven reviews of Thomas Kunkel’s Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker (2015) and see the various ways they respond to Kunkel’s revelation that Mitchell fabricated certain aspects of his great “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The New Yorker, September 22, 1956). The seven reviews are:

1. Thomas Berenato’s "Progress of Stories" (Los Angeles Book Review, April 21, 2015)

2. Janet Malcolm’s "The Master Writer of the City" (The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015)

3. Charles McGrath’s "The People You Meet" (The New Yorker, April 27, 2015)

4. Blake Bailey’s " 'Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker,' by Thomas Kunkel" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, May 19, 2015)

5. Thomas Powers’ "All I Can Stand" (London Review of Books, June 18, 2015)

6. John Williams’ "Review: 'Man in Profile" Studies Joseph Mitchell of 'The New Yorker' " (The New York Times, June 24, 2015)

7. Thomas Beller’s “Nowhere Man” (Bookforum, Summer 2015)

Before looking at these pieces, I want to set out the fabrications reported by Kunkel. There are six:

1. The single Saturday visit with Hunter, as described in the story, is actually a conflation of at least seven different interviews that Mitchell conducted with Hunter over a number of months.

2. The three long Hunter monologues in the story were constructed by splicing (and “embroidering”) quotations from related segments of multiple Mitchell-Hunter conversations. Kunkel says, “While Mitchell stayed faithful to the spirit and tang of Hunter’s observations, it seems clear that much of the old man’s language was Mitchell’s own.”

3. In the story, Mitchell’s first meeting with Hunter occurs in Hunter’s house; in actual fact, it took place at Sandy Ground’s African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

4. In the story, it’s Rev. Raymond Brock who steers Mitchell to Hunter; in actual fact, it was a man named James McCoy, sitting on the porch of a house in Sandy Ground, when Mitchell passed by, who first mentioned Hunter to Mitchell.

5. In the story, Mitchell first encounters Brock in St. Luke’s Cemetery; in actual fact, he didn’t meet him there. Kunkel says, “While Mitchell was preparing his story, he asked if could set their meeting in St. Luke’s Cemetery, which is one of the graveyards Mitchell knew from his early visits. Brock agreed that would make for a better read and gave his permission….”

6. In the story, Hunter takes the “BELOVED SON” wreath ribbon out of his wallet at the cemetery entrance. In actual fact, according to Kunkel, “Mitchell first came across the BELOVED SON ribbon while in Hunter’s house on his second visit there; it was spread atop a bureau in his bedroom. On a table beside Hunter’s bed lay his late son’s wallet. While it’s possible that Hunter had for a time carried the ribbon in his own wallet, it doesn’t appear he pulled it out for Mitchell in the poignant manner the writer described.”

In Man in Profile, Kunkel asks, “Should the reputation of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” suffer for the license Mitchell employed in telling it?” He answers, “As with any aspect of art, that is up to the appraiser.”

Well, let’s see what the seven appraisers listed above have to say. Thomas Berenato, in his “Progress of Stories,” writes,

What the “character” Mr. Hunter says in the story “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” is not verbatim what George H. Hunter told Mitchell in propria persona, but it is revelatory of his character, or at least of “character” period. Sometimes Mitchell sought, and received, permission from his subjects to rearrange or even reassign the dialogue that took place. Sometimes not. In any case, monologues unspool for pages at a time. Soliloquies as charming and harrowing as these are few to find outside the works of Joyce, Beckett, or Bernhard. They are all as unmistakably Mitchellian as Sebald’s are Sebaldian. Mitchell, Kunkel writes, “was in fact a first-rate writer of literature whose chosen medium happened to be nonfiction.”

Implicit in this is that fact pieces that are considered “literature” are somehow exempt from the requirement that they be accurate.

Janet Malcolm, in her “The Master Writer of the City,” expresses a similar view. She refers to Mitchell’s “radical departures from factuality.” Regarding “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” she says,

What Kunkel found in Mitchell’s reporting notes for his famous piece “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” made him even more nervous. It now appears that that great work of nonfiction is also in some part a work of fiction. The piece opens with an encounter in the St. Luke’s cemetery on Staten Island between Mitchell and a minister named Raymond E. Brock, who tells him about a remarkable black man named Mr. Hunter, and sets in motion the events that bring Mitchell to Hunter’s house a week later. But the notes show that the encounter in the cemetery never took place. In actuality, it was a man sitting on his front porch named James McCoy (who never appears in the piece) who told Mitchell about Mr. Hunter years before Mitchell met him; and when Mitchell did meet Hunter it was in a church and not at his house.

Malcolm mocks the puritanical response to the liberties Mitchell takes with the facts. She says,

He [Mitchell] has betrayed the reader’s trust that what he is reading is what actually happened. He has mixed up nonfiction with fiction. He has made an unwholesome, almost toxic brew out of the two genres. It is too bad he is dead and can’t be pilloried. Or perhaps it is all right that he is dead, because he is suffering the torments of hell for his sins against the spirit of fact. And so on.

Her view is that “Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat.” She says,

His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they’re so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition.

Malcolm suggests, “Mitchell’s genre is some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named.”

Charles McGrath, in his “The People You Meet,” takes a different view. He says, “More than we knew, or wanted to know, he [Mitchell] made things up.” Of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” McGrath says,

Mitchell’s best work is lovely and stirring in a way that a documentary or a recorded interview could never be. George Hunter, an elderly black man and Staten Island resident, and the subject of a story that is probably Mitchell’s masterpiece, would be less interesting if we had to read what he actually said. And yet the piece gains immeasurably from being presented as factual, an account of scenes and conversations that really took place. If we read it as fiction, which it is, in part, some of the air goes out.

McGrath’s view differs from Malcolm’s. She sees Mitchell’s fabrications as a function of his creative imagination. She holds that most journalists lack such an imagination (“There are no fictional characters lurking in their imaginations. They couldn’t create a character like Mr. Flood or Cockeye Johnny if you held a gun to their heads”). Whereas McGrath says, “As inglorious examples like Jayson Blair demonstrate, invention is often easier than reporting—you can do it without even leaving home—and requires no special talent other than nerve.”

McGrath doesn’t use literary values to excuse Mitchell the way Berenato and Malcolm do. But he does defend him. He says, “Mitchell’s best defense is that he wrote what he did out of affection and empathy for his subjects, not a wish to deceive.”

Blake Bailey, in his “Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, by Thomas Kunkel,” calls Mitchell’s writing “a kind of hybrid nonfiction that encompassed (with the blessing of his editors) long embellished monologues delivered by old Mr. Flood and Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, the Gypsy king, who were actually composites of various New York characters with a piquant admixture of Mitchell himself.” Other than the “long embellished monologues,” Bailey makes no mention of any of the other fabrications reported by Kunkel. He calls Mitchell “arguably, our greatest literary journalist — a man who wrote about freaks, barkeeps, street preachers, grandiose hobos and other singular specimens of humanity with compassion and deep, hard-earned understanding, and above all with a novelist’s eyes and ears.”

Thomas Powers’ “All I Can Stand,” is a favorable assessment of Kunkel’s book and a wonderful review of several of Mitchell’s best stories, including “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (“To disappear is the common fate and it would have been Mr Hunter’s, too, were it not for one thing – Joe Mitchell’s refusal to let him go. In the way of writers, Mitchell has listened to Mr Hunter, told his story, and stayed the clock”). Interestingly, throughout his piece, Powers refers to Mitchell’s stories as “fact pieces” without qualification or acknowledgment of the “license” (Kunkel’s word) that Mitchell employed in writing them. Is Powers in denial of Mitchell’s fabrications? Or does he view them as irrelevant? His failure to comment on Kunkel’s revelations is a weakness in a piece that is otherwise an excellent appreciation of Mitchell’s writing.  

John Williams, in his “Review: Man in Profile Studies Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker,” calls Mitchell “a writer who observed and imagined his way to a brilliant, heightened version of reality.” He says, “It’s clear Mitchell did make things up.” He approvingly quotes Janet Malcolm’s Kunkel review (“But few of us have gone as far as Mitchell in bending actuality to our artistic will. This is not because we are more virtuous than Mitchell. It is because we are less gifted than Mitchell. The idea that reporters are constantly resisting the temptation to invent is a laughable one. Reporters don’t invent because they don’t know how to”). It appears that Williams, like Berenato and Malcolm, sees Mitchell as a literary artist, exempt from journalism’s basic “don’t mess with the facts.”

Thomas Beller, in his “Nowhere Man,” observes that Mitchell’s pieces convey an “immersive sense of interest in their subjects, within which there is affection, even love.” He says Mitchell’s prose is “burnished with the warmth of empathy.” He doesn’t mention Mitchell’s fabrications other than to say that Mitchell wrestled with “guilt over liberties he took with facts,” and to point out that Mr. Flood was not Mitchell’s only composite character.

       

Until I read these reviews, I didn’t think of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” as a “heightened version of reality” (Williams) or a “kind of hybrid nonfiction” (Bailey) or “some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named” (Malcolm). I thought of it the way Powers apparently still thinks of it – as a “fact piece.” I agree with McGrath when he says, “If we read it as fiction, which it is, in part, some of the air goes out.”

I resist reading “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” as fiction. Mitchell didn’t intend it as such. In the Author’s Note of his great Up in the Old Hotel (1992), he classified it as “factual.” In my opinion, everything in it is factual, except the six fabrications listed above. They are sufficient to compromise the story’s status as a fact piece, but insufficient to justify reclassifying it as fiction. Bailey’s phrase – “a kind of hybrid nonfiction” – will have to do for now.  

August 3, 2015 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is a contest between Becky Cooper’s "Bar Tab: Loosie Rouge" (“Panties, petite enough to fit the models clustered around the bar, hung like birthday bunting over the liquor bottles”), Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Chomp Chomp" (“For dessert, get the banana fritters, eat them hot, and wait for the kiss of spice”), Ian Frazier’s, "Amo, Amas" (“Languages and facts flew like sparks from a grindstone and skidded bluely onto the board”), and Peter Schjeldahl’s "Shapes and Colors" (“At length, beauty does arrive, though clad in its judicial robes, as truth”).

And the winner is Becky Cooper’s “Bar Tab: Loosie Rouge” for superbly noticing those petite panties “hung like birthday bunting over the liquor bottles.”

July 27, 2015 Issue

Jill Lepore’s brilliant "Joe Gould's Teeth," in this week’s issue, has the potential to be every bit as classic as the piece it takes off from – Joseph Mitchell’s great “Joe Gould’s Secret” (The New Yorker, September 19 & 26, 1964). It’s a gentle undermining of the accuracy of Mitchell’s conclusion that Gould’s The Oral History of Our Time didn’t exist. It begins wonderfully:

For a long time, Joe Gould thought he was going blind. This was before he lost his teeth, and years before he lost the history of the world he’d been writing in hundreds of dime-store composition notebooks, their black covers mottled like the pelt of a speckled goat, their white pages lined with thin blue veins.

That “their black covers mottled like the pelt of a speckled goat, their white pages lined with thin blue veins” is marvelously fine. “Joe Gould’s Teeth” brims with inspired writing. Of the sheaves of Gould’s letters that Lepore keeps finding in libraries and archives, she says,

I pictured it like this: I’d dip those letters in a bath of glue and water—the black ink would begin to bleed—and I’d paste them over an armature I’d built out of seagull feathers and rolled-up old New Yorkers. I called my papier-mâché “White Man (Variation).”

Even though Lepore shows that Mitchell was wrong about the non-existence of Gould’s Oral History, she doesn’t judge “Joe Gould’s Secret” a failure. She says,

“Joe Gould’s Secret” is a defense of invention. Mitchell took something that wasn’t beautiful, the sorry fate of a broken man, and made it beautiful—a fable about art. “Joe Gould’s Secret” is the best story many people have ever read. Its truth is, in a Keatsian sense, its beauty; its beauty, truth.

Lepore’s piece complicates my feelings about “Joe Gould’s Secret.” In the Introduction to his  superb 1992 collection Up in the Old Hotel, Mitchell says, “Joe Gould’s Secret is factual.” Can it still be considered as such? I’m not sure.  

Daniel Soloman's "Industry, Ingenuity, and Fracture: On John McPhee"

Daniel Soloman, in his "Industry, Ingenuity, and Fracture: On John McPhee" (Los Angeles Review of Books, July 24, 2015), treats McPhee’s collective works as a “moral history.” He says, “McPhee’s work can, in fact, be read as a moral history of American society and its institutions.” Soloman appears addicted to the word “moral.” He uses it seven times in his piece: “moral history,” “moral core,” “moral burden,” “moral tale,” “moral story,” “moral consequences,” “moral question.” He seems to view McPhee’s work not as art but as a set of moral instructions. I disagree with this approach. It detaches the “messages” of McPhee’s stories from the only medium in which they can live, the medium of their language. Soloman refers to McPhee’s “impressive craft,” but expresses no delight in it. His method is insufficient to McPhee’s exquisite artistry.

Elizabeth Bishop - Poetic Trickster?

Colm Tóibín, in his absorbing On Elizabeth Bishop (2015), calls Bishop’s habit of correcting or qualifying herself a “trick.” He says,  

The enacting of a search for further precision and further care with terms in the poems (and maybe in the letters too) was, in one way, a trick, a way of making the reader believe and trust a voice, or a way of quietly asking the reader to follow the poem’s casual and then deliberate efforts to be faithful to what it saw, or what it knew.

I’m not sure “trick” is the right word. It connotes insincerity. It’s too cynical. When Bishop, in her great “Santarém” (The New Yorker, February 20, 1978), says, “In front of the church, the Cathedral, rather,” is she trying to trick us into trusting her voice, or is she simply trying to be as accurate as possible? Tóibín further says,

The trick established limits, exalted precision, made the bringing of things down to themselves into a sort of conspiracy with the reader. But she also worried about anything that might be overlooked (“no detail too small”), or not noticed properly, or exaggerated, or let too loose into grand feelings, which were not fully to be trusted.

I agree with the “no detail too small” part of this observation. Bishop was a meticulous observer; she relished visual accuracy. Seamus Heaney, in his “Counting to a Hundred: On Elizabeth Bishop” (The Redress of Poetry, 1995), refers to her “obsessive attention to detail.”

But Tóibín has spurred my thinking. Why enact the qualification? Why not, in “Santarém,” for instance, just delete “church” and insert “Cathedral”? Why show both the first word choice and the more accurate second one? I think this is attributable to another element of Bishop’s style – her Hopkinsian aim to portray, in her words, “not a thought, but a mind thinking” (quoted in James Fenton’s “The Many Arts of Elizabeth Bishop,” The Strength of Poetry, 2001). As Fenton says, she shows “the feeling mind, feeling its way to thought.” One way she does this is by showing her hesitations, corrections, and qualifications. For example:

                                           Oil has seeped into

the margins of the ditch of standing water

and flashes or looks upward brokenly,

like bits of mirror – no, more blue than that:

like tatters of the Morpho butterfly.

[from “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto,” The New Yorker, December 24, 1966]

No, more blue than that – this instant qualification isn’t a trick; it’s a habit of mind – “a feeling mind, feeling its way to thought.”

July 20, 2015 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue that most absorbed me is Jon Lee Anderson’s "Opening For Business." I’m fond of Cuba. It’s the source of some of my most pleasurable travel memories. I haven’t been there since 2011. I’m curious to know what’s happening there as a result of the announcement last December that the United States and Cuba agreed to normalize relations. Anderson’s excellent 

piece informs me:

To a visitor, Havana appears much the same as it has for decades––people at loose ends, distressed buildings—but there has been an explosion of small private enterprises and, with them, pockets of encouraging prosperity. For the first time since the sixties, when Castro declared a “revolutionary offensive” to “eliminate all manifestations of private trade,” Cubans are being allowed to take charge of their material lives. People are better dressed; there are more cars on the road; and everywhere there are new restaurants and bars and hostels, where Cubans rent rooms to foreign visitors. In early April, Airbnb announced the launch of Cuban operations; by month’s end, Governor Andrew Cuomo had flown in with a planeload of New York business executives for a trade summit, and an N.B.A. good-will delegation had set up training camps for Cuban athletes. On May 5th, the U.S. Treasury Department lifted restrictions on ferry services from Florida; the same day, Jet Blue said that it planned to begin flying between Havana and New York.

Tourism has surged nearly twenty per cent this year, and hotel lobbies in Havana are noisy with troubadours singing “Guantanamera” and odes to Che Guevara; buses and luridly painted old Chevys trundle sightseers around the city. There are Europeans, Canadians, Brazilians; one morning, I saw a group of elderly Chinese visitors dressed in safari clothing exploring the grounds of La Finca Vigía, Hemingway’s home.

Increasingly, there are also Americans, mostly sixty-somethings on “cultural tours” but also college students and hipsters from New York and Los Angeles. People in Havana joke that the latest accessory for an evening out is an American friend. The city’s harbor is being refurbished to accommodate U.S. cruise ships….

Havana’s night life, once moribund, is alive again. In a former peanut-oil factory, La Fábrica de Arte Cubano hosts dancers, filmmakers, painters, photographers, and musicians. Across town, the Las Vegas Cabaret features a transvestite show. Havana, long a Soviet-style culinary wasteland, is now a fine place to go out for Spanish, Italian, Iranian, Turkish, Swedish, or Chinese, in restaurants frequented by foreigners but also by newly moneyed Cubans….

The best parts of “Opening For Business,” for me, are the first-person sentences, e.g., “One day this spring, as I rode through the city in a taxi, a glossy black BMW raced past, and a policeman at the next intersection gave the driver a deferential salute”; “In Havana, I met a successful Miami night-club owner who is converting his family’s old home into a boutique hotel.” They personalize the piece, converting fact into experience.

“Opening For Business” is an illuminating report on the shifting identity of the “new Cuba.” I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: The most inspired sentence in this week’s issue is Shauna Lyon’s “But, after a bout of wrestling, a forkful of sweet crab meat was finally dipped into a sauce of toasted garlic slivers and rich guajillo-chili-infused oil, and there was peace” ("Tables For Two: Rosie's").

July 6 & 13, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Lawrence Wright’s "Five Hostages" is written in the third person – my least favorite perspective. Nevertheless, the piece totally absorbed me. It’s about five Americans kidnapped in Syria and their families’ fight to save them. It’s beautifully structured. But it has a political aspect I’m not sure I agree with. It’s rough on Obama for the “ineffectiveness” of his policy on terrorist kidnappings. But it wasn’t Obama who put these five people in harm’s way. They voluntarily assumed the grave risk of being kidnapped and murdered when they crossed into Syria. My take-away from this powerful piece is two-fold: (1) ISIS is one of the most barbaric terrorist groups the world has ever seen; (2) outsiders who venture into Syria should do so without illusion; they’re risking their lives.

2. Laura Miller, in her enjoyable "The System," a review of Don Winslow’s novel The Cartel, says of Winslow’s previous novel The Power of the Dog, “But none of it is a laughing matter.” Then, in the next line, she says, “Scratch that. Some of The Power of the Dog is funny.” Her sudden reversal made me smile. It’s an example of a critic winging it. Pauline Kael would approve.

3. And now here’s a collage of my favorite lines in this week’s issue:

The fibrousness of the paper and the uniqueness of each painstaking ridge turn the impassive gray or black surfaces of Park’s canvases into unexpected terrain (“Goings On About Town: Art: Park Seo-bo”) | The film’s good cheer seems less infectious than enforced; the cinematic embrace is stifling, and the good vibes feel overdone, like a present-tense trip of instant nostalgia (Richard Brody, “Goings On About Town: Movies: A Poem Is a Naked Person”) | Hitchcock’s ultimate point evokes cosmic terror: innocence is merely a trick of paperwork, whereas guilt is the human condition (Richard Brody, “Goings On About Town: Movies: The Wrong Man”) | Once he’d been spotted, a glass of marmalade-colored Languedoc in hand, the music writers made quick work of a plate of prosciutto and calculated an intricate split of their bill (Amelia Lester, “Tables For Two: The Four Horsemen”) | By the time a late-night June rainstorm appears, and the subway’s lesser, more beige lines are being contemplated, Murphy has migrated from a table to the bar, where the bartender is pouring a quietly effervescent rosé out of a not so quiet magnum (Amelia Lester, “Tables For Two: The Four Horsemen”) | The distillery is in a brick building with the warm smell of a country club’s oak locker room (Emma Allen, “Bar Tab: Kings County Distillery”) | His breakfast companion, who had been enjoying the gentle intensity of his company—the Concorde doesn’t take an article in British English, he said; he was certain that left-handers were overrepresented in the pilot population; he loves the B and C gates of Heathrow’s Terminal 5; flying back from Vancouver in winter, you can see the Northern Lights almost every night; when a B.A. pilot shows up for work, his iPad must be charged to at least seventy-five per cent—was suddenly put in mind of an ancient activity of her own, going on dates in restaurants that had televisions (Lauren Collins, “Bird’s-Eye View”) | Out on the runway, a queue was forming: a Middle East Airlines A320, bound for Beirut; a KLM 737, heading back to Amsterdam; the state aircraft of the United Arab Emirates, a private 747, half snow goose, half tapir, its snout sniffing the sky (Lauren Collins, “Bird’s-Eye View”) | Schick’s interpretation, which he has been honing for forty years, is a sinuous audiovisual ballet in which hard-hitting, rat-a-tat drum solos intermingle with subtle, whispery sounds, as of a tapped gong or a brushed gourd (Alex Ross, “Outsiders”) | In the course of four movements, this evanescent material acquired mass: droplets of melody and harmony precipitated from the air (Alex Ross, “Outsiders”)

William Finnegan's "Off Diamond Head"

I want to correct an oversight. Reviewing the June 1^st New Yorker, I overlooked William Finnegan’s wonderful "Off Diamond Head." It’s a “Personal History” piece about the “clandestine life” Finnegan led when he was thirteen, living in Hawaii – clandestine in the sense that Finnegan’s parents knew him only as “Mr. Responsible.” They had no idea he was running with a racist gang called the In Crowd; they didn’t know about his fights with bullies at school; and they didn’t know about the risks he was taking on the water, surfing with his best friend Roddy (“I darted around, dodging peaks, way out at sea, half-hysterical, trying to keep an eye on Roddy”). I skipped “Off Diamond Head” the first time around because I thought it was about something I wasn’t interested in – surfer culture. But Finnegan is one of The New Yorker’s best writers (his "Silver or Lead" is a masterpiece). So I returned to “Off Diamond Head.” From its opening sentence (“The budget for moving our family to Honolulu was tight, judging from the tiny cottage we rented and the rusted-out Ford Fairlane we bought to get around”) right through to its superb conclusion –

A bruise-colored cloud hung over Koko Head. A transistor radio twanged on a seawall where a Hawaiian family picnicked on the sand. The sun-warmed shallow water had a strange boiled-vegetable taste. The moment was immense, still, glittering, mundane. I tried to fix each of its parts in memory. I did not consider, even in passing, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment would take me where it chose.

– it caught and held me. Finnegan doesn’t just recollect his Hawaiian experiences, he relives them on the page. Of the waves at Kaikoos, he writes,

Thick, dark-blue peaks seemed to jump up out of deep ocean, some of them unnervingly big. The lefts were short and easy, really just big drops, but Roddy said the rights were better, and he paddled farther east, deeper into the break. His temerity seemed to me insane. The rights looked closed-out (unmakable), and terribly powerful, and, even if you made one, the ride would carry you straight into the big, hungry-looking rocks of outer Black Point.

Of the waves at Cliffs:

The sets were well overhead, glassy and gray, with long walls and powerful sections. I was so excited to see the excellence that my back-yard spot could produce that I forgot my usual shyness and began to ride with the crowd at the main peak. I was overmatched there, and scared, and got mauled by the biggest sets. I wasn’t strong enough to hold on to my board when caught inside by six-foot waves, even though I “turned turtle”—rolled the board over, pulled the nose down from underwater, wrapped my legs around it, and got a death grip on the rails. The whitewater tore the board from my hands, then thrashed me, holding me down for sustained, thorough beatings.

Crazy! Why do it? Why expose yourself to such “sustained thorough beatings,” to the risk of death? Finnegan’s answer – “It simply compelled me” – is hard to comprehend. But in the existential risk-taking of his thirteen-year-old surfer self, I see the ballsy journalist, who, in 2010, would venture into Michoacá – the hell mouth of the Mexican drug war – to report first hand on the mayhem.

Mid-Year Top Ten 2015

“Aesthetic hierarchies,” James Wood says, in his great The Nearest Thing to Life, “are fluid, personal, eccentric, always subject to revision, and quite possibly a bit incoherent.” Yes, and they’re also fun. I enjoy evaluating The New Yorker. This time each year, I pause, look back over the past six months, and pick my favorite pieces. Here then is my Mid-Year Top Ten 2015.

Reporting

1. David Owen’s “Where the River Runs Dry” (May 25, 2015)

2. Ian Parker’s “The Shape of Things to Come” (February 23 & March 2, 2015)

3. Raffi Khatchadourian, “A Century of Silence” (January 5, 2015)

4. Jill Lepore’s “The Cobweb” (January 26, 2015)

5. Rivka Galchen’s “Weather Underground” (April 13, 2015)

6. Dana Goodyear’s “The Dying Sea” (May 4, 2015)

7. Rebecca Mead’s “Sole Cycle” (March 23, 2015)

8. Luke Mogelson’s “When the Fever Breaks” (January 19, 2015)

9. Jane Kramer’s “The Demolition Man” (June 29, 2015)

10. William Finnegan's “Tears of the Sun” (April 20, 2015)

Criticism

1. James Wood’s “Look Again” (February 23 & March 2, 2015)

2. Dan Chiasson’s “Out of This World” (April 13, 2015)

3. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Moving Pictures” (March 16, 2015)

4. James Wood’s “Circling the Subject” (May 4, 2015

5. Alex Ross’s “Eyes and Ears” (February 9, 2015)

6. Dan Chiasson’s “Beautiful Lies” (March 30, 2015)

7. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Native Soil” (May 25, 2015)

8. James Wood’s “Story of My Life” (June 22, 2015)

9. Dan Chiasson’s “American Snipper” (June 1, 2015)

10. Anthony Lane’s “High Gear” (May 25, 2015)

Talk of the Town

1. Mark Singer’s “All-Nighter” (May 11, 2015)

2. Ian Frazier’s “Russophilia” (February 16, 2015)

3. Lizzie Widdicombe’s “Air Bus” (June 1, 2015)

4. Nick Paumgarten’s “Hut!” (June 22, 2015)

5. Dana Goodyear’s “Life With Father” (June 29, 2015)

6. Sarah Larson’s “Cinephiles” (January 19, 2015)

7. Nick Paumgarten’s “Life Without Audience” (June 1, 2015)

8. John Seabrook’s “Free” (February 2, 2015)

9. Emma Allen’s “Landlord” (June 29, 2015)

10. Alec Wilkinson’s “Hands” (June 29, 2015)

Best Short Story

Louise Erdrich’s “The Flower” (June 29, 2015)

Best Poem

C. K. Williams, “Hog” (February 23, 2015)

Best Blog Post

Jiayang Fan, “Searching for America with General Tso” (“Cultural Comment,” newyorker.com, March 12, 2015)

Best Illustration

Riccardo Vecchio’s illustration for Jane Kramer’s “The Demolition Man” (June 29, 2015) (see above)

Best Photo

Ian Allen’s portrait of Chastity Belt for “Goings On About Town” (May 25, 2015)

Best Cover

Mark Ulriksen’s “Baseball Ballet” (April 27, 2015)

Best Issue

May 25, 2015, containing, among its many pleasures, David Owen’s superb “Where the River Runs Dry,” three first-rate reviews (Anthony Lane’s “High Gear,” James Wood’s “All Her Children,” and Peter Schjeldahl’s “Native Soil”), and Ian Allen’s ravishing, color-drenched “Goings On About Town” photo of the band Chastity Belt.

Best Sentence

Or does it refer to stuff that’s really, really hard to follow, especially when certain brainiacs insist on reading their turgid prose in a monotone that makes us doubt our very existence, because, Jesus, why doesn’t this guy in the gray turtleneck occasionally look up and, you know, smile? – Mark Singer, “All-Nighter” (May 11, 2015)

Best Paragraph

I went farther into the church, making a list of the things that the people of Diyarbakir had left there. Dried scraps of bread. Automotive carpeting. An old shoe. A fragment of a transistor radio. Corrugated plastic, some of it burned. Where the main altar had been, there was a fire pit; among the ashes, a wrapper for a candy called Coco Fino and empty cans of Efes beer. A rusted wire. Coils of shit. In the inset of a wall, someone had arranged several stones in a neat line. Hundreds of daisies reached upward. And as the sun descended behind the high city walls the smell of grilled meat drifted over from nearby homes, and the sound of children playing began to fill the streets. A ball was kicked and it hit the side of a building and bounced. Some boys clambered over the wall that surrounded the church. Women left their kitchens, and climbed to their roofs to collect carpets that had been put out to air. TVs wired to satellite dishes came on, filling spare rooms with their ethereal glow. All of Diyarbakir, it seemed, except the church, drifted forward in time. Overhead, a flock of common swifts darted and circled among the old stone arches. Their black wings arced like boomerangs as they swooped through the ruins—above the piles of earth, the weeds and the wildflowers, all the trash—and their movements were ceaseless, careless, as if unweighted by anything. – Raffi Khatchadourian, “A Century of Silence” (January 5, 2015)

Best Description

Haslbeck suggested that I try on the lace-up boot, and I slipped my bare foot into it. With the warmth and softness of the fur, and the cradling comfort of the foot bed, it felt wonderful. I think I may have gasped. – Rebecca Mead, “Sole Cycle” (March 23, 2015)

Most Memorable Image

The helicopter made its shuddering descent. Legs shook; sippy cups spilled. Marcy said, “Wow! I love this part!” The pilot yelled, “Touchdown!” – Lizzie Widdicombe, “Air Bus” (June 1, 2015)

Most Inspired Detail

When undone, scarves with modernistic prints sent out gusts of international perfume. – Ian Frazier, “Russophilia” (February 16, 2015)

June 29, 2015 Issue

Italy is a wonderful place to bike. I was there a couple of weeks ago, cycling the Parco del Mincio and Parco del Ticino. I took the train to various cities (Trenitalia is an amazing system). One morning, at a packed café called Cuppi (est. 1934), on Via Matteotti, in Bologna, I watched the guy running the cappuccino-maker; he was like a virtuoso pianist, his hands flying over the machine, working the various knobs and handles. He produced the best cappuccino I’ve ever tasted. On another day, at a canteen overlooking the Mincio River, I drank a glass of iced, freshly squeezed pomegranate juice that was so damned good, I’ll never forget it. As I sat there savoring it, contemplating the beautiful Mincio, I suddenly realized I’d become an italophile. And so, when Jane Kramer’s "The Demolition Man," a profile of Italy’s Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, appeared in this week’s issue, I devoured it. What a Tuscan feast of political detail! Renzi’s clothes (his work uniform consists of “jeans and a rumpled white shirt, open at the neck”), how he came to power (he struck a deal with Silvio Berlusconi; “In the matter of craftiness he was miles ahead of the man whom no politician in Italy had ever managed to outfox before”); his previous occupation (he was an “immensely popular” mayor of Florence); how he selected his cabinet (“he opted for youth and women – the obvious appealing things”); his conversation (“He has what could be called a peripatetic mind and, like any good performer, he uses it to keep you on the edge of your seat, not asking inconvenient questions, and also, perhaps, to impress himself when he is about to confront an obstacle in his path”); his enemies (Beppe Grillo, leader of the Five Star Movement, on the populist left, and Matteo Salvini, leader of the new “national” Lega party, on the populist right, “both competing for the same anit-Europe, anti-immigrant votes”); on and on – Kramer includes it all in a superbly structured report that, interestingly, begins and ends with Angela Merkel. Kramer’s level of access to Renzi is impressive. She even visits him in his New York hotel suite (“ ‘They love their past, their present, but they need a vision and an explanation of their future – in the possibility of a future,’ Renzi told me that night, flopping onto a couch in the living room of his hotel suite”). My take-away from this immensely absorbing piece is that Italy is fortunate to have, in Matteo Renzi, a young, spirited, dynamic leader who is determined to make real change. It will be interesting to see how he fares. I hope he doesn’t get worn down the way another young, spirited, dynamic leader, Barack Obama, has been worn down by relentless conservative stonewalling.

Postscript: Another attractive aspect of Kramer’s piece is Riccardo Vecchio's gorgeous illustration - a delicately hued portrait of Renzi with a jumble of Florentine rooftops, including the Duomo and Giotto's Campanile, in the background. Ravishing! 

Postscript #2: All four Talk stories in this week’s issue are beauties: Ian Frazier’s "Secuity"; Emma Allen’s "Landlord"; Dana Goodyear’s "Life With Father"; and Alec Wilkinson’s "Hands." Of the four, my favorite is Goodyear’s layered "Life With Father," about (1) the time in 1996 when Maya and China Forbes picked up their dad, Cameron, at McLean, the psychiatric hospital outside Boston, and took him to lunch; (2) Maya Forbes’s movie Infinitely Polar Bear (“The title comes from a phrase Cam once used to describe his condition on a McLean intake form”), which tells the story “of how Cam, recently recovered from a breakdown, took over the care of Maya and China, aged ten and eight, while Peggy [Maya and China’s mother], in order to support them, went to New York to get an M.B.A. and eventually, a job at the brokerage firm E. F. Hutton”; (3) China’s home life with her husband Wally (“Wally, who was wearing shorts and black socks with Birkenstocks, did a crossword puzzle”) and her three children, Clementine, Imogene, and Hackley. Goodyear has worked her text close to the compression of poetry.