February 1, 2021 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rachel Syme’s “On the Nose,” a delightful review of two recent books on scent: Harold McGee’s Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells and Robert Muchembled’s Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times. Syme’s opening paragraph is a beauty:

My obsession with perfume began when I was around ten years old, spritzing on layer after layer of my mother’s Anaïs Anaïs and Poison, until I reeked of a duty-free store. It continued through my mall-rat teen-age years, when I blew through my babysitting tips at Bath & Body Works, convinced that I could amplify my personality with a generous dose of Sun-Ripened Raspberry. Throughout my twenties, I collected hundreds of fragrance samples, bought for less than five dollars apiece from Web sites with names like the Perfumed Court and Surrender to Chance. Tiny glass vials of liquid tuberose regularly spilled out of my coat pockets. So when an editor at a newspaper for which I occasionally wrote about hair and beauty trends asked me if I had anything to say about perfume, I told her I did. I assumed that the main requisite for the task was personal experience, not technical expertise; surely I already had the vocabulary for detailing the scentscapes I’d been wandering for years. I knew I loved the smell of violets—their chalky, chocolate undertones. Or I thought I knew. Sitting down at my keyboard, I began to waver. Was it more like talcum powder and linden honey? Or like a Barbie-doll head sprinkled with lemonade?

I’d rate that the best opener of 2021 so far. I love carnal language; Syme’s piece brims with it. For example: “The olfactory world is more private than we may think: even when we share space, such as a particularly ripe subway car, one commuter may describe eau d’armpit as sweet Gorgonzola cheese, another will detect rotting pumpkin, and a third a barnyardy, cayenne tang.”

Syme’s “On the Nose” is a sensuous plunge into the scentosphere. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: Reading Syme’s review, I recalled another great New Yorker "nose" piece – Chandler Burr’s “The Scent of the Nile” (March 14, 2005), a profile of French perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena. Here’s a whiff:

Ellena’s best-known fragrances are Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert, for Bulgari, and First, for Van Cleef & Arpels. Just before joining Hermès, he had created L’Eau d’Hiver for Frédéric Malle’s élite collection, Éditions de Parfums. The scent was inspired by an aspect of the great 1906 Guerlain perfume Après l’Ondée. He said, “The problem—well, you can’t say there’s a problem with Après l’Ondée—but, bon, voilà, it is too opulent. Guerlain is baroque: put this in, and this, and this.” On the other hand, he said admiringly, the Guerlain scent had a marvellous sillage—the olfactory wake that trails behind a wearer of perfume. Someone once defined sillage to me, rather metaphysically, as the sense of a person being present in the room after she has left. Creating a sillage that is potent but not overpowering is tricky. With L’Eau d’Hiver, Ellena said, he wanted to pay homage to the Guerlain scent’s sillage—“but in enlightened form.” He selected elements from Après l’Ondée that were “soft, comfortable, light.” One of these was the natural essence of hay. He took some aubépine, an olfactory blend of finger paint and the wax used to clean linoleum floors, and added it to methyl ionone, a synthetic whose smell suggests iris. He then added a few more ingredients, including a natural distillation of honey. It took him two years to perfect his formula, which in the end contained twenty ingredients—very few, for a perfume. L’Eau d’Hiver smells, delightfully, of ground white pepper and cold seawater, with a touch of fresh crab. And it has a sillage worthy of Guerlain.

If you enjoy ravishing descriptions of scent, as I do, you’ll love Chandler Burr’s exquisite “The Scent of the Nile.” 

January 25, 2021 Issue

Opening this week’s New Yorker, I was delighted to find a painting by Jane Freilicher, a beautiful red, pink, and green work called Untitled (Still Life with Large Plant and Cityscape), c.1990, illustrating Andrea K. Scott’s absorbing capsule review of Kasmin Gallery’s new exhibition “Jane Freilicher: Parts of a World.” Freilicher’s The Painting Table (1954) is one of this blog’s touchstones (see here). Scott writes,

For more than fifty years, as Abstract Expressionism gave way to Pop, then to Minimalism, and on to Neo-Expressionism, until art’s isms exhausted themselves, Freilicher devoted herself to painting “eternally fixed afternoons,” to borrow a phrase from Frank O’Hara’s 1957 poem “Chez Jane.” (In addition to being a phenomenal artist, Freilicher was a muse of the New York School.) In the attentive tradition of Pierre Bonnard—and with a similar passion for color—Freilicher, who died in 2014, at the age of ninety, found beauty at home, whether in her Greenwich Village apartment or at her house on the East End of Long Island. The best of these luminous views unify inside and outside—and still-life and landscape. The fifteen works in the exhibition “Jane Freilicher: Parts of a World,” at the Kasmin gallery, lean into the artist’s interior side.

That nails it: “attentive tradition of Pierre Bonnard”; “passion for color”; “found beauty at home.” Let’s give a huzzah for Freilicher’s distinctive, delectable art.

Jane Freilicher, Untitled (Still Life with Large Plant and Cityscape) (c.1990)

3 for the Road: John McPhee's "Coming into the Country"

This is the second in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Coming into the Country.

John McPhee’s Coming into the Country chronicles his travels in Alaska in the 1970s. It consists of three separately structured compositions. The first, titled “The Encircled River,” describes a canoe-and-kayak trip he took with a five-man study team down the Salmon River of the Brooks Range. The team is trying to determine whether the Salmon should be part of the wild-river proposal before Congress, a proposal that would set aside the area as unalterable wild terrain. McPhee says of the Salmon, “In a lifetime of descending rivers, this was the clearest and the wildest river.” He writes,

Paddling again, we move down long pools separated by short white pitches, looking to see whatever might appear in the low hills, in the cottonwood, in the white and black spruce – and in the river, too. Its bed is as distinct as if the water were not there. Everywhere, in fleets, are the oval shapes of salmon. They have moved the gravel and made redds, spawning craters, feet in diameter. They ignore the boats, but at times, and without apparent reason, they turn and shoot downriver, as if they have felt panic and have lost their resolve to get on with their loving and their dying. Some, already dead, lie whitening, grotesque, on the bottom, their bodies disassembling in the current. In a short time, not much will be left but the hooking jaws. Through the surface, meanwhile, the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air – then fall to slap the water, to resume formation in the river, noses north, into the current. Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins.

The strangeness and beauty of that last sentence verge on the surreal. McPhee’s images often have surreal elements. Later in the same piece, describing the team’s camp grub, he writes,

Breakfast in the frying pan – freeze-dried eggs. If we were Kobuk people, one of us might go off into the watery tundra and find fresh eggs. Someone else might peel the bark from a willow. The bark would be soaked and formed into a tube with the eggs inside, and the tube would be placed in the fire. But this is not a group of forest Eskimos. These are legionaires from another world, talking “scenic values” and “interpretation.” These are Romans inspecting Transalpine Gaul. Nobody’s skin is going to turn brown on those eggs – or on cinnamon-apple-flavored Instant Quaker Oatmeal, or Tang, or Swiss Miss, or on cold pink-icinged Pop-Tarts with raspberry filling. For those who do not believe what they have just read, allow me to confirm it: in Pourchot’s breakfast bag are pink-icinged Pop-Tarts with raspberry filling. Lacking a toaster, and not caring much anyway, we eat them cold. They invite a question. To a palate without bias – the palate of an open-minded Berber, the travelling Martian – which would be the more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye?

That passage makes me smile every time I read it. Who besides McPhee would think to combine freeze-dried eggs, Pop-Tarts, forest Eskimos, Romans, Transalpine Gaul, Berber, travelling Martian, and “the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye” in one paragraph? No one. He’s one of the most imaginative factual writers in all of literature. “The Encircled River” is one of his masterpieces. I’ll have more to say about its artistry in future posts.

The second section of Coming Into the Country is called “What They Were Hunting For.” It’s about the search for a new capital of Alaska. The primary means of travel in this piece is by plane and helicopter. McPhee describes wonderful aerial views of Alaskan landscape. This one, for example:

The truly immense glaciers might be down in the southeast, but the glacier that was off to our right just now was in no sense modest. The helicopter had crossed Shulin Lake, and had circled it, tilting far over so the committee members could hang by their seat belts for a plan view, its big rotor blades biting the air with the sound of a working axe. Level again, it was proceeding west toward the Kahiltna River, the source of which, off to the north, was almost as preëminent as the mountains above. It came down out of the Alaska Range like a great white tongue. It came – the Kahiltna Glacier – from eleven thousand feet, from a high saddle between the peaks of Foraker and McKinley. And two, three, four miles wide all the way, it flowed fifty miles south into the valley, where it finally turned into a river at an altitude of scarcely a thousand feet. This was the big glacier the climbers land on – and the fact that they land at the seven-thousand foot contour has nothing to do with the strategies of the sport. They do so because airplanes are not permitted to land in Mount McKinley National Park, and the park boundary happens to cross the glacier at that level. The river below us was the product of the sun, and even in autumn and from the helicopter’s high perspective it was awesome to see. Most fast rivers are white, smooth, white, smooth – alternating pools and rapids. This one was white all the way, bank to bank, tumultuous, torrential, great rushing outwash of the Alaska Range. With so many standing waves, so much white water, it appeared to be filled with running sheep. The color of the water, where it was flat enough to show, was actually greenish-gray, and its clarity was nil. It carried so much of what had been mountains. Glacier milk, as it is called, contains a high proportion of powdered rock, from pieces broken off and then ground by the ice. The colors of the outwash rivers are determined by the diets of the glaciers – schist, gneiss, limestone, shale. 

Of the many pleasures of that passage – the definite, specific, concrete language, the originality of the figuration (“With so many standing waves, so much white water, it appeared to be filled with running sheep”), the interesting facts (“Glacier milk, as it is called, contains a high proportion of powdered rock, from pieces broken off and then ground by the ice”) – the most piquant, for me, is the sonic description of the helicopter (“its big rotor blades biting the air with the sound of a working axe”).

The book’s third section, “Coming into the Country,” is its longest, and perhaps its richest. It describes the people and terrain of Eastern Alaska, principally around the tiny bush community of Eagle, on the upper Yukon River. For example, here’s McPhee’s sketch of trapper Dick Cook:

Cook is somewhat below the threshold of slender. He is fatless. His figure is a little stooped, unprepossessing, but his legs and arms are strong beyond the mere requirements of the athlete. He looks like a scarecrow made of cables. All his features are feral – his chin, his nose, his dark eyes. His hair, which is nearly black, has gone far from his forehead. His scalp is bare all the way back to, more or less, his north pole. The growth beyond – dense, streaked with gray – cantilevers to the sides in unbarbered profusion, so that his own hair appears to be a parka ruff. His voice is soft, gentle – his words polite. When he is being pedagogical, the voice goes up several registers, and becomes hortative and sharp. He is not infrequently pedagogical.

And here’s McPhee’s description of the Yukon River, as he personally experienced it, canoeing the hundred-and-sixty-mile stretch between Eagle and Circle:

From the hull, meanwhile, came the steady sound of sandpaper, of sliding stones, of rain on a metal roof – the sound of the rock in the river, put there by alpine glaciers. Dip a cupful of water and the powdered rock settled quickly to the bottom. At the height of the melting season, something near two hundred tons of solid material will flow past a given point on the riverbank in one minute. Bubbling boils, like the tops of high fountains, bloomed everywhere on the surface but did not rough it up enough to make any sort of threat to the canoe. They stemmed from the crash of fast water on boulders and ledges far below. Bend to bend, the river presented itself in large segments – two, three, six miles at a stretch, now smooth, now capped white under the nervously changeable sky. We picked our way through flights of wooded islands. We shivered in the deep shadows of bluffs a thousand feet high – Calico Bluff, Montauk Bluff, Biederman Bluff, Takoma Bluff – which day after day intermittently walled the river. Between them – in downpourings of sunshine, as often as not – long vistas reached back across spruce-forested hills to the rough gray faces and freshly whitened summits of mountains. Some of the walls of the bluffs were of dark igneous rock that had cracked into bricks and appeared to have been set there by masons. Calico Bluff – a sedimentary fudge, folded, convoluted in whorls and ampersands – was black and white and yellow-tan. Up close it smelled of oil. It was sombre as we passed it, standing in its own shadow. Peregrine falcons nest there, and – fantastic fliers – will come over the Yukon at ballistic speed, clench their talons, tuck them in, and strike a flying duck hard enough (in the neck) to kill it in midair. End over end the duck falls, and the falcon catches it before it hits the river. As we passed the mouth of the Tatonduk, fifteen ducks flew directly over us. Brad Snow reached for his shotgun, and quickly fired twice. Fifteen ducks went up the Tatonduk. Above the Nation, steep burgundy mountainsides reached up from the bright-green edges of the river, then fell away before tiers of higher mountains, dark with spruce and pale with aspen, quilted with sunlight and shadow. Ahead, long points of land and descending ridgelines reached toward one another into the immensity of the river, roughed now under a stiff wind. Filmy downspouts dropped from the clouds. Behind the next bend, five miles away, a mountain was partly covered with sliding mist. The scene resembled Lake Maggiore and might have been the Hardanger Fjord, but it was just a fragment of this river, an emphatic implication of all two thousand miles, and of the dozens of tributaries that in themselves were major rivers – proof and reminder that with its rampart bluffs and circumvallate mountains it was not only a great river of the far northwestern continent but a river of preëminence among the rivers of the world. The ring of its name gave nothing away to the name of any river. Sunlight was bright on the mountains to both sides, and a driving summer rain came up the middle. The wind tore up the waves and flung pieces of them through the air. It was not wind, though, but the river itself that took the breath away.

So many brilliant, artful touches here – the evocation of the sound of the river against the canoe’s hull (“sound of sandpaper, of sliding stones, of rain on a metal roof”), the precise naming of the bluffs (“Calico Bluff, Montauk Bluff, Biederman Bluff, Takoma Bluff”), vivid description (“sedimentary fudge, folded, convoluted in whorls and ampersands”), capture of light, color, wind, rain, geography, geology, wildlife – all in dynamic interplay with the action of the canoe moving down the river. Coming into the Country brims with such passages. I enjoy it immensely. 

Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss various aspects of Coming into the Country – its action, structure, imagery, point of view, sense of place, use of figuration – in more detail. But first I want to introduce the third book in my trio – Ian Frazier’s superb Great Plains. That’ll be the subject of my next post in this series. 

Zeina Durra's Ardently Attentive "Luxor"

I want to thank Richard Brody for leading me to Zeina Durra’s beautiful movie Luxor. I saw it last night on iTunes and enjoyed it immensely. Here’s Brody’s capsule review in full:

The tension between the grip of memory and the power of immediate experience is poignantly portrayed in this documentary-rooted drama, written and directed by Zeina Durra. It stars Andrea Riseborough as Hana, a British doctor who checks into a grand but faded hotel in the Egyptian city of the title, where she has gone to recover from the trauma of her work in Jordan with victims of the Syrian civil war. She has history with the city—two decades before, she took part in an archeological project there—and runs into an Egyptian archeologist named Sultan (Karim Saleh), a former lover who attempts to rekindle their relationship. Hana is open to his friendship but may be too unsteady for love; her self-healing involves extended wanderings through the city, as if to rediscover lost aspects of herself. The dialogue is thin and the action is patchy, but Durra films Hana’s travels—and the places that she visits—with an ardent attention that fuses emotional life with aesthetic and intellectual exploration.

That “ardent attention” perfectly captures Luxor’s essence. 

January 18, 2021 Issue

In this week’s issue, Anthony Lane reviews Kornél Mundruczó’s new movie Pieces of a Woman. He says, “For the most part, Pieces of a Woman is a model of concentration and clout, fired up by actors of unstinting ardor.” I agree. I saw it a couple of weeks ago; it’s transfixing – especially the first scene, a home birth that goes terribly wrong. That scene, almost unendurably intense and tragic, about thirty minutes long, filmed in a single take, is a cinematic tour de force. The film features brilliant performances by Vanessa Kirby and Ellen Burstyn. Lane lists Kirby’s previous accomplishments, but neglects to mention her role as Princess Margaret in The Crown. She was stunning in that series; equally so in Pieces of a Woman. A star is born. 

January 4 & 11, 2021 Issue

The best thing about this week’s issue – the first of 2021 – is the beautiful Jorge Colombo cover showing an urban night scene: people sitting outside at a corner café; white face mask on table; another white face mask dangling from a customer’s ear; delicate string of glowing yellow lights; outdoor heater with gold-colored grill; bright-red neon letters of restaurant sign. It’s peaceful, comforting, relaxing – the perfect way to usher in the new year.

I love Colombo’s work. It has the look of casual spontaneity, blending sketching, photography, and painting. Remember “Bar Tab”? The New Yorker discontinued it in 2018. It was one of my favorite columns. Each week it featured a bar review illustrated by a wonderful Colombo finger painting. Here’s one – from McKenna Stayner’s terrific “Bar Tab: Super Power” (February 27, 2017) – that I particularly admire:

Illustration by Jorge Colombo, from McKenna Stayner's "Bar Tab: Super Power"

On Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov (Photo by Carl Mydans)

Recent essays on Vladimir Nabokov by Ian Frazier (“Rereading Lolita,” The New Yorker, December 14, 2020) and Patricia Lockwood (“Eat butterflies with me,” London Review of Books, November 5, 2020) spurred me to consider my own view of Nabokov’s work. I’m not a fan of his novels – too many puns, puzzles, and chess moves. But two of his nonfiction pieces have influenced me tremendously: “Colette” (chapter 7 of his brilliant autobiography Speak, Memory, 1966) and “Inspiration” (included in his 1973 Strong Opinions, a collection of interviews and articles). 

“Colette” originally appeared in The New Yorker, July 31, 1948. It’s a wonderful recounting of a 1909 trip that young Nabokov and his family took from St. Petersburg to Paris on the Nord-Express, and then from Paris to Biarritz on the Sud-Express. It begins unforgettably:

In the early years of this century, a travel agency on Nevski Avenue displayed a three-foot-long model of an oak-brown international sleeping car. In delicate verisimilitude it completely outranked the painted tin of my clockwork trains. Unfortunately it was not for sale. One could make out the blue upholstery inside, the embossed leather lining of the compartment walls, their polished panels, inset mirrors, tulip-shaped reading lamps, and other maddening details. Spacious windows alternated with narrower ones, single or geminate, and some of these were of frosted glass. In a few of the compartments, the beds had been made. 

This superb passage enacts the “delicate verisimilitude” of the object it describes. In detail after marvelous detail, the memory of a model sleeping car seen long ago is fondly evoked. I love the way the details – the blue upholstery, the embossed leather, the polished panels, the inset mirrors, the tulip-shaped reading lamps – steadily accrue. Nabokov lavishes his attention on it. It’s a thrilling act of description – the first of many in this exquisite story. 

My other favorite Nabokov piece, “Inspiration,” defines a seldom mentioned, but essential literary ingredient: “One can distinguish several types of inspiration, which intergrade, as all things do in this fluid and interesting world of ours, while yielding gracefully to a semblance of classification.” The first phase is the “prefatory glow” (“This feeling of tickly well-being branches through him like the red and the blue in the picture of a skinned man under Circulation”). The second stage is the “forefeeling” of what the writer is going to tell:

The forefeeling can be defined as an instant vision turning into rapid speech. If some instrument were to render this rare and delightful phenomenon, the image would come as a shimmer of exact details, and the verbal part as a tumble of merging words.

“A shimmer of exact details” - how fine that is.

Nabokov not only defines inspiration, he provides examples of it in other writers’ work. He says,

From a small number of A-plus stories I have chosen half-a-dozen particular favorites of mine. I list their titles below and parenthesize briefly the passage – or one of the passages – in which genuine afflation appears to be present, no matter how trivial the inspired detail may look to a dull criticule.

One of the stories he lists is John Cheever’s “The Country Husband” (The New Yorker, November 20, 1954). The passage he chooses is “Jupiter [a black retriever] crashed through the tomato vines with the remains of a felt hat in his mouth.” Cheever’s sentence is sublime. Would I have noticed it on my own? Probably not. Nabokov’s selection of it helped shape my own idea of what constitutes an inspired sentence. I’ve never forgotten it. 

Neil Sheehan's Brilliant "An American Soldier in Vietnam II - A Set-Piece Battle"

Neil Sheehan (Photo by Brendan Hoffman)

Yesterday, The New York Times reported the death of Neil Sheehan, author of one of the great Vietnam War chronicles – A Bright and Shining Lie (1988). Parts of this book originally appeared in The New Yorker: see “An American Soldier in Vietnam I - The Rooster and the Tiger” (June 20, 1988); “An American Soldier in Vietnam II – A Set-Piece Battle” (June 27, 1988); “An American Soldier in Vietnam III – An All-Round Man” (July 4, 1988); and “An American Soldier in Vietnam IV – The Civilian General” (July 11, 1988). 

I remember reading these excerpts as they came out. The second part, “A Set-Piece Battle,” is one of the most extraordinary New Yorker pieces I’ve ever read. It’s an incredibly intense, detailed account of the battle of Ap Bac that puts you squarely there, pinned in a rice paddy with three downed choppers and a rifle company under withering Viet Cong fire. Here’s a sample: 

Sgt. 1st Class Arnold Bowers, twenty-nine years old, from a Minnesota dairy farm and the 101st Airborne Division, heard the bullwhip crack of the first bullet burst through the aluminum skin of the helicopter while the machine was still fifty feet in the air. Bowers’s helicopter was the second in the flight. Vietnam was his first war. During his previous eight and a half months in the country he had experienced no combat beyond a few skirmishes with snipers. The whip cracked again and again over the din of the H-21’s engines before the wheels of the machine settled into the paddy and Bowers jumped out into the knee-high water with a squad of infantry and the ARVN first lieutenant commanding the company.

And another:

The tree line crashed with the opening volley. Bowers did not pause, and Mays controlled his nerves and stayed right behind him despite the cracks of the incoming bullets. Cho’s .50 caliber and heavy machine gun on the other M-113 slammed like jackhammers in response to the guerrillas’ fire. Mays could make out amid the din the answering drumrolls of defiance from the Viet Cong machine gunner at the right-hand corner of the irrigation dike.

One more:

The driver of the second M-113 began to back up. Scanlon saw that this crew was abandoning one of their infantrymen who had fallen wounded into the paddy. He shouted and waved his arms. The driver of the other vehicle heard him and pulled forward again, but no one would get out to pick up the wounded soldier. Scanlon sprang over the side of his M-113 and ran to the man. As he reached him, one of the infantrymen from the second M-113, braver than the rest, reached him too and helped Scanlon to pick him up and carry him in through the rear hatch and lay him on the floor. While they were rescuing this wounded soldier, yet another infantryman who was still in the paddy was hit and a BAR man on this second M-113 was struck. The .50 caliber gunner on the second M-113 had also lost his nerve and was cowering in the hatch and perforating the sky. After they had carried in the other wounded soldier, Scanlon pulled and yelled at this gunner too until he had him up and trying to aim the machine gun. “Shoot at the bottom of the tree line,” Scanlon shouted.

The prose isn’t fancy; you don’t want it to be. You want it terse and to the bone – no fucking around. That’s what Sheehan delivered in this brilliant piece of war reportage. 

3 for the Road: Edward Hoagland's "Notes from the Century Before"

This is the first in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll begin with a review of Notes from the Century Before. 

Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before chronicles his 1966 trip up British Columbia’s Stikine River, “left as it was in the nineteenth century by a fluke of geography.” The geography is breathtaking – eighty thousand square miles ("like two Ohios") of wild rivers, snow-topped mountains, and thick forests, containing tiny villages that are “unimaginably isolated.” Hoagland travels by boat, plane, and truck. He does a lot of walking, roaming the settlements, talking to old-timers, seeing what there is to see, noting it all down – detail after amazing detail. Here, for example, is his description of the village of Eddontenajon:

The mountains stood close and steep, with silver runnels and pockets of snow and passes going off in every direction, as if the country were still full of sourdoughs and mystery trips. Plank bridges have been laid across a creek that bisects the village beside the church, which is another log cabin. On the low hill backing the whole, a cemetery is already getting its start, picket fences around the few graves. I walked up and down, pretending to have business to do at the opposite end from wherever I was, practically sifting the place through my hands like a miser. The cabin foundations sit edgily on the ground, as though on an unbroken horse. Initials are cut on some of the doors to tell who lives where, and fuzzy fat puppies play in front, next to the birch dog sleds which are seven or eight feet long and the width of a man’s shoulders, weathered to a chinchilla gray. The grown dogs sleep in the fog of hunger. Swaying and weak, they get up and come to the end of their chains, like atrocity victims, hardly able to see. Snowshoes hang in the trees, along with clusters of traps. 

And here’s his portrait of Willie Campbell, one of the oldest residents of Telegraph Creek:

At last Willie turned up, a stooped twisted man on a cane with a young tenor voice and another of those immense Tahltan faces, except that his was pulled out as long as a pickaxe and then bent at the chin. A chin like a goiter, a distorted cone of a forehead. He looked like a movie monster; he was stupendous. He was wearing hide mittens and shoes, and he pointed across the Stkine to where he had seen a grizzly the day before.

And here’s his depiction of a young man in Eddontenajon roasting a moose head over a fire:

On the scaffold overhead a batch of pink trout was drying. Pieces of meat hung down, a hole punched in each and a rope strung through. Some rib cuts were drying too, but mainly the fire was roasting the head of a moose, kept in its skin so the meat wouldn’t burn. It rotated steadily at the end of a wire which he wound by twisting from time to time. The eyes were closed, the hair was blackened and sometimes afire, the antlers were gone, the ears had been cut off to feed the dogs, yet it was as recognizable as a moose as in life – as at peace as a comic strip, humorous moose. He said the head would feed his family for a meal or two and that the body would keep them provisioned for the whole summer while he was away on a job.

If you relish definite, concrete, vivid writing, as I do, you’ll be sure to enjoy Notes from the Century Before. It’s written in the form of a journal, parts of it in the first person, present tense – my favorite mode. It brims with sentences like “Coming back across a grassy range, I meet a loose troop of horses, who slide out of reach like so many fish, wheeling in a flat, careful curve as if they were tied head to haunch: insouciant, bonehead horses, sinister in the face.” 

Hoagland seems incapable of writing vaguely. He deals in particulars. I read him as much for his exuberant style as for his substance. But the substance – “this gigantic ocean of heaped-up land almost too enormous to comprehend” – is pretty damn spectacular, too. The book is double bliss – amazing subject, delectable prose style. I devour it.

Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss a number of aspects of Notes from the Century Before, including its action, structure, imagery, point of view, sense of place, and use of figuration. But first I want to introduce the other two books in my trio. Next month, I’ll review John McPhee’s great Coming into the Country.  

Best of 2020: Reporting Pieces

Photo by Paolo Pellegrin, from Ben Taub's "Five Oceans, Five Deeps"

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2020 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Ben Taub’s “Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” May 18, 2020 (“Most submarines go down several hundred metres, then across; this one was designed to sink like a stone. It was the shape of a bulging briefcase, with a protruding bulb at the bottom. This was the pressure hull—a titanium sphere, five feet in diameter, which was sealed off from the rest of the submersible and housed the pilot and all his controls. Under the passenger seat was a tuna-fish sandwich, the pilot’s lunch. He gazed out of one of the viewports, into the blue. It would take nearly four hours to reach the bottom”).

2. “April 15, 2020,” May 4, 2020 (“As the sun came up, dully brightening the morning, it revealed that the day was ordinary and out of the ordinary at the same time. Figures appeared far apart on the boardwalk, each one alone, each making a different exercise motion. One was using a jump rope, another had two small dumbbells, and another a piece of pipe. Many wore masks. On the horizon to the left lay the narrow sand spit of the Rockaways, a stratum of pale-brown beach below a gray-green line of bushes and trees. To the right loomed the grayish point of Sandy Hook, in New Jersey. In between, a small boat motored slowly by, its wake as white as a bridal train. The ordinary-extraordinary day settled in and locked itself into place. The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere. The whole city had become a waiting room”).

3. Alex Ross’s “The Bristlecones Speak,” January 20, 2020 (“Spears of dead wood jut into the air. The trunk is a marbled hulk stripped of bark, like driftwood thrown from a vanished ocean. A ribbon of live bark runs up one side, funnelling water and nutrients to clumps of green needles high above”).

4. Bill Buford’s “Good Bread," April 13, 2020 (“By nine, a line extended down the street, and the shop, when you finally got inside, was loud from people and from music being played at high volume. Everyone shouted to be heard—the cacophonous hustle, oven doors banging, people waving and trying to get noticed, too-hot-to-touch baguettes arriving in baskets, money changing hands”).

5. Burkhard Bilger’s “Building the Impossible,” November 30, 2020 (“Unlike the slide, which bullies through the apartment like a giant intestine, the staircase seems to crystallize the spaces it’s in. Built of white nanoglass—an opaque and extremely hard synthetic stone—it twists up through the building in precisely organized shards, offering sudden glimpses through the rooms unfolding around it”).

6. Vinson Cunningham’s “Eightyish,” April 13, 2020 (“Outside, I imagine that each stranger’s head is crowned by a saint’s halo of fatal droplets, waiting to surf on one of my breaths into my body and cut through my lungs like a spray of glass”).

7. Jonathan Blitzer’s “Juan Sanabria,” April 20, 2020 (“He’d been among the first fatalities. ‘Was he the eleventh person who died? I was trying to figure out if he was the tenth or the eleventh,’ Comerford told me. ‘That made this whole thing very real. Before, the deaths were just statistics. Knowing that one of them was Juan, it gave the thing a face’”).

8. Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Independent People,” June 8 & 15, 2020 (“That evening, the weather was clear and cool—by New York standards, too cool to eat outside, by Reykjavík standards balmy. The outdoor cafés were crowded. Restaurants had been asked to arrange their tables to keep groups two metres apart, but some diners, I noticed, had pushed the tables closer together. Everyone was talking and laughing, masklessly. The scene was completely ordinary, which is to say now exotic—just people meeting up with friends for dinner. For a traveller these days, this might be an even better draw, I thought, than glaciers or whale-watching”).

9. Luke Mogelson’s “The Uprising,” June 22, 2020 (“Barricades around the four surrounding blocks impeded traffic and law enforcement. The sidewalk outside the Cup Foods grocery store—where an employee had called the police after suspecting George Floyd of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill—was buried under bouquets, mementos, and homemade cards. Activists delivered speeches between the gas pumps at a filling station; messages in chalk—“fight back,” “stay woke”—covered the street”).

10. Dana Goodyear’s “From the Ground Up,” October 12, 2020 (“The walls are made from elongated quartzite bricks, with gray-scale variations reminiscent of the larchwood slats of his atelier. Open seams in the ceiling allow sunlight to enter in ghostly lines—some defining an alternative volume within the space, others fanning out like an annunciation. A brass spout funnels water from the source, St. Petersquelle, into a brass basin with cups attached by chains. In one secluded pool, swimming around a corner reveals a chamber where the human voice harmonizes with the room so that humming creates a glorious Gregorian echo”). 

Best of 2020: The Critics

Illustration by Chloe Cushman, from Anthony Lane's "Plotting a Course"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2020 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Anthony Lane's “Folies à Deux,” June 1, 2020 (“To see Coogan and Brydon being waited upon by unmasked servers, who carry the plates with bare hands, is to yearn for the touchstones of a mythical past. As one kindly waitress inquires, in a lull between courses, 'Do you want to continue?' Yes, if we can. Forever”).

2. James Wood's “Reward System,” September 14, 2020 (“At those moments when Gyasi’s prose is summoned to intense specificity, it smears into cliché: ‘On the nights when he would slink in through the back door, coming down from a high, reeking to high Heaven’ ”).

 3. Peter Schjeldahl's “Off the Wall," November 16, 2020 (“Bevelled edges flirt with object-ness, making the works seem fat material presentations, protuberant from walls, rather than pictures. But, as always with Gilliam, paint wins”).

 4. Anthony Lane's “Plotting a Course,” December 14, 2020 (“Could Susan be the first person on record to discuss her distant sexual history while playing Monopoly and Scrabble, and, if so, does a threesome count as a triple-word score?”). 

5. Julian Lucas's “Death Sentences,” September 21, 2020 (“Forget Susan Sontag’s dictum that diseases shouldn’t have meanings. Guibert inhabited AIDS as though it were a darkroom or an astronomical observatory, a means for deciphering the patterns in life’s dying light”).

6. Dan Chiasson's “Suspended Pleasures,” September 7, 2020 (“The Airstreams and roadsters, the delis and coffees are there whenever and wherever we want to experience them, and they can be reanimated on demand”).

7. James Wood's “Enigma Variations,” August 24, 2020 (“A sparse realism scars the pages—Leonard, abandonment, the phone call, a North Dakota hospital”).

 8. Leo Robson's “The Art of the Unruly,” July 6 & 13, 2020 ("As she invokes a world of pounding hearts and thumping ears and watering mouths, she exhibits a refreshing freedom from embarrassment, an indifference to the concept of overkill").

9. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Target Practice,” February 17 & 24, 2020 (“He sneaks whispery formal nuances into works whose predominant effect may be as subtle as that of a steel garbage can being kicked downstairs”).

10. Dan Chiasson’s “A Trick of the Senses,” January 20, 2020 (“This is the core feature of Hass’s work, in my view: an Etch A Sketch method that allows the surface of the completed poem to be erased and revised, with traces of previous attempts, along with gaps for when the lightning strikes”).

Best of 2020: newyorker.com

Photo by Deanna Dikeman, from Erin Orbey's "A Photographer's Parents Wave Farewell"

Here are my favourite newyorker.com posts of 2020 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Eren Orbey’s “A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell,” March 4, 2020 (“Each image reiterates the quiet loyalty of her parents’ tradition. They recede into the warm glow of the garage on rainy evenings and laugh under the eaves in better weather. In summer, they blow kisses from the driveway. In winter, they wear scarves and stand behind snowbanks. Inevitably, they age”).

2. Emma Cline’s “Mike Mandel’s Selfies from the Seventies,” October 12, 2020 (“When Mandel pressed the timer, placing himself among the lives of strangers, it was the photographic equivalent of a toss of the coins in I Ching: you ask the universe to reveal itself; you await the universe’s answer”).

3. Helen Rosner’s “What We’re Buying for the Quarantine,” March 18, 2020 (photographs by Dina Litovsky).

Photo by Dina Litovsky, from Helen Rosner's "What We"re Buying for the Quarantine"

4. Rachel Syme’s “The Queen’s Gambit Is the Most Satisfying Show on Television,” November 13, 2020 (“But for me the glamour of the series is another of its quiet subversions. In life and on screen, chess is considered the domain of hoary men in moth-eaten cardigans, playing in smoky gymnasia that reek of stale coffee. ‘The Queen’s Gambit,’ instead, finds an unlikely synergy between the heady interiority of chess and the sensual realm of style”).

5. Andy Friedman’s “The Return of Kathleen Edwards,” August 8, 2020.

Illustration by Andy Friedman, from his "The Return of Kathleen Edwards"

6. Charlotte Mendelson’s “Sunflowers, with Love and Hate,” October 7, 2020 (“My sunflowers, grown from seed and standing proud among my dumpy black-currant bushes and rampaging mint, do rather dominate my garden”).

7. Maeve Dunigan’s “Poems Edgar Allan Poe Wrote While Lost In a Corn Maze,” October 30, 2020 (“Melancholy is the man / Who enters corn without a plan”).

8. Charles McGrath’s “Remembering Daniel Menaker, A Lighthearted Champion of His Writers,” October 29, 2020 (“Dan cared passionately about his writers. He defended them against what he thought was The New Yorker’s overly rigid house style, and sometimes preserved their eccentricities just for their own sake”).

9. Johanna Fateman's "The Photographer Who Set Out to Watch Herself Age," December 16, 2020 ("The shutter's cable release is like a part of her always in hand, its dark tail trailing out of the frame").

10. Chris Wiley’s “A Photographer and an Inmate Exchange Ways of Seeing,” December 13, 2020 (“At the heart of Soth and Cabrera’s connection is art: art as a container of meaning, a honing steel for the sensibilities, a lodestar for living”).