April 25, 2011 Issue

Amidst all the hectic dunking, fracking, handbag marketing, and neuronal computation going on in this week’s issue, I’d like to pause a moment to celebrate the bonnet-wearing bunny on the delicious pink-yellow-and-white Maira Kalman front cover. Of the many great New Yorker cover illustrators, Kalman is the most brilliant colorist. This week’s cover, titled “Everywhere I Go I See Hats,” is ravishing. Kalman produced my all-time favorite New Yorker cover – the March 14, 2005, “Just Duckie,” showing a blue-billed duck comfortably nesting on a woman’s reed-like green hair. Kalman is a genius – right up there with Matisse, in my humble opinion. I see she currently has a show at the Jewish Museum [“Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World)”]. If I lived in New York, I’d definitely check it out.

Interesting Emendations: Maile Meloy's "Travis, B."

Claudio Cambon, Ghost Horse, Spring Blizzard (2000)

Maile Meloy’s "Travis, B." (The New Yorker, October 28, 2002) is, in my opinion, the finest short story to appear in the magazine in the last ten years. It’s about a twenty-two year old, part-Cheyenne loner named Chet Moran, who works feeding cows on a farm outside Glendive, Montana. Due to polio, contracted before he was two, and to broken bones suffered in horse-riding accidents, he’s physically disabled. He walks “as though turning to himself to ask a question.” He lives in “an insulated room built into the barn.” One winter night, just for something to do, he drives into town. He sees a light on in the school. People are going inside. He decides to join them. He meets Beth Travis, a young lawyer, who is teaching a course on school law. He tries to connect with her. At first Beth seems unresponsive. She seems distracted, preoccupied with her own troubles. The gap between them seems vast. Then something amazing happens. One night, Chet decides to saddle up his horse and ride into town to attend Beth’s course. After class, he offers to take her to the café on his horse. She agrees. “He held her briefcase against the pommel, and she held tightly to his jacket, her legs against his. He couldn’t think of anything except how warm she was, pressed against the base of his spine.” When they arrive at the café, she laughs. “She looked amazed.” It’s an astounding, elating scene; it seems, against all odds, that Chet has made a breakthrough with her. It’s the highpoint of the relationship. That evening, just before they part, Chet kisses her hand and then her cheek: “She didn’t move, not an inch, and he was about to kiss her for real when she seemed to snap out of a trance, and stepped away from him.” It’s the story’s turning point. The next night of class, Beth is absent; there’s a new teacher. Chet walks out of class and impulsively decides to drive the six hundred miles to Missoula, where Beth lives, to see her. It’s a romantic quest and it fails. He finds Beth in Missoula; he says to her, “I just knew that if I didn’t start driving, I wasn’t going to see you again, and I didn’t want that. That’s all.” But Beth doesn’t respond. “He stood there waiting, thinking she might say something, meet him halfway. He wanted to hear her voice again. He wanted to touch her, any part of her, just her arms maybe, just her waist. She stood out of reach, waiting for him to go.” Chet returns to the farm. It seems he still retains hope of seeing her again: “He wondered if maybe he had planted a seed, with Beth Travis, by demonstrating his seriousness to her.” But then he decides that she won’t come looking for him. “That was the thing that made him ache.” The story ends sadly: “He fished her phone number out of his pocket and studied it a while in the moonlight, until he knew it by heart, and wouldn’t forget it. Then he did what he knew he should do, and rolled it into a ball, and threw it away.”

I apologize for the roughness of the foregoing summary; it doesn’t even come close to doing justice to the story’s subtlety and poignancy.

I first read “Travis, B.” back in 2002 when it appeared in The New Yorker. There’s also a version of it in Meloy’s 2009 story collection Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It. Comparing the two versions, I found a number of interesting differences. For example, in the New Yorker version, Meloy describes Chet as follows:

He spent his twenty-first birthday wearing long johns under two flannel shirts, his winter coat, and the rancher’s big oilskin, with his feet on the space heater, warming up soup on the stove. But he got afraid of himself that winter; he sensed something dangerous that would break free if he kept so much alone.

The book version of that passage is sparer:

He spent his twenty-first birthday wearing long johns under two flannel shirts and his winter coat, warming up soup on the stove. He got afraid of himself that winter; he sensed something dangerous that would break free if he kept so much alone.

Another example where the book version suffers loss of detail is a passage describing Chet at work. The magazine version is as follows:

That weekend was the longest one he’d had. He cleaned the tack for the team, and curried the horses until they gleamed and stamped, watching him, suspicious of what he intended. He dosed the calves that needed it with medicine, but mostly they were fine, and went bawling back to their mothers, who waited outside the barn. He wondered if the cows had an idea of their calf, with his habits and smells. Did they worry, or did they just wait for the next thing to happen?

In the book version, that passage is reduced to the following:

That weekend was the longest one he’d had. He fed the cows and cleaned the tack for the team. He curried the horses until they gleamed and stamped, watching him, suspicious of what he intended.

Some readers may prefer the shorter book version of the above-noted passages. But I confess I’m partial to the extra detail (oilskin, space heater, dosing the calves with medicine, etc.) in the New Yorker version.

The differences aren’t just with respect to details. Meloy’s descriptions of Chet’s and Beth’s reactions to each other seem slightly edgier, more intense, in the book version. For example, in the New Yorker story, when Chet offers to show Beth where the café is located, Meloy says:

She looked at him, as if wondering whether she could trust him, and then she nodded. “O.K.,” she said.

In the book version, describing Beth’s reaction to Chet’s offer, Meloy says:

She looked like she was wondering whether to fear him, and then she nodded. “Okay,” she said.

Meloy changed “trust” to “fear.” Why? Maybe to heighten our apprehension of the potential explosiveness of the “something dangerous” that Chet senses within himself. Does the story benefit from such heightening? Not necessarily. Chet’s character is ambiguous. He could be one of those quiet, bottled-up types who one day suddenly goes berserk. Or he could simply be a cowboy embodiment of Gatsby's "romantic readiness." Whatever the case, Chet's profile in the magazine story seems a hint more modulated than it does in the book version. And this seems to work to the story's advantage.

Meloy mentions the fear element again in the following passage, which is the same in both versions, except for the book's addition of “and restless”:

She studied him and seemed to wonder again if she should be afraid. But the room was bright, and he tried to look harmless. He was harmless, he was pretty sure. Being with someone helped – he didn’t feel so wound up and restless.

Chet also experiences fear. In the magazine version, Meloy writes:

He wanted to say that he wasn’t hungry when he was around her, but he feared she might shy away.

In the book version, Chet’s fear that Beth “might shy away” is changed to the more definite “she would shy away.” It’s a subtle change, but it reinforces my impression that Chet’s image in the book version is slightly more dangerous-seeming.

In conclusion, I count at least seventeen compositional differences between the New Yorker “Travis, B.” and the “Travis, B.” of Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It. Granted, most of the changes are minor. However, “Travis, B.” is a masterpiece, and so these variations matter. Overall, I’d say the New Yorker piece is the better version. I wonder why Meloy changed it.

April 18, 2011 Issue

This week’s highlight is Geoff Dyer’s New Yorker debut. His “Poles Apart” is deeply pleasurable. I’ve long been a fan of Dyer’s work. His Out of Sheer Rage was a constant companion during my travels in Nunavut in 2006. The italicized sections of his But Beautiful, describing a Duke Ellington/Harry Carney road trip, are, for me, touchstones of what constitute great writing. My favorite sentence in “Poles Apart”? Well, actually, I have two: “There were amazing photographs of the coils of rock in the variously colored water –reddish, pink, pale blue – and there was the Zapruder-inflected footage of its construction, but the jetty had gone the way of Atlantis, sinking beneath the waveless surface of the Salt Lake.” And, “Most of what there was to see was traffic-related: gas-station logos, trucks the size of freight trains, snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder.” That “snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder” is inspired!

Two other notable pieces this week: Evan Osnos’s “The Grand Tour” (“And yet, behind Berlusconi’s opera buffa and the prosperity gospel about Chinese one-party efficiency, my busmates caught unredacted flickers of insight”) and Keith Gessen’s “Nowheresville” (“Strangest of all was the wind howling through the elevator shafts. 'Whooooo,' it said. 'Whoooo-ooo-ooo' ”).

April 11, 2011 Issue

When was the last time you saw “moviegoers,” “prep,” “colonoscopy,” “woman,” “drinks,” “swears,” and “orgasm” combined in one sentence? I’ll bet never. If you want to read it, turn to Tad Friend’s delightful “Funny Like a Guy,” in this week’s issue, and you’ll find, amidst the rich verbal textures, this miracle of inventive construction: “Studio executives believe that male moviegoers would rather prep for a colonoscopy than experience a woman’s point of view, particularly if that woman drinks or swears or has a great job or an orgasm.” There’s poetry in that! Here’s another example from the same piece: “Though she had arresting cameos in 'Lost in Translation' and 'Brokeback Mountain,' her more usual task in fare like 'The Hot Chick,' has been to perform CPR on such dialogue as 'It’s not every day that your best friend grows a penis' – to be a one-woman rescue team for films that aimed low and crashed before they got there.” That “to perform CPR on such dialogue” is inspired, as is the combination of movie titles, together with the surrealistic quote and “one-woman rescue team.” “Funny Like a Guy” is filled with such assemblages – grammatical equivalents of Joseph Cornell’s miniature boxes of weird, poetic images and oddments. Reading them is bliss!

Pritchett's Precision

In preparation for a post I’m planning called “Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 – 2011,” I’ve been rereading some of V. S. Pritchett’s work. Between 1949 and 1988, he wrote seventy New Yorker book reviews. They are among the glories of the art of book reviewing. I don’t think it’s correct to say, as Roger Angell said, that Pritchett “was not a stylist” (“Marching Life,” The New Yorker, December 22, 1997). I think he was a great stylist. Maybe what Angell meant is that he didn’t write fancily. And that’s true, he didn’t. His style was plain, but it was clear and sharp – “sharp as horseradish,” as he himself said about Chekhov’s humor (in his brilliant essay “A Doctor,” included in his 1979 collection The Myth Makers) – sharp in terms of both precision and pungency. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

On Camus: “His senses responded to the harsh mountain landscape, the stony plateau, and the desert that was another sea; to the clear sunlight, the brassy heat, and the seductive silence of the evenings. The deep sense of “indifference” in him responded to the indifference of nature, but not in a Northern, Wordsworthian way; there was nothing “deeply interfused” here. Each stone or tree was an object: his visual sense of the “things” of landscape is intense in all his writing. Mortality was a presence as unanswerable as a rock.” (“Albert Camus,” The New Yorker, December 20, 1982)

On Tolstoy: “He is the absolute patriarch. He toils as an artist, as a teacher, as a farmer, and in bed. His family toils for him. His wife obeys – and also learns from him the deadly habit of diarizing and counter-diarizing. His intellect growls away, and he exacts as much from himself as he exacts from others.” (“Two Bears in a Den,” The New Yorker, August 21, 1978)

On Byron: “Byron is a good letter writer because whether he is scoffing, arguing, or even conducting his business affairs, he has a half-laughing eye on his correspondent; although he can turn icily formal, he has mainly a talking style of worldly elegance and is spontaneously the half self of the moment, for not only he but everyone else knew the duality of his nature. The whole person can be deduced from what he dashingly offers. His character is a springboard from which he takes a dive into what he has to say about himself for the moment, bringing other people to half life in the splash.” (“Byron,” The New Yorker, June 2, 1980)

On Henry James: “The spell of the letters really lies in their idiosyncrasy. They are communings with himself as much as with friends. They are also talking letters. They are written in his dictating period, and he writes as one listening to his own voice as it leads him on, watching his words float on the air, and delighting in the studied mischief of his hesitations and parentheses. He always evokes the friend to whom he is writing. His enormous privacy flowers. His lonely room fills up with voices; he carries his friends down the happily rambling stream of consciousness.” (“The Last Letters of Henry James,” The New Yorker, August 20, 1984)

Lean, simple sentences composed of concrete, precise words that evoke vivid images and sensations – “stony plateau,” “brassy heat,” “his intellect growls away,” “his enormous privacy flowers,” “icily formal,” etc. - govern the style of the above-quoted passages, and are among the hallmarks of Pritchett’s brilliant way of writing. The sentence “Mortality was a presence as unanswerable as a rock,” in the Camus passage above, is exemplary of that clear, sharp quality I mentioned earlier.

Credit: The above photo of V. S. Pritchett is by Cecil Beaton; it appears in The New Yorker (December 22, 1997) as an illustration for Roger Angell’s “Marching Life."

April 4, 2011 Issue

There’s a terrific GOAT blurb in this week’s issue about Karen Kilimnik’s show at 303 Gallery. It’s so good – where goodness means rich, surprising, delicious, nearly abstract - I’m going to quote it in full:

Like no one except Cady Noland – but with sweetness, rather than menace – Kilimnik decisively altered installational art two decades ago, imbuing it with an emotive, storytelling force. Here an early “scatter” piece, “The Hellfire Club Episode of the Avengers” (1989), is reprised, along with never before seen drawings from the eighties, recent paintings, and some new painting-like photographs (a full moon tangled in branches of nocturnal trees). Photographs, photocopies, props, and velvet drapes – almost entirely of black, white, and gray – elevate fandom for the old Brit spy show to a pitch of soulful delirium. Everything about it is shabby and surprises. The shattery composition amounts to a walk-in-Cubism of achingly various romance.

"The shattery composition amounts to a walk-in-Cubism of achingly various romance" – how fine that is! I wonder who wrote it? My guess is Andrea K. Scott, who writes GOAT’s “Critic’s Notebook” on art. But that “Photographs, photocopies, props, and velvet drapes – almost entirely of black, white, and gray – elevate fandom for the old Brit spy show to a pitch of soulful delirium” is very Schjeldahlesque. The way the verb “elevate” is buried in the middle of the sentence is a hallmark of Schjeldahl’s style. For example, in a piece on Agnes Martin, Schjeldahl writes, “Scored, alternately continuous and broken horizontal lines cut to white gessoed canvas through a white-bordered square mass of tar-black paint” (“Life Work,” The New Yorker, June 7, 2004; included in Schjeldahl’s great 2008 collection Let’s See). So … I think the “Kilimnik” blurb could’ve been written by Schjeldahl. It’s such a delectable piece that it intensified my appreciation of several other GOAT items this week, e.g., the “Joan Mitchell,” which features yet another of those gorgeous “buried verb” sentences - “Counterpoints of piled-up paint and blank surface convey that more is more and that less is heaven.” Now, that just has to be by Schjeldahl, doesn’t it? Either that or his piquant style is rubbing off on GOAT’s writers.

If you’re like me and you enjoy “catalog” sentences – exuberant compendiums of detail that bespeak love of life – you’ll like GOAT’s “Paul Ramirez Jonas” note, which describes the base of an equestrian statue that “doubles as a four-sided bulletin board.” On this board are pinned, “notes, business cards, ticket stubs, money, a dry-cleaning receipt, children’s art, a paper mobile, work-for-hire notices, and the inevitable ephemera of New York: a ‘no menus’ sign and a ‘Dan Smith will teach you guitar’ flyer.” Did I mention that I love lists like this? I devour them. John Updike, in his wonderful essay on Thoreau (in Updike’s 2007 collection Due Considerations), says, “It is the thinginess of Thoreau’s prose that excites us.” It’s the same for me regarding these great GOAT pieces: it’s the thinginess that excites me.

And the excitement continues, because there are at least two more dandy lists in this week’s GOAT: Mike Peed’s inspired “Tables For Two” description of Edi & The Wolf’s interior (“The inside holds what appears to be the hoard of an exuberant and undiscerning band of freegans: old wooden chairs affixed to the walls at curious angles, worn leather boots filled with dead flowers, a forty-foot rope salvaged from a Bed-Stuy belfry strung like crepe paper above the bar”); and a glorious passage in Richard Brody’s mini-review of Yasujiro Ozu’s wonderfully titled 1933 silent film Dragnet Girl – “His gleeful compositions put objects obsessively front and center – a drum kit, a set of dice, a row of Martini glasses, a billiard cue that pokes right at the camera – and presage the deep-focus symphonies of Orson Welles and even the vertiginous enticements of 3-D.” Great writing! I lap it up.

Postscript: Since posting the above, I’ve read Steve Coll’s “The Casbah Coalition” and David Grann’s “A Murder Foretold.” They're both excellent – destined to be classics. I wouldn’t be surprised to see “A Murder Foretold” made into a movie. It’s absolutely gripping.

March 28, 2011 Issue

The best thing in this week’s issue is the color-drenched 1941 photo of Helena Rubinstein, wearing a flame-red dress, dripping with jewels, seated in a sumptuous purple armchair. Unfortunately, the article that accompanies the photo – Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Color of Money” – is a dud. Ostensibly a book review, it’s actually another one of Gladwell’s business morality tales. But in this one, the moral Gladwell teases out of a review of Ruth Brandon’s Ugly Beauty is that “Sometimes beauty is just business.” Thank you, Malcolm, for that illuminating aperçu.

Sometimes baseball is just business, too - most of the time, actually. Which is why I took a pass on reading Ben McGrath’s “King of Walks.” Having absolutely no interest in Spanx, I merely skim-read Alexandra Jacob’s “Smooth Moves.” Then I turned expectantly to Lauren Collins’s “Sole Mate.” I loved Collins’s “Angle of Vision” (The New Yorker, April 19, 2010). Alas, “Sole Mate” is not nearly as good, and I think I know why. Its subject, the shoe designer Christian Louboutin, does not appear to attract Collins’s admiration the way the paraglider/photographer George Steinmetz does in “Angle of Vision.” There’s nothing in “Sole Mate” that even comes close to matching the inspiration of some of the passages in “Angle of Vision.” This one, for example: “Their parabolic swells and eskered spines, splitting shadow, reminded me of horseshoe crabs. In the fading light, the sand turned from the color of paprika to a blood-orange shade and then to an iridescent purple, like eyeshadow, eventually deepening to a chocolaty brown.”

The only other piece in this week’s issue that had potential to be interesting was Evan Osnos’s “Aftershocks.” While it’s gracefully written and contains many absorbing facts about the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan’s northeast coast last month, it fails to put a human face on the victims. Compare it with Jon Lee Anderson’s gritty “Neighbors’ Keeper” (The New Yorker, February 8, 2010), a report on conditions in Haiti six days after it was struck by an earthquake. Anderson places Nadia François, who walks miles from her town in a ravine in search of supplies, at the center of his piece. We see the devastation of the landscape and the suffering of the people at ground level, as Anderson follows François’ desperate quest for aid. Osnos, in his piece, doesn’t get close enough to the trauma. And in fairness to him, there was the risk of radiation exposure if he got too close to the disaster zone. Whatever the reason, his piece feels weirdly detached. I think the problem is that Osnos gives us his Tokyo experience, when what we're expecting is a detailed description of life in the cities and villages hit by the tsunami.

Second Thoughts: I’m feeling guilty. I was too hard on Osnos’s “Aftershocks.” The passage in which Osnos and a friend are driving through Tokyo at night and are stopped at a red light “as an aftershock rippled through the car” is amazing.

March 21, 2011 Issue

Maybe I should just change the name of this blog to “Ian Frazier and Me,” and be done with it. Frazier’s my man! A new piece by him is a major event. He has two in this week’s issue: a Talk story called “Heavy Hitters,” and a feature titled “Back to the Harbor.” It’s interesting to see how Frazier handles the Talk tradition that discourages the use of the first person singular. “We” is the preferred point of view, as in “Lately, we’ve been pondering the pigeons in Bryant Park.” Frazier is the quintessential first-person-singular writer – it’s one of the many things I like about his writing. In conformity with the Talk “rule,” he generally refrains from using “I” in his Talk pieces. But he doesn’t often use “we” – and no wonder; it seems pretty damned artificial to ask a writer to write as if he’s a crowd. Sometimes he uses “you,” as in “If you drilled a hole straight through the earth, starting at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty-second Street, you would pass through ten inches of pavement, four feet of pipes …” (“Antipodes,” The New Yorker, May 19, 1975; included in Frazier’s great 2005 collection Gone To New York). But most of the time, he writes in the third person, giving his Talk pieces an objective feel that’s quite distinct from his other work, which is written in a much more personal style. Now and then, I suspect Frazier of sneaking himself into his Talk stories by posing as an anonymous questioner. For example, in this week’s “Heavy Hitters,” which is a wonderful description of an evening of Daily News Golden Gloves amateur boxing at the Cultural Performing Arts Center in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, there’s a referee named Ilya Friedman, who is “introduced to the crowd as having been a boxer in the Soviet Union.” We know Frazier is a passionate Russophile. In the story, Frazier has an unidentified man sitting next to Friedman asking him questions:

The man asked him where in Russia he was from. “Odessa,” he replied, pronouncing it “Ah-dessa.” The man asked what weight he had fought at over there. “When I started, I didn’t even have any weight, I was a child,” he said. “Later, I fought at seventy-five kilos, what is called cruiserweight in America. I fought a hundred and thirty-seven amateur fights in the Soviet Union, and won a hundred and twenty-four.” The man asked what was the difference between these matches tonight and boxing in the Soviet Union. “These are friendly fights,” Ilya Friedman said.

Maybe I’m crazy, but, as I say, I suspect that the man doing the questioning is none other than Frazier himself. This is not the first time I’ve had this feeling. At the end of Frazier’s memorable Talk piece “Lovefest” (The New Yorker, March 1, 2010), Frazier writes, “Somebody asked the Reverend Daughtry if today’s was the coldest march he had ever been on.” I have a hunch that “somebody” was Frazier. But I could be wrong.

The other piece by Frazier in this week’s issue – “Back to the Harbor” – is a beauty. Frazier has so many interests – seal-watching is one I didn’t know about until now. It’s about Frazier nosing around Staten Island and other places looking for seals. He eventually finds them when he takes a seal-watching cruise in New York Harbor. Frazier has a way of putting things in his stories that most other writers leave out. For example, in “Back to the Harbor,” he talks about having a flat tire as a result of hitting a pothole: “I thought I had no spare, but when I pulled over and checked, I did. I changed the tire in a lot in Perth Amboy and got to Staten Island just after sunrise.” I like incidental details like that – after all, they’re part of life, and deserve to be mentioned. In “Back to the Harbor,” Frazier’s descriptions of park benches (“All the park benches had blankets of snow pulled up over their knees”), birds (“A flock of brants on the water croaked their creaky calls, ring-billed gulls on the breeze teetered like skateboarders”), a ship (“The captain sped up to avoid a huge in-bound cargo ship, which sped by in our wake with its containers piled high like a waiter balancing dishes”), the basking posture of seals (“curved like cocktail wieners on toothpicks”), a peregrine falcon (“The elegant little predator came into focus against the sky framed by the bincoculars’ circle, moving his head back and forth surveillantly”) are inspired. He devotes a very funny paragraph to the description of a plastic patio chair that he finds on the beach at the foot of Joline Avenue. If you collect verbless sentence fragments, as I do, check out this dandy from “Back to the Harbor”: “A huge tractor tire on its side with herring gulls standing on it, a row of white pines a recent storm had knocked down, deep snowdrifts, a man in a car in the parking lot doing a crossword puzzle.” “Back to the Harbor” is like a prose poem of facts. I enjoyed it immensely.

Teju Cole's "Flat" Description

I’m still trying to figure out what James Wood meant by “‘flat’ description” in his review of Teju Cole’s novel Open City (“The Arrival of Enigmas,” The New Yorker, February 28, 2011). In his piece, Wood talks about a particularly vivid image that occurs near the end of Open City: Julius, the novel’s narrator, is attending a Carnegie Hall performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony; he sees an elderly lady walking up the aisle. Cole describes her as follows:

She walked slowly, and all eyes were on her, though all ears remained on the music. It was as though she had been summoned, and was leaving into death, drawn by a force invisible to us. The old woman was frail, with a thin crown of white hair that, backlit by the stage, became a halo, and she moved so slowly that she was like a mote suspended inside the slow-moving music.

Wood says,

Cole prepares his effects so patiently and cumulatively, over many pages of relatively “flat” description, that the image of the old woman leaving as if for death, suspended like a mote in the music, seems not forced or ornamental but natural and almost inevitable.

“Flat” in the sense that Cole’s description is dull and lifeless? I don’t think that’s what Wood means. The fact that he sets “flat” in quotation marks indicates that he’s using the word in a particular way – to denote a particular style of description. There’s a hint as to what he means when he says the image of the old woman “seems not forced or ornamental but natural and almost inevitable.” We know that Wood dislikes overly rich description. In his essay “John Updike’s Complacent God” (included in his 1999 collection The Broken Estate), he disdainfully refers to Updike’s “puffy lyricism” and “slathered detail.” He’s an anti-inflationist. When it comes to verbal representation of reality, he seems to prefer an almost literal transcription – the thing itself. It’s the kind of description that Teju Cole abundantly provides in Open City. For example, here’s Cole’s depiction of a section of Wall Street:

I walked toward the west. People bought food from a falafel vendor whose van was parked on the corner, or walked alone, in pairs, in threes. I saw black women in charcoal grey skirt suits, and young, clean-shaven Indian-American men. Just past Federal Hall, I walked past the glass frontage of the New York Sports Club. Right up against the glass in its brightly lit interior was a single row of exercise bicycles, all of them occupied by men and women in Lycra who pedaled in the silence and looked out at the commuters in the dusk. Near the corner of Nassau, a man in a scarf and fedora hat stood with an easel before him and painted the Stock Exchange in grisaille on a large canvas. A stack of completed paintings, also grisaille, of the same building seen from different angles, lay at his feet. I watched him work for a moment, as he loaded his brush, and with careful gestures applied white highlights to the acanthus of the six massive Corinthian columns of the Stock Exchange.

“I saw,” I watched,” “I noticed,” “I scrutinized” – these words occur frequently in Cole’s writing. His descriptions are built on data received through the eye. He rarely constructs a metaphor or simile, and when he does, it’s usually a fairly plain one (e.g., “The just risen sun came at the Hudson at such an acute angle that the river gleamed like aluminum roofing”).

There’s a Hopperesque quality to many of Cole’s descriptions that I really like. That image of the men and women on their exercise bicycles pedaling “in the silence,” looking out “at the commuters in the dusk,” in the above-quoted passage, for example, seems to me a scene that might’ve caught Hopper’s eye.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Cole’s “flat” description – what I understand “flat” to mean, at any rate – is his use of catalog. For example, here’s a passage from Open City in which he catalogs the details of the interior of a Chinese shop:

The shop, of which I was the sole customer, was a microcosm of Chinatown itself, with an endless array of curious objects: a profusion of bamboo cages as well as finely worked metal ones, hanging like lampshades from the ceiling; hand-carved chess sets on the ancient-looking bar between the customer and the shopkeeper’s bay; imitation Ming Dynasty lacquerware, which ranged in size from tiny decorative pots to round-bellied vases large enough to conceal a man; humorous pamphlets of the “Confucius say” variety, which had been printed in English in Hong Kong and which gave advice to those gentlemen who wished to find success with women; fine wooden chopsticks set on porcelain chopstick stands; glass bowls of every hue, thickness, and design; and, in a seemingly endless glass-fronted gallery high above the regular shelves, a series of brightly painted masks that run through every facial expression possible in the dramatist’s art.

I’m a sucker for compendiums of detail like the one above. They seem to me to be one of the most effective ways for a writer to reproduce reality. The trick is in knowing how to make something good, something artful, out of them. There’s an intriguing scrap of catalog writing under the title “Descriptions of Things and Atmosphere” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s nonfiction collection The Crack Up that reads as follows:

Seen in a Junk Yard: Dogs, chickens with few claws, brass fittings, T’s elbow, rust everywhere, bales of metal 1800 lbs, plumbing fixtures, bathtubs, sinks, water, pumps, wheels, Fordson tractor, acetylene lamps for tractors, sewing machine, bell on dinghy, box of bolts, (No.1), van, stove, auto stuff (No.2), army trucks, cast iron body, hot dog stand, dinky engines, sprockets like watch parts, hinge all taken apart on building side, motorcycle radiators, George on the high army truck.

Fitzgerald must’ve made this entry in his notebook with the intention of someday turning it into something – a scene in a novel or short story, maybe. But, unfortunately, he didn’t live long enough to do so. In Open City, Teju Cole integrates his catalogs of urban details into a larger narrative about a young man for whom walking in the city is “a release,” “a reminder of freedom.” He’s successfully done what all artists strive to do - shape reality’s welter into something meaningful.

March 14, 2011 Issue

Raffi Khatchadourian’s excellent “The Gulf War,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, convincingly corrects at least two major misconceptions regarding last year’s massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: (1) that the government wrongfully ceded control over the spill response to BP; (2) that BP’s response was inept. Khatchadourian says:

It has become conventional wisdom that the BP-funded response to the spill was a chaotic and mismanaged affair, driven by corporate avarice, lacking in urgency, and at times willfully negligent of the problem’s scope – the idea being that any organization that had caused such a catastrophe, and that was so clearly unprepared for it, could not in good faith clean up the scene of the disaster. The evidence for this is much like the imagery of heavy oiling: vivid and convincing upon first consideration, but also fragmentary and anecdotal. At the peak of the cleanup effort, forty-seven thousand people were fighting the oil, a community equivalent in size to Annapolis, or the workforce of G.M. – as one federal scientist called it, “a company built in the middle of the night.” In just half a year, the response expended nearly sixty million man-hours, roughly nine times what it took to build the Empire State Building. After the well ruptured [on April 20, 2010], BP accepted help from competing oil companies, and hired the world’s leading oil-pollution specialists to run key operations. The logistical demands on the effort, which spanned the entire Gulf coast – a region of varied geography and political culture – were immense. President Obama was not exaggerating when he announced in June, “This is the largest response to an environmental disaster of this kind in the history of our country."

Khatchadourian’s impressive article is divided into eight parts that describe, among other interesting things, the efforts of a Shore Clean-Up Assessment Technique (SCAT) team searching for oil pollution in the Louisiana marshland ("One had to travel, sometimes an hour or more, to see the oil - one had to hunt for it"); the strong leadership of Admiral Thad Allen (commandant of the Coast Guard, “who struggled to keep the various parties united”), Edwin Stanton (commander at the Houma Incident Command Post, who believed “in a big show of force”), and Roger Laferriere (Stanton’s replacement, who recognized that “the principal fight against the oil was offshore, to be conducted with a weapon – dispersants – that many people thought was more harmful than the spill itself”); the alarmist histrionics of the president of Plaquemines Parish, Billy Nungesser (“Like no other official during the spill, Nungasser embodied the rage, anxiety, and frustration that swept through South Louisiana”); President Obama’s involvement in resolving conflicts between local politicians and the responders (at a critical juncture, he says to Admiral Thad Allen, “Thad, I want to get a panel together, and get a roundtable discussion, and then I want to be briefed on the answer, and I want it done in the next few days”); the close collaboration between BP and the Coast Guard (“As the response outgrew what BP was obligated by law to support, the company nonetheless gave the Coast Guard nearly everything it asked for”); the debate over the use of dispersants (“Scientists and activists spoke of the dispersants as if they had been concocted in a weapons lab”).

As it turned out, the use of dispersants may well have been determinative in what appears to be a positive environmental outcome (“Luck certainly played a role in sparing large portions of the coast – a turn in the weather could have made the impact much worse – but a strategy based on dispersing the oil offshore appears to have helped prevent a great deal of crude from hitting the land”).

In terms of writing as pure writing, I enjoyed the last part of “The Gulf War” the most. Wonderfully titled “The Plume Hunters,” it describes, from a first person point of view, a science crew’s search for under-sea oil plumes. In it, Khatchadourian writes my kind of ideal sentence: “It was late on a September night, and in the darkness I climbed up to the bridge.” As a reader, I welcomed Khatchadourian’s appearance in the narrative. I like it when a writer lets us in on his whereabouts and what he’s doing in pursuit of the story. In his brilliant profile of Julian Assange (“No Secrets,” The New Yorker, June 7, 2010), Khatchadourian did the same thing that he does in “The Gulf War” – he waits until near the end of the piece to step inside the narrative frame. I wish he’d write more in the first person. He’s tremendously effective when he does.

The Parentheses of Pauline

One of the hallmarks of Pauline Kael’s incomparable style was her extensive and creative use of parenthesis. She stuffed all kinds of comments - sniffs, snorts, hoots, harrumphs, cackles, raspberries, tidbits, wisecracks, barbs, etc. – inside brackets. Example of a wisecrack (from her review of Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, The New Yorker, December 27, 1969; included in her great National Book Award-winning 1973 Deeper Into Movies):

Ashamed of her sexuality (like all liberals, in this schematic view), she is given such lines as – to Redford – “I use you the way you use me.” (Most women in the audience will probably think, Lucky you.)

Example of a tidbit (from her review of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, The New Yorker, June 28, 1982; collected in her 1984 Taking It All In):

Henry Thomas (who was the older of Sissy Spacek’s two small sons in Raggedy Man) has a beautiful brainy head with a thick crop of hair; his touching serio-comic solemnity draws us into the mood of the picture.

Example of a barb (from her terrific essay “Fear of Movies,” The New Yorker, September 25, 1978; collected in her 1980 When The Lights Go Down):

She is truly a terrible actress, of the nostril school. (Did she study under Natalie Wood?)

There’s scarcely a paragraph in the hundreds of reviews she wrote that doesn’t contain at least one parenthesis. Sometimes she’d pack two or three in a single sentence. Example (from her brilliant 1969 Harper’s Magazine essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” included in her 1970 collection Going Steady):

It took off from a political double entendre that everybody had been thinking of (“Why, if Joe McCarthy had been working for the Communists, he couldn’t be doing them more good!”) and carried it to startling absurdity, and the extravagances and conceits and conversational non sequiturs (by George Axelrod out of Richard Condon) were ambivalent and funny in a way that was trashy yet liberating.

Kael’s paragraphs are like strings of firecrackers going off – sparks of perception flying in every direction – many of which are caught in parentheses. There are at least three kinds of Kael parenthesis. The first kind is sort of a “memory pocket,” which Kael filled with movie associations drawn from her vast knowledge of the cinema. Example (from her review of Saturday Night Fever, The New Yorker, December 26, 1977; included in When The Lights Go Down):

(She’s reminiscent of the girl Margaret Sullivan played in The Shop Around the Corner.)

A second type is what I would call her “poison pen” parenthesis, in which she plants a sharp-tongued comment. Example (from her review of Midnight Express, The New Yorker, November 27, 1978; collected in When The Lights Go Down):

(I didn’t hope for Billy and his friends to escape – just for the movie to be over.)

And a third variety of Kael’s parenthesis is a very general category that I simply call “descriptive.” It’s my favorite kind, in which Kael tucks an extra bit of memorable detail into her descriptions of scenes, characters, actors, etc. Example (from her review of Stardust Memories, The New Yorker, October 27, 1980; collected in Taking It All In):

She seems to be used just for her physiognomy – for her bony chest and wide mouth (its corners run right into her cheekbones).

It’s hard to say how Kael’s penchant for parenthesis developed. It may be a spin-off from her admiration for thirties comedies’ fast-talking, wisecracking heroines – e.g., Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard. I say this because I see a parallel between the quick, subversive way a verbal wisecrack is delivered and the quick, subversive way Kael inserts her parenthetical comments into her writing). Or it could be an aspect of her tendency to say something and then immediately qualify it with a “but ... ,” “though ... ,” “still ... ,” thereby adding shade after shade of nuance.

Kael’s parentheses don’t stick out or clog the flow of her writing. They’re part of what makes the texture of her prose so incredibly rich. They're a means of conveying the action of her thought.

From the hundreds (maybe thousands) of parentheses that Kael wrote, here are six I’ve chosen mainly because they strike me as being so … Kaelesque:

(The bit of opera performed in China Is Near is the damnedest thing since “Salammbô” in Citizen Kane.) – “China Is Near,” The New Yorker, January 13, 1968

(And when, at last, he communicates with a visitor from above, there is a fleeting suggestion of Jean Renoir’s lopsided grin in the extraterrestrial’s young-old face.) – “The Greening of the Solar System,” The New Yorker, November 28, 1977

(You’ll also notice that she gets the worst – the most gnomic – lines, such as “At the center of a sick psyche there is a sick spirit.” Huh?) – “Fear of Movies,” The New Yorker, September 25, 1978

(His theory that men impart their substance and qualities into women along with their semen is a typical macho Mailerism; he sees it as a one-way process, of course. Has no woman slipped a little something onto his privates?) – “Marilyn,” The New York Times Book Review, July 22, 1973

(He wants to be buried in an unmarked grave. Of course. That’s why he’s made a four-hour movie about himself and his pilgrimage.) – “The Calvary Gig,” The New Yorker, February 13, 1978

(For true dryness, you’d have to sit through The Legend of the Lone Ranger to hear another great comedian, Jason Robards, as President Ulysses S. Grant, rasp out at the end, “Who is that masked man?”) – “Arthur,” The New Yorker, July 27, 1981

Credit: The above 1985 photograph of Pauline Kael is by James Hamilton. It appears on the back of her 1985 collection State of the Art.

Cézanne's "Card Players" and "Smokers": Clark v. Schjeldahl

It’s interesting to compare Peter Schjeldahl’s review of the Met’s “Cézanne’s Card Players” (“Game Change,” The New Yorker, February 28, 2011) with T. J. Clark’s piece on the same show when it was at the Courtauld (“At the Courtauld,” London Review of Books, December 2, 2010). Schjeldahl, in his review, refers to Clark’s piece, and says:

Clark still adores the pictures. I don’t, especially. The greatness of Cezanne’s art is undeniable but, for me, dauntingly saturnine, with a medicinal aftertaste, despite fugitive beauties of touch and color, which still often take me by surprise.

Schjeldahl is right; Clark does adore the pictures. In “At the Courtauld,” Clark says:

There is an astonishing trio of large portraits of a middle-aged man, probably a farm labourer, in his Sunday best – loans from Mannheim, St. Petersburg and Moscow – that it is worth traveling the earth to see hung in a row. They are the most complex depictions of “an ordinary man” to come down to us from the recent past.

When I read Clark’s piece, I found the references to “class position,” “his class’s best thinkers,” and “class identity” off-putting. Clark seemed way too class-conscious for my taste. One thing I can’t abide is snobbery, and I thought I detected a strong whiff of it from Clark’s review. Then, last week, when I read Schjeldahl’s “Game Change,” in which he points out that Clark is a Marxist, it became clear to me that all that “class” business in Clark’s Cézanne piece stemmed from his interpretative ideology. Ideological critics have always seemed to me to be bent on leaving out whatever in an artwork is not to their purposes, or on distorting, in the service of argument, what they do find to describe. I haven’t had the benefit of seeing the actual Card Players, but from what I can see of them in reproductions, I find myself agreeing with Schjeldahl when he says, “The scenes of the Card Players are thoroughly banal – unless you sentimentalize peasants, as Clark does, hailing them as actors in a ‘great historical turning point,’ mainly blooms of a perishing class.” Notwithstanding Clark’s ideological a priori, he is an amazing writer. Check out his description of the St. Petersburg Smoker: “In the St. Petersburg painting the red of the peasant’s lip bleeds – explodes – across his chin, neck, earlobe, shadowed forehead.” There’s a wonderful description of one of Cezanne’s paintings (the Orsay Card Players) in Schjeldahl’s piece, too: “Pooling darks intermingle with lighter hues that are like exhalations from damp earth.” When I look closely at the reproduction of Cézanne’s Study for the Card Players that is used to illustrate Schjeldahl’s New Yorker piece, I marvel at the way the figure of a man playing cards has been bodied forth in paint. As Schjeldahl says, “It is amazing, when you think about it, that a clutter of coarse, arbitrary-seeming strokes can add up to a solid – and impenetrably stolid – man.” How did Cézanne do it? Schjeldahl attributes Cézanne’s achievement to “being rigorously true to the testimony of eyesight.” This is helpful, but only in a general way. Clark seems to get closer to an answer when he focuses on the details of the paintings. For example, he says:

In the Hermitage Smoker, a group of black bottles and flushed fruit turns out to be a painting of part of a painting produced 20 years ago before (now in Berlin): an ominous, doom-laden vision of familiar things, done in great thunder and lightning impasto of Cézanne’s first (I hate “early”) style. The Moscow Smoker’s elbow goes off at a neat tangent into a long vertical borrowed from the edge of the curtain, and over to the right he is given a woman partner on the wall, on a piece of canvas whose corner refuses to stay flat.

That “into a long vertical borrowed from the edge of the curtain” is very fine. But then Clark suddenly stops his fascinating analysis and rather crazily says, “Blather about these sorts of detail being so many tokens of ‘paintedness’ has me immediately switching off my metaphorical hearing aid and humming the ‘Ça ira.’” Well, I, for one, don’t consider it blather at all. Those descriptions of detail are the most interesting things in Clark’s piece – far more interesting than his points about “class position,” “class identity,” and so on, which truly are blather.

Credit: The above artwork is Paul Cézanne’s “Study for the Card Players” (ca. 1890-92), used to illustrate Peter Schjeldahl’s “Game Change” (The New Yorker, February 28, 2011).