May 20, 2013 Issue

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

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

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

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

May 13, 2013 Issue

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

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

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

May 6, 2013 Issue

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

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

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

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

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

April 29, 2013 Issue

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

April 22, 2013 Issue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both pieces are extraordinary. I enjoyed them immensely. 

April 15, 2013 Issue

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

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

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

April 8, 2013 Issue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting Emendations: Aleksandar Hemon's "Mapping Home"

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

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

And here’s the book version:

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

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

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

April 1, 2013 Issue

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

March 25, 2013 Issue

Dogs, hip-hop, punk, opera, TV, “failure memoir,” paranoid billionaire – at first glance, the contents of the March 25^th New Yorker appear most unappetizing. But there’s always something in every issue – a line of sharp description, a piquant observation, a pungent detail – to appreciate. This week’s issue is no exception. I enjoyed William Finnegan’s “The Miner’s Daughter” for its description of Port Hedland (“Ancient-looking, iron-covered conveyor belts lattice the badlands”; “Bulk-carrier ships hunker like squared-off stadiums beyond the evaporation ponds”). And Anthony Lane’s review of Spring Breakers contains a line that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker questions: “Who, you want to ask, can possibly be the magus behind this bacchanal – this forthright sucking of Popsicles, this spume of beer hosed across bare flesh, this char-grilled day?”

What, you may ask, are some of the other “great New Yorker questions” in my collection? Here are three:

To the palate of a traveling Martian – which would be more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye? – John McPhee, “The Encircled River – I” (The New Yorker, May 2, 1977)

How radical can you be in a town where the locals shop in leopard-skin bikinis at 4P.M.? – Sasha Frere-Jones, “Critic’s Notebook: South For Winter” (The New Yorker, March 20, 2006)

But does the nation's capital of artisanal bitters really need another nostalgia-soaked outpost for herb muddling? - Andrea K. Scott, “Tables For Two: Maison Premiere” (The New Yorker, September 26, 2011)

Paper Rooms: The Art of Interior Description in "New Yorker" Profiles

Fairfield Porter, Interior with a Dress Pattern (1969)

Alec Wilkinson, in his recent “Jazz Hands” (The New Yorker, March 11, 2013), a profile of the jazz pianist Jason Moran, misses a glorious opportunity to describe Moran’s Harlem apartment. He says that the living room has “a view of the Hudson River” and that it contains an “upright piano from his parents’ house.” But with regard to how the room is furnished and decorated, he doesn’t say. Wilkinson would no doubt scoff at my hunger for such details. “Jazz Hands” is, after all, a piece about jazz, not interior decoration. Nevertheless, descriptions of the rooms in which people live help illumine their character.

John Updike, in his absorbing essay “Fictional Houses” (Odd Jobs, 1991), refers to “the cozy quality of the brick rows of Pennsylvania small towns” and “the many subtle styles, much patched and revised, of wooden farmhouses” in New England, and says, “To describe these houses is halfway to describe the life lived in them.” In my opinion, the same can be said about the rooms, apartments, lofts, offices, and other places that the subjects of New Yorker profiles live, work, and hang out in: to describe these places is “halfway to describe the life lived in them.”

Whitney Balliett, in his great jazz profiles, often depicted the rooms his subjects lived and performed in. For example, in his “The Human Sound” (The New Yorker, December 26, 1970; included in Balliett’s 1979 collection American Singers), a profile of Bobby Short, he describes Short’s Carnegie Hall apartment as follows:

The small foyer on the first floor contained a desk, a big Queen Anne armchair, a bicycle, and a staircase. A turn-around kitchen opened off it. The living room, at the top of the stairs, was two stories high, with a vaulted ceiling and a row of high windows facing north. At one end were a small bar, a bathroom, and a second set of stairs. The stairs led to a spacious balcony, which served as Short’s bedroom. A bedroom window faced a small roof, where his cats, Rufus and Miss Brown, were aired. The furnishings were high-class Camp. A heavy glass-topped coffee table rested on a zebra-skin rug, and on the rug, beneath the table, were two metal lizards—one gilt, one brass. A pair of big daybeds, which were covered with bright African-looking material and leopard-skin pillows, flanked the table. Near the foyer stairs were a huge wooden lion, a stolid eighteenth-century Italian refectory table, and one of those roofed-in wicker wing chairs that still haunt old summer cottages on Naushon Island. An antler chandelier hung in the living room, and it was echoed by a Teddy Roosevelt leather chair with tusks as arms. Pictures of every description jammed the walls, and the window side of the room was lined with books and bric-a-brac.

Balliett’s room descriptions are so lovingly detailed, I want to enter them, sit in that Teddy Roosevelt chair with the tusk arms, and soak up the atmosphere. Here’s another Balliett apartment description – this from his great Jim Hall profile, “The Answer Is Yes” (The New Yorker, March 31, 1975; included in his 1977 collection Improvising):

When the Halls were married, he moved into her apartment, on West Twelfth Street. It faces south and is at eye level with chimney pots and the tops of ailanthus trees. Sunlight fills the living room all day. The off-white walls are hung with a lively assortment of lithographs, oils, and drawings. A tall cabinet, which contains hundreds of L.P.s, is flanked by full bookshelves. A sofa, a hassock, a fat floor pillow, a couple of canvas Japanese chairs, and a coffee table ring the window end of the room. An upright piano sits by the front door, and Hall’s electric guitar rests on a stand by the kitchen door.

The above-quoted passages are typical Balliett apartment descriptions. They’re almost “description for description’s sake,” akin to 17^th century Dutch still life – “devised as a feast for the attentive eye” (Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing, 1983).

It seems to me that New Yorker descriptions of physical interiors divide into at least three categories:

1. Description done purely for the pleasure of describing interesting, beautiful things;

2. Description that illumines the subject’s character;

3. Description that furthers narrative.

The first two types are closely linked. For instance, Balliett descriptions are both “feasts for the attentive eye” and illustrations of the occupants’ lifestyle. A classic example of the third category is found in Janet Malcolm’s Ingrid Sischy profile, “A Girl of the Zeitgeist” (The New Yorker, October 20 & 27, 1986; included in Malcolm’s 1992 collection The Purloined Clinic). Malcolm begins her brilliant piece with a description of Rosalind Krauss’s loft:

Rosalind Krauss’s loft, on Greene Street, is one of the most beautiful living places in New York. Its beauty has a dark, forceful, willful character. Each piece of furniture and every object of use or decoration has evidently had to pass a severe test before being admitted into this disdainfully interesting room – a long, mildly begloomed rectangle with tall windows at either end, a sachlich white kitchen area in the center, a study, and a sleeping balcony. An arrangement of geometric dark-blue armchairs around a coffee table forms the loft’s sitting room, also furnished with, among other rarities, an antique armchair on splayed, carved feet and upholstered in a dark William Morris fabric; an assertive all-black Minimalist shaped-felt piece; a strange black-and-white photograph of ocean water; and a gold owl-shaped Art Deco table clock. But perhaps even stronger than the room’s aura of commanding originality is its sense of absences, its evocation of all the things that have been excluded, have been found wanting, have failed to capture the interest of Rosalind Krauss – which are most of the things in the world, the things of “good taste” and fashion and consumerism, the things we see in stores and in one another’s houses. No one can leave this loft without feeling a little rebuked: one’s own house suddenly seems cluttered, inchoate, banal.

Malcolm’s piece is structured around apartments, lofts, and studios. It uses them not just as organizing principles, but as a means of analyzing their occupants’ various notions of style.

An example of a room description that falls in all three of the above categories is Mark Singer’s memorable depiction of Goodman Ace’s living room (“Goody,” The New Yorker, April 4, 1977; re-titled “Words Fool Me,” and included in Singer’s wonderful 1988 collection Mr. Personality):

These days, the cottage of Ace’s own cottage industry is his apartment in the Ritz Tower – four spacious rooms of white walls and black-and-white tiles. The living room leads to a terrace that offers a view of Park Avenue below and Central Park to the northwest. Ace often used to sit on the terrace and read and work – a habit he sustained until a few years ago, when flocks of pigeons began to roost there. “Shoo, pigeons!” didn’t get rid of the birds, nor did the pigeon repellants, plastic windmills, or signs that said “No Pigeons Allowed,” so he finally gave up and retreated indoors. The apartment contains the same furniture that it has had for twenty years – off-white leather upholstery, a vague flavor of Art-Deco-in-decline, the aura of a stage setting. On one of the armchairs, there is a green cushion with white lettering  that says, “LAUGHTER IS THE MUSIC OF THE HEART.” A white grand piano stands in one corner of the room, and atop the piano are a ceramic vase filled with artificial roses, a thirty-year-old photograph of Jane Ace, an unframed photograph of Groucho inscribed “Dear Goody, Here Is Me. Groucho,” and an ineluctably stubborn pile of unanswered mail.

That “ineluctably stubborn pile of unanswered mail” functions as a segue to a discussion of Ace’s letter writing, particularly his Groucho Marx correspondence.

Interior description in today’s New Yorker profiles isn’t as detailed as it once was. The mention of one or two telling particulars appears to be preferred to extensive notation of a room’s contents. For example, here is the extent of David Remnick’s description of Israeli spymaster Meir Dagan’s Tel Aviv apartment: “The apartment is decorated with his canvases. They are naïve, sentimental, Orientalist—desert landscapes, a Bedouin, an old man in the Iranian town of Tabriz” (“The Vegetarian,” The New Yorker, September 3, 2012). In two quick, vivid strokes, Lauren Collins sketches the Paris office of Gerard Depaerdieu’s lawyer, Hervé Temime: “Temime, who represented Roman Polanski, sat at a desk, in front of spectacular windows framed by bright-yellow velour curtains. His printer was filled with bright-yellow paper” (“L’Étranger,” The New Yorker, February 25, 2013). Elizabeth Kolbert vivifies a room in Oostvaardersplassen’s administrative offices when she writes, “Vera picked me up one day at my hotel in Lelystad, and we drove over to the reserve’s administrative offices, where we had a cup of coffee in a room decorated with the mounted head of a very large black Heck bull” (“Recall of the Wild” (The New Yorker, December 24 & 31, 2012).

There are exceptions to the minimalist approach. Jeffrey Toobin, in his “Madoff’s Curveball” (The New Yorker, May 30, 2011) neatly conveys the look of Fred Wilpon’s office as follows:

The headquarters of the Wilpon empire resembles an English manor house transplanted to a high floor in Rockefeller Center. Wood panelling, thick carpets, and pastoral landscapes in heavy frames offer a serene contrast to the hubbub below. Soft drinks are decanted into crystal glasses. (No Coke; Pepsi is a Mets sponsor.) True, the muted television in the reception area is set to SNY—the Wilpons’ successful cable sports channel—and there is the obligatory LeRoy Neiman painting. But the Neiman shows the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, rather than his customary jock kitsch, and the over-all feel of the offices is boardroom, not locker room.

Judith Thurman, in her “Ask Betty” (The New Yorker, November 12, 2012), unreels an admirable Balliettian run of interior detailing when she describes Betty Halbreich’s Park Avenue apartment:

You could not describe Halbreich’s décor as soberly tailored. The den is paneled in knotty cypress (“big in the fifties”), with pink chintz upholstery (“It used to be tartan”). The master bedroom has gingham walls and needlepoint rugs. There is a laundry suite, and a walk-in closet dedicated to Christmas decorations. In the formal dining room (Wedgwood-blue walls, opaline-glass chandelier, antique breakfront groaning with heirloom china), Halbreich’s banquet table was set for two.

But these depictions pale in comparison with my all-time favorite New Yorker interior description – John McPhee’s masterful evocation of the room in Otto’s farmhouse restaurant “where the customers sit and have their aperitifs while they wait for a message from the kitchen that it is time to go to table for dinner” (“Brigade de Cuisine,” The New Yorker, February 19, 1979; included in McPhee’s classic 1979 collection Giving Good Weight):

I remember from the first moment I walked into it the compact and offhand rural European character and feeling of that room. With its nonchalant miscellany of detail, it was beyond the margins of formal design, but it was too pleasurable merely to have been flung together and too thematic not to imply a tale. There were a pair of bullfighter prints – one called “La Lidia” and the other a depiction of a desencajonamiento – and protruding sharp-horned from the wall between these pictures was the head of a fighting bull. The animal had been raised on the dehesa of Pepe Alvarez and killed in the ring with a sword. Crossed Spanish swords had been hung above the fire. All around the room were wrought-iron Spanish sconces with small amber bulbs. There was a three-hundred-year-old map of the Danube, a two-hundred-year-old map of “Magna Britannia.” There were hand-carved cabinets. There were tall wicker chairs, Queen Anne chairs, and Spanish brass-studded leather chairs in groups on a red tile floor. I eventually learned that many of these things had come down through the chef’s family – to America from England via Spain. There were heavy red curtains on brass rods. The ceiling slanted upward in the mansard manner, with boards of tongue and groove. The silent paddle fan hung down between exposed checked beams. Staring back at the bull were the small glass eyes of a taxidermal fox – just its head and neck, on a plaque – and near it were photographs made in Alaska of dog foxes and vixens. A poster in one corner said “Extinct is forever” and presented line drawings of vanishing and vanished creatures – Cape lion (1860), quagga (1883), Labrador duck (1875), solenodon, snow leopard, northern kit fox.

Lofts, apartments, offices, farmhouses, rooms, having been willfully acquired, furnished, and decorated tell us much about their occupants, and their description is a major resource of the art of the profile.

Interesting Emendations: David Denby's "Jungle Fever"

Hearing the sad news of Chinua Achebe’s death, I recalled David Denby’s “Jungle Fever” (The New Yorker, November 6, 1995) – one of the best “A Critic At Large” pieces ever to appear in the magazine – in which Denby argues against Achebe’s potent charge that Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is racist. A version of “Jungle Fever” appears as chapter 27, titled “Conrad,” in Denby’s wonderful 1996 Great Books.

Comparing the two versions, I notice a couple of interesting differences. Firstly, the Great Books version uses slightly stronger language to describe the racism argument. For example, it says that Heart of Darkness “could be read as racist by anyone ruthless enough to detach its representation of life from meaning” (emphasis added). This sentence isn’t in the New Yorker piece. The book version also says, “Still, one has to wonder if blaming writers for what they fail to write about is not a bizarrely wrongheaded or even malicious way of reading them” (emphasis added). The New Yorker version of this sentence uses “extraordinarily” instead of “bizarrely,” and omits “or even malicious way of reading them.”

Secondly, the “pleasure” aspect of Denby’s argument in the New Yorker piece is less pronounced than it is in Great Books. Early in Great Books, in a passage that I adopt as one of this blog’s touchstones, Denby says,

I believe in pleasure, even in “immediate” pleasures, “shallow” pleasures. Pleasure is the route to understanding; you expand on what you love, going from one enthusiasm to the next, one book to the next, one piece of music to the next, and finally what you wind up with as the sum of these pleasures is your own soul.

In Great Books’ “Conrad” chapter, Denby describes Achebe’s (and Edward Said’s) approach in terms of “their fear of narrative pleasure, their demand for correct attitudes.” These words don’t appear in the New Yorker version. Neither does the brilliant question posed near the end of the Great Books version: “So what had pleasure learned, how had pleasure been corrected, extended, or rebuffed?”

And when, in Great Books, Denby concedes a point to Achebe’s and Said’s approach, he says, “So let pleasure yield this much to the academic left: However wrong or extreme in individual cases, the academic left has alerted readers to the possible hidden assumptions in language and point of view.” The New Yorker version drops the “So let pleasure yield this much” and simply says, “However wrong or extreme in individual cases, the academic left has alerted readers to the possible hidden assumption in language and point of view.”

Both versions make a powerful case for Heart of Darkness as a work of “daunting intricacy.” (Great Books says, “daunting”; The New Yorker says, “spectacular.”) I prefer the Great Books version slightly more because it argues the pleasure principle.