July 27, 2015 Issue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Bishop - Poetic Trickster?

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                           Oil has seeped into

the margins of the ditch of standing water

and flashes or looks upward brokenly,

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

like tatters of the Morpho butterfly.

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

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

July 20, 2015 Issue

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

piece informs me:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 6 & 13, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

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

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

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

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

William Finnegan's "Off Diamond Head"

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

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

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

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

Of the waves at Cliffs:

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

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

Mid-Year Top Ten 2015

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

Reporting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Criticism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talk of the Town

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Short Story

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

Best Poem

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

Best Blog Post

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

Best Illustration

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

Best Photo

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

Best Cover

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

Best Issue

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

Best Sentence

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

Best Paragraph

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

Best Description

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

Most Memorable Image

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

Most Inspired Detail

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

June 29, 2015 Issue

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

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

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

June 22, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Nick Paumgarten’s "Hut!" is one of this year’s best Talk stories. It describes a recent evening excursion in New York Harbor carried out by members of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. Traveling in two Hawaiian-style canoes, “forty-five feet long and made of fibreglass, with outriggers (ama) connected by spars (iako),” they’re looking for possible moorings for the Hokule’a, “a working replica of a traditional Polynesian sailing vessel” that will be visiting New York City next summer. I like “Hut!” ’s brisk, vivid notation: “The boats skimmed out into the current”; “The harbor was a bedlam of gulls and boats”; “Unmenacing flotsam drifted past. Foam baseball bat, soccer ball, scrunchie”; “They flew on the tide, the city sparkling by.” The piece brims with open air immediacy. I enjoyed it immensely.

2. I devoured Calvin Tomkins’s "What Else Can Art Do?." It’s a profile of Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford. I relished its description of Bradford’s process:

He starts with a stretched canvas and builds up its surface with ten or fifteen layers of paper—white paper, colored paper, newsprint, reproductions, photographs, printed texts—fixing each layer with a coat of clear shellac. Sometimes he embeds lengths of string or caulking to form linear elements in the palimpsest. When the buildup reaches a certain density, he attacks it with power sanders and other tools, exposing earlier layers, flashes of color, and unexpected juxtapositions. Not until the first sanding does he begin to see where the painting is going. He works like an archeologist, rediscovering the past. The method seems haphazard, but it’s not, and the results can take your breath away.

And I enjoyed Tomkins’s personal perspective – the way he participates in his report, e.g., “It was nearly eight in the evening, time for dinner. Bradford locked up the studio, and we got into his silver Range Rover—he bought it last year, after sitting in a lot of other cars and deciding that it had the most headroom—and drove for fifteen minutes to a restaurant in another part of South Los Angeles, called Leimert Park”; “Bradford had recently installed a major sculpture at the Los Angeles International Airport, and we went to see it the next morning.” Tomkins has changed his style since his The Bride and the Bachelors days. Back then he wrote mostly in the third person major. I find his subjective, first-person approach, as exemplified in “What Else Can Art Do?” and last year’s superb "Into the Unknown," much more engaging, immediate, and satisfying.

3. I’m pleased to see that James Wood hasn’t lost his edge. I enjoy his appreciative reviews, but I like it when, every now and then, he takes the gloves off. His excellent "Story of My Life," in this week’s issue, is an assessment of Alejandro Zambra’s new story collection My Documents. In it, Wood takes aim at “self-reflexive fictionality.” Regarding Zambra’s story “The Private Life of Trees,” he says,

Julian, the protagonist of “The Private Lives of Trees,” described as “a professor, and a writer on Sundays,” waits up one evening for his wife, Veronica, to return home. To pass the time, and to keep his young stepdaughter distracted, he tells her a story that he has been improvising at bedtime, which he calls “The Private Lives of Trees.” But Julian is also writing a real book, which sounds a lot like Zambra’s own first novel—it’s “about a young man tending a bonsai.” This level of self-reflexivity can sometimes seem about as resonant as the prospect of repeatedly having to smell one’s own breath, and perhaps Zambra is knowingly protecting himself from such criticism when he has one of Julian’s friends complain to him that he’s been reading “too much Paul Auster.”

That “This level of self-reflexivity can sometimes seem about as resonant as the prospect of repeatedly having to smell one’s own breath” made me smile. It put me in mind of other Wood zappers, like the one in his piece on Sheila Heti, where he says of a passage in Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, “If I wanted to hear that, I could settle in at a Starbucks and wait for the schoolkids to get out at three o’clock.” Whoa! Watch out for Wood. He can dance, but he can also sting. It’s what gives his criticism its delicious acerbity.  

James Wood's "The Nearest Thing to Life"

What does criticism gain by being personal? By “personal” I don’t mean ad hominem. I mean autobiographical. What is a critic aiming to accomplish when he includes a chunk of his own personal experience in his writing? In his new collection, The Nearest Thing to Life, James Wood serves up four essays, each of which contains a personal component. This is a departure for Wood. Most of his work consists of reviews – among the best in the business. He’s also written at least two personal essays – “The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon” and “Packing My Father-In-Law’s Library” – both collected in his great The Fun Stuff (2012). The pieces in The Nearest Thing To Life weave together personal history and literary commentary. They’re more ruminative than analytical. They’re like autobiography set to literary theory. For example, the first essay in the book, titled “Why?” (originally published in the December 9, 2013 New Yorker) is a meditation on death and fictional form. It begins with an account of a memorial service that Wood attended and ends with an examination of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. In between, it discusses death, religion, Wood’s strict religious upbringing, his discovery of fiction’s freedom (“I still remember that adolescent thrill, that sublime discovery of the novel and short story as an utterly free space, where anything might be thought, anything uttered”), and propounds a theory – “To read the novel is to be constantly moving between secular and religious modes, between what could be called instance and form.” The piece is a shade heavy on religion for my taste, but in light of Wood’s upbringing (“The scriptures saturated everything”), that’s forgivable. The real question is whether this form of essay is preferable to Wood’s essay-reviews. Before I answer, let’s briefly consider the other three pieces in The Nearest Thing to Life.

The second piece is “Serious Noticing” – my favorite of the four. It extends and amplifies Wood’s splendid philosophy of “detail.” In his How Fiction Works (2008), he says, “In life as in literature, we navigate via the stars of detail.” Wood has a jeweler’s eye for detail. He distinguishes between real and literary detail, relevant and irrelevant detail, “off-duty” and “on-duty” detail. In “Serious Noticing,” his consideration of Chekhov’s “The Kiss” (“The details are the stories; stories in miniature. As we get older, some of those details fade, and others, paradoxically, become more vivid. We are, in a way, all internal fiction writers and poets, rewriting our memories”) leads to a reminiscence about growing up in the northern English town of Durham (there’s a wonderful line describing coal pouring down a chute into the basement of his family’s house – “I vividly remember the volcanic sound, as it tumbled into the cellar, and the drifting, bluish coal-dust, and the dark, small men who carried those sacks on their backs, with tough leather pads on their shoulders”). The piece advances a theory of “life-surplus” (“the life-surplus of a story lies in its details”); talks about “serious noticing” (serious noticing is a way of “rescuing the life of things from their death”); and concludes by observing, “We can bring the dead back by applying the same attentiveness to their shades as we apply to the world around us – by looking harder: by transfiguring the object.” I question that last bit about “transfiguring the object.” It connects with an observation that Wood makes earlier in the piece: “Just as great writing asks us to look more closely, it asks us to participate in the transformation of the subject through metaphor and imagery.” So when Wood says, “by looking harder: by transfiguring the object,” he seems to be saying “looking harder” means looking at something in terms of its potential for metaphor and imagery. I disagree. For me, “looking harder” means seeing things exactly as they are. C. K. Williams, in his On Whitman (2010), says,

As for the body of the world, of existence – Whitman isn’t trying to raise reality through his poetry to another level of being, another realm of possibility: his poetry embodies rather the gigantic illuminations that are evident in perception. Unlike Rilke’s earth that desires only to be transformed; unlike Traherne’s “The corn was orient and immortal wheat,” Whitman’s vegetation is itself, his poems don’t need or want a mode of existence that depends on transformation: his metaphoric stuff is inherent in his perceptions; rather than using mind to alter reality, he finds ways to enlarge the underused senses of the mind, to fling the eyes and ears open wider, to make more sensitive the endings of the nerves.

Wood’s theory of transformation aside, his philosophy of detail, as expressed in How Fiction Works, and elaborated in “Serious Noticing,” seems to me one of the most useful, beautiful ideas in all of literary criticism. His love of detail is palpable. When he says, in “Serious Noticing,” “I think of details as nothing less than bits of life sticking out of the frieze of form, imploring us to touch them,” I feel his passion. I want to touch them, too.

The Nearest Thing to Life’s third essay is called “Using Everything.” It’s about the practice of literary criticism. It contains a few surprises. One of them is Wood’s revelation that “A lot of the criticism I most admire is not especially analytical but is really a kind of passionate rediscription.” He explains that by “passionate rediscription” he means “an act of critique that is at the same time a revoicing.” I like this idea of the critic as sort of jazz singer – the critic jazzing his subject text. But my first love is analysis. It’s why I read criticism. It’s why I devour Wood. He’s an excellent analyst of style, of structure and language. Here’s a quick example. In his How Fiction Works (2008), he quotes this long, remarkable sentence from Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre –

Lately, when Sabbath suckled at Drenk’s uberous breasts – uberous, the root word of exuberant, which is itself ex plus uberare, to be fruitful, to overflow like Juno lying prone in Tintoretto’s painting where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit – suckled with an unrelenting frenzy that caused Drenka to roll her head ecstatically back and to groan (as Juno herself may once groaned), “I feel it deep down in my cunt,” he was pierced by the sharpest longings for his late little mother.

 – and says,

This is an amazingly blasphemous little mélange. This sentence is really dirty, and partly because it conforms to the well-known definition of dirt – matter out of place, which is itself a definition of high and low dictions. But why would Roth engage in such baroque deferrals and shifts. Why write it so complicatedly? If you render the simple matter of his sentence and keep everything in place – i.e., remove the jostle of registers – you see why. A simple version would go like this: “Lately, when Sabbath sucked Drenka’s breasts, he was pierced by the sharpest longing for his mother.” It is still funny, because of the slide from lover to mother, but it is not exuberant. So the first thing the complexity achieves is to enact the exuberance, the hasty joy and chaotic desire, of sex. Second, the long, mock-pedantic, suspended subclause about the Latin origin of “uberous” and Tintoretto’s painting of Juno works, in proper music-hall fashion, to delay the punchline of “he was pieced by the sharpest of longings for his late little mother.” (It also delays, and makes more shocking and unexpected, the entrance of “cunt.”) Third, since the comedy of the subject matter of the sentence involves moving from one register to another – from a lover’s breast to a mother’s – it is fitting that the style of the sentence mimics this scandalous shift, by engaging in its own stylistic shifts, going up and down like a manic EKG: so we have “suckled” (high diction), “breasts” (medium), “uberare” (high), “Tintoretto’s painting” (high), “where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit” (low), “unrelenting frenzy” (high, rather formal diction), “as Juno herself may have once groaned” (still quite high), “cunt” (very low), “pierced by the sharpest of longings” (high, formal diction again). By insisting on equalizing all these different levels of diction, the style of the sentence works as style should, to incarnate the meaning, and the meaning itself, of course, is all about the scandal of equalizing different registers.

Wood’s criticism abounds with such analysis or redescription or descriptive analysis. Wood can call it whatever he wants so long as he keeps writing it. I can’t get enough of it.

Another surprise in “Using Everything” is Wood’s view of criticism as a form of storytelling. He says, “The good critic has an awareness that criticism means, in part, telling a story about the story you are reading.” Really? What I like about criticism, in general, and Wood’s reviews, in particular, is that they aren’t stories. They’re description; they’re analysis; they’re argument. “Give me some straight talk. Give me a little humor. Give me something real. Above all, give me an argument,” Dwight Garner says, in “A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical” (The New York Times Magazine, August 15, 2012). I agree.

The great value of “Using Everything,” as far as I’m concerned, lies in its appreciation of criticism as literature. The best critics, Wood says, “speak to literature in its own language.” This is a refreshing corrective to the dismal views expressed by Adam Gopnik (“Criticism serves a lower end than art does, and has little effect on it”: see “Postscript:Robert Hughes,” newyorker.com, August 7, 2012) and Richard Brody (“Criticism is a parasitical operation”: see “How To Be A Critic,” newyorker.com, August 22, 2012). For me, criticism – “writerly criticism,” as Wood calls it – is one of the most stimulating, satisfying, nourishing sources of reading pleasure. Janet Malcolm’s deconstruction of Sylvia Plath biographies (The Silent Woman), Richard Ellmann’s tracing of the sources of Joyce’s “The Dead” (James Joyce), Helen Vendler’s analysis of the grammatical shifts in Seamus Heaney’s style (The Breaking of Style), Michael Fried’s analysis of the structures of Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (Realism, Writing, Disfiguration), Svetlana Alpers’s argument for the importance of the distinction between description and narration (The Art of Describing) – I could go on and on – are every bit as artful and creative as the great works they take as their subjects. They are literature. I value them immensely.

The fourth essay in The Nearest Thing to Life is “Secular Homelessness.” I praised it when it originally appeared in the London Review of Books (February 20, 2014) under the title “On Not Going Home” (see my comment here). But rereading it in The Nearest Thing to Life, I’ve had second thoughts. It is a great essay – I’m still convinced of that – the verbal equivalent of a Rauschenberg combine, in which materials as diverse as Thomas Tallis’s “O Nata Lux,” Durham Cathedral, the Hudson River, Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile,” a Green Card, a bumper sticker, Boar’s Head trucks, Deltic diesels, W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants are conjoined to make an arresting meditation on homelessness. But Wood’s mirroring off exilic literature strikes me as a bit much. His life is not in the least comparable to Said’s and Sebald’s tragic exiles, refugees, expatriates, and émigrés. And his statement that after eighteen years living in the U.S., he looks down his Boston Street and “feels nothing” is hard to comprehend. Compare it with Aleksandar Hemon’s immigrant experience, as described in his superb "Mapping Home" (The New Yorker, December 5, 2011). In March, 1992, Hemon, a Bosnian citizen, arrived in Chicago on a cultural exchange. He planned to stay only a month. But in April, the Bosnian War began and Hemon decided to stay in Chicago. To get to know the place better, he did a lot of walking. He says, “I wanted from Chicago what I’d got from Sarajevo: a geography of the soul.” Eventually, he settled into the Chicago neighborhood of Edgewater. “Little by little,” he writes,

people in Edgewater began to recognize me; I started greeting them on the street. Overtime, I acquired a barber and a butcher and a coffee shop with a steady set of colorful characters – which were, as I’d learned in Sarajevo, the necessary knots in my personal urban network. I discovered that the process of transforming an American city into a space you could call your own required starting in a particular neighborhood. Soon I began to claim Edgewater as mine; I became a local.

This is quite a different story from Wood’s. My point is that not all immigrants feel homeless. It’s possible to make a home in a new place. But you have to want to; like Hemon, you have to want “a geography of the soul.” I suspect that the only place in which Wood truly feels at home is his books. This would be the case even if he'd stayed in England.

And now to return to my initial question: Are the hybrid essays in The Nearest Thing to Life preferable to Wood’s reviews? The answer is no they aren’t. I relish the descriptive analysis of his reviews. They are a form of art. Long may he keep writing them.

June 8 & 15, 2015 Issue

James Wood, in his great The Nearest Thing to Life, says, “The real, in fiction, is always a matter of belief – it is up to us as readers to validate and confirm.” I confess I’m a nonbeliever. For whatever reason – lack of imagination, skepticism, a Heaney-like desire to see things plain (“things founded clean on their own shapes”) – I’m unable to suspend my disbelief. And so, when The New Yorker’s Summer Fiction Issue appears, as it has this week, I gravitate toward what seem to me to be the least fictional pieces. For example, Thomas McGuane’s "Fall River," in this week’s issue, appears to be mostly personal history. It contains a wonderful line that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker sentences:

I also have a deck of playing cards with bathing beauties in arousing costumes to distract me, as well as match rockets, which I light in the basement until I’m rebuked for trying to burn the house down, baseball in North Park, daring trips to the third floor’s sagging porch, which is about to fall into Brownell Street and has been declared out of bounds, and rides with my Uncle Frank in his “foreign” car, a Ford (he calls it foreign because “it is entirely foreign to me”).

That “daring trips to the third floor’s sagging porch, which is about to fall into Brownell Street” is inspired!

June 1, 2015 Issue

Pleasures abound in this week’s issue – Richard Brody on Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (“Fuller’s pugnacious direction and his gutter-up view of city life romanticize both the criminal code of honor and the jangling paranoia of global plots; his hard-edged long takes depict underworld cruelty with reportorial wonder as well as moralistic dread”), Emma Allen on a cocktail called What the Doctor Ordered (“The rum made it taste like a mind-bending root beer”), Lizzie Widdicombe on Uber for helicopters (“The helicopter made its shuddering descent. Legs shook; sippy cups spilled. Marcy said, ‘Wow! I love this part!’ The pilot yelled, ‘Touchdown!’ ”), Nick Paumgarten on the end of Vin Scelsa’s “Idiots Delight” (“After ‘Goodnight Ladies,’ Scelsa signed off: ‘Thanks for your ears. I love you all’ ”) – but for me its most piquant delight is Dan Chiasson’s review of John Ashbery’s Breezeway (“These poems conjure a massive mental errata slip made up of what they almost say and nearly mean”). Chiasson is on a roll: four reviews this year, so far – all brilliant!

It would be perverse to say that I enjoyed Michael Specter’s "Extreme City," an account of a recent visit he made to Luanda. The inequality it describes is appalling. But I do relish it as writing. I like going (vicariously) where Specter goes. He’s always out and about, nosing around, seeing what’s to be seen. He says, “One afternoon, I visited Tako Koning, a Canadian petroleum geologist, who lives on the seventh floor of an older building in the center of Luanda,” and I’m right there with him. He says, “One day, I had lunch at Oon.dah, on the first floor of the Escom Center,” and I’m happy to tag along. Specter’s pieces afford the experience of first-person access. The payoff is readerly bliss.