Pictures Pretty (and otherwise) in the Penny Press!

The main motif in the writing of September 5th's New Yorker gets trying mighty fast: in feature piece after feature piece, readers are subjected to some pretty unconvincing sleight-of-hand. The delightfully talented Rebecca Mead writes a profile piece about charlatan crackpot 'business guru' Timothy Ferriss and tries the whole time to strike an even tone she obviously doesn't feel. True, she occasionally uncorks a line like "Ferriss professes to be untroubled that his own freedom to live 'outside of the inbox' is bought by transferring drudgery to the inboxes of less fortunate individuals in the developing world." But for the most part she restrains herself - to a degree far, far in excess of what her ridiculous subject deserves - and that becomes a somewhat nervous reading experience. Ditto Larissa MacFarquhar's long profile piece on charlatan crackpot 'philosopher' Derek Parfit, which not only makes an amateurish blunder right out of the starting gate (it opens disastrously, with the piece's real opener not popping up until Paragraph #4) but also lavishes equal diplomacy on somebody who was as bankrupt a thinker as he was a human being. And the redoubtable Ian Frazier does the same thing with charlatan crackpot 'artists' Theo Jansen, trying his level best to write about a perpetrator of boondoggle eyesores as though he might just be Augustus Saint-Gaudens in disguise.

There were highlights in prose, of course - no issue of The New Yorker is completely barren. The always-reliable Louis Menand turns in a wonderfully-done piece on Dwight Macdonald, and Tad Friend writes a long and fascinating piece on the troubled California town of Costa Mesa, where, oddly enough, yours truly has spent a good deal of time (soaking up the hospitality of a broad-shouldered young friend who got roped into one fun activity after another, as it were). And how curiously satisfying it was to read David Denby corroborate my own impression that "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" was actually terrific!

But no, the real impacts of this issue were visual. The sharpest in the short-term was negative, a cartoon by incredible Roz Chast that hit a little too close to home:



And the best was this issue's glorious cover, a muted, melancholy, wise, fantastic illustration called "Coney Island Express" by Eric Drooker that shows a subway car in the last glimmering of sunset, its headlights already on, speeding away from the glowing horizon of Coney Island's ferris wheel and rides, speeding away from the bright lights and fun of summer, into the chilly early evenings of autumn. I have many, many fond memories of escaping the broiling heat of the city for some fun afternoons at Coney Island with good friends, and this cover's marvellous use of light brings into full effect the idea of summer's ending. It's a little masterpiece of a type you don't see quite as often in New Yorker covers as you once did (they go for topicality over lyricism almost all the time these days) - all the more to be treasured for that fact.

Penny Press addendum: the New Yorker!

The middle ground between the two Penny Press extremes I mentioned last time is of course The New Yorker, perhaps the greatest example of such a middle ground magazine in the history of magazines. I read along the whole spectrum - from the beer-guzzling boss-hating chick-scoring mags like Outside and Men's Journal, where a fist-pumping mostly-brainless hetero homogeneity is assumed on the part of every reader, to the The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, where that reader is presumed not only to read books and care about them but also to like reading about them at length. I even follow the spectrum out onto its thin branches in periodicals like the TLS and The Journal of Roman Studies, where it's presumed the reader not only cares about the subjects at hand but knows them very well and does not need his French - or Latin - translated.

But I come back to The New Yorker for balance between the two extremes. When it's done well, there's scarcely any magazine that can more feel like intellectual home base (justifiable regional bias had me giving that accolade to The Atlantic for a century, until it left Boston and became a bit dumber).

It's not always done well, and even when it is, not all of it is. This present era at The New Yorker, for instance, is a bad one for its famous cartoons: two-thirds of the current stable of regulars draw so poorly that their captions could be written by Oscar Wilde and still not save them.

And maybe the jury is still out on whether or not this is a good era for the magazine's movie criticism, even though both its regular movie reviewers, David Denby and Anthony Lane, are well-known writers with book deals and loyal followers. Lane is witty, but I suspect him of caring about that fact more than anything else connected with his job - I can't count the number of times I've seen him swerve into oncoming traffic for the sake of a punch line, and for all his obvious intelligence, I far more often remember his reviews for some sharp apercu rather than for some sound assessment.

And then there's Denby! I'll admit up front that writing a monster of narcissism like Denbys bestselling The Great Books (in which all of the Western canon, it turns out, is just there to help Denby come to terms with mid-life anomie while blandly re-affirming his life-long suspicion that he's the smartest person in the history of the human race) is a sin from which it's unlikely I'll ever grant full redemption. If Denby wants blank-slate forgiveness for creating that big chunk of lazy hypocrisy, he'll take a sabbatical and write a book called Ungreat Books in which he enthuses honestly about the twenty or thirty non-canonical books he's actually read and loved in his life. Until that day comes, I'm bound to be a bit poorly disposed toward his work.



But even so, there are highs and lows! And his recent review of the new 50-million dollar 3-D action movie "The Green Hornet" starring Seth Rogen constitutes THE Denby-low so far in 2011: it's virtually an itemized list of the things that bug me about this writer, and that list can surely be epitomized in this passage:

Rogen says that he has been obsessed with comic books and superheroes for years. Well, I'm sorry to put it this way, but "The Green Hornet" is what you get when someone who dropped out of high school to do standup comedy, then spent a decade in movies and television, conceives a Hollywood "passion project."

That's what you get? So it's a rule, like an axiom out of Euclid? Competence = grad school? Quite apart from the fact that a glance at the cv's of most of Hollywood's greatest talents in the last 100 years makes that a silly thing for a professional movie critic to hint, there's also the arrogance of such a pronouncement - it's the worst stereotype of the squinty-faced, greasy-haired, Skittles-popping, brainlessly elitist movie-critic, noisily shifting in his seat during his free screening, impatient to begin too-loudly rehearsing his pans on his cell phone in the lobby  - not to a friend, since he has none (having alienated the last of them in senior year high school), but to his own answering machine, for later meta-analysis. That's what you get? So Rogen's failure (not discernible to me - the movie fails, yes, but Rogen's by far the best thing in it) was pre-ordained? If you knew his friggin academic record going in, nothing you could see in the next 90 minutes would rise above it? And what about all the schmucks who stayed in school? We've never seen a dumb or predictable movie from any of them? Bet we have.

This kind of thoughtless elitism is the exact counterpart of Lane's manic blitheness - both prefer mannerism to substance, so both tend to leave their actual subject-movies largely undiscussed. It often makes me wish Matt Taibbi reviewed movies, or that Locke Peterseim wrote for The New Yorker.

Fortunately, the current roster of New Yorker mainstays seldom if ever disappoint. Medical writer Atul Gawande turns in a great, perceptive piece in this issue on the good - and the great deal of bad - that comes from hospitals spending lots of money and time on the care of just a handful of the most critical patients. Gawande concentrates on how much medical science can learn from those few very expensive patients, and how much of what it learns can then be applied to patients in general. To which I might sheepishly stress a point Gawande makes only in passing: some of those long-term extremely costly patients are very grateful for all the extra care and bother. They'd rather have their names changed for legal reasons in a New Yorker piece about medical expense than be dead, thanks very much.

Of course, even the magazine's big guns can occasionally misfire even in the middle of a good essay. Louis Menand, for instance, in this issue turns in a typically solid and enjoyable piece on the substance and legacy of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (like some of the best book-critics - and some of the worst! - he uses some new book about Friedan as his pommel-horse: the point of the whole exercise is what he has to say about Friedan's book - the middle-man is just there as a skimpy justification for his own more fascinating observations). But at the end of the piece, as I was happily reading along, I stumbled upon this little bit of sacrilege:

Still, you don't need to read a book to talk about it (and it is considered an accepted decorum, in talking about it, not to be obliged to admit that you never read it).

Yeesh. I'm hoping that's just a dose of middle-ground irony that went down the wrong pipe.

the New Yorker Fiction Issue in the Penny Press!

Well, the New Yorker Fiction Issue is here, and as you'd expect, there's plenty to hate.

I'm less disposed to that hatred than I was in previous years, mainly because I've just recently had a hand in helping to create a Fiction Issue myself (over at Open Letters - plenty of good stuff for you to enjoy this month! More good stuff, if I may be so bold, than can be found in this issue of the New Yorker), so I've experienced some of the frustrations and compromises any group of editors must face in pulling together a double-sized special issue like this one. A freelancer who's multiple-submitted a piece all over creation and hasn't told you, so you only stumble across the fact that you've been scooped two days before deadline, with no time to find an article to take the place of what is now yesterday's news? It happens. A long, scholarly piece that just germinates new typos, no matter how many editorial eyes scrutinize it? They exist. Writers who use the special mission of a Fiction Issue to heap praise on authors who don't deserve it? Oh yes. And then there's the most basic compromise of all, the one that faces every editor of any capacity not just with special theme-issues but all the time: not all writers are created equal. Some of them try their hardest, bless 'em, and only manage to produce marginally-readable prose, whereas others wait until the last minute and flash out brilliant patter. It all adds to the challenge of creating a Fiction Issue in the first place, and it gives me an added dose of empathy for the folks at the New Yorker.

Still, plenty to hate.

Yiyun Li turns in a brief meditation on what it meant to her to read Hemingway during her compulsory time in the Chinese Army - turns out the experience convinced her how much cooler she is than anything written by Hemingway, because books aren't real, because in the end they're simplistic, escapist things. As Li discovered, "All would be well if you lived in a novel." Great way to start a Fiction Issue. Yeesh.

The estimable Roger Angell writes another brief piece (pitched, as so much of his recent stuff has been, as though he himself were roughly 100 - and reminding me that such a sentimental it's-poignant-because-it's-me tone is tedious in any writer, no matter how distinguished, no matter if he really is 100) remembering books in his family's summer cottage in Maine. He turns in a good bit on the scorned art of re-reading:

There's a sweet dab of guilt attached to rereading. Yes, we really should be into something new, for we need to know all about credit-default swaps and Darwin and steroids and the rest, but not just now, please. My first vacation book this year will be like my first swim, a venture into assured bliss.

Good prose, but the same crackbrained premise that underlies this whole Fiction Issue: that "summer reading" or "vacation reading" is somehow a legitimate category, that on vacation (and as I've pointed out before, so many magazines still craft issues like this one as though all summer reading were vacation reading, as though all of us were members of the 18th century London Ton and as soon as June rolls around, we shutter up our town-houses and decamp for three solid months of delicious frolic at our country estates, when in reality we're sniffing some fat-ass's garlic-breath on a jam-packed subway car with no air conditioning, on our way to our same old daily job, winter or summer) it's not only OK but expected to read lighter stuff. Needless to say, I hate this premise, since its most glaring implication is that non-summer reading is a boring chore, a duty we slog through dutifully but unhappily. Angell, firmly stuck in cranky-old-man mode, enthusiastically reinforces that premise, but I can assure you: there are new books on Darwin that would thrill you more deeply than any "beach reading" you're planning this summer. Angell knows this; he's just being a putz, denigrating reading right there in the middle of the Fiction Issue.



I thought I saw a glimmer of relief in the fact that the hugely talented David Grossman wrote an article about the hugely talented Bruno Schulz - but I was wrong! Schulz wrote some wonderful prose and led a fascinating, frustrating life (until it was ended in an anecdote too shopworn to need repeating here), but it turns out he's not the subject of Grossman's article: Grossman is. More specifically, the fact that Grossman used Schulz as a character in his novel See Under: Love. Grossman mechanically recites all the pertinent biographical details about Schulz, but he doesn't take much trouble to hide the fact that what he really wants to talk about is himself, his books, his writing process, etc. Schulz is just there as window-dressing, which is, upon a moment's reflection, a tad insulting for Schulz.

And that's nothing compared to how Thomas Mann would feel if he could come back from Hell and read Aleksandar Hemon's one-page confessional about how much Magic Mountain meant to him. The answer: squat. Reading his three columns of breathless prose, you quickly become aware that the only author who's ever meant anything to Hemon is that hugely talented criminally underpraised author, Aleksandar Hemon. Mann is entirely forgotten almost as soon as he's invoked. It's enough to make me wonder if the editors of this issue aren't playing a prank on the readers; "let's commission what-this-book-meant-to-me" pieces from writers who hate reading." Or something like that.

There aren't many such little pieces in the issue, thank gawd, but there's still plenty more to hate. Naturally, R. Crumb will always appear at or near the top of any list. For thirty years, I've been puzzling about this talentless moron's cult popularity, and now I get to match that puzzlement with outrage, because the talentless moron has apparently taken it into his head to illustrate the Bible. Excerpted here in the New Yorker is his rendition of the Book of Genesis, to which he appends the following assurance: "Nothing Left Out!"

Nothing left out, but plenty added in - not only Fat Ugly Amazon Women (they're expected, since they're in every single thing Crumb draws) but also a God with a long white beard and flowing robes, when no such spectacle is described in Genesis. And it goes on from there, cluttering up and uglying up the first chapter in the greatest of all books. In the accompanying brief preface, Crumb says that he occasionally turns to Ecclesiastes for insight, but never the Book of Genesis - because it's "too primitive." So he's got the irony thing down pat.



Wandering in such a desert, I naturally perked up at an article by Louis Menand. As far as deadline-writers go, he's in the upper ranks of those who usually do no wrong, and his subject here, the history of writing workshops in America, is promising. Unlike so much in this New Yorker, he doesn't disappoint. Right from the start, he's tossing the quips like a fine salad:

The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart.

Menand is a good deal more generous in his conclusions about writing workshops than I would have been. I have some familiarity with the phenomenon, and I've come to the conclusion that Kay Boyle was write: they should be illegal. Fully one-half of the rot that rivens the entire superstructure of contemporary fiction is caused by writing workshops carefully, lovingly molly-coddling crappy prose all the way to publication (the other half? Hordes of idiot readers clamoring for books to be video games - always completely new, always explosively over-stimulating from the first sentence, anything, as long as it's crack cocaine and not, you know, the boring old experience of reading - because really, who likes that?)(I have a dear friend who sometimes dabbles in this kind of idiocy, though she bloody well knows better; she'll finish a piece of poop by somebody like Yiyun Li and say, "Boy, reading that really made me want to meet the author," when she knows perfectly well good fiction will only prompt the response, "Boy, reading that really made me want to read something else by the author"). So the widespread growth of writing workshops can only be deplored, and Menand gets kudos for deploring in such a balanced, gentlemanly fashion.

And what, you ask, about the fiction in the Fiction Issue?

Plenty to hate.

There's the merely boring - Edna O'Brien turns in a story so long and pointless I kept checking to make sure it wasn't by Alice Munro. I find it hard to believe there were no bigger-name authors clamoring for a spot in the New Yorker Fiction Issue, and O'Brien's presence here makes me dread a Munro-Trevor one-two punch in the Atlantic's Fiction Issue.

And there's the gawd-awful - Jonathan Franzen writes a story called "Good Neighbors" that couldn't be more lazy or narcissistic if it were called "Jonathan Franzen, hung over, sits down to cobble something together for the New Yorker Fiction Issue." Franzen's story is nominally about some yuppies who move into a down-at-heels neighborhood and proceed to gentrify it, but who can concentrate on even so flimsy and gimmicky a plot as that, when you have to wade through cliches, idioms, and already-dated slang to get to it? The yuppies - the Berglunds - ask all the typical yuppie questions:

... how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else's children's sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it.

Loathsome stuff, yes, and rendered all that more loathsome by the sickeningly solid conviction that it isn't really fiction at all, that it's just a barely-transposed excerpts from Franzen's own 'To Do' list. Reading this lazy, pointless prose tends to make me seethe, as I seethed throughout the entire self-indulgent monstrous length of The Corrections. I keep wondering what ever convinced Franzen that he was a writer, that this stuff he produces is worthy of general publication. I suspect there's a writing workshop at the heart of it.

But I can't only complain about writing workshops, since they sometimes produce gems. The best short story in this Fiction Issue - indeed, the best short story I've read anywhere so far in 2009 - so obviously comes from a workshop that I don't even need to know the biography if its author, Tea Obreht, to know she's spent a lot of time perched at a conference table, murmuring 'constructive criticism' about crapola. Her story, "The Tiger's Wife," is the issue's piece of debut fiction, and it's a stunning debut. Whether or not Obreht ever lives up to the promise of this story is an open question (she has a book coming out in 2010); certainly I've loved New Yorker short stories this much by authors who then disappeared, or wrote garbage for the rest of their lives.

But for now, I can only urge each and every one of you: read "The Tiger's Wife." Go out and buy the Fiction Issue of the New Yorker just for this story.



The tale is set during World War II - German bombs fall on a city somewhere in Europe, breaking open the wall of a tiger cage in the town zoo and setting free the scorched and bewildered tiger inside. He wanders through the chaos of town and eventually makes his way up into the mountain villages, slowly learning to listen to his instincts, slowly learning how to hunt and kill his own food rather than wait for his handlers to feed him. He takes up residence near a village which Obreht populates with characters who are intensely, unostentatiously real, and as they grow more anxious about the lurking presence of the tiger in the foothills, they decide to organize a hunting party. Obreht's story makes compulsive reading; her descriptive abilities are first-rate:

The day was intermittently gray and bright. A freezing rain had fallen during the night, and the trees, twisting under the weight of their ice-laden branches, had transformed the forest into a snarl of crystal.

... and her comic timing - that rarest of writerly gifts - is well-nigh flawless, as in this moment when the shooter's first shot misses the tiger and it bounds across a frozen lake straight at him:

The tiger was almost over the pond, bounding on muscles like springs. He heard Jovo muttering, "Fuck me," helplessly, and the sound of Jovo's footsteps moving away. The blacksmith had the ramrod out and he was shoving it into the muzzle, pumping and pumping and pumping furiously, his hand already on the trigger, and he was ready to fire, strangely calm with the tiger there, almost on him, its whiskers so close and surprisingly bright and rigid. At last, it was done, and he tossed the ramrod aside and peered into the barrel, just to be sure, and blew his own head off with a thunderclap.

In a perfect world, the special Fiction Issue of the New Yorker would be filled with such gems as "The Tiger's Wife," but no. You have to hunt for such great stuff, sifting through crap in a dozen different magazines, always hoping you'll find something that glows in the dark. It almost never happens, but oh, it's so sweet when it does. Maybe the next Fiction Issue will do it again. I'll read it, and I'll let you know.