AUTHOR NOTES

Boundary Wars | Markets and the Good | Issues Fall 2023
The subject here is the dividing line between literary fiction and genre fiction and whether that boundary is meaningful or defensible.  This essay makes a brief and somewhat ambivalent defense of “literary” fiction, against the claim that all novels and short stories should be understood to belong to  a single broader category called “literature.”  Setting aside strict hierarchies of value—few people would argue that the average literary novel is superior to Raymond Chandler or William Gibson—thinking about what kind of books an author seeks to be in dialogue with is a useful interpretive tool.

What’s Left of Psychoanalysis? Autumn 2023
This essay on the recent revival of interest in psychoanalysis—a field that had been in decline for decades—was destined to make a lot of people unhappy.  A lot of people think psychoanalysis is faintly ridiculous, assume it was long ago debunked, and can’t imagine why anyone would want to devote 4300 words to it.  On the other hand, those within the psychoanalytic community were destined to be disappointed by anything less than a full-throated defense of the field to which they have devoted their professional lives.  I always intended to write something that tried to make sense of my own ambivalent feelings about psychoanalysis, both the promise that led me to begin studying it professionally and the frustrations that ultimately led me to give it up. 

Review of Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer 9.8.23
It gives me no pleasure to write negative reviews; I’d rather focus on and celebrate the work I admire.  I felt constrained, however, to give a strongly negative review to Claire Dederer’s “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma,” which addresses the ethics of consuming worthy art created by flawed or “monstrous” people.  My review was negative not because I disagree with the author’s thesis but because she never gets around to stating one.  As to her embrace of subjectivity in criticism, there I did disagree.  Here’s what I wrote: “We all have opinions, cultivated and otherwise, deeply held and casual.  Criticism begins with the implicit claim that our opinion is worthy of attention.  In this gesture lies the risk and responsibility of the critic.  The risk is that one invites the lazy retort, ‘Who the hell are you?’  The responsibility is to anticipate that rebuke, to honor it, and to meet it however we can.”

The Undiscovered Country 6.23.23
This was an occasional piece, written to mark the death of the American novelist, Cormac McCarthy.  McCarthy has his detractors, who find his prose style wearying and his philosophical pessimism overwrought. There seems little question, though, that his work is destined to last a long time. After this article was published, a reader wrote to ask where he should begin with McCarthy. My answer was “The Road” (2006), which is shorter and more accessible than McCarthy’s mid-career masterworks and achieves an emotional register not found in “Blood Meridian” or “All The Pretty Horses.”

Stay in the Moment Spring 2023
City Journal’s “Diarist” section features short essays based on a particular geographic location. This one is called “South Brooklyn Diarist” because that is where my son plays many of his baseball games, but I am really speaking more of a mental space, that of the youth sports parent. Watching our kids compete can bring up a lot of emotions for which we are not fully prepared.

Reading Martin Amis 5.24.23
I wrote this brief essay for City Journal to mark the passing of the British novelist, Martin Amis, who died at 73 after living almost his entire adult life in the public eye. His celebrity was a mixed blessing at best; the London tabloid press treated him contemptuously, essentially driving him out of England. He relocated to New York in 2011, and we were more than happy to have him. His private domestic troubles did not seem important even then, and his death puts them permanently in the rearview. What matters now is what he wrote and the enormous, salutary impact he had on English prose style as both a novelist and a critic. If you are new to Amis, his scabrously funny 1984 novel, “Money,” is the place to start.

Rod Serling’s Enduring Appeal 5.12.23
I got a lot of emails about this meditation on the career and life of “Twilight Zone” creator, Rod Serling. Serling, who died in 1975 at only 50 years old, had a brief but extraordinarily productive career in television, and he is well loved by fans who have rediscovered “The Twilight Zone” in syndication. Serling’s own mistaken verdict on his work as a writer of hundreds of screenplays and teleplays: “Momentarily adequate.”

Fourth and Long for the NCAA 4.28.23
Here I return to one of my frequent subjects, NCAA athletics. The piece was occasioned by the appointment of a  new NCAA President, former Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker. I discuss the considerable challenges that Baker will be facing. As always, though, I’m also trying to pose larger questions about what we want from college sports.

The Fast Casual Society 4.14.23
I’m rarely able to predict which pieces will strike a nerve with readers.  This short essay about the casualization of American standards of dress attracted spirited commentary.  Some people shared my sense that something has been lost; others felt that I was scolding them for wearing their favorite pair of jeans to the opera.  This is not an argument that I am likely to win; all the momentum of our culture is against me.  If nothing else, though, I thought it was important to mark this change in our manners and pause for a moment over what it might mean.

The Spirit of Appomattox | Shelby Foote, Then and Now Spring 2023
Americans of a certain age will remember the vivid impression made by historian and novelist, Shelby Foote, when he appeared in Ken Burns’ documentary epic, “The Civil War,” in 1990. Charming, erudite, and witty, Foote seemed able to channel all the passion and drama of events more than a century gone. Foote also embraced several premises that we now regard as dubious, including that the Confederate cause was honorable and that slavery was not the primary source of the conflict. This essay asks what we are meant to do with a writer who wrote beautifully about those who fought the war on both sides while seeding a dangerous and divisive myth about that war’s causes.

Norman Mailer on American Politics 2.24.2023

Norman Mailer’s centenary came in January 2023 with his reputation at low tide.  Nonetheless, I welcomed the opportunity to write about him.  Mailer suffered a lot of mocking reviews in his long career, but it was evident from the start that he was a major talent.  He achieved early success with his World War II novel, “The Naked and the Dead” (1948), but his “nonfiction novel,” “The Executioner’s Song” (1979), about the condemned convict, Gary Gilmore, is likely to prove his most durable achievement.  This review of a collection of Mailer’s political writings, “A Mysterious Country,” recognized his enthusiasm for American politics but seconds his own assessment that he was “wrong half the time on prognostications.”

HBO's "Sex Diaries" Is a Cynical Misfire 1.20.23
HBO was the leader of the “prestige television” wave of the 1990s and 2000s that brought us landmark shows like “The Sopranos” and “The Wire.”  Here I review a new HBO documentary series, “Sex Diaries,” a series of 8 close up looks at the sex lives of Brooklynites of various persuasions.  “Sex Diaries” is cynical trash—unworthy of extended discussion—so I used the review to reflect on the long shift in American sexual mores that began in the 1960s.  Will the last monogamous, married couple please turn the lights out before they leave?

Annie Ernaux: All Ego, No Boundaries 10.21.22
I read a great deal of Annie Ernaux’s work in preparation for this piece, which was commissioned on the occasion of her being named the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. There is no question that Ernaux has talent and conviction. She is also, in her writing persona, a monster of arrogance and narcissism. Writing very much against received opinion, I argue here that her books mark a “moral terminus” for contemporary French literature.

Review of “Babysitter”, by Joyce Carol Oates 9.23.22
Joyce Carol Oates has won every major American literary award and has been floated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. There has also been a steady countercurrent of critical complaint about her, principally that she writes too much and that the quality of her work is therefore uneven. This review of Oates’ novel, “Babysitter,” which returns her to Detroit and to many of her familiar themes, provided an opportunity to weigh the claims of her admirers and her detractors.

Historian in the Arena 8.15.22
This article, occasioned by the death of historian David McCullough, surveys McCullough’s accomplishments and also some of the tensions between popular and academic historians. The academic historians mostly did not respect McCullough; they tended to regard his American history as vivid but shallow. McCullough, in turn, saw himself as a writer first, and he believed that most historians do not write well. This mutual disregard is a subject to which I hope to return.

Larkin in America 8.5.22
I wrote this brief essay for the centenary of the British poet, Philip Larkin. Larkin’s reputation has suffered because of his reactionary politics, but those who admire him tend to do so extravagantly. I myself am inclined to forgive the author of “Aubade” and “Church Going” and “MCMXIV” almost anything.

A Rare Talent, a Lingering Absence 7.22.22
This retrospective on the career of the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman (“Capote,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Boogie Nights”) was suggested by a friend who noted how often “PSH” had been a subject of conversation between us since his death in 2014. One cannot help but fumble for a connection between the darkness in Hoffman’s best work and the drug addiction that took his life prematurely.

Many Summers of Love 6.10.22
Roger Angell’s death in May 2022 at age 101 brought lovely tributes in the New Yorker and elsewhere. This essay, published about a month later, was therefore free of the burdens of obituary, which permitted me to focus almost entirely on Angell’s baseball writing. Angell loved the game and found a great deal in its hypnotic circularity without being in the least sentimental about it. His 1980 profile of the fearsome Cardinals’ right-hander, Bob Gibson, might have been his summa.

The Enigma of Cool 6.3.22
Anthony Bourdain had a peculiar charisma. Socially awkward, self-involved, often ill-tempered, he nonetheless attracted talented collaborators and inspired great loyalty. His June 2018 suicide was surprising, inevitable, and vexing. Having overcome drug addiction to achieve fame and recognition, he died alone in a French hotel room. The delicate beauty of some of the later episodes of his CNN travel show, “Parts Unknown” – Manila and Hanoi were especially successful – makes one wonder whether in some way he was already starting to say goodbye.

Orwell’s Humor 5.3.22
What more is there to be said about Eric Arthur Blair, the British writer who, as George Orwell, gave us “Homage to Catalonia,” “Animal Farm,” and “1984”? In this essay, I argue that humor is a neglected aspect of Orwell’s writing and his cosmology. It’s true that Orwell’s was a short and not especially happy life, and that the later writings that made his global reputation were dourly portentous. His two comic novels of the 1930s, however, tell us a good deal about how Orwell saw himself and what he thought might become of the England that he loved so much and hated so bitterly.

The Hard-Knock Life 4.22.22

Two books by boxing journalist Carlos Acevedo offered me an opportunity to say more about the “red-light district of professional sports,” an arena of sorrow, privation, and occasional sublimity. Acevedo, who is working in a fading tradition of literate boxing journalism, is particularly attracted to talented fighters who seem driven to beat themselves – the crazies, the flameouts, the perennially luckless. In their stories we might occasionally find something of ourselves.

William Faulkner’s Tragic Vision Winter 22
I worked especially hard on this long piece about the reputation of one of our greatest writers, the Mississippi novelist, William Faulkner: long, brooding walks; index cards taped all over my office; stacks of Faulkner’s novels, letters, and biographies. I wrote probably 15,000 words to get to the final version of about 4250, and some of what I cut I even liked. The subject here is not Faulkner’s writing per se but his views on race. He was broadly supportive of the civil rights movement, but he wasn’t a consistent friend to it. What’s more important, I argue, is that in his imaginative life he enacted its central premise: that black Mississippians were the moral and spiritual equal of their white neighbors.

In Search of a Point 2.4.22
I generally have the pleasure of reviewing books I like and writing about cultural figures I admire. This strongly negative review of “Everything and Less: The Novel In The Age of Amazon,” by Stanford professor Mark McGurl, was not written with any particular pleasure, but sometimes the duty of a critic is to be critical. I called this meandering compendium of literary-theoretical cliches “lazy, self-satisfied, and infuriating” – a verdict I stand behind.

Leaving the Field 11.17.21
This is one of several pieces I’ve written on the rapid changes occurring in college sports, some of which I approve and some of which I deeply regret. It is abundantly clear that I am not winning this argument and that we are headed for full professionalization, with college athletes paid salaries, engaging in collective bargaining, and perhaps not even required to register for classes. If this comes to pass, the players will do better financially, at least in the short run. What such a system will have to do with higher education, however, is a mystery.

This article is pegged specifically to the NCAA’s creation of a Division I Committee to make recommendations on the future governance of revenue-generating sports. I concluded, somewhat quixotically, that “the Commission’s mission should be one of both preservation and change. Its members should remind themselves of what is ennobling in college sports, as well as what is sometimes cynical and mercenary. A new governance structure that prioritizes academic integrity and the health and education of the athletes would help renew faith in another troubled American institution, one that many of us still want to believe in.”

John Updike and the Politics of Literary Reputation 9.24.21
Aesthetic preferences shift over time, and once-admired writers sometimes lose status in the process. The reputational decline of the novelist, poet, and critic John Updike since his death in 2009 is an especially striking example. When Updike died, the British novelist, Ian McEwan, wrote that “American letters … is a leveled plain.” Even Updike’s detractors acknowledge that he was a master of English prose. Beautiful prose, however, is something American readers no longer seem to desire, and the preference for a less epistemologically confident style, like that of Denis Johnson, or a calculatedly austere one, like that of Cormac McCarthy, has moved Updike to the margins. As I wrote here, “Updike’s reputational decline coincides with a decisive shift in the aesthetic preferences of the American literary mainstream. Much of American literature is now written in the spurious confessional style of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Readers value authenticity over coherence; they don’t value conventional beauty at all.”

Loving the Fight 8.13.21
The firing of Andrew Sullivan from New York magazine, arising from his publication as an editor a quarter century before of a controversial excerpt of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s “The Bell Curve,” struck me as one of the silliest events in what has been a very silly period in American public life. Murray and Herrnstein’s incendiary thesis—that there are consistent and observable differences in IQ between the races—is not one that I find credible. I’m not sure Sullivan believes it himself, but as editor of The New Republic, he felt inclined to publish it, simply because he thought it was relevant and interesting.

This piece is a review of a recent collection of Sullivan’s journalism, “Out On A Limb.” I found that his work stands up exceedingly well, especially his elegant and frank writing on gay culture. “With luck,” I wrote, apropos of Sullivan’s HIV-positive status, “he will live long enough to outlast this ugly period in American life, to see his faith in his adopted country vindicated, and to find himself once again welcome in the magazines that now pillory him. That would complete an almost operatic journey, from boy wonder to cartoon villain to grand old man.”

Doctor’s Son 7.2.21
The aesthetics of American fiction have moved decisively against John O’Hara, the prolific novelist and short story writer who was once rumored to be a candidate for the Nobel Prize. He is no longer much read, but the best of his large body of work has kept its punch. Here I remember his great autobiographical story of the 1918 influenza pandemic, “The Doctor’s Son.” O’Hara experienced this event firsthand as a 13-year old in his hometown of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, assisting his physician father on his rounds. “The Doctor’s Son” brings the creeping terror of a plague vividly to life.

A Tragic Destiny 4.9.21
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s three-part documentary, “Hemingway,” appeared at a moment when Hemingway’s reputation was disappearing behind his myth. As I wrote in this essay-review, “Their mission … is to provide a more naturalistic portrait of Hemingway the man and thereby return us to the indelible work itself. They have succeeded marvelously.” That Hemingway continues to find new readers is a matter of personal interest for me, because of the impact that his first novel, “The Sun Also Rises,” and his short stories, especially “A Natural History of the Dead,” made upon me as a young man. So once again this is an effort on my part to redeem a debt.

Show Me the Money 3.30.21
Here I discuss a then-pending Supreme Court case, NCAA v. Alston, involving a challenge by a class of student-athletes to NCAA restrictions on the benefits they could be offered by their athletic departments. I believed that the Court would probably divide on ideological grounds, with the conservatives siding with the NCAA. Three months later, the Court decided the case 9-0 in favor of the players, with Justice Kavanaugh expressing bitter contempt for the NCAA in his opinion. This outcome made it clear that the NCAA would no longer have the tools to defend its “student-athlete model,” the much-derided concept that collegiate athletes are fundamentally different from their professional counterparts.

Old School 2.15.21
Frederick Wiseman makes very long documentaries about American institutions. The one under review here, “City Hall,” is 4.5 hours of unnarrated footage taken inside the halls of Boston’s municipal government. Wiseman’s work has been widely celebrated, in particular his 1967 debut, “Titicut Follies,” consisting of shocking footage shot inside an asylum. Several of his recent films—“Boxing Gym” (2010); “At Berkeley” (2013); and “Monrovia, Indiana” (2018)—are almost hypnotic in effect. I liked “City Hall” somewhat less than I do those films, because I felt a curious disconnect between Wiseman’s sense of what was happening on the screen and my own. Put another way, I felt his thumb on the scale, and I resented it.

Political Football 9.25.20
This is another essay warning against creeping professionalization in college sports. By the time I wrote this, it was clear that the consensus was moving against me, and it has moved even more in the two years since. We have now almost entirely erased the distinction between college and professional athletes. This has benefited those players who are able to profit significantly from exploiting their new NIL rights. I’m certainly not against anyone making a buck. But what will be the unintended consequences?

Country Music and the Limits of Nostalgia 1.31.20
I have written a few times about the work of PBS documentarian Ken Burns. Here I consider his sweeping 8-part series, “Country Music.” I found “Country Music” very affecting, even though I have not been a fan of the music and, as a New Englander and then a New Yorker, I do not belong to the culture in which it is rooted. That is Burns’ power as a narrative artist – he overcomes cultural distance to tell a story that eventually comes to seem universal.

Watching and Its Implications 10.18.19
The problem of brain trauma in college and professional athletes deserves to be taken seriously, and I believe it is incumbent on the NFL, the NHL, and others to play a constructive role in investigating it. At the same time, I found myself disagreeing with the opinion pieces I encountered that suggested that we should all stop watching the games. Calling on personal experiences as a fan of football and boxing, and considering some core concepts of human freedom and agency, I consider here the ethics of our watching sports that we know contribute to the risk of cognitive decline and other problems in retired players.

Promise and Waste 6.21.19
This is a review of a biography of the late U.S. diplomat, Richard Holbrooke, written by the New Yorker writer, George Packer. Holbrooke was a fascinating figure, driven, arrogant, and blinkered. He served his country very well, including helping to end a brutal 1990s war in the Balkans. He also made a lot of enemies in the close combat of official Washington. Packer’s book is strongest as a kind of ethnography of our diplomatic and foreign policy establishment.

Living to Regret 6.14.19
Patrick Radden Keefe’s investigation in “Say Nothing” of the murder of a single mother, committed by the Irish Republican Army at the height of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, opens up into a meditation on political violence and its enduring consequences. Young men might convince themselves that they have the moral right to kill for a cause, and in rare instances they might even be right; living with that choice is another matter altogether. I have always thought that the thumbs up/thumbs down aspect of a critic’s job was the least important, but I cannot recommend “Say Nothing” strongly enough. It will have a place of honor on your bookshelf.

Wishful Thinking on Antitrust 3.8.19
This is a strongly negative review of “The Curse of Bigness,” by Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu, who subsequently became an advisor to President Biden. Professor Wu’s book argues – recklessly, in my judgment – that we should radically remake the field of antitrust law, the means by which we regulate competition in a market economy. This is an ongoing controversy; the Federal Trade Commission, building on the views expressed in Wu’s book, is now proposing to take on a strikingly more aggressive regulatory posture. The microeconomic theory can get complicated, but the fundamental question is simple: do we want free markets or don’t we?

Pater Familiar 6.19.20
The changing role of fathers, from one of benign neglect to increasing daily engagement, marks one of the biggest cultural shifts of our lifetime. It is also a tremendous driver of inequality. The one in four American children who now grow up without a father in the home have much worse life outcomes along any dimension you care to measure. Some men simply don’t want to care for their children; many more, I believe, wish to be good fathers but don’t know how. I argue in this short piece that we need a culture of fatherhood to support men who find themselves trying to be the father to their own children that they may never have had.

A Writer’s Honor 12.6.19
This short essay addresses a subject to which I have returned repeatedly, what we might call the politics of literary reputation. The writer under consideration here is novelist Richard Ford, whose work I have long admired. The elegance and repose of his writing contrasts with the occasionally bellicose personal behavior that has gotten him in trouble. How do we understand the forces that caused him to spit on someone who gave one of his books a sardonic review, and how much as readers should we ultimately care?

Free Markets and Their Critics 11.7.19
As a reviewer, one sometimes admires a book from page to page but cannot entirely agree with the author’s conclusions. That was the case for me with Binyamin Applebaum’s history of Chicago School economics, “The Economists’ Hour.” Applebaum, who writes on business and economics for the New York Times, takes a potentially dry topic—the shift in the postwar macroeconomic policy consensus that began in the academy and eventually became government policy—and makes of it an almost Gothic romance. Applebaum’s Heathcliff is Milton Friedman, the tiny University of Chicago economist of prodigious rhetorical power who, directly and through the younger economists he mentored, gradually turned the ocean liner of U.S. policy away from the Keynesian model. Lacking formal training in economics, my learning curve was steep, and it was Applebaum himself who made the climb possible. So it was with reluctance and humility that I noted some points of disagreement with him.

For Love of Watching the Game 8.30.19
I don’t often write personal essays, but my son’s nascent youth baseball career aroused unexpected feelings in me that I thought many parents would connect with. So many young men (and increasingly, young women) start out wanting to be professional athletes. For most of them, that dream will eventually come to end. What is the value of the experiences they have between when they get their first baseball glove or hockey stick and when they put the game away for good?

Advertisements for America 8.2.19
Here I reconsider the work of the late novelist Norman Mailer, whose reputation has declined from its heights in the 1970s. Mailer was in some ways a foolish figure, often more interested in controversy than in writing itself. He stabbed one of his wives; threatened to punch Gore Vidal; wrote a silly book about Marilyn Monroe. Even so, I usually found myself rooting for him. I wrote this essay to try to understand that paradox.

Fields of Dreams 12.20.18
This was the first essay I ever wrote for City Journal, where I eventually became a Contributing Editor. The subtitle, “A Defense of the Division I Athletic Scholarship,” says it all. The essay argues that, despite bad NCAA oversight, college sports were a system that was mostly working, both for the athletes and the schools. Since this was published in December 2018, college sports has shifted dramatically toward a professional sports model – exactly the course I warned against. Time will tell whether I was right or wrong.

Without Illusions: Jonathan Clarke Interviews Novelist, Critic, and Translator Tim Parks 7.6.16
Tim Parks is a British novelist, critic, and translator who is too-little known in the United States. His criticism for the New York Review of Books is a good place to start. I interviewed Parks at some length via email (he now lives and teaches in Italy). Frankly, I think he found me irritating; he often quarreled with my questions. The resulting transcript is perhaps more interesting in as a result. I find Parks particularly insightful on the subject of literary translation (a category he rejects, incidentally).

The Contents of His Head: On A.O. Scott’s ‘Better Living Through Criticism’ 2.8.16
This was my second extended consideration of the work of New York Times film critic, A.O. Scott. I greeted the announcement that Scott would be publishing a book in defense of the art of criticism with great excitement. I’m sorry to say that his “Better Living Through Criticism” disappointed me, partly because my expectations were so high: “We live in an age in which opinion has been radically democratized by digital publishing, which means the professional has to shout louder than ever to be heard … Scott’s Harvard degree, his polished prose, and his intimidating cultural range … are not just unavailing but likely to create intractable resentment in many of his readers. And because we have become a society hungry to consume but paralytically reluctant to judge, one of the basic motives of the critic, to create taxonomies of value, has become suspect. This, then, is a rather defensive and sometimes irritable book, an act of muffled aggression by a man besieged and yet conscious of occupying a privileged position in the world.”

Six Possibly True Observations About Renata Adler 5.19.15
In her day, Renata Adler was an intellectual celebrity, a controversialist, and even something of a pinup, thanks to a striking photograph taken of her by Annie Liebovitz. This essay was occasioned by a 2015 collection, “After The Tall Timber,” which gathered the best of her political and cultural reporting, mostly written for the New Yorker. Here’s the summing up: “Renata Adler has not been clubbable. She has picked fights. She has generally been eager both to take offense and to give it. And once the battle has been joined, she has always had to have the last word. For this, and for the great embarrassment of her irrepressible talent, she has not been forgiven.”

Alive with Disagreement and Dissent: On A.O. Scott, Politics, and Art 1.7.15
The New York Times film critic, A.O. Scott, was a few years ahead of me at our public high school in Providence, Rhode Island (which decades before also produced the great New Yorker humorist, S.J. Perelman). I did not know Tony Scott then, but I have followed his subsequent career with pleasure. This long essay considers his plea, made in a series of Times columns, for a more politically engaged American novel. I found that I could not wholly agree with Scott on this particular subject. Few critics, however, are as consistently interesting.

Human Resources: On Joshua Ferris 9.23.14
Here I consider the career of the young American novelist, Joshua Ferris. Ferris takes big conceptual swings, and he has as much conviction as anyone around. A long midcareer assessment seemed appropriate, because his work is likely to last. His second novel, “The Unnamed,” happens to be set in a Manhattan law firm very much like Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, where Ferris’ wife once worked – as did I.

Style and the Man: On Adam Begley’s Updike 6.20.14
John Updike was a hero of mine, not just a great novelist but also, in his criticism for the New Yorker, my frequent instructor in how to read fiction. Writing a review of the first major biography to be published after his death in 2009 was therefore not easy; I felt that I had a debt to discharge. I also felt an envy of his biographer, Adam Begley, that I probably didn’t fully acknowledge to myself. Perhaps as a result, this review now seems to me a little ungenerous. Begley’s recreation of Updike’s youth in Shillington, Pennsylvania and the forces that shaped him as a young man is a considerable achievement.

The Silence Artist: On The Selected Letters of Willa Cather 6.14.13
Willa Cather is one of our unlikeliest great novelists. When American literature was dominated by a narrow establishment firmly centered in Boston and New York, Cather was growing up on a farm in Red Cloud, Nebraska. This seems not to have concerned her greatly: “Cather was one of nature’s miracles, possessed from an early age of an unaccountable conviction that she was meant for something. Yes, she was female, and she lived in Nebraska. The world of letters was a long way away in every sense. Cather could not have been unaware of these facts … but [she] simply opened the door to artistic freedom and walked through it.” The occasion here was the publication of a collection of Cather’s letters, but I used it as an opportunity to talk about a piece of Cather criticism I admired, Joan Acocella’s “Willa Cather & The Politics of Literary Criticism.” I also wanted to strip away some of the sentimentality with which Cather’s work is sometimes handled by those who would turn her into a repository of heartland values.

Fighting Words: Kasia Boddy’s Boxing: A Cultural History 4.30.10
This review of a cultural history of a boxing by a British academic allowed me to explore my lasting fascination with a sport that most educated people regard as brutal and pointless. There’s no doubt that boxing is a violent sport and a rough business. Most fighters end up brain damaged and broke. At its best, though—as I hope to convince you—it delivers moments of rare beauty and pathos.

William Langewiesche and “Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight” 2.13.18The high-profile journalist William Langewiesche, best-known as the author of “American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center,” got his start in journalism as an aviation writer. Before that, he had been a bush pilot, working in remote regions of the Sahara and West Africa. Flying is in his blood; his father, Wolfgang Langewiesche, is the author of an immensely famous flight instruction guide, “Stick and Rudder,” which is still widely used. This essay focuses on William’s collection, “Inside The Sky: A Meditation On Flight.” The book includes Langewiesche’s fascinating longform investigations of two aviation disasters, “On A Bombay Night,” which examines how an experienced pilot became spatially disoriented and flew a perfectly good Boeing 747 into the Arabian Sea; and “The Lessons of Valujet 592,” which investigates how a case of bureaucratic “pencil whipping” led to a catastrophic in-flight fire that brought a DC-9 down in the Everglades. Langewiesche’s aviation reporting is both a surprising look inside the world of flight and an elegant journalistic primer.

“Why’s This So Good?” No. 99: Renata Adler and ‘Reckless Disregard’ 12.3.15Among other things, Renata Adler was an accomplished courtroom journalist. Her book, “Restless Disregard,” gathers her reporting on two momentous libel trials that took place in the same Manhattan federal courthouse in 1985. Both cases were defended by the law firm, Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, where I later worked for almost 11 years; some of the lawyers in the book eventually became known to me. “Reckless Disregard” is partly about the frustrations and obfuscations of the legal process. (The title refers to the legal standard for libel established in United States v. Sullivan, which required that the defendant have displayed a “reckless disregard for the truth” of what it published.) More than that, though, it is an attack on institutional media, which was a frequent Adler target: “it was evident that witnesses with a claim to any sort of journalistic affiliation considered themselves a class apart, by turns lofty, combative, sullen, lame, condescending, speciously pedantic, but, above all, socially, and, as it were, Constitutionally arrogant, in a surprisingly unintelligent and uneducated way. Who are these people? is a question that would occur constantly to anyone upon reading or hearing the style and substance of their testimony.”  

The Stuff of Empathy 12.16.19
The argument of this essay is right there at the end of the first paragraph: “Empathy is becoming the state religion of American literature. It is also a deeply dubious way to think about what we want from writers.” My complaint here is not about empathy itself—who would want to come out against it?—but about the increasingly narrow paths we ask imaginative writers to travel in the service of our preferred politics, our sense of historical grievance, and above all our desire that they not risk giving offense. Here’s my conclusion: “The road to cliché is paved with good intentions. We should defend literature for the basically irresponsible, self-seeking, and often delightful activity it is, both for readers and writers.”

Balloon Meets Pin 11.29.18
The late Janet Malcolm was a formidable stylist, and this essay, which focuses on her courtroom writing, perhaps suffers from an unconscious attempt to imitate her. Her own professional life involved a harrowing encounter with the legal process—she was sued for libel by the subject of one of her New Yorker articles—and she spent a good deal of subsequent time trying to decipher the law’s “stories,” that is, the tales that trial lawyers and judges tell that must stand in for the irreducible complexity of human events. She was capable of extraordinary insights into how lawyers think and how they see themselves. She also sometimes asked too much of the law, which she of all people must have understood was necessarily imperfect. For perfect justice, we will have to wait for the next life.

On The American Beat 10.12.17
The journalist David Halberstam was one of my first “grown up” writers. I discovered him when I was 12 or 13 and someone gave me his marvelous book on the NBA, “The Breaks of the Game,” which remains one of the best sports books ever published. A New York Times correspondent in Vietnam, Halberstam was best-known for his “serious” books, including “The Best and the Brightest” (how the United States got into Vietnam) and “The Reckoning” (a massive volume about the decline of the American auto industry). Halberstam wrote quickly, and his loose, prolix style was sometimes lampooned, but for a teenager, having the curtain pulled back on adult institutions was simply thrilling.

Briefcase Blues 3.16.10
This brief essay, written for Bookforum, is a survey of four influential postwar books that seem to form a set: “The Lonely Crowd,” by David Reisman; “White Collar,” by C. Wright Mills; “The Organization Man,” by William Whyte; and “The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life,” by Erving Goffman. Here’s how I summed up what these books collectively represented: “In the United States, the span of years following World War II was … a time of optimism and newfound self-regard .. [yet] the country as seen by these writers was materially abundant but spiritually arid, a place of conformity and pervasive underlying anxiety.”

Santa Monica Homesick Blues: Rebecca Donner's Sunset Terrace Winter/Spring 2005
This is a review of an autobiographical novel by a young Columbia MFA grad, Rebecca Donner, who has since gone on to bigger things. Her non-fiction book, “All The Frequent Troubles Of Our Days,” about an American woman executed by Hitler for her work in the German resistance, was a New York Times bestseller in 2021. My review of her novel, “Sunset Terrace,” was written for Gulf Coast, an excellent small literary magazine published by the University of Houston English Department. “Sunset Terrace” never found a large audience, but it was clear from the start that Donner would eventually make an impact.