The Paris Review, long recognizable for its fat, little, bookish profile, has been redesigned under the watch of new editor Philip Gourevitch. Also gone is the practice of emblazoning the cover with an abstruse piece of art (as opposed to, say, the New Yorker) and nothing else. “Maybe no one thought it before Mr. Plimpton died, but the venerable old magazine did need an update.” says Bud, who’s got a full accounting of the venerable literary magazine’s new look (and contents).
The new Paris Review
From the Newsstand: Eisenberg on Nádas
As others have noted, the current issue of The New York Review of Books features a long Deborah Eisenberg essay on the Hungarian novelist Péter Nádas (now available online courtesy of Powell’s Bookstore). I’ve been interested in Nádas for some time (though the sheer size of A Book of Memories requires putting it off until next year) and in Eisenberg for longer, and so it may come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I found her essay completely beguiling.Unlike certain other NYRB contributors – one can barely turn around these days without running into John Updike or Joyce Carol Oates, you know, appreciating this or reconsidering that – Eisenberg’s critical corpus has so far been small. Possibly nonexistent. You won’t find her penning introductions and encomiums and toasts; they’d probably run to 15,000 words and take her a year to write. All I knew of her literary taste, prior to reading “The Genius of Peter Nádas,” was that it overlapped with mine (Robert Walser, Humberto Constantini).As it turns out, Eisenberg brings to nonfiction the same philosophical and perceptual rigor, the same psychological acuity, and the same metaphorical daring that animate her stories. “After finishing [A Book of Memories], I, for one, felt irreversibly altered, as if the author had adjusted, with a set of tiny wrenches, molecular components of my brain,” she writes, before going on to cover totalitarianism, war, literary style, and the situation of the American writer. It is almost enough to make one wish for more Eisenberg essays. Alas, time being finite, that might deprive us of Eisenberg fiction.
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Gourevitch and the Paris Review
Initially I found yesterday’s announcement of Philip Gourevitch’s hiring as editor of the Paris Review to be odd. I know him best for his journalism in the New Yorker and his much praised works of non-fiction, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families and A Cold Case, but he didn’t seem to have the proper pedigree to head a magazine that is so prominent in its championing of short fiction. However, a look at the press release accompanying the announcement reveals that “Gourevitch holds an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia University, and has published a number of short stories in literary quarterlies. He worked as cultural editor of the Forward in the early nineties, before turning to writing full time,” which would indicate that he does indeed have experience both as a writer of fiction and an editor. Beyond that, perhaps from his experience with the New Yorker, Gourevitch may have inkling of what it takes to make an unabashedly highbrow publication both a critical and financial success. Many were dismayed, or at least apprehensive, when former editor Brigid Hughes was forced out, but I think that Gourevitch’s appointment should leave Paris Review devotees cautiously optimistic. For more details and background on Gourevitch, visit Galley Cat.
A Man of Appetite Amongst the Waifs
Alone (I’d be willing to bet) among the Millions staff, I am a reader of Vogue. Not, I often think, a sensible choice: Much of what one finds to read between the covers of the average monthly issue is utter tripe, I willingly admit – at least if you’re not an heiress. The ideal reader of Vogue is a lady who lunches (preferably in New York and on two lettuce leaves washed down with fine white wine) and many of the magazine’s readings reflect this demographic: For example, Sally Singer’s dead-earnest account of how hard it was for her to get back in shape for a gala at the Met after having a baby, or Tomasin Day-Lewis’ equally un-self-aware recounting of how scary it was when her son almost, sort-of got hurt while skiing. Depending on one’s mood, these pieces can be hysterical, infuriating, or fascinating (as anthropological bits of evidence in support of Fitzgerald’s assertion that “the rich are different from you and me”). But these are not what keep me a reader.No, I read Vogue for Jeffrey Steingarten – one of the finest food writers on the planet. The irony of finding The Man Who Ate Everything in the midst of pages and pages of photographs of 100 pound, six-foot-tall women is hardly one I am the first to note, but a man of Steingarten’s superbly well-developed sense of humor, I imagine, relishes this irony anew every month. Steingarten’s style of essay is a delightful mix of personal narrative and culinary reportage, and while he occasionally (not always) finds himself in rarified surroundings, he has the blessed sense not to pretend they’re otherwise (as many of Vogue’s contributors – to other, unintentionally comic ends – do). He is both dyed-in-the-wool food enthusiast, connoisseur, and self-deprecating comic hero, and his contribution to the November issue, “Temptation Island,” is a fine example of his gifts, both comic and culinary. (Which is to say that if you find yourself in a hair salon or a doctor’s office and see the issue with Jennifer Connolly in a dark blue dress on the cover, do yourself a favor and turn to page 379).Since I cannot offer a link to the text of this article, I offer instead a few liberal quotes from Vogue as a Steingarten-ian aperitif. This month’s article is an account of his trip to a resort in the Maldives with his wife, a trip he approaches with trepidation, fearing both resort group activities and (more grave) that there will be nothing good to eat. Reminiscing about resort group activities past, he writes:I particularly remember a nightmarish diving excursion off the coast of Maui into the spectacular crater of an extinct volcano called Molokini, led by a guy who believed he was Don Ho, and his partner, who answered to the name of Snorkel Bill and had an unbreakably amiable demeanor, at least until an unexpected storm arose and we all tried to climb back on board up a ladder that gyrated so violently that some of us were thrown back into Molokini and one was knocked out, while a half-dozen sharks circled beneath the boat – but that’s a story for another time.And of his wife’s spa treatments:By this time my wife was carefully plotting her visits to the spa. The first of these, an Ayurvedic treatment for her long-standing sinus condition, took place the next morning, before breakfast. The Ayurvedic practitioner had her lie on a wooden massage table, which he then tilted to lower her head as he squirted a mixture of 62 herbs into her nose. Before long, the liquid had flowed down into her mouth. The doctor was surprised when this caused my wife to throw up, but, she recalls, he got out of the way in time; once this emergency had passed, and for the following month, my wife’s sinus condition was cured! She was meant to return for two more meetings with the 62 herbs but quietly let the opportunity slip by.And, finally, a morsel about Maldivian food:Our first Maldivian dish was a clear tuna soup called Garudiya that, I had been told, every Maldivian family eats every day of the year; pieces of yellowfin tuna are boiled with vegetables and red and black pepper, and the result is pungent and deeply flavored. There were five other dishes, including a stir-fry of squash with mustard seeds and sweet ketchup; a redfish curry; a bright yellow sweet potato curry; a salad of the sweetest lettuces with fresh coconut, chili, and onion. It would have taken us a month or two to exhaust this place, in all of its novelty and variety, but far less time to exhaust our bank account.These morsels do not quite do Steingarten justice. Excerpts never do, I suppose, but I promise delight to those who seek out the full text.And, for those averse to Vogue reading, Steingarten can also be consumed in book form: The Man Who Ate Everything, and It Must’ve Been Something I Ate. (But you do thereby deny yourself the strange sensation of disjunction caused by reading about a spring roll binge on a page flanked by images of the waifiest of waifs.)
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Figuring out 9/11 with fiction
In her review of Deborah Eisenberg’s collection, Twilight of the Superheroes, CSM reviewer Yvonne Zipp leads with this declaration: “The Great American Novel used to be literature’s giant glass mountain. Now, it seems, we’ve switched to Making Sense of Sept. 11 as the ultimate unattainable goal.” I don’t know if that’s really true. Is this something American fiction writers are grappling with these days? Is this the great question of our generation? I don’t know, but then again, for whatever reason, I would love to read a work of fiction that takes on 9/11 in a challenging and illuminating way – so maybe 9/11 should matter to writers. Zipp goes on to say that “none have come closer to the top” than Eisenberg does with the title story in this collection, surpassing, in this contest to make sense of 9/11, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Anita Shreve.Zipp also calls Deborah Eisenberg “the American Alice Munro,” which is funny because I always thought Alice Munro was the Canadian Joyce Carol Oates.See Also:Michiko Kakutani has a review of Jay McInerney’s new novel, The Good Life, which takes on 9/11.
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From the Newsstand: Michael Lewis Goes to Iceland
Michael Lewis turns in yet another tremendous piece in the current issue of Vanity Fair. This one is about the catastrophic financial collapse in Iceland:Walking into the P.M.’s minute headquarters, I expect to be stopped and searched, or at least asked for photo identification. Instead I find a single policeman sitting behind a reception desk, feet up on the table, reading a newspaper. He glances up, bored. “I’m here to see the prime minister,” I say for the first time in my life. He’s unimpressed. Anyone here can see the prime minister. Half a dozen people will tell me that one of the reasons Icelanders thought they would be taken seriously as global financiers is that all Icelanders feel important. One reason they all feel important is that they all can go see the prime minister anytime they like. For those following along at home, we’ve also noted Lewis’ two takes on the Wall Street collapse and his more recent piece on the NBA.
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High Praise for Edward P. Jones
In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley writes a glowing review of Edward P. Jones’ All Aunt Hagar’s Children and has high praise for Jones as well:Now there can be no doubt about it: Edward P. Jones belongs in the first rank of American letters. With the publication of All Aunt Hagar’s Children, his third book and second collection of short stories, Jones has established himself as one of the most important writers of his own generation — he is 55 years old — and of the present day. Not merely that, but he is one of the few contemporary American writers of literary fiction who is more interested in the world around him than he is in himself, with the happy result that he has much to tell us about ourselves and how we live now.Perhaps Yardley (and I) are just rooting for a hometown hero. (I grew up in the DC area.) But after reading The Known World and many of Jones’ short stories, it’s hard to deny that he’s one of the best writers working today.In the NY Times, Dave Eggers is similarly admiring of Jones’ work. He writes that The Known World “is considered by many (including this reviewer) to be one of the best American novels of the last 20 years. It’s difficult to think of a contemporary novel that rivals its sweep, its humanity, the unvarnished perfection of its prose and its ultimately crushing power. The book’s narrative force is so steady and unerring that it reads as though it was not so much written as engraved in stone. It became a classic the moment it was finished.””Bad Neighbors” is a story by Jones that recently appeared in the New Yorker.