It’s been a while since we’ve done an “Ask a Book Question” at The Millions, but Kirk from Texas left a good one in the comments of a recent post:You write a lot about your obsession with The New Yorker… Can you tell those of us that are unfamiliar with the publication more about it, and why you like it so much.I love The New Yorker for many reasons. I prefer to know a little about a lot of things rather than a lot about a few, and so I find the wide range of topics the magazine takes on is appealing. It’s a surprising unpredictable magazine. I also like that the magazine has history, and that it has stayed true to itself by changing only incrementally over the years and for the most part taking pains to make sure any changes made sense. Generally speaking, The New Yorker is guaranteed to provide me with at least one transcendent reading experience per month, often more than that, and very few clunkers. It is exceedingly rare that I quit reading an article halfway through. By that measure alone it beats any other magazine I’ve ever picked up.I could go on about The New Yorker for pages, but instead, I thought I’d let some others spill some ink on their love for the magazine. We’ll start with Emily Gordon, who heads up Emdashes, a blog devoted to a single magazine. I’ll let you guess which one.When I tell people I write a blog about The New Yorker, they’re either excited and ask for the url, or freaked out. The people in the second group get that funny look so familiar to elementary-school students and poets, and say with withering irony, “Wow, you must really LOVE it.” Being an unfashionable enthusiast and advocate of the New Sincerity, I answer simply that I do.In his email asking for my thoughts about the magazine, Max called me “the Web’s pre-eminent NYer expert.” I wish! I’m reminded every time I go to a New Yorker-themed event–especially on the Upper West Side–that there are far more fanatical and expert readers out there, and they usually have a couple decades of subscribership on me, too. In my paying work life, I’m a magazine editor and a book and media critic, so that’s the spirit in which I write the blog. At the same time, I sometimes feel like a roving preacher from a quirky sect, with all the attendant longing for clarity and community, and possibly some of the narrow-mindedness and naivete, too. Meanwhile, perhaps also like an evangelist, I get to experience moments, collectively and alone, of overpowering delight and that spooky but real phenomenon called “flow.” (Also, the blogosphere being what it is, moments of derision, bafflement, and the sound of stone silence.) Man, I sound like Garrison Keillor. My real point is, I’ve made a lot of wonderful friends who feel the way I do, and despite moments of overextended self-doubt, I’m grateful for all of this.But back to the reason for reading it in the first place. I read Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” recently, and wrote down this line: “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.” That’s probably at the heart of it. I’m a third-generation New Yorker reader, and the magazine’s writers and artists are essential to both sides of family language and lore. When I was at the Daniel Alarcon and Zadie Smith reading at the most recent New Yorker Festival, in a beautiful church-like space called the Angel Orensanz Foundation, I had the strange thought that I was in the only church my parents (who are long-divorced atheists) would ever have attended. I got a little teary thinking about them, in the Church of The New Yorker with its Chastian or Steinbergian heaven, and hey, I was the one who said I was an evangelist. “This isn’t a magazine–it’s a movement.” Harold Ross said that.So what do I preach? That the magazine, far from a bastion of elitism and snobbery, is the site of the most hardworking and stirring journalism available in English, about essential subjects like New Orleans, the global environmental crisis, American poverty, education, and the war in Iraq. Some people will never agree; they think the whole thing is foolish. “Tell me why your project is so compelling or should be to someone like me who DESPISES the culture of writing that the NEW YORKER inspires and finds literary glomming to be complete bullshit,” an acerbic fellow blogger once wrote me, sneeringly. He thinks the publishing-industrial complex needs taking down, not celebrating. I defended myself in the lengthy email exchange, but afterward I felt like my soul had been slapped to the floor, as in that scene in Amelie. I was so outraged but so suddenly unsure of my mission that I thought of shutting down the site entirely, taking my ball and going home, as my friend Tom would say; it’s a little like the way I felt when I heard, just recently, that a New Yorker film critic (for the Goings on About Town listings, which contain some of the sharpest and wittiest writing in the magazine) refers to me as “the New Yorker groupie.” Ow.On the other hand, there are lots of worse things to be. Steve Martin wrote in the magazine this week that he sometimes feels nostalgic for the “high spirits and high jinks” of his early career, “before I turned professional, before comedy became serious.” Maybe The New Yorker, too, is best viewed from one’s childhood coffee table, before it becomes a media outlet, a buzz-worthy blog topic, an online brand, a symbol of what one has, in some senses, lost: the life of Pauline Kael; the grandparents who understood fewer and fewer of the cartoons and became sorrowful about it; the vast possibilities of a future full of limitless writing and reading opportunities. But for now, I’ve got a way of broadcasting my–let’s face it–devotion. Want to be saved? Subscribe. I’m only half kidding.Millions contributor Garth also weighed in with his thoughts on the magazine:I was trying to explain to a friend the other weekend why The New Yorker is the greatest magazine in the history of American magazine journalism. I can think of a few reasons.First, I love The New Yorker for the assumptions it makes about its readership. It assumes that we are bright, literate, patient, and curious about the world. (Okay, it also assumes that we’re well-off and liberal, but that’s less important). It assumes that I, who loathed biology in high school, will be fascinated and moved by 8,000 words on the redwoods…and lo and behold, I am. Rather than tailoring itself to the marketplace, which is how we now think of the publishing place, The New Yorker recognizes that it CREATES its marketplace. Which is why I hate to see it stoop to puff-pieces on Cate Blanchett or Mariah Carey.Second, I find the history of The New Yorker, and its attendant myths, endlessly fascinating. One example: Jamaica Kincaid was doing odd-jobs for editor William Shawn when he decided that she should write for the magazine. She and George Trow and Ian Frazier became an inseparable, and eccentric triumvirate. Later, she married Mr. Shawn’s son Allen.Third, The New Yorker has subsidized a staggering (surprising) number of canonical writers. E.B. White? New Yorker. J.D. Salinger? New Yorker. The Fire Next Time? First ran in the New Yorker. Silent Spring? Likewise. Eichmann in Jerusalem? You guessed it. Oliver Sacks, Joseph Mitchell, Alistair Reid, Janet Malcolm, Calvin Trillin, Philip Gourevich, Pauline Kael, A.J. Liebling, James Thurber, William Steig, the Addams Family, John Cheever, Saul Steinberg… Among the current writers, Elizabeth Kolbert, Georges Packer and Saunders, Nick Paumgarten (the new Ian Frazier), Peter Schjeldahl, Mark Singer, and James Wood (as of last month), are all doing work that may still entertain and instruct years from now. This is not even to mention the art.Each week, The New Yorker delivers a multi-course meal (about four-hours worth) of reporting, opinion, reviews, cartoons, and humorous “casuals” to my door. Sometimes the meal is mediocre, but it’s always sustaining.And finally, Millions contributor Noah brings us home:I don’t have a subscription, though I once did. It started sort of piling up on me, making me feel like an arch procrastinator. I’d like to renew but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. But one thing about The New Yorker: you can pick up an issue, be it this week’s, last week’s, or one from 1987, and it always reads. This is surely a testament to the quality of the writing, but also to the editorial sensibilities that drive the magazine. My most memorable New Yorker article was about Rafael Perez, disgraced and incarcerated LAPD officer, who testified for the state in the prosecution of numerous other LA cops who were part of the Rampart Crash unit, a renegade police outfit that committed numerous crimes. Denzel Washington’s character in the movie Training Day was based on Perez. Perez has also been rumored to have had a hand in the murder of Biggie Smalls. Great article. The cartoons are fun too.
Chicago has inspired some of America’s greatest fiction and continues to be a fruitful setting for contemporary writers. I’ve just completed The Lazarus Project (review hopefully forthcoming), and its twinned stories – set in Chicago 1908 and present day Eastern Europe – mine Chicago’s multicultural past and ignominious history. The book, based on the true story of the mysterious death of immigrant Lazarus Averbuch reminded me a lot of The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson’s non-fiction account of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the serial killer who lurked in its shadows (my review here). Both Devil and Lazarus vividly evoke the chaos of Chicago, a turn of the century boomtown of slaughterhouses, nascent industry, and the first “skyscrapers” that was quickly aligning itself as the country’s center after only decades earlier being its frontier.
Jumping forward in time, Chicago produced one of America’s greatest novelists, Saul Bellow, who haunted the hauls of Northwestern in the 1930s. Garth writes that “the greatest Chicago novel ever is The Adventures of Augie March, which is highly recommended for someone who liked Kavalier & Clay.” This contention is hard to dispute.
Patrick points us to another, more contemporary literary lodestar for Chicago: “The poet laureate of Chicago is Stuart Dybek (I mean, I don’t think he actually is, I just think he should be). The Coast of Chicago and I Sailed With Magellan are both absolute must reads. They both entirely take place in Chicago (mostly the South Side, but not exclusively). He’s one of my favorite authors, and somebody who should have a much larger audience.”
I think Sister Carrie takes place in Chicago, no?
But I wouldn't recommend reading that.
If you're up for something a bit odd, I'd heartily recommend Mark Smith's The Death of the Detective. It's the detective novel as creeping nightmare, with Chicago playing the role of a disturbingly familiar hell. The detective of the title slowly disintegrates as he wanders all over Chicago, seeming to hit every conceivable neighborhood, each of which is carefully and memorably rendered. It's a chilling, unforgettable book.
Oh, and if I may be allowed to recommend a couple of books from my employer, the University of Chicago Press, how about Ben Hecht'sA Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago and Mike Royko's One More Time and For the Love of Mike, all collections of great columns from giants in the history of Chicago newspapers. And Royko's book about the first mayor Daley and his machine, Boss, which I only wish my employer published.
I would recommend my own company's Looped, by Andrew Winston, which unlike most Chicago novels does not focus on a particular neighborhood, but rather takes on a much greater breadth of the city through its large, diverse, Altman-esque cast of characters.
The Lazarus Project was a great book, but Chicago was mostly a footnote there to Eastern Europe. But ditto on the Upton Sinclair and Stuart Dybek titles you mentioned – all three are must-reads, along with absolutely anything by Mike Royko (including Boss, his Daley bio). I'd also strongly recommend Nelson Algren's novel The Man With the Golden Arm and story collection The Neon Wilderness (and though his nonfiction Chicago: City on the Make is one of my alltime favorites, its obscure references make it better for a more seasoned Chicagoan than a neophyte), Richard Wright's Native Son, Ward Just's An Unfinished Season and Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned. And those are just for starters.
Thanks everyone, these are awesome. I'll definitely be making multiple trips to the Northwestern bookstore. :-)
I'd also love to hear anymore suggestions people have, so I'll keep watching the comments.
Richard Wright's Native Son should be on this list. Set in Chicago in the 1930's it chronicles the decline and fall of a young black man named Bigger Thomas–not light summer reading (race, class, the absence of social justice, an unlikeable hero)–but one of the great American novels, I think.
Try Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks. It's a novella set in Chicago's African American neighborhoods during the 1940's, and tells the story of the title character in 34 vignettes. It is Brooks' only work of adult fiction–she was primarily a poet–but she should have written more because I think this book is tremendous. Maud Martha's story is nothing special–no high drama or headline material–the real attraction to this story is in the language Brooks uses to sketch out the arc of a human life, and in the character that Brooks has created in Maud Martha.
Scott Simon of NPR Weekend Edition just published a novel about Chicago, Windy City. I haven't read it yet, but it's in the stack. It's a murder mystery (the mayor is killed), but it's mostly about Chicago politics, from what I've read. If you like detective stories, I would also recommend the early Sara Paretsky detective books featuring V.I Warshawsky. The later books don't have as much Chicago color (I don't know about the most recent books in the series–I stopped reading them about three novels ago). But I lived in Chicago when the earlier books came out, and my friends and I tried to find the bar where V.I. hung out. The descriptions were based on real neighborhoods, but given fictional names.
I recommend Nowhere Man, by Aleksandar Hemon
Sorry I didn't see this topic sooner as I believe that James T. Farrel definitely rates a mention.
One of the few mystery writers I read is Sara Paretsky whose feisty and very socially aware and active PI is based in Chicago. This is where I have learned about the actual people and neighborhoods of Chicago.
Michael Harvey has written two great detective novels that take place in Chicago: The Chicago Way and The Fifth Floor.
Sean Cherchover's Big City, Bad Blood is also worth a read.