Anodyne
Friday, September 14, 2007
 

Pete sends along this short, thoughtful assessment of consummate New Yorker writer John McPhee, lately improving, like his compatriot Alice Munro, from a good writer into a truly great one. McPhee's latest piece, an experimentally structured profile of his old editor William Shawn, kept me occupied on the ferries to and from Powell River; I'd laugh out loud; K. would ask, "What's so funny?"; I'd pass the magazine over; she'd guffaw; back the magazine would come & etc.

McPhee's best line, ever: his likening, in the Shawn piece, of durian to a "fecal tiramisu."

"[I]t’s not just McPhee’s indefatigable curiosity about seemingly everything -- exotic cars, cattle branding in Nevada, lobsters and how UPS plants in the east ship them -- that makes his writing so incredible. It’s that, at a sentence level, his is among the most pure writing in the language. I hesitate to use the term pure, just because its too loaded, carries so much baggage. The sensation most akin to reading John McPhee’s sentences is experiencing incredibly clear, clean water, and for the life of me I haven’t been able to nail it down much more clearly than that. I don’t know if it matters whether it’s like drinking the water, or letting it run over your hands, but there’s a cleanliness to his prose that’s almost startling."
- posted by cjb @ 6:20 PM


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