PicoBlog

If you toil in the fields of nonfiction, as I do, you probably have an opinion about John McPhee, as I do. This week, I had the great privilege of reviewing his latest book for the Washington Post Book World (which, by the way, is one of only two stand-alone newspaper book reviews in the country, and which is deftly and smartly edited by one John Williams, who improves everything I send him). Here is part of what I wrote:

All writers have false starts. We once stuffed them in manila folders and pushed them deep inside our desks; now we store them in a different kind of folder. But we still rarely give up on them, harboring a shameful hope that someday we’ll perform freelancer’s CPR, breathing new, sellable life into them.

If you’re John McPhee, longtime New Yorker staff writer, author of 31 books and nonagenarian statesman of what’s often called longform journalism, you can collect these abandoned projects into a book. “Tabula Rasa: Volume 1” is a charming, breezy collection of reminiscences about projects that didn’t make it, ideas that never got fully baked, research never written up, either because the subject died or because McPhee, who was born in 1931, lost interest along the way.

McPhee has never been a huge seller or a household name, but among other writers he’s almost unanimously revered. For me, his desert island books include “The Headmaster,” about Frank Boyden, who ran Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts for more than half a century, and “Heirs of General Practice,” about backwoods doctors in Maine. And I always enjoy a reread of “A Sense of Where You Are,” his breakthrough 1965 profile of basketball star and future senator Bill Bradley. These are masterpieces. So it’s reassuring to know that, like us mortals, he has unfinished business.

You can read the rest here.

There is no more perfect sweet than the chipwich, when it is done right. Most chipwiches, like the kind found in the big freezer in the quickie mart, are too small and terribly freezer burnt, and both the cookies and the ice cream are of poor quality. But then, once in a while, you find the real thing. That’s what happened when I purchased a chipwich from the Barts Ice Cream (apostrophe their omission) stand at the Green River Festival, a music event I attended in Greenfield, Mass., a couple weeks back. The cookies were big and round and soft, the ice cream fresh and delicious.

(I realize “chipwich” is brand name, like Kleenex, but what else is one to call it? “Ice cream sandwich” means something else.)

Back to books . . .

If you happen to navigate over the full McPhee review, and then stay to browse the Post book section, you’ll find a review essay by the aforementioned John Williams discussing the new Richard Ford novel, the last in his series about his character Frank Bascombe, in the light of John Updike’s four novels about his character Rabbit Angstrom. I read only one Rabbit novel, and could not get very many pages into the one Bascombe novel I tried, so I am ill qualified to discuss the matter.

But I will linger to say that later this month Richard Russo will publish Somebody’s Fool, his third novel about Sully, the hard-luck protagonist first seen in Nobody’s Fool, which was made into a great movie with Paul Newman. So that makes three novelists who have journeyed with their central characters over three or more books. And Jonathan Franzen has said that his most recent, the wildly awesome Crossroads, will be the first in a trilogy.

Some people lose attention span as they get older, which is true of me when it comes to movies, but not when it comes to books. I think maybe because I have been primed by long-running TV serials like The Sopranos and The Wire, I am actually more into multi-part fictional epics than I used to be. I am excited for the Russo, and even more excited for the Franzen (which is likely 10 years off).

Partly because I like author interviews, partly because I like British accents, I listen to the podcast Books and Authors, from the BBC. The latest episode features an interview with Richard Ford—same one I just wrote about, a couple paragraphs ago!—and it turns out that he wins the accent prize for the episode! Plummy as interviewer Alex Clark sounds, she has nothing on the Southern drawn of Mr. Ford. Listen up!

I’ll take this moment to ask: Does any author sound as good as Ford? I have heard old audio of Frost reading, which was pretty great; same goes for Auden. But Ford! Holy cow. Maybe I should be listening to the Bascombe novels—but only if they’re read by him.

But the latest one isn’t! It’s read by one Richard Poe, who according to Audible also reads books by Clive Cussler and Richard Feynman (and he reads at least one edition of the Bible). I gave a listen to a sample of Poe. He’s no Richard Ford.

I mean, listen to this guy:

And finally . . . I have fallen back in love with Wimbledon this year. I paid for the streaming service I needed, and I have been making the most of it. Rooting for Eubanks the American, and for Alcaraz, and against Djokovic, in the gentlemen’s draw; rooting for all the Americans in the ladies’ draw.

Wimby, how I missed you.

Yes, I love The Bear, and am glad it’s back for Season 2. Yes, I knew the offensive term “Jewish lightning.” Yes, it’s good when art depicts how people actually talk, rather than sanitized, happy-clappy versions of how people would talk if we were all enlightened. And yes, the best part of JTA’s article on this episode is that it cautions us, at the top, that the article contains “light spoilers.” Is a “light spoiler” like “light bondage,” or is it more like “lite dressing”? This will keep me up tonight . . .

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