Megan mentioned this book back in March, saying she’d read a review of it that made her think she’d like it, and wondering if I’d heard of McPhee. Since he writes for the New Yorker, and I’m one of those New Yorker subscribers who reads every single article, even if it doesn’t immediately seem to be about something I’m interested in, I figured I must have read his work, but still couldn’t place his name. Then I looked in the New Yorker’s digital archive and realized he’d written a 2007 piece called “Season on the Chalk,” about the chalk landscapes of Europe, including bits about geology and wine-making and WWII history, which I’d entirely forgotten about until I saw it there. But once I heard the title I remembered liking it so much I tore the whole thing out of the magazine and kept it for a while, because it was just so good. Here’s the start of that essay, which is included in this book:
The massive chalk of Europe lies below the English Channel, under much of northern France, under bits of Germany and Scandinavia, under the Limburg Province of the Netherlands, and—from Erith Reach to Gravesend—under fifteen miles of the lower Thames. My grandson Tommaso appears out of somewhere and picks up a cobble from the bottom of the Thames. The tide is out. The flats are broad between the bank and the water. Small boats, canted, are at rest on the riverbed. Others, farther out on the wide river, are moored afloat—skiffs, sloops, a yawl or two. Tommaso is ten. The rock in his hand is large but light. He breaks it against the revetment bordering the Gordon Promenade, in the Riverside Leisure Area, with benches and lawns under oaks and chestnuts, prams and children, picnics under way, newspapers spread like sails, and, far up the bank, a stall selling ice cream. He cracks the cobble into jagged pieces, which are whiter than snow. Chalked graffiti line the revetment and have attracted the attention of Tommaso, who now starts his own with the letter “R”. (p 9)
I love that so much: the pace of it, the way it sets the scene; I love this whole essay for the way it’s about landscape/place, the way it mingles broad historical fact with personal experience. I love how wonderfully precise McPhee can be, with sentences like this: “An armada of swans, in single file, swims out from near the shore and toward the center of the river—thirty-eight swans” (p 10).
And while others of McPhee’s essays don’t excite me quite as much, I still admire the way he writes, the care and pleasure it seems he takes in it, whether he’s writing about his mother or canoeing or eating unusual meats (puffin, weasel, bear) or lacrosse. The essay on the latter was funny for me to read/re-read—it’s another I first read in the New Yorker—because despite having gone to a high school where almost everyone in my class of 20 played lacrosse, I’ve never even seen a lacrosse game and found myself having to really slow down and try to make sense of what on earth he was talking about. Yes, I sometimes wished that particular essay (which is 58 pages) would hurry up and be done already, but that’s more a comment on my tastes than on McPhee’s writing. And when I did finish the essay on lacrosse, moving on to an essay about antique view cameras/his daughter’s photographic collaborations with Virginia Beahan (really pleasing landscapes, like this and this), I forgot my boredom and was delighted all over again by the McPhee’s particular mix of description and detail and humor. Also really pleasing: an essay about unusual foods, an essay about fact-checking that’s in large part a paean to fact-checkers. I could have done without the essay on golf (are you sensing a theme here?). But the fact-checking essay, so good! It kind of makes me wish I were a fact-checker, except I suspect I’d make a better proofreader or copy editor than fact-checker, or at any rate, would have to work a lot harder to be a good fact-checker than I would to be a good proofreader or copy editor.
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