A Terrific New Yorker (with Zadie Smith)

While Rhian goes mercilessly hacking at my book, I'm sitting back and enjoying the latest New Yorker, which they're calling the INNOVATORS ISSUE.

I'm not much for themed anything, but especially dislike themed New Yorkers. Not that they're usually so bad--it's just that I find the normal ones so comforting. They are the artifact of just another regular week, with a variety of mildly interesting things going on, and being written about. I find the theme issues to be hostile to the concept of averageness, especially the ones that are packed with short fiction by people younger and more famous than I.

But I digress. This issue turns out to be great--almost as if it were made especially for me. There's a piece on the Large Hadron Collider, which is either going to change science as we know it by proving various things, or change science as we know it by failing to. There's an annoyingly long bit about Banksy, annoying not because it's poorly written but because it's written about Banksy. (Don't get me wrong--I quite like Banky's stuff. But his earning-fame-by-pretending-to-disdain-it attitude, the literary analog of which we have had quite enough of thank you, is a bit hard to bear.) We have a fine little article about the Antikythera mechanism, the best-named artifact of all time, and another great piece about uber-geek luthier Ken Parker, of Parker guitars (I find the famous Parker Fly a bit too fussy for the exertions of rock and roll, but I like Parker's way of working).

And there's a new Zadie Smith story, which might possibly be part of a Zadie Smith novel that isn't finished yet. It's pretty OK, but Smith's OK is everybody else's brilliant masterpiece, and I enjoyed it enormously. It contains a lot of little self-referential asides, of the sort that people of Smith's generation (by which I suppose I mean, broadly speaking, myself) can write in their sleep, but again, I would rather watch Zadie Smith sleep than just about anyone else dance the macarena. She drops in sentences like "It was 1956, as mentioned above" without batting an eye, and offers this wonderful take on contemporary dying:

This is reminiscent of all the dutiful grandchildren and great-grandchildren lingering over deathbeds with digital recorders, or else maniacally pursuing their ancestors through online geneaology sites at three in the morning, so very eager to reconstitute the lives and thoughts of dead and soon-to-be-dead men, though they may regularly screen the phone calls of their own mothers. I am of that generation. I will do anything for my family except see them.

That may not make her an "innovator," but, like everything else she does, it makes her awesome.

Don DeLillo in the New Yorker

I just read DeLillo's new story in the NYer, though it's really an excerpt from the new novel that's coming in July. Since I've read about half of Falling Man (and it's not among the books we've put in Self-Storage) it was pretty familiar. In fact, it was so familiar, I couldn't really enjoy it. In fact, I kind of hated it.

I'm a fan of Don DeLillo because I like White Noise and Libra and because he has his own thing he works hard at -- a vision. Also, he's just plain talented, and a person has to respect that. But I couldn't read Underworld because of the excerpt he published in Harper's, a story he called "Pafko at the Wall." It was about baseball, which was bad enough, but it was also incredibly self-conscious. Forget it! JRL told me Underworld was great but I didn't have the stomach for it.

It's weird, though: when I was reading the New Yorker story I kept thinking, Hm, people are going to think this is pretty hot stuff. Yep, that bit there, pretty amazing! But at the same time, the material was so tired. It could be that I just read Ken Kalfus's book, which is about a very similar subject (man is in one of the Towers, survives, and it changes his personal relationships) or it could just be in the air. Or... it could be that DeLillo's style and his reputation overwhelms his subject. I found myself thinking that I couldn't even tell if the story was good or not, because I have all this backlog of feeling about DeLillo, and about 9-11, and about New Yorker stories.

I hated the excerpt because of the telegraphic dialog, which is meant to sound like real people talking but actually sounds like fake affected literary people, and because of the easy real-life drama. And -- and here I'm crawling very carefully out on a limb -- because it feels like DeLillo has appointed himself Voice of the Nation. I'm sure he didn't mean this, but reading that story I felt like I was being told how to interpret that day in 2001, and somehow that feels wrong.

I haven't talked to anyone else who's read it yet so I'm curious what people think about it.