Notes from the New Yorker staff on their literary engagements of the week.
I commute from Rockaway in the summer, and am always looking for something to read on the A train. One year, I got through the first volume of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” I had to buy a new bag to tote it around in. This year, my choices have been less weighty. I started “Surviving the Shark: A Surfer’s Terrifying Tale of a Brutal Attack by a Great White,” by Jonathan Kathrein with Margaret Kathrein. (I picked it up off the book bench, where the books department leaves review copies for the staff, and where I am an avid feeder.) The author was sixteen when a shark sank its teeth into his leg while he was surfing the Red Triangle, north of San Francisco. I assume that the co-author is his mother. I have to admit that I skimmed the parts leading up to the shark attack and felt my interest waning after it took place. I left Jonathan in the hospital, where he had decided to give interviews, because the news reports were not getting it right. I had the feeling he would live to surf again.
Now I’m immersed in “Seaworthy: A Swordboat Captain Returns to the Sea,” by Linda Greenlaw. Greenlaw is a lady skipper. She was captain of one of the boats that Sebastian Junger wrote about in “The Perfect Storm,” and wrote her own account of that storm, “The Hungry Ocean” (which I haven’t read), as well as “The Lobster Chronicles: Life on a Very Small Island” (which I have). You don’t run into many books about boats written by women—Rosemary Mahoney’s “Down the Nile (Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff)” is a good one, and in it Mahoney even comments on women’s apparent lack of interest in boats, or at least in writing about boats. I guess Ahab is just not that appealing a model—there is a reason that so many tales of the seafaring life feature eye patches and peg legs. Anyway, “Seaworthy” is an account of swordfishing off the Grand Banks in an old tub of a boat, the Seahawk. Lots of things go wrong, which I love, because it confirms my own limited experience on the water (crushed pinkie, Bellevue). If nothing goes wrong, there’s no story.
—Mary Norris
I’ve been reading Jeff Kisseloff’s 1995 oral history “The Box,” about television history from 1920-1965. Particularly fascinating was the section about daytime soap operas and the one about junk Westerns, which dominated prime time TV much the way procedurals do now. I love how even within these tiny, degraded fiefdoms, creators still found a way to draw distinctions. “Lassie was a wimpy show,” says the writer Jennings Cobb. “‘Rin Tin Tin’ writers looked down their nose at ‘Lassie.’ Rin Tin Tin was a ballsy dog who took on Indians. Lassie was pretty effeminate.” (He also complains that Rin Tin Tin producers demanded adverbs in the scripts: “The dog barks, right? The dog cannot bark ‘happily’ or ‘angrily,’ perhaps some shading but not ‘nostalgically.’”)
—Emily Nussbaum
After a fourth failed attempt to get past page fifty of Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping,” for reasons that I continue to want to believe are circumstantial, and not a reflection of taste or temperament, I recently started reading “The Lay of the Land” by Richard Ford. Surer ground, maybe. Here are some things I know I can daydream about: New Jersey, real estate, Frank Bascombe. Why Frank Bascombe? Because of paragraphs like this:
Ford is back in the news, of course, for “Canada,” his new novel, and I started that, too, before committing to “Lay of the Land,” on grounds, mainly, of paperback preference. A bookmark check reveals that I left off at: “What my father did during the next days was drive around eastern Montana and western North Dakota (places he’d never been), searching for a bank he could rob.” Hard to imagine I won’t return to it.
Speaking of Canada, though, I’m in the early stages of hockey withdrawal, and so last night, before bed, I picked up Jack Falla’s “Open Ice,” and turned to the chapter on skating the Rideau Canal, in Ottawa—something I’ve never done, but hope very much to. I know, I know: it’s June. Talk to me in January and I’ll be reading “The Swimmer.”
—Ben McGrath
Photograph by Alex Arbuckle.