Canary in a Coal Mine: Bad Writing Comes to the New Yorker
By Jonathan Berohn
Let me just start off by saying I’ve had my own subscription to the New Yorker for about 15 years, and before that I read my parents’ copy starting in about 1983. Suffice it to say that I’m a diehard fan.
All things considered, I don’t think there has been a better magazine over that time for giving readers lively stories on culture, politics, literature, current events, sports—anything that curious minds would want to know about. Suffice it also to say that things have looked rosier at the New Yorker. It was one thing when the short story writers gradually changed from cutting edge literary voices to either a) big name writers who often get the space based on name only or b) writers who get the nod because they can claim some kind of cultural/ethnic/gender minority status (preferably all three). Still, ignoring the weekly short story, while sad, has been offset by the quality of the rest of week’s articles. Until recently.
Articles by Formula
For the past couple years, many of the New Yorker’s features—especially those written by newer writers—have become maddeningly formulaic. Tell a little bit of the story. Jump back (or ahead) in time to an amusing anecdote. Jump back into the chronology of the story. Jump back for another anecdote. Repeat as necessary. I don’t know who convinced an editor over there that readers don’t like to read a well-organized story that can proceed without jumping all over the place but I’d like to string him or her up with a nice simple timeline. Oh—did I tell you about the time we did timelines in grade school? It was really—oh wait—that’s boring and distracting.
A New Low
As annoying as it was, I could even get past the formulas, knowing I could count on articles by such New Yorker stalwarts as John Updike, Roger Angel, and Anthony Lane. Some new developments have made begin to wonder, though. A recent article from the October 25 issue really made me reexamine my loyalty to the New Yorker. I feel a little bad calling out other writers by name, but when they’re taking my money for their drivel—and that’s being generous—I have to draw the line. In her article “Across the Styx River,” Caroline Alexander thoroughly butchers a piece on recovering US servicemen’s remains from Vietnam. To give you an idea of the tone of the piece, somehow she actually manages to use 2 semi-colons on the first page of her article. If there is a more arcane and pretentious form of punctuation around I am not familiar with it. Never fear, though—she makes up for punctuation stiffness with sentences such as: “The soil was dumped into one of twelve hanging screens, then passed through quarter-inch mesh and examined for artifacts and biological matter; most excavations turn up only fragmentary remains.” Apparently they have much in common with Ms. Alexander’s writing. At least she makes us all feel better by tacking on useless images such as : “Under a leafy bower on a ridge of the hill, Vietnamese government officials, who accompany every mission, had their own small camp, from which smoke or steam of a pot on the boil occasionally escaped.” Yes—great stuff indeed.
