A New Yorker would probably recognize more of the faded fashions from these eighty years' worth of The New Yorker essays. Anyone might recognize many; Hirschfeld, crosswords, domain-name squatting. Readers will find familiar authors either displaying their style in small, or polishing it into near transparency. I thought the most transparent essays the best ones. They're so short, and on such slight subjects, that there's no room for posturing or even overt personality from the author. Posturing fades into archness or incomprehensibility.
Reading the book straight through is like watching an old movie on the walls of Plato's cave. Enormous events of the twentieth century pass without direct mention. The essayist is looking at a polished spot on the wall of the cave; we peer over the essayist's shoulder, with a little light of future knowledge. Wars and revolutions explode outside the cave and the glare is at the edges of our vision.
The earliest Talk of the Town essays were published under the pseudonym "Van Bibber III", a reference to ' urbane character.
ISBN: 0375736493
So wrote clew in History (20th c.). | TrackBack