Word: mcphee
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...McPhee is nothing if not professional, though, and it's doubtful his slip was accidental. Instead. he seems--heresy of heresies--to have left out a fact on purpose, apparently because he is more interested at that particular moment in conveying things through the eyes of the New York photographers. They don't know the rental agent's name so neither will McPhee's readers. By concerning himself with things like point of view and particularly with achieving a certain kind of narrative tone, McPhee sacrifices the kind of reportorial strictness and tone that readers of journalism are used...
...tone is the key to it all; it lets McPhee write in an unusually personal way. He begins an article about Loch Ness, home of the monster, by telling his readers that he and his wife and four daughters were sitting next to the Loch picnicking on "milk, potato sticks, lambs' tongues, shortbread, white chocolate, Mini-Dunlop cheese." Another article is about a basketball game McPhee played in some time ago. Another, about a white-water canoeing championship, spends much of its time talking about the kinds of canoes McPhee paddled in as a child and how he went about...
...McPhee, however, has accomplished quite a trick: he has gotten himself so perfectly attuned to his audience that he can write the way he does without beginning to grate. Part of it is that he is an extraordinarily meticulous writer, able to achieve an effortless, limpid tone without leaving any loose sentence ends, or losing the thread of his story, or using words that do not belong exactly where they are. His articles seem to convey information almost by accident and to flow along without any forethought, McPhee having just sat down and written out his impressions of something...
None of that is really the case, of course. When McPhee wants to he bristles with facts, peculiar laundry lists of numbers, even, stuck in odd-seeming places. And the seamlessness of his writing--it's nearly impossible to look back on one of his studies and think, despite their division into vignettes, that anything should have been put somewhere else--shows how carefully he organizes...
...McPhee appears to be well aware, though, that he is writing for people who want primarily to be entertained rather than informed, people who are not looking to be dazzled or shocked or spurred into action, but to have a pleasant time reading. He is entirely successful; Pieces of the Frame is pleasant throughout, never jarring. The strongest reaction it produces is an occasional moment of wonderment at the sheer unassuming virtuosity of a particular turn of phrase or paragraph or article. It is all, along with everything else, in perfect good taste...