Word: mcphee
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
THERE ARE NO FLIES on John McPhee, only the slightest lines of sweat, not enough body odor to warrant mention. His writing is clean, disinfected. Everybody says his prose shines; as usual, everybody is right. But it's the comfortable shine of a well-oiled set of carpenter's tools, fresh from a whetstone. No dancing hot shine of flame, nc shine of the evening ahead playing off fender chrome...
...McPhee made his reputation by writing well about a great variety of things-basketball players and orange growers; men who designed strange, useless aircraft; anachronistic citizens of the Hebrides or the Pine Barrens. His latest collection, Giving GoodWeight, which will be released in paperback next week, continues in the same expansive vein. Five stories this time-farmers who sell their produce in Manhattan, an engineer who decides the best site for a nuclear power plant is anchored off the Jersey Shore, a New York Times reporter given to playing pinball, a group of wealthy men making a canoe trip...
...rear up and head off the track. His is a Roone Arledge view of the world; should one have the luck to visit bobsledding one week, take in cliff-diving in Acapulco the next, and perhaps watch the pounding of the Firecracker 500, then one will have seen sport. McPhee's corollary: the variety of human experience means simply that if he can capture one of everything-accountant and orange grower, chef and outdoorsman, barber and candlestick maker-then he will have captured life...
...McPhee, of course, does manage to find a pattern. All his heroes share rationality and expertise, none are geniuses but all are talented. Steering clear of poets, not to mention saints, prostitutes and writers, he concentrates on the sane. His ideals are Jeffersonian-farmers wander in and out of his collections, and inventors rank only below professional canoeists in his pantheon. Meet Richard Eckert, a man given to "gray suits, gray socks, black shoes, white shirts and Paisley ties," who invents the wave-tossed nuke while he is "standing wet, naked and soapy in his shower." This, perhaps, is inspiration...
...peripatetic and specifist of sorts, McPhee -- like his cohorts -- must feel somewhat cheered now that many private concerns have risen to the general interest, and the essay once again enjoys a reasonably wide and diverse circulation. As for success and riches, the lot of the essayist has probably been most realistically defined, once again, by E.B. White. "A writer who has his sights trained on the Nobel Prize or other earthly triumphs had best write a novel, a poem, or a play," assures White, "and leave the essayist to ramble about, content with living a free life and enjoying...