Word: mcphee
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Writers tend to choose subjects that go along with their style and what they are trying to say; Tom Wolfe, for instance, used to write about social outcasts with strange, frenetic lifestyles because he wrote frenetically and believed the prevailing middle-class ways of living were becoming out-dated. McPhee writes about things that are generally as sedate as his style--tennis, Scotch whiskey, conservation--and that are diversions, not threats, for the upper-middle class, educated Easterners who make up his audience. His subject matter is often identical with the subject matter of the lush advertisements that surround...
...best things in Pieces of the Frame are outside this comfortable sphere--an article about a lucrative quarterhorse race in New Mexico and one about the decay of Atlantic City. In both McPhee the educated family man on vaction fades away; he is not present at all in the racing article, and he takes on an unusual, ghostly Monopoly-playing persona in Atlantic City. The removal helps, because it gets rid of the chummy, comfortable tone that dominates the rest of the book. McPhee's writing works best when he is confronting the unfamiliar and making an effort to convey...