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...Staff writer Candace I. Munroe can be reached at cimunroe@fas.harvard.edu...
Although it is pleasant to see a talented writer branch into new territory, exposition remains McPhee’s strength and thus his longer, more journalistic pieces are most rewarding. McPhee’s style is unique, but in a way that does not encroach upon the material. The worst narrative journalists are those that cannot overcome their fondness for their topics; the slightly better ones have trouble overcoming their fondness for their own voice. McPhee is able to avoid both of these pitfalls...
Because of this, McPhee’s journalism can be challenging. His writing has a crisp physicality and attention to detail: he is fond of lists, and he does not cut corners. It is easy to see how a younger writer, more enamored of punch and cleverness, might sigh at a passage like the following from “Under the Cloth;” “They cross the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey and go north on the Palisades Parkway to Rockefeller Lookout in Englewood Cliffs.” The cacophony of place names does nothing...
...Tokyo” in the East Coast-centered world of lacrosse, he could easily be talking about himself; his entire oeuvre could well be seen as an unsuccessful attempt to escape this cultural milieu. While he certainly managed to transcend the typical place and subject matter of the northeastern writer, he never quite shakes that intellectual sensibility, nor the envelope of privilege through which he perceives the worlds he describes...
...Checkpoints,” McPhee good-naturedly summarizes the unglamorous aspects of journalism: the deliberations about comma placement, the silly follow-up interviews, the tension between writer, editor, fact-checker and subject. It’s enough to deter many who, after the quiet delights of the preceding essays, might understandably wish to quit their day jobs and write for “The New Yorker.” But while it certainly obliterates any illusions that McPhee’s job is an easy one, it is also an affirmation of why his essays are worthwhile, both...