THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 16, 1997 TAG: 9702130554
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: Bill Ruehlmann
LENGTH: 75 lines
The thing about pronouncing anything ``new,'' especially in America, is that it gets old fast. Today the so-called New Journalism - so designated by Tom Wolfe and other switched-on wordsmiths of the late 1960s - is upwards of three decades out of date. And it wasn't all that new to start with.
But the genuine vigor of what was identified as New Journalism - ambitious nonfiction marked by reportorial rigor and grace in the prose - endures in the work of superior practitioners like John McPhee.
``Because of his prolificacy and the consistent quality of his books,'' writes critic Michael Pearson of Old Dominion University, ``McPhee, perhaps more than any other nonfiction writer of his generation, has legitimized the literary importance of nonfiction.''
Pearson puts the man and his writing in context with John McPhee (Twayne Publishers, 145 pp., $24.95), an incisive entry in Twayne's evaluative United States Authors series.
Formerly, conventional critics gave fiction writers all the respect. Art resided exclusively within the pages of the Great American Novel. Journalists labored in the lesser sweatshop of Craft, where hacks hewed out informative but ephemeral tomes requiring persistence, not vision.
The nonfiction writer's status changed with justly celebrated true-life achievements like The John McPhee Reader (1976) and the coincident exhaustion of contemporary fiction.
McPhee, 65, who made nothing up, has turned out 23 well-observed books to date, diamonds all in the treasure box of shaped prose.
The energetic author is very like the dervish chef McPhee describes in Giving Good Weight (1979): ``Otto is moving so fast his work has become a collage of itself, as - all in a minute - he pours out lime juice, eats a handful of seviche, tosses a veal into a skillet, and hunts through the wild mushrooms for deposits of grit. Chaos cannot get at him in the depths of composition. Those are finished compositions going out through the door - the mottled brown envelopes of pork loin, the drapefold saucing of the poached quennelles.''
Finished compositions; fever and repose exist side-by-side in McPhee's writing, always fresh, always focused, always in synch.
``McPhee,'' writes Pearson, ``is a reporter, a man transported by facts, warmed by details, and in the careful attention to the specifics of a scene or a character's idiosyncracies, he fashions stories from truth and made with art.''
Pearson demonstrates how McPhee takes the untidy minutiae of real life and organizes it into epiphany. The form of McPhee's work imitates its subject matter, like the structure of Oranges (1967), shaped in sections at once as intricately connected and individually independent as segments of the fruit itself. McPhee contains the sweet narrative juice within a tightly unified architectural skin.
McPhee's marvelously various range is suggested by titles of his books - The Headmaster (1966), Looking for a Ship (1990), The Ransom of Russian Art (1994). Pearson shows that the author's gift for emotion recollected in tranquility stems from a life lived in and around the university community of Princeton, N.J. His first book, A Sense of Where You Are (1965), was about basketball player Bill Bradley, but its title constitutes a kind of theme for McPhee's work, which is imbued with place.
Ultimately, McPhee, like Pearson, is an educator.
Pearson is the right person to explain McPhee. A family man like his subject, the English professor, 47, has written many articles and two books that deal with the profound influence of geography on the creative life: Imagined Places (1991) and A Place That's Known (1994). He has just completed a memoir of his own locale-informed youth, titled Dreaming of Columbus: A Boyhood in the Bronx.
McPhee says pay attention; Pearson says pay attention to McPhee. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia
Wesleyan College. ILLUSTRATION: WANT TO GO
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