2018-08-13
A mix of new and old work from New Yorker staff writer McPhee (Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, 2017, etc.), assembled curiously but with his trademark eye for detail.
Fittingly for a writer obsessive about the nuance of words, the title has multiple meanings. In an essay anchoring the first section, the "patch" refers to a patch of lily pads good for fishing for chain pickerel and, less overtly, to his final efforts to bond with his dying father. The second section, "An Album Quilt," is deliberately patchwork, collecting excerpts from articles previously unavailable in book form. Many date back to his stint at Time magazine in the 1950s and '60s, when he produced celebrity profiles. Pieces about glitterati like Cary Grant, Richard Burton, and Sophia Loren seem peculiar coming from a writer now more associated with oranges, plate tectonics, and lacrosse, but his approach hasn't wavered: He delivers the goods in a dry (but not humorless) deadpan, trusting in the details of his research to produce the kind of surprise and irony that lesser writers turn to verbal acrobatics to achieve. The best detail in the Loren profile comes not from the actress or her associates but from her infant wet nurse; a brief profile of Joan Baez distills her rebellious attitude into the tart two-word quote that ends it. Still, to put it in golf terms McPhee might appreciate, his long game was always much stronger than his short game. He isn't built for "Talk of the Town"-style observational pieces about MENSA meetings or Peter Sellers' knack for accents. He's built for long-form pieces like "The Orange Trapper," in which his obsession with collecting lost golf balls becomes a deep dive into the wilderness and a kind of proxy study of the American class ladder.
A sturdy collection of top-shelf McPhee, with a grab bag of curiosities for fans.
"This far into a prolific career, it may be a good time to finally unmask [McPhee] as a one-trick pony. In The Patch, he again shamelessly employs his go-to strategy: crafting sentences so energetic and structurally sound that he can introduce apparently unappealing subjects, even ones that look to be encased in a cruddy veneer of boringness, and persuade us to care about them . . . The Patch is just another chapter in an ongoing memoir of generous curiosity." —Craig Taylor, The New York Times Book Review
"A work that gains its newness through structure alone . . . the experience of having decades of details and observations and exacting description wash over you, the time or the context of the writing never exactly clear, is a fascinating one . . . a more honest and effective way of stitching together the memories of a life, the structure in a way acknowledging that a neat beginning, middle and end is part of the artifice of writing." —Willy Blackmore, Los Angeles Times
"[McPhee] is a singular gem within the contemporary nonfiction genre: a writer who is known for his reported long-form narratives but who has a prose-poetic sense that extends down to his paragraphs and sentences . . . McPhee is more vessel than magician—and this is said with recognition of his skill. His work is behind the scenes and beneath the surface: The page belongs to the story." —Nick Ripatrazone, National Review
"McPhee’s sentences are as varied as the geographic features he so often describes: some move at a glacial pace, some jut up unexpectedly like exposed granite, others gooseneck like snaking streams, still others burn like understory, quick, dangerous. Always his sentences capture some crystalline essence in their intricate, melodious designs—making connections, spinning webs, accreting meanings." —Tyler Malone, Literary Hub
"Pulitzer winner John McPhee has spent his career covering subjects that don’t inherently seem like fodder for good, much less gripping, journalism: things like geology, oranges, shad. But he’s adept at making the esoteric seem essential and personal. The Patch, his latest collection of nonfiction essays, largely about angling and sports, is no exception . . . " —J.R. Sullivan, Men's Health
"The Patch, John McPhee’s new book, could only have been written by a journalist with decades of experience and an archivist’s disposition . . . In McPhee’s career-spanning miscellany, he marvels at Iceland’s glaciers, shadows Hershey’s chief chocolate taster and admires the roller-skating bears of the Moscow State Circus . . . There are many lovely passages in The Patch . . ." —Kevin Canfield, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“[McPhee] provides a bountiful cornucopia of insightful essays that display the wide range of his interests and tastes . . . McPhee delights in cracking open subjects, both ordinary and esoteric, and making them accessible to the layperson in works that testify to his virtuosity as one of the greatest living American essayists.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Delightful . . . It's a rare gift, to be able to see as well as McPhee sees, and to be given the time that it takes to describe the connections between things so clearly . . . It's also rare to encounter a writer who writes so artfully about himself while hardly writing about himself at all." —Bookforum
