Reader’s Corner

Silk Parachute
By John McPhee
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010
Reviewed by Daniel Bellow

John McPhee, for those who have been living under a rock all this time, is the best writer of long-form journalism living in America today. He’s been on the staff at The New Yorker since Mr. Wallace Shawn was the editor, and has written about everything from fission to fishing in the same unflashy yet compelling style so often imitated by lesser practitioners of his art. I once saw a book review that contained the phrase “a-la McPhee” and I thought: there is no higher praise, that guy can die now.

Silk Parachute is McPhee’s twenty-eighth book (not counting the first and second volumes of The John McPhee Reader), a collection of short pieces most of which will be familiar to those with a subscription to The New Yorker. The title piece, a reminiscence of his mother, who was ninety-nine years old at the time he wrote it, is an intense four-page aria that conveys more feeling than you would have thought possible in such a small space. He stirred me nearly to tears with his description of how she stood with her youngest boy in the freezing cold, indulging his fascination with the planes landing at LaGuardia Airport, then took him downstairs and bought him a wonderful toy, a silk parachute that always came back to him. His publisher informs us, superfluously, that it has become his most anthologized piece of writing.

There are several such gems in this collection, and McPhee shows us more of himself here than is his usual habit. He takes us behind the scenes at The New Yorker for a glimpse of the fact-checking department, talks about all the weird things he has eaten in the line of reporterly duty, and introduces us to his daughter Laura, who takes long exposure photographs with an antique box camera.

Pick a sentence, any sentence, on any page of this book. Is there so much as a word out of place? I didn’t think so. McPhee’s powers are so great, he can interest me in subjects I don’t care about, and even, in the case of the sport of lacrosse, to which I am hostile. In my days at Northfield Mount Hermon, up the Connecticut River from McFee’s alma mater, Deerfield Academy, I thought the lax jocks were the worst people in the world. Intending to abandon the piece after a good faith effort, I was hooked for all sixty-two pages.

Did you know that the white cliffs of Dover are part of a chalk formation that extends east and north into France and Holland, and that the chalky soil is what gives the grapes of Champagne their flavor? Neither did I, until I read “A Season on the Chalk,” where McPhee somehow brings his grandchildren into the narrative without sounding contrived or cute. That’s when I resolved to read Basin and Range and McFee’s other geological writings, just to see what else I’ve been missing.

The anecdote that cemented my admiration beyond all danger of diminution, however, is the discussion of what passes for journalism at the U.S. Open. On the golf course one day, some fifty years ago, he had an epiphany: “I envisioned golf as a psychological Sing Sing in which I was an inmate.” He picked up the ball (of course he remembers the brand), put it in his pocket, and quit cold. As he describes the vapidity of the golf scene, I think what a good thing it is for all of us who like to read stories in magazines that John McPhee has had better things to think about all this time.

—Daniel Bellow