John McPhee has mastered the art of seriously not taking himself too seriously. The Princeton-born and -educated Pulitzer Prize- winning author of more than 28 books and longtime essayist for The New Yorker offers us an enchanting collection of pieces here that are eccentric and intellectual and brimming with enthusiasm.
Whether describing the intricacies of the game of lacrosse or his grandson’s talent for creating precocious graffiti or merely recounting the bizarre foods he has sampled over his 79 years, McPhee, and this surely seems to be part of his master plan, remains modest and humble and always cognizant that he is but a small part of a large and magnificent universe, rather than the center of it.
Even when the primary subject of a piece revolves around a cherished loved one, McPhee manages to delicately place them as part of a larger tapestry. Sometimes a reader may find himself growing frustrated by his frequent digressions, but that same reader will soon be transported into McPhee’s world, where the miracles of science and technology and the physical world are explored.
The author rejects pettiness and darkness and seems to waste little or no time worrying about the tragedy of the human condition. He is consumed by an undying quest for knowledge. In a manner similar to Richard Preston, the wonderful science writer who has explained complex topics to the general public, McPhee performs in a similar manner, often bringing readers to places they have never even considered.
For example, in 2002, he wrote “The Founding Fish,” which discusses the American shad, a large and feisty fish found mostly in the Northeastern United States. McPhee tells us about the shad’s role in history, discusses its heroic migratory habits, noting that a single shad can travel more than 10,000 miles in its lifetime, and then veers off into arcane areas of fish biology while lamenting on his own frustrating experiences trying to catch a shad. His thought trajectory is boundless.
McPhee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece on geology, “Annals of the Former World,” was the result of a two-decade effort spent working with various geologists who studied rocks at various outcrops by the road.
For McPhee, the experience was almost religious. He claimed after completing this book in 1998 that “You realize that the time of the dinosaurs is very, very recent comparatively. It’s only 65 million years ago. The earth is 4.6 billion years old. Once you’ve grasped that, you can close your eyes and really sense the motions of collision and mountain-building and oceans appearing and disappearing. You can see it going by, in your mind.”
In a wonderful essay in this collection, McPhee accompanies his daughter and her working partner, both landscape photographers whose work has been exhibited at various prestigious museums throughout the country, as they attempt to take a perfect photograph in the blistering summer heat of the Bronx, where they have set up their 18-pound Deardorff view camera at the New York Botanical Garden.
This particular camera is unusually powerful. It creates an 8-inch-square negative that can be blown up into a print that exceeds 40 square feet. The image created is an amazingly vibrant high-definition panoramic view that allows the looker to see the tiniest details — a single blade of grass or hair, or each petal of a small flower.
We watch McPhee as he observes his daughter working with her colleague as they attempt to figure out how to get the best shot. We listen to him listening to them analyzing the light, fretting over camera angles and trying to figure out which lens they should use before finally deciding to shoot the picture. It is a long, laborious process but McPhee is enthralled by his daughter’s perfectionism and idealism and originality, which seem so much like his own.
She has traveled the world with this camera taking breathtaking photographs, from the pyramids in Yucatan to a power station in Iceland to a three-story monument she found near the New Jersey Turnpike that listed the names of 42 dead rock stars. Like her father, she is drawn to the unusual and often searches out places where altered and unaltered worlds intertwine.
None of McPhee’s essays is sad or depressing or lonely, not even the first one, about his 99-year-old mother, who cursed Alfred Knopf when he rejected her son’s first submission.
McPhee can still remember being 11 and being taken by his mother to LaGuardia field to watch the airplanes take off and land, leaving him spellbound and euphoric — feelings that remain with him to this day. This was surely his mother’s most enduring and greatest gift to him: a love of exploring the world. Reading Mcphee, it becomes our gift.
Elaine Margolin is a freelance book reviewer and essayist in Hewlett, N.Y.
NONFICTION
Silk Parachute Essays
by John McPhee, $25.95
