Editorial
Front Page - Friday, November 13, 2009
I Swear...
More from The New Yorker
Vic Fleming
Last week we were discussing The New Yorker. Or I was. It is the best literary bargain on the market. Cartoons, poetry, fiction, journalism and art: all for a dollar a week.
I’d pointed out some humor in a story in the Oct. 19 issue and segued into the opening sentence of a story in the Oct. 26 issue. “Procedure in Plain Air,” by Jonathan Lethem, a novelist eight times over, begins:
“Later, after the men in jumpsuits had driven up and begun digging the hole, Stevick would remember that the guy on the bench beside him had been gazing puzzledly into the cone of his large coffee and had tried to interest him in the question of whether the café’s brew aftertasted of soap or not.”
For some reason, this passage made me wish that I remembered how to diagram sentences. I had a professor in college who would occasionally digress from his lectures on Romantic Literature to diagram a sentence.
men / had driven –That’s about as far as I can get.
Please, if you are or know an English teacher who still goes in for such stuff, send or e-mail me a diagram of the above sentence.
Lethem’s sentence is by no means as humorous as the two cited in last week’s column (from Julian Barnes’ short story “Complicity”). But, as an introduction to a piece of fiction, it is stellar in serving to pique a reader’s curiosity.
If you’d like to treat this column as a literature lecture, then, before going forward, pause and write out all the questions that are suggested by this one sentence.
•••
Have you made your list? Let’s compare:
Later than what? Or, after what?
Who are the men in jumpsuits?
What do the jumpsuits signify?
Where did they drive up to?
What kind of a hole are they digging, or did they dig?
Who is Stevick?
Where is this bench?
Who is the guy who wants to talk about whether the coffee tastes soapy?
Does Stevick take the bait and discuss coffee quality with this guy?
•••
On the assumption that most of you do not want to treat this column as a literary lecture, I’ll move on.
I mentioned last week that the art in The New Yorker is outstanding. The original drawing to illustrate this story is, ironically, appropriate for Halloween: A bald man in an orange jumpsuit, with two white stripes on the arm and two white stripes on the torso, stands over a hole in a street.
The shape of the hole suggests a grave to me, although it’s outlined in orange (a fact that is explained in the story). In the foreground is a water hydrant, atop which rests an orange traffic cone with two white stripes (an image also explained in the story).
[To be continued]
I SWEAR
© 2009 Vic Fleming
|
|