By Craig Taylor
THE PATCH
By John McPhee
242 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
Here is the seventh collection of essays by John McPhee, his 33rd book and perhaps his eleventy-billionth word of published prose. This far into a prolific career, it may be a good time to finally unmask the 87-year-old 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. He's been working this angle since the 1950s; it's a good thing we're finally onto him now.
Reading McPhee's back catalog prompts uncomfortable questions, like "Why am I suddenly compelled to know more about plate tectonics or the engine rooms of the merchant marine?" In "The Patch," it's "Why am I suddenly invested in McPhee's quest to pluck golf balls from local rivers using a telescoping rod called an Orange Trapper?"
At this stage in life, McPhee is no longer writing stories that take him hiking with blistered feet through the Glacier Peak Wilderness, and when he canoes, he paddles through "The Patch" of the title essay aware of his so far "uneroded" balance. He mentions cycling, but his exercise still seems to derive from sentence construction, prying out lazy words, rummaging through dictionaries and wringing suspense from unlikely moments, as when he extends his Orange Trapper. It "quivers, wandlike." He reaches and reaches and finally snatches up a golf ball before fleeing the approaching greenskeeper "at a speed so blazing that I probably could not duplicate it if I were to try now, but that was years ago, when I was 80."
McPhee finds surprising poetry in the material at hand, as in his list of found golf balls emblazoned with the names of mutual funds; the shanked Titleists of the 1 percent sink into his beloved Merrimack, Delaware and Connecticut Rivers. The Northeast has changed and is always changing, from the rivers to the pine forests to the earth's crust below. Nature, in McPhee's journalism, can only be preserved until it's threatened again.
So why is he interested in this telescoping rod? Why the 18-wheeled trucks of the title essay in his earlier book "Uncommon Carriers"? Why did he dedicate so many words to oranges in the brilliantly titled "Oranges"? "Compulsions are easy to come by and hard to explain," McPhee admits in this new collection. Over the years, with generosity, he's shared them. "I have never spent time with anyone who was more aware of the natural world." This is how McPhee described a mineral engineer in one of his finest books, "Encounters With the Archdruid,"adding, "He seemed to find in the land and landscape … an expression of almost everything he had come to believe about that world." With time, the description now shines back on its author.
"The Patch" is billed as a "covert memoir," but McPhee has smuggled excerpts from his life into most of his books. "When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author," he warned students in his recent writing memoir, "Draft No. 4." "If you see yourself prancing around between subject and reader, get lost." Never a known prancer, McPhee has instead drifted gracefully alongside his interviewees, in motion and in communion, in canoes and the cabs of trucks, listening with an almost obsolete respect to both sides of our various divides: to the mineral engineer and the environmentalist. "The Patch" is just another chapter in an ongoing memoir of generous curiosity.
It's McPhee's way to prod landscape and people until an avalanche of the verifiable tumbles into his notebooks. He is never one to simply walk through a meadow when the path passes "heather, lupine, horsemint, daisies and wild licorice." The color and fragrance of his writing could easily turn sickly if they didn't yield up the world with such precision, if they weren't deployed in the service of greater meaning.
Case in point: In the first and best essay in this collection, he vividly introduces the latest thing-you-didn't-know-you-cared-about: the chain pickerel, a fish with a "culinary quality … in inverse proportion to its size." As expected, McPhee describes an explosive "slime dart" that treads water "in much the way that a hummingbird treads air." But he ensures that the essay is as much about the legacy of his dying father. The image of a fish "as voracious as insurance companies, as greedy as banks" lingers like a splash, but the lasting impression is that of a patient lying in a hospital bed while his son tells him what he caught that morning with the old man's bamboo fishing pole.
About the only essay in this collection that McPhee can't elevate is an account of an N.C.A.A. lacrosse game pitting the University of Denver against Syracuse. McPhee is, thankfully, human in the face of a few daunting subjects. Even with his faultless sentences, research and structure, the subject remains, with earthbound obstinacy, a game of lacrosse.
The second half of the book comprises an experiment called an "album quilt," a montage of "fragments" of varying length from pieces done across the years, a mix of buffed and whittled snippets in which Joan Baez leads to Thomas Wolfe, and a profile of Barbra Streisand gives way to a disquisition on oared ships, and young Time magazine McPhee alternates with wise New Yorker McPhee. With 250,000 words available, McPhee says he cut 75 percent. He was left surveying a stack of heartwood.
For someone who filled his recent book on the craft of writing with diagrams of circles and arrows resembling halftime football strategies, "The Patch" is a departure. At first it looks like a revelation in looseness, as if McPhee had simply riffled through his voluminous back catalog. In his introduction to the album quilt, McPhee assures readers, "With 56 three-by-five cards on a large smooth table, I reached an arrangement of passages in an intentionally various, random and subjective manner." I accept the subjective; the random not so much. I'd believe him more if the book didn't end with two essays placed with intent. The first is a remembrance of Robert Bingham, his longtime editor at The New Yorker, a chance to convey Bingham's love for language and its finest practitioners. The second describes a journey to McPhee's beloved Alaska and the northern landscape's ability to broaden both a writer and a person. McPhee might like you to believe these two cue cards happened to cling together in a vigorous shuffle, but my hunch is that "The Patch" is surreptitiously structured, un-unplanned. After years of elevating his prose with patience and organization, the craftsman just can't help himself. I suspect it's all he knows.
Craig Taylor, editor of the literary magazine Five Dials, is the author of "Londoners."
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