Music of Detail

Americans collect things of the world, as if by storing and cataloguing factual objects or objective facts we could wall ourselves off from mutability. If we become bored with matchbook covers, if we create a scarcity of obscure beer cans, the Franklin Mint obligingly fabricates the pseudo-objects known as collectibles. John McPhee collects facts like the most acquisitive among us, and displays them to gorgeous advantage in volumes of elegant prose. Giving Good Weight is his 14th book in 14 years; it assembles five essays from The New Yorker, where the house phrase for the genre is “fact-pieces.” At his least, McPhee is fastidious in displaying his collection; at his most, a moral intelligence adds instruction to elegance.

The article which gives this book its title reports on the subsidized farmers’ markets of New York City and the truck farms which supply them. McPhee the reporter worked on the farms and sold produce in the markets. Telling his tale, he moves rhythmically from city to country, from growing to selling, making by his prose sentences a literary object as resolved as a sonnet. Or he moves scene and image the way a composer moves the melody, giving us what we long for in a manner that surprises while it satisfies. Naming the objects of this world—pastorals of city blocks, manufactories of carrots—he displays continual affection for the things and people named: for cabbages “in full original leaf, untrimmed, each one so broad and beautiful it appears to be a carnation from the lapel of the Jolly Green Giant”; for “Slade’s beans, Hodgson’s onions, Van Houten’s lettuce”; and for Slade, Hodgson, and Van Hou- ten. Affection wells up in description, in quotation, in narration. The effect is as busy, rich, and worldly—to complete a troika of analogies—as a painting by Breughel.

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Donald Hall

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Americans collect things of the world, as if by storing and cataloguing factual objects or objective facts we could wall ourselves off from mutability. If we become bored with matchbook covers, if we create a scarcity of obscure beer cans, the Franklin Mint obligingly fabricates the pseudo-objects known as collectibles. John McPhee collects facts like the most acquisitive among us, and displays them to gorgeous advantage in volumes of elegant prose. Giving Good Weight is his 14th book in 14 years; it assembles five essays from The New Yorker, where the house phrase for the genre is “fact-pieces.” At his least, McPhee is fastidious in displaying his collection; at his most, a moral intelligence adds instruction to elegance.

The article which gives this book its title reports on the subsidized farmers’ markets of New York City and the truck farms which supply them. McPhee the reporter worked on the farms and sold produce in the markets. Telling his tale, he moves rhythmically from city to country, from growing to selling, making by his prose sentences a literary object as resolved as a sonnet. Or he moves scene and image the way a composer moves the melody, giving us what we long for in a manner that surprises while it satisfies. Naming the objects of this world—pastorals of city blocks, manufactories of carrots—he displays continual affection for the things and people named: for cabbages “in full original leaf, untrimmed, each one so broad and beautiful it appears to be a carnation from the lapel of the Jolly Green Giant”; for “Slade’s beans, Hodgson’s onions, Van Houten’s lettuce”; and for Slade, Hodgson, and Van Hou- ten. Affection wells up in description, in quotation, in narration. The effect is as busy, rich, and worldly—to complete a troika of analogies—as a painting by Breughel.