Critical Evaluation

“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.”

Craig Taylor, “In These New Essays, John McPhee Finds Poetry in the Material at Hand.” The New York Times. December 17, 2018.

First Excerpt

“You move your canoe through open water a fly cast away from a patch of lily pads. You cast just shy of the edge of the pads—inches off the edge of the pads. A chain pickerel is a lone ambush hunter. Its body resembles a barracuda’s and has evolved to similar purpose. Territorial, concealed in the vegetation, it hovers; and not much but its pectoral fins are in motion. Endlessly patient, it waits for prey to come by—frogs, crayfish, newts, turtles, and smaller fish, including its own young. Long, tubular, with its pelvic fins set far back like the wings of some jets, it can accelerate like a bullet.

 

“You lay a kiwi muddler out there—best white or yellow. In the water, it appears to be a minnow. Strip in line, more line, more line. In a swirl as audible as it is visible, the lake seems to explode. You need at least a twelve-pound leader, because this fish has teeth like concertina wire. I tried a braided steel tippet once, of a type made for fish of this family, but casting it was clunky and I gave it up in favor of monofilament thick enough to win the contest between the scissoring teeth and the time it takes to net the fish. I’ve been doing this for more than thirty years, always in October in New Hampshire with my friend George Hackl, whose wife owns an undeveloped island in Lake Winnipesaukee. Chain pickerel are sluggish and indifferent in the warmer months. In the cold dawns and the cold dusks of October, they hit like hammers, some days on the surface, some days below it, a mass idiosyncrasy that is not well understood.”

 

Second Excerpt

“The tilt of these essentially parallel faults is to the north. In each earthquake, the lower side slipped north, the upper side moved south. In each earthquake, the north-south dimension of the basin shortened somewhat, and its adjacent mountains went up a couple of feet. This local compression began in relatively recent time, when the Pacific Lithospheric Plate, moving essentially northward, sort of shouldered into the North American Plate where the San Andreas Fault presents an awkward curve that is known in geology as a prominent restraining bend. The mountains went up. People came, and Los Angeles went up. The mountains, hills, anticlines will continue to go up, the basin will continue to be compressed, as long as the Pacific Plate keeps pushing into the restraining bend. The Pacific Plate, sliding, weighs 345 quadrillion tons.

“Like a city planner, the plate motions have created Los Angeles. The plate motions have shaped its setting and its setting’s exceptional beauty, raising its intimate mountains ten thousand feet. The mountains are such a phalanx that air flowing in from the west cannot get over them, and a result is the inversion layer that concentrates smog. Plate motions in Los Angeles folded the anticlines that trapped the oil that rained gold and silver into the streets. Plate motions have formed a basin so dry that water must be carried to it five hundred miles. Plate motions have built the topography that has induced the weather that has brought the fire that has prepared the topography for city-wrecking flows of rock debris. Plate motions are benign, fatal, eternal, causal, beneficial, ruinous, continual, and inevitable. It’s all in the luck of the cards. Plate motions are earthquakes.”