The reason I eat a sandwich is because I want to eat a little bit of a lot of good things — meat, cheese, veggies, spread, really good bread — all at once. As sandwiches swell larger and larger, that calculus gets thrown off. I end up with a bite that’s all meat, another that’s just veggies, and that uncanny situation where the center of the sandwich protrudes out too far compared to the rest of it, only exacerbating the unbalanced bite problem.
I understand why these hulking, overstuffed sandwiches have taken over: They look great on Instagram, where it’s all about that sweet cross-section shot, but this has come at the expense of the eating experience. The best sandwiches I’ve had recently have looked modest in pictures, but they’ve resulted in perfect bite after perfect bite since I can squish the whole thing down and actually eat every element at the same time.
All writers have false starts. We once stuffed them in manila folders and pushed them deep inside our desks; now we store them in a different kind of folder. But we still rarely give up on them, harboring a shameful hope that someday we’ll perform freelancer’s CPR, breathing new, sellable life into them.
If you’re John McPhee, longtime New Yorker staff writer, author of 31 books and nonagenarian statesman of what’s often called longform journalism, you can collect these abandoned projects into a book. “Tabula Rasa: Volume 1” is a charming, breezy collection of reminiscences about projects that didn’t make it, ideas that never got fully baked, research never written up, either because the subject died or because McPhee, who was born in 1931, lost interest along the way.
The narrative arc is about "relentless human progression and our resulting departure from nature," the evolution from animal to human being to machine and the violence of imposed order, the violence necessary for dominance. This theme manifests throughout, in language and narrative and numbers and manners and hierarchy and markets.
Returning to the world of his novel “Harlem Shuffle,” Colson Whitehead’s “Crook Manifesto” is a dazzling treatise, a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game. There’s an element of crime here, certainly, but as in Whitehead’s previous books, genre isn’t the point. Here he uses the crime novel as a lens to investigate the mechanics of a singular neighborhood at a particular tipping point in time. He has it right: the music, the energy, the painful calculus of loss. Structured into three time periods — 1971, 1973 and finally the year of America’s bicentennial celebration, 1976 — “Crook Manifesto” gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people.
John Milas’s honest, sad and disturbing first novel, “The Militia House,” might be called gothic fiction or horror, but at heart it’s the story of one man’s struggle to maintain his grip on reality amid incessant conflict. Our narrator, Corporal Loyette, has joined the Marines primarily because his brother was killed by an I.E.D. while serving in Iraq. He doesn’t speak of revenge, but does have a sense that it is his duty to go, to see the elephant, to show his face on a battlefield of his own time.