An Article in The New Yorker

For over ten years, I’ve subscribed to The New Yorker. In our book club, a group of men mostly in my age group, an impressive and eclectic group (of which I’m still a newbie after sixteen years of active participation), I still feel like a person who is not all that well-read. At any rate, of the thirteen of us, approximately half are subscribers to the Magazine. I suppose we are readers, at least to some extent. The reason that “to some extent” is used is that the magazine comes every week, and most all of us see it pile up at times. On occasion, the overflow stack must be carted over the local hospital where the same lovely older woman who is the desk receptionist at St. David’s (she must have worked there forever) just cackles when I bring in my latest stack of magazines, especially The New Yorker.

My goal is to at least sit down in a quiet room once a week and start turning the pages. A creature of habit, I always start with the Letters, and mutter to myself how difficult it must be to get a letter published. Every word must have been polished and burnished for hours. One of the guys in our book club actually had a letter accepted and published two months ago, and he mentioned to me that his letter was edited heavily, with a portion elided completely. But still, wowzer!

The issue I got around to reading today (March 21, 2020) was dated March, 16, so I was "right on it,” for sure. After starting in my usual manner, a letter entitled “The Joe and Bernie Show” simply knocked me out. Of course it was very critical of Mr. Trump, but full of information. One small sentence rang true. “Trump has a bully’s instinct for identifying points of tension.” In fact, the President has mastered the art of intimidation, whether it’s at the podium when he dislikes a question from the press and cuts off the person with “Excuse me,” the way he does, or whether he comes completely unhinged as he has done this week with members of the press corps during the Corona virus updates. Poor Mike Pence, the nominal chair of the Task Force, usually stands meekly, ready for an obsequious supporting role when called on. Amy Davidson Sorkin, the writer of this letter, is simply brilliant; a person could stop right there and get one’s full money’s worth from this entire issue.  I flipped through the pages and felt at one point that I might actually get through the issue without finding an article that I simply "must"  read, but then I came to a book review of Hillary Mantel’s third work in the trilogy about Thomas Cromwell and the Tudor trilogy.

Hillary Mantel

Ms. Mantel’s first book, Wolf Hall, and her second work, Bring Up the Bodies, have gotten wide circulation in both print as well as stage and screen. This review, actually five and a half full pages, not including a drawing of Mr. Cromwell (before he lost his head … oops, spoiler) is simply brilliant. But almost everything in the Magazine is.

The first of the three works.

And the second.

The reviewer, David Mendelsohn, is the editor at large at the New York Review of Books, so he’s a pro at this. He must have read every one of Ms. Mantel’s huge oeuvre of work, as he mentions various works and comments on them in a way that confirms my knowledge of her work is superficial at best. However he really captures the energy and drama, especially of the first two books in the trilogy, even as he finds this new, and final portion, somewhat repetitious. He actually feels that she did what she needed to do regarding Cromwell in the first two works, and could have left the dramatic and grisly sending to history and the reader’s imagination.

Two pieces of Ms. Mantel’s prose, interspersed with the reviewers words, and repeated here are examples of the great writing of both: By the end of the trilogy, the King – “a man of great endowments, lacking only in consistency, reason, and sense – has come to embody the irrational forces that Cromwell has always tried to combat and that Mantel has always probed.” In addition, “Cromwell, the mirror, has mistaken himself for the light, which can only be Henry.” This second entry explains the title of the third and final work in the trilogy, “The Mirror and the Light.”