Journalism: The Best American Magazine Writing 2007 Compiled by the American Society of Magazine Editors Columbia University Press, 502pp. US$16.95 Early one evening last winter, I found myself on Abbey St with no immediate plan. Perhaps I had just been buying some stationary.
I was a frustrated, down-at-heel, freelance journalist: frustrated at the failure of the Irish media to pay me to write the stories I wanted to write, frustrated at myself for failing to write them anyway, and fed up with the bitty news stories and reviews that kept me, or at least my by-line, alive.
In search of inspiration, I went into Eason, came out with the New Yorker, and retreated to the Oval, where I buried myself in a pint and a profile of Christopher Hitchens by Ian Parker. Hitchens, who "drinks like a Hemingway character: continually and to no apparent effect"; who writes poorly punctuated columns in a single draft, as if he were "transcribing a lecture he can hear himself giving". What a man. And what a profile.
Today, I am a frustrated, down-at-heel, freelance journalist, surviving on bitty news stories and reviews, etc, etc. But at least I have a subscription to the New Yorker. Parker's profile of Hitchens resurfaces in this American anthology. It is published with a lacklustre, textbook-like cover, and carries endorsements from the Sacramento Beeand Publishers Weekly. Don't be put off. It contains some of the finest journalistic writing you most likely did not read.
IT'S A BOOK to dip into according to your prejudices. For me, that means war reporting (broadly defined, I mean writing about things nobody would want to witness apart from reporters). American magazines are fond of a style of ruminative reportage that particularly suits war reporters, probably because these are the journalists most likely to still be trying to understand something long after they have filed their 500- word news report and gone home. This volume has some fine examples.
There is Hitchens himself, in an essay on the impact of Agent Orange in Vietnam. His own piece has one thing in common with the article on him in the same volume: both are largely about Christopher Hitchens. His style is ungainly, given to indulgent asides and cluttered with the devices of oral rhetoric ("I must tell you . . . Perhaps you remember . . . I swear to you"). It is almost anti-literary. He visits the deformed children born to victims of Agent Orange: "One should not run out of vocabulary to the point where one calls a child a monster, but the temptation is there". Rather than render a scene shocking, he voices his own shock. He writes outrage, not reportage. It shouldn't work, but Hitchens is a one-off, and it does.
There is similar outrage in William Langewiesche's reconstruction of the events surrounding the massacre of Iraqi civilians at Haditha by US Marines. But outrage never overwhelms the piece; instead, it is marked by a deep empathy for the soldiers on the front line in Iraq.
There was a military inquiry, and Langewiesche obtains the records. One contains an interview with an Iraqi army soldier, as transcribed by an inept translator. "'Someone is bomb me, I am shoot him, but he is just shoot at me, and I am just shoot him back.' This is the kind of fight that Donald Rumsfeld could not imagine", writes Langewiesche. Elsewhere, "War is fog. Civilians die".
There is a vivid account of the Beslan school siege, and an intimate piece on Zimbabwe's self-destruction. But most shocking is a piece of reportage closer to (this volume's) home: Tom Junod's report for Esquireon the prosecution in Louisiana of the owners of St Rita's nursing home in New Orleans, where 35 old people drowned in their beds when the levees broke.
Junod got access to the nursing home owners, Sal and Mabel Mangano, broke the story of how they were being made scapegoats for the disaster, and pulled it together in a shocking but page-turning narrative. Underlying it all is the empathy that comes from doubt: doubt that he, the writer, would have made better decisions than those implicated in his story. This is the key characteristic of good "war" reporting, because it is the only way to make the extraordinary and the horrific explicable. Langewiesche and Hitchens have it too.
THERE IS LIGHT as well as dark, notably Vanessa Grigoriadis's piece of haute-couture gonzo journalism for New Yorkmagazine on someone called Karl Lagerfeld, who has the energy of "twenty-five thousand Turkish elephants!" according to "socialite Anne Slater, wearing her big blue glasses and grinning up a storm".
Susan Casey writes about the patch of ocean in the North Pacific where plastic waste covers an area twice the size of Texas: "Out here in this desolate place, the water is a stew of desolate crap".
There is a dull-looking essay by Paul Theroux on geese, and a saccharine piece of film criticism from The Nation by Stuart Klawans. There is plenty of cliché, a dose of righteousness, and a general trend to gonzo self-indulgence. But the best in this volume stands with the best anywhere, essays with the compulsive readability of a good novel, but the immediacy and moral power of good journalism. And it's a lot cheaper than a subscription to the New Yorker.
Colin Murphy is a Dublin-based journalist. His essay on the rise and fall of the Irish sugar industry appeared in the Dublin Review last year