Tabula Rasa, Volume 1

May 1, 2023
In this solid collection, McPhee (The Patch), a New Yorker staff writer since 1965, describes “in capsule form the many writing projects that I have conceived and seriously planned across the years but have never written.” The 51 brief pieces stick to the Pulitzer winner’s signature mix of personal reflection and observational journalism, touching on his recollections of visiting Extremadura (an “autonomous community” in Spain that was the birthplace of many conquistadors, including Hernando de Soto and Hernán Cortés), stumbling into a professorship at Princeton’s fledgling journalism program in 1975, and road-tripping from Maryland to Ohio with his daughters. Several dispatches meditate on the 92-year-old author’s mortality, as when he discusses abandoning his plan to write “about a 25,000-cow dairy farm in Indiana” to instead compile this volume, which he suggests is an “old-man project” intended to keep him active. Standout selections consider the “neologymnasts” in the pharmaceutical industry who rebrand generic medications, the construction of the leaning tower of Pisa, and the creative pieces of nonfiction writing his students came up with during Covid-19 lockdown. McPhee’s gift for language is on full display (he calls Vermont and New Hampshire “two goat legs reversed for packaging”), but the unfinished snippets will likely hold the greatest appeal for the author’s most ardent admirers, who will enjoy the intimate look inside his process. It’s a revealing compendium of curios from a first-rate writer.