鈥淭abula Rasa, Volume 1鈥� by John McPhee (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
What do you do when your writing career lasts seven decades but you haven鈥檛 said everything you once thought about saying? If you鈥檙e John McPhee, you crack open your notebooks and give fans a taste of the stories you never wrote.
That鈥檚 the premise behind 鈥淭abula Rasa,鈥� which the 92-year-old McPhee wryly indicates is 鈥淰olume 1鈥� because 鈥渢he purpose of (the project) is to keep the old writer alive by never coming to an end.鈥�
There are plenty of snippets here that will make readers wish McPhee had indeed delved deeper into particular topics. A longer profile of fellow writer Edward Abbey would have been nice after hearing him recount the stoning of a rabbit at a Princeton colloquium. Or more color from a 1979 Independence Day fireworks party aboard Malcolm Forbes鈥� yacht in New York鈥檚 East River.
Some of the best writing in this collection could be considered memoir 鈥� from McPhee鈥檚 high school job as a billy club- and flashlight-toting night watchman at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, to finding one-sentence and three-page autobiographies written by his late parents among their possessions.
Most of the writing is no more than vignettes, as in 鈥淏ack up the Riverbank,鈥� which lists the 19 species of fish McPhee has caught on the Delaware River. He chose to write about only one, the American shad, in his book 鈥淭he Founding Fish.鈥�
鈥淭abula Rasa鈥� demonstrates just how broad McPhee鈥檚 鈥渢abula鈥� has always been. He鈥檚 like an NBA star who always has the green light to shoot. His career as a contributor and staff writer at The New Yorker, begun in 1963 and still going, allows him to pitch editors on topics that interest him, then travel to where those stories are. Sometimes even after all that effort the words never get published, and we鈥檙e left with the mere promise of a longer piece, as in the essay called 鈥淏eelining.鈥�
鈥淭he longest beeline distance in the forty-eight contiguous United States runs from Bellingham, Washington, to Boca Raton, Florida, two thousand seven hundred miles and change.鈥� I don鈥檛 know about you, but I鈥檇 buy a McPhee book featuring the characters he鈥檇 meet along the way. Instead, all we can do is wait for 鈥淰olume 2.鈥�
Rob Merrill, The Associated Press
