Review: Draft No. 4

Draft No. 4 by John McPhee
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Review of John McPhee’s Draft No. 4

So I was at that point in my own work of extended nonfiction writing – the point where I can’t decide whether I am essentially finished or need to start over with chapter one – when it seemed like a good idea to talk my troubles over with someone who’d been through them before. And who could be better than John McPhee, arguably the premier nonfiction writer of the last generation?

The good news is that McPhee talks here about wrestling with some of the same things that are weighing on me now. In his chapter on “Structure,” for instance, he talks about a kind of base, architectural sense to a prose piece. I get it, I think, and I feel good about myself for getting it. He’s letting me (us) in on technical talk. It’s esoteric, but that’s OK. We’re in the same business. If we were guitarists, it might be a matter of unusual tunings. If we were tailors, it might be about the nature of inseams.

And there is a lot of that good news. Just about every one of these chapters has something to offer. He talks about the nature of facts in nonfiction, siding with me (and with every serious thinker on the subject I know save a single writer who led a workshop I was in) that, if you know you’ve invented anything, or even if you suspect you’ve gotten anything wrong, then what you have is fiction, not nonfiction. It’s often fun to hear him talk about the various lengths his New Yorker fact checkers would go to determine whether the plaque on Sylvia Plath’s old apartment is the color and style the author declared or whether a World War II Japanese fire balloon really landed on the roof of the facility where they worked on the Manhattan Project.

I have gotten a decent splash of what I wanted when I picked up this book. It’s comforting to think about how I might abstract the organization of my own manuscript – about the geometric shape I could use to sketch it. It’s comforting as well to think about the matter of “omission.” There are great nuggets that just don’t fit. And it’s inspiring to hear him talk about the nature of interviewing subjects; I can see how talk show hosts do it, but it seems a different art for writers like him (and maybe like me). One good tip: you know the nuggets when you find them.

Given all that, I feel grateful that this book has come out at just the moment I need it. I have, in fact, set a record for least time between discovering a book in the New York Times Review of Books and then reading it in full: three days.

But, I have to throw a little shade, too. In tone here, it feels as if, hearing my questions (and my questions are implicitly the questions his students and other would-be writers ask) he feels license to go in whatever direction his mind takes him. He’s the one who says he’s writing about writing, but it often drifts into memoir. That, in itself, is fine – I wouldn’t be reading this if it weren’t from the great John McPhee. (And that’s not sarcasm even if it sounds a bit like it.) But there are times when the self-references seem to assume more familiarity with his life and oevre than I bargained for, when it feels as if he’s walking down the hall and assuming I’m at his heels hanging on his every word. It’s a privileged tone, and I guess I prefer a less condescending one.

In one of the later chapters, he talks about frame of reference, mocking himself and other writers for assuming that readers will get references that may be out of date or obscure. In many instances, I have that reaction to his stories. At times he describes an editor or writer from the New Yorker in detail; at others he presumes we know someone or that we recognize the standing of one mid-century magazine versus another.

Overall, I’m happy to forgive that mild self-centeredness. The lessons he has to impart are the product of an idiosyncratic career as a writer, so I’ll accept them idiosyncratically. I’ll also appreciate the digressions and stories that grow out of and give prelude to those lessons.

Still, as a Midwesterner who lived in New York only briefly – not long enough to adapt to the omnipresent bustle – I feel a bit removed from the wisdom here. Every story and every writer is different is a cardinal principle, and I endorse it. But sometimes here I feel as if the experienced man who’s helping me is also reminding me that his world is so different from mine that I’m going to have to solve my writing problems on my own.




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