The Human without A Human

In what must have been the greatest present ever, I received a New Yorker subscription for Christmas. Since then, the stylish pages have been arriving in my letterbox (physical, for snail-mail and possibly even the occasional snail) once a week. But the quantity of terrific writing in each has proved slightly more than I can easily get through in a week--especially as I insist on reading the small-print theatre and gallery reviews for shows I will never see, on the other side of the world. So I'm a little behind. This is usually fine, seeing as the New Yorker isn't the world's newsiest publication, but I would like to catch up. So I've put down the novels for a moment, and have been reading New Yorker all the time. This means at least two hours a day on trains and buses, most days. Anyway, this might all translate into a fair few NY article discussions over the next few weeks.

Yesterday, I read a great article about the U.S. prison system: The Caging of America, by Adam Gopnik (NY staff writer--dream job anybody?). It addressed the weirdly, worryingly large number of people America keeps imprisoned--something like 6 million under some kind of 'correctional supervision.' The article was everything I think good CNF should be: informative, moving, challenging, and highly readable. But it lacked an ingredient that I've been thinking of as essential to these factors: an individual story. It has seemed pretty obvious to me that the key factor lifting the best CNF above journalism was a tangible human focus, the closely observed story of (at least) one specific person, even if as part of a broader social narrative. "The Caging of America" featured no such thing--no characteristic individual story to structure the social comment around, no real narrative anecdotes, not even any interviews. It's all 'she writes', and no 'she told me'. And yet I found the article to be a great success. How can this be?

I suspect part of the answer lies in the prevalence of the author's own ideas in the piece. It is not a human interest feature, but an essay. And it may be that cogent, well-researched thoughts on a profound human problem can be as engaging, thought-provoking, and even moving as a narrative account of one person's story. Another part, I think, is Gopnik's powerful activation of the reader's imagination. It is here that it becomes possible for us to connect with his topic on a level other than the intellectual. Consider his opening passage:

A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

By engaging the reader's imagination, Gopnik manages to make a story of generalities, of an anonymous 6 million, as personal and affecting as memoir.

It's an excellent article, and a fascinating topic--again, I hope I'll inspire someone to read it (luckily it's open to non-subscribers). I don't know how close I've come to the real core of it's strengths; I'd be very interested to hear other people's thoughts. My CNF class looks at essays in about a month's time, hopefully that'll bring clearer insights. I know I loved it, anyway.