Silk Parachute by John McPhee

John McPhee made his reputation on the strength of short, elegant books on small subjects. Written with crystalline clarity, each book strove to live up to Flaubert’s dictum that an author should be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

For many years this has been a winning strategy for McPhee. Nearly everything he has written has appeared first in The New Yorker and then in a beautiful little edition from FSG. (He thus gets paid twice for everything he writes, a neat trick that must appeal to his Scottish nature—as it would to any author’s.)

It must seem strange to him, then, that his biggest bestseller, Coming into the Country, was his most sprawling book, devoted to his most unruly subject (Alaska). Equally odd is the fact that his most anthologized essay is one of his most uncharacteristic. “Silk Parachute,” the title piece in this new collection, is a tribute to his mother and a reminiscence of childhood—the sort of self-reflection that he very rarely allows himself.

McPhee looks back in several of the essays here: on his prep-school basketball career, on learning to canoe, and on his “life list” of prairie oysters, rattlesnakes, and other strange foods he has eaten in the line of duty. He spends time with his grandson in England and with his daughter as she and her partner create fantastically detailed photos with a Mathew Brady-style view camera. And he describes what it was like to work with the legendary fact checkers of The New Yorker and with the equally legendary William Shawn, the “iron mouse.”

It’s a little sad to see McPhee, now 79, apparently summing up his life’s work, but it’s clear to see that while giving pleasure to his readers over the years he has harvested a great deal for himself.