McPhee and Thoreau

I was pleased to see, at Anecdotal Evidence, a celebration of John McPhee that begins with an appreciation of one sentence: “Junipers in the mountains were thickly hung with berries, and the air was unadulterated gin.”

McPhee, like John Updike, has been so prolific, so consistently excellent, and so well exposed in the pages of The New Yorker, that he is danger of being underestimated.

I was especially tickled that Patrick Kurp uncovers a link between McPhee’s work and Thoreau’s Journal that I had never suspected. (See also ”Now I Am Ice, Now I Am Sorrel” and Henry and John.)

McPhee admires competence and problem-solving in his subjects, qualities embodied in his prose. Among American writers he most resembles the Thoreau of the journal, not in “philosophy” (a dreaded word in this context) but in his regard for craft.