Positive Addition

Positive Addition

New mag N+1-despite some negative signs-is worth a look.

By Jacob Siegel

N+1 is a biannual political and literary journal conceived as an heir to late and lamented literary and political magazine Partisan Review. N+1 has the admirable, antiquated aim of bringing attention to long-form writing that is thoughtful and serious, and it attempts to deal with broad cultural currents-or at least those streams powerful enough to wash up on the high ground. Which is also to say that it is often stuffy and pretentious with plenty of inflated writing and "serious young man" posturing. Yet, some opaque excesses aside, there is plenty worth reading, and they run pieces as good as anything around.

The magazine earned a name in its inaugural issue by putting a pox on some of the biggest houses in the business. The Weekly Standard got smacked with the label "Pomo neo-con," McSweeney's was accused of leading a "regressive avant-garde" and The New Republic was dismissed as a "Major League culture magazine supporting a farm team political bureau." They then went on to attack The New Republic literary critic James Wood and the magazine's Arts and Letters section anyway, accusing them of an excess of negativity and a shortage of positive vision of what contemporary literature should be. This last attack was strong enough to merit a reply from Wood in the current issue.

Each N+1 issue is loosely organized around a big theme. The newest one ranges broadly with an inquiry into the nature of pop music with-no surprise here-Radiohead as its centerpiece to short fiction, personal essays, and literary and cultural criticism.

In spite of this variety, the magazine's editors claim that the collection can be read as a whole, and that all its pieces revolve around something they call "reality principles". An example of these "reality principles" can be found in an essay entitled "The Neo-Liberal Imagination," which examines Harvard's putative meritocracy. Here a writer notes that while Harvard is proud and pointed in showing off its lower-income students, they are actually few and far between, and there is little indication that this will change. This is one of the most provocative essays in the collection, and certainly the one that most directly addresses the question of whether America builds Potemkin villages to distract itself from the existence of an entrenched class system. But the piece is far from characteristic of the magazine. Taken as a whole, N+1 lacks a unifying principle.

The big picture never comes into focus.

Beginning with a series of unsigned pieces that sum up everything from dating to the economy and "the reading crisis", the magazine's authors use the first person plural, with a tone of weary omniscience. When the writers say something on behalf of "we" they don't seem to be including the readers or speaking with a collective editorial identity, but instead voicing the thoughts of some disembodied brilliant and sensitive braintrust that has waited long enough and deserves to finally be heard. These pieces are smart but light, with plenty of grandiloquence but far less acuity.

The biggest problem with the N+1 is that culture and fiction section seems to have hoarded all the style and substance. When the political writing isn't a colorless rehash of a familiar topic it's even worse, bloated and hollow like a distended belly. Where the fiction and personal essays are clear and readable, the political musings are opaque and detached from their ostensible subjects. The most egregious example of this is an article from the new issue, "On Torture and Parenting." An extended riff on the psychological links between, well, torture and parenting, it ends up saying nothing remotely useful about either. Instead of asking any of the relevant questions about torture, it avoids the practical and material aspects altogether to trade in the sort of loose theoretical conjecture that allows anybody to be an amateur psychologist.

The essay on Radiohead is lucid and intelligent, one of the best in the issue and well worth reading for what it says about the meaning and limitations of pop music. The fiction is impressive, with a sharply observed story by Benjamin Kunkel and two fairytales by the Russian author Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. In his defense of himself and The New Republic, James Wood defends himself against the charge of being a reactionary or a professional hitman and reminds us of all the contemporary writers he's championed. But the problem with Wood is not that he's some demented gatekeeper trying to expel modernity like Dale Peck, nor is it that he confuses good taste with good writing, although that's closer to the truth. Wood's real problem is that he often fails to recognize his own well-reasoned and compelling vision of what the novel ought to be. Focusing on the most writerly aspects of a book, he can miss the real substance behind the form and end up writing bloodlessly about subjects that demand some reaction and engagement from a good critic.

This makes the N+1 critique of him more than a bit ironic, as their flaws are, more or less, those of which they accuse him. That's to be expected of serious young men with big ideas, something we know a little about in these pages, but a little less serious and a little more ideas would take these guys a long way. Overhauling the political section would be a good place to start, Here's one suggestion: In their previous issue they ran a piece on Christopher Hitchens, a man who's been profiled enough to earn a case with the NYCLU, and who seems to always produce shrill and cynical writing whenever he's the subject. Why not write something about Paul Berman, a leftist and a writer for Dissent. He's made similar arguments to Hitchens' for an anti-totalitarian war against Islamists but his progressive bona fides, lower-profile, and more consistent reasoning might provoke some deliberation and nuance from somebody trying to write about him and a more interesting profile as the upshot.

All that said, you should buy this magazine. You'll look smarter for owning it and get smarter by reading it, a rare and precious combination that deserves support from people who want good writing to find a home.