Coming Into the Country

"John has written more than thirty books, about incredibly esoteric subjects. There was a time when he was writing a book a year, as well as reporting for the New Yorker . He wrote a book about oranges. He wrote a book about a guy making canoes out of birch bark in the traditional manner of Native Americans. He wrote a book about a basketball player. He wrote a book about a tennis match. It’s an amazing range of things, but there’s a unifying voice and a unifying attention to detail and to structure. In my opinion Coming into the Country , about Alaska, is his best book. It describes the natural history and scenery in incredible detail, but he’s also writing about a very unusual part of America, and how it was becoming what it is now. He was there at an interesting moment in the seventies, when they were trying to find a new capital for the state. There were a lot of decisions to be made about resource management, and he illuminates those issues as well as describing how communities and individuals function in this incredibly rugged place. It’s a wonderful book. When I took his course on nonfiction writing, we looked at sections of Coming into the Country , and some of the decisions that McPhee made as a writer. For example, there’s a set piece, maybe a few pages long, about seeing a bear. It’s an incredibly vivid piece of writing, and that was the first time someone showed me this way of putting material into a story. You step outside of your normal voice and take a short detour, focusing on this other subject, whether it’s a bear or Chinese cigarettes – which is a set piece of my own in Country Driving . There are also some lessons about structure in Coming into the Country that are wonderful. Read the first section of the book and look at what McPhee does with the tenses. There’s a shift between the past and the present tense, and it plays a key role in the structure. I put this book on my list because I think it can teach a writer a lot about structure and control of material. He has all of these tools at his disposal. You notice from the beginning that he’s making decisions, that nothing is just being thrown out onto the page. It’s all been thought out; there’s a purpose to everything."