When I picked up John McPhee’s Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, I was a little surprised to hear that the old man was still plying his trade.1 Not being a regular New Yorker reader, I hadn’t seen his byline for quite some time. For me, his name is closely associated with my teenage years, the 1970s, when everybody’s parents had a copy of Oranges, in its attractively contemporary fsg jacket, jazzing up their coffee table, and everybody’s hippie big brothers and sisters were reading, or pretending to read, Coming into the Country. I also remembered with pleasure his brilliant Levels of the Game, the stroke-by-stroke analysis of the 1968 U.S. Open semi-final match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner in which McPhee demonstrated the startling degree to which tennis is a game of the mind.

But when I began reading the first of the eight essays that make up Draft No. 4, a lot of less agreeable recollections came flooding back. I now remembered that in fact it had been McPhee’s endless, digressive, self- indulgent pieces, rubber-stamped first by William Shawn and then by Robert Gottlieb, that finally made me cancel my subscription to the New Yorker in irritation. Each one seemed to be some three-part, book-length exegesis on gutting a fish, or something of that sort. The ultimate insult, I recall, was a 1993 piece, of about 20,000 words, on tires. Not that it was McPhee’s longest,