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PIECES OF THE FRAME by John McPhee

PIECES OF THE FRAME

by John McPhee

Pub Date: June 23rd, 1975
ISBN: 0374514984
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

As everyone knows, McPhee is a man of many parts and interests and this is an assortment of his casuals which take place here and there. From a week's Travels in Georgia with two experienced ecologists inventorying the area's wildlife—opossums snakes, a nighthawk and a canebrake, a weasel (which they roast)—to the title piece in which he and his family spend a day at Loch Ness wondering whether they'll sight that monster who might be a serpent or just a worm. Other stops in Scotland include a distillery with its very special Josie's Well and a ten-mile pilgrimage from Birnam Wood to Dunsinane. His sports pieces include canoeing, basketball, tennis (Rod Laver on the court); the most exciting is Ruidoso in New Mexico where there's an All-American Futurity for a $766,000 purse attended by all the Texas cowboy millionaires, their abdomens sparkling with platters of silver, and one plain man from Arkansas who hopes his unknown Calcutta Deck will bring it home. Outclassing all of them, there's his own applied game of Monopoly in the Atlantic City where it originated—and the present day Search for Marvin Gardens in the one-time exclusive resort's deep and complex decay, rubble, dogs, rooming houses. This is an inspired piece. Occasional reading—McPhee is one of the most unobtrusively instructive and pleasurable writers around.