Just out this month is a sadly (and, I suspect, needlessly)
flawed book by Renata
Adler. Only people who can tolerate reading an ordinarily good
writer in a book where she is, not at all ordinarily, committing
many unexpected lapses will want to bother with Gone: The
Last Days of The New Yorker (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
Unless, that is, they are as die-hard on the subject of The New
Yorker as I am . . .
What went wrong here? The writing is frequently abysmally bad. Too
often, Adler's sentences fail to make sense, fail, indeed, even to parse.
Her facts are frequently inaccurate. I had begun making a list of those
that struck me as of doubtful likelihood; Robert
Gottlieb's review, in The New York Observer, includes many of
the same examples, so I omit them now.
One is reminded, reading this book, of how necessary good editors are
even for writers who are professionals. The New Yorker once
practiced good editing. Adler looked better in that environment --
much better! -- than she looks here.
Of course, that is part of her point. The magazine formerly known as
The New Yorker has flown the coop. It's somewhere else. It's not
here. It's gone. Some kind of slaughtered chicken, headless, still flaps
wildly about on the newstand floor looking like a well-remembered
and much-loved magazine called "The New Yorker." But that's
precisely what it ain't.
And its absence, its loss, its unnecessary death, its murder -- however
one chooses to describe or explain its "gone-ness" -- is the cause of this
prolonged, out-of-control lament for The New Yorker of the great
Shawn days.
Too bad that Adler's book is so uncontrolled. Too bad that no
friend told her that she had let her anger, her rage, and her sorrow run
away with her. Too bad that no one pointed out that the book she has
produced is so self-serving and unintentionally self-revealing (Gottlieb
is good at noticing these flaws in it, and at noticing, too, how
unpleasant they are) that its point is vitiated. For all that, I thought
the book worth reading.
I've met no other reader who agrees with me, I should add.
Despite having so many things wrong -- badly wrong -- with it,
Adler, right off the bat, repays the attention of anyone concerned with
such aspects of book history as the different ways in which books
and magazines (or journals) define, indeed create, their
audiences and their audiences's sense of "community." In addition, her
discussion of the American intellectual community and its vehicles of
non-specialized expression is important. Finally, anyone who cared
about The New Yorker will find that her book is necessary, warts
and all.
That magazine is now as dead as a doornail. Even if David Remnick, its
current editor, succeeds in making it once again a magazine to which
someone might feel more or less . . . well, "respectable"? . . . while
giving it attention (a trick his predecessor never learned), whatever that
magazine turns out to be won't be anything like what it once was.
David Lodge's Home Truths (London: Secker and
Warburg, 1999 -- paperback), a novella, is a fun fast read. Lodge's
characters are a writer who is prolific and successful in the mass media;
his old friend, a writer who has stopped writing and now anthologizes
instead; the anthologist's wife who, once upon a time, was part of a
threesome when they were all young and at university together; and a
newspaper reporter whose specialty is evisceration of her interviewees.
This is not a book that will live in memory in the manner of
Changing Places or Small World (one looks forward, in hope
and expectation, to seeing Lodge, some day, revisit Morris Zapp in
Chicago). Much slighter fare -- and, of course, a much slighter book -- it
is nonetheless an extremely enjoyable meditation on the meandering
"progress" of the lives people lead and of the ways in which our modern
media society may impinge on those lives with unblinking and unthinking
effects.
The "Great English Novel"? No. Not even the "Great English Novelette."
But I picked the book up off a new arrivals shelf and did not put it down
till I had finished reading every word. I recommend it with great warmth.
A friend recommended the very short work by
Zvi Kolitz, Yosl Rakover Talks to God, trans. Carol Brown
Janeway, from the edition by Paul Badde, afterwords by Emmanuel
Lévinas and Leon Wieseltier (New York: Pantheon, 1999). The
entire book doesn't hit a hundred pages. Kolitz's part of it ends
on page 25.
Rakover is writing things down as his building -- located in Warsaw --
is about to fall. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto is about to be
successfully suppressed by the Nazis; things look bad for Yosl. Indeed,
they are bad: he will be dead within minutes of finishing his
manuscript, if he is even able to finish it. In these last few
minutes of his life, Yosl, whose wife and six children have, as the
undertakers nowadays so sweetly put it, "preceded him in death" --
unpleasant death, you will be unsurprised to hear -- remonstrates with
God. All these things you have done to us, Yosl writes, none of them good,
all of them reflective of the "hastoras ponim -- God has hidden His
face" (p. 10): all of them cannot keep me from honoring your name.
It's all very impressive, I suppose. Alas, I didn't believe a word of
it.
On the other hand, some of its readers have found it so convincing that
the revelation that this document is a fiction, not an autobiographical
fragment really found amidst the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto (as it claims,
in a manner traditional to fictions, to be), has come as an unbelievable
thunderbolt. The book thus resembles Wilkomirski's Fragments (also
translated by Carol Brown Janeway), a fiction published by its author as
if it were autobiography, "fact." Kolitz has written a fiction that its
readers assumed was fact (although he himself seems not to have
anticipated or sought this fate for his story). The discovery of their
origins as fictions has distressed readers of both books.
Paul Badde writes about the discovery of the author, Zvi Kolitz (still
alive in New York), and the effort to trace an accurate version of his
original text (written in Yiddish? German? English?). Lévinas and
Wieseltier react to the book in their afterwords ("Loving the Torah More
Than God"; "A Privation of Providence"). Their essays are interesting; I
was (to my surprise) particularly taken by Wieseltier's skeptical response
to the book.
Kolitz's fiction is naive in the extreme. Moreover, his are assumptions
(whether adopted for the sake of the fiction or not how can I tell?) I
find little short of astonishing. Still and all, I'm glad I read the
entire little book. It's interesting, it's troublesome, and it's worth
thinking about. A bissel.
Another short book I read this month
-- is there a pattern here? -- is Henry A. Grunwald's Twilight:
Losing Sight, Gaining Insight (New York: Knopf, 1999). A child
concerned that I eat more carrots gave me the book for Christmas, and I
guess I'm glad I read it: it's not bad.
Grunwald writes from the perspective of a person slowly losing all
sight to progressive macular degeneration. I've not read much in this
area; the only comparable book I know is the reverse story, that is, of a
man who regains his sight after many years of blindness. (Western American
historian Robert V. Hine tells that story in Second Sight
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) -- and a lovely story
it is, both as it describes what the sightless Hine was able to learn to
do as a historian, and as it describes his responses to seeing for the
first time people he has lived his entire life with.)
Grunwald's book is a lot less cheerful than Hine's, especially for
someone who depends on his sight as much as I. Yet it does not drown in
self-pity, looking instead at questions such as the way in which a
print-culture person (Grunwald) manages to stay afloat in a world where
print is no longer able to buoy him.
Curiously, in the same way that Renata Adler almost inadvertently
reflects on magazine culture in her book about The New Yorker,
TIME's former editor Grunwald also raises matter worth attention
and thought by people for whom print culture is a way of life or a subject
of scholarly investigation -- or both. And it does so in a way that will
not depress you.
A long book, not a short one, is Philip Ziegler's
London at War 1939-1945 (New York: Knopf, 1995); but I read it
anyway, in part as a pendent to John Lukacs's Five Days in London,
which I'd read last month.
Not a book without its longueurs, London at War has the virtues
of a good story to tell that is also an important one. But its problems
are severe. On the basic level of simple vocabulary, I wish his American
publishers had provided a glossary, especially of abbreviations. Perhaps
for people for whom, like Ziegler, the Blitz is a living memory, terms
like "ARP," et al., need no elucidation -- but, even in Britain,
their numbers must perforce be growing fewer every year. Here, not only
are they very small but also they always were.
In addition, Ziegler mentions, but never really explores, the underside
of the generally triumphal tale he tells. The Black Market; the impact on
neighborhoods, and on London generally, of the physical destruction the
city endured under reiterated bombing raids and rocket attacks; the impact
on individual people of the deaths they experienced (children, parents,
siblings); the experiences of Londoners in exile (children sent to the
countryside, or Canada, or the United States); the experiences of soldiers
-- from Europe, from the Commonwealth, from the United States -- or of
refugees "exiled" in London; the utter failure of the post-war rebuilding
effort: Ziegler mentions such issues, and others, but he scants every
single one of them.
The result is a book that manages, oddly, to elicit a sense that it is,
in part, merely propaganda. It also simply reeks of an
aren't-you-glad-we-went-through-this-together-and-became-heroes attitude
characteristic of feel-good history. I learned things from this book. But
not enough.
I read the paperback edition of John Grisham's
The Testament (1999; rpt. New York: Island Books, 2000) this
month. It's a really bad book. And I really read it all the way through.
And I really enjoyed it. Sorry.
Owen Wister's Lady Baltimore (New York:
Macmillan, 1906) will not be everybody's cup of tea. I enjoyed reading
it less as "literature" -- a satisfied reader of The Testament
would lack credibility in this line anyway, of course -- than as history.
The novel's narrator is a youngish man who represents the aristocracy
of the post-Civil War triumphant North. He finds himself, for ridiculous
reasons, in what I assume has to be Charleston, South Carolina, doing
research in his family's genealogy. He has been sent there by a formidable
(pre-Wodehousian) aunt to demonstrate his fitness for membership in an
organization that depends on descent from royalty.
He soon encounters a woman in whom he takes an interest. She works at
the place where he eats lunch. While he is there, she takes an order for a
wedding cake (a "Lady Baltimore") from a young man about to be married to
another woman. The other woman represents "new" standards appropriate to
the Gilded Age: that is, no standards but avarice and money, no family
background (a father "conspicuous for personal prudence" at the Battle of
Chattanooga [p. 35] -- i.e., he turned and ran), and a passion for the
1906 equivalent of lifestyles of the rich and shameless. Given what Wister
makes us see right from the start of her husband-to-be's nature and
breeding, their marriage is obviously inappropriate. How to prevent it,
for people too constipated to speak for themselves honestly, and how to
sort out the various other entanglements that bedevil our heroine, our
villainess, and our two heroes, is Wister's main business in the novel.
Our Northern and Southern heroes find themselves in an Eve Kosofky
Sedgwick-like relationship that takes place through and over the woman (or
women) with whom they are also involved. I found this fascinating in and
of itself. In addition, however, a lot of other business gets transacted
in the novel. Much of it has to do with the ways in which, as Wister
reveals, American society has been hypocritical in its assumptions about
African-Americans in the wake of the Civil War. It is clear, as the novel
goes on, that that War did little but divide two aristocracies, Northern
and Southern, who ought by nature to have been conjoined to oppose the
degradations each now experiences from the "new" people whom Ms. Wrong and
her cowardly father represent. It divided them, it turns out, over the
issue of people who are, really, a pretty bad crowd and ought not still to
divide North from South any longer. True, they ought not to have been
slaves, or, well, not exactly . . . But the only ones that are worthwhile
are those who know their place: a place, of course, of deference.
Lady Baltimore is not, as may by now be clear, an especially
attractive book. It's racist as well as sexist. Moreover, its class
attitudes will also bear remarkably little thought. It is, however, an
astonishingly interesting book, both in the way it is written and in the
seriousness and assumption of intellectual and moral honesty with which
Wister approaches his subject. (Wister is not an entirely negligible
figure, after all: he was a chummy of President Theodore Roosevelt, whose
decision to host Mr. Booker T. Washington at The White House comes in for
considerable reproach in the novel.) Perhaps the book is, after all, only
a curiosity. I still think it's one well worth pondering, if such matters
interest you at all.
Wister might not have liked it or its author, but I
found it very hard to put down Michael Awkward's Scenes of
Instruction: A Memoir (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
The book is, in a word, brilliant.
Organized around academic ritual events, graduations -- from elementary
school, junior high school, a New England boarding school, a New England
small college, and graduate school -- Awkward's memoir takes the author on
a very long journey in order, as it were, to move him a distance of about
three miles. He begins in a childhood spent largely in a housing project
(coincidentally imploded by the City of Philadelphia on the day after I
finished reading Awkward's book) to a position, now, as a Professor of
English at the University I work for. (For readers wary of a conflict of
interest, never fear: I've not met the author and, given his evident
warmth of feeling for Penn and the Department of English, am unlikely ever
to do so.)
His journey is, as you might already have begun to suspect, a bit
longer than it could easily have seemed. As he describes himself in the
book, Awkward began life black, poor, illegitimate, and physically scarred
(the result of a childhood accident with a heated suacepan), the youngest
child of a severely alcoholic mother who had herself been both physically
abused and battered by his father. The mere recitation of such background
factors must function as a set of "leading economic indicators"; yet they
turn out to have indicated nothing at all -- well, I suppose the author
must still be black -- about a person whose ability to remember that
literature may be Literature but is also "a criticism of life" receives
wonderful expression in this memoir.
This is one of those books I hesitate to say much about for fear of
spoiling it. Nothing I can say about it is anything that it doesn't say
better for itself. Run, don't walk: this is one you should not let get
away. A book about Philadelphia; a book about emerging from the
African-American underclass; a book about academia (at many levels); a
book about literature; a book about family, strengths as well as
weaknesses; a book about love: at this point, the copywriter would say
something like, "It's got it all!" -- and the copywriter would be right.
Return to Traister's non-current touts (beginning with August 1995, when this home page was
begun).
2000 INDEX: 1999 2001
Return to Traister's current touts.
You can
send Traister e-mail concerning this page at
traister@pobox.upenn.edu
Anticipating a "Tout" for next month, I must
add that I am presently about three-quarters of the way through Ben
Yagoda's About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made
(New York: Scribner, 2000, $30.00). Yagoda's seems, so far, to be the
book that Mary F. Corey may have
thought she was writing but which I thought she didn't write. My initial
impression is that it is the best book I have read about The New
Yorker. By far. More, of course, next month.
You have done everything to make me lose my faith in You, to
make me cease to believe in You. But I die exactly as I have lived, an
unshakeable believer in You.
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