Murderer's row

A Reporter's Reporter

Kurt Anderson review of 'A Writer's Life' in the Times: It's hard to overstate Gay Talese's gold-standard reputation. A few years ago, David Halberstam called him "the most important nonfiction writer of his generation, the person whose work most influenced at least two generations of other reporters."

The bedrock of that reputation consists of several exceptional magazine profiles from the 1960's, in particular "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," published in Esquire in 1966. Helped along by one of the great modern magazine headlines, the piece became a canonical archetype of the so-called New Journalism — nonfiction conceived and written in the manner of fiction, with fully rendered scenes, extended conversations and plainly subjective depictions of mood. In 1969, Talese published "The Kingdom and the Power," an institutional portrait of The New York Times, where he had been a reporter for nine years. That book became a best seller, certifying him as a literary pop star as well as a reporter's reporter. Just two years after the Times book, he published another first-rate best seller, his story of a Mafia family called "Honor Thy Father." ...

He's now 74, and one's instinct is to let him take his victory lap and applaud respectfully for the good work he has done. "A Writer's Life," I figured, would be a traditional memoir that picked up where "Unto the Sons" left off, in the 1940's, when he was 12. But this book is something else. It's mostly an account of Talese's inability these last 14 years to find a story that he and his editors were excited about. His dead ends and dry holes might have been usefully deconstructed and illuminated with careful, tough-minded, craftsmanlike introspection — something akin to the way, for instance, that Joan Didion created a masterpiece last year out of the death of her husband. But instead he has simply recapitulated and redoubled his botches by aggregating old notes and manuscript pages and interlarding them with bits of autobiography and self-abasement. The whole is less than the sum of its mostly arbitrary parts. It's a saga of serial professional failures that is itself a failure. ...

Rather than a memoir, though, Talese had decided to write a book "set within the milieu of a restaurant." He had accumulated files of notes since the 70's, although by the summer of 1999 he had written only 54 pages. So instead of working one Saturday afternoon in 1999, he's watching baseball on TV — and happens to change channels to the final game of the Women's World Cup soccer championship, the United States versus China. This prompts many pages of weirdly generic text about modern China, of which this is a typical passage: "Brand-name merchandise from the West had been distributed and also made in China for many years, encouraged by the trade policies of Deng Xiaoping, who became the Party ruler in 1978 (two years after Mao's death) and proclaimed, 'To get rich is glorious.' But now in 1999, as this nation of 1.3 billion people was about to mark a half-century of Communist rule that had been inaugurated by Mao's triumphant entrance into Tiananmen Square in October of 1949, China was hardly rich."

We know all this, of course, so why do we need to read it again? It is setup. It is drumbeat. Because the quietly desperate Talese is deciding he has stumbled onto his next Big Story. ...

It's one thing to rummage through the files and cut and paste together enough material to fulfill a very old book contract. Talese has hustled enough over the years to be permitted a punt. But a great deal of the prose in "A Writer's Life" is shockingly, inexcusably bad. ...

He's naturally old-school — always wears a suit and tie, writes longhand, flies on "a jet airplane," takes a "motor ride," calls blue jeans "dungarees" and China "the mainland." Fine. But most of the bad writing seems faux-old-fashioned in a stilted, wordy, strenuously highfalutin way — Restoration Hardware prose. "We journalists, in my view, were the pre-eminent chroniclers of contemporary happenings," he writes, and "I still respond inharmoniously to home cooking." About nepotism, he writes of employees "on the Times payroll in part (if not entirely) because of their cosanguinity or their conjugal affiliation with the Ochs patrilineage."

Are these guys overated? This group of ambitious white male authors who came of age after the war, the Doctorows and Mailers and Updikes and Wolfes and Roths (and to a lesser extent Talese), these old lions whose every new release is still scrutinized, pondered over for what it tells us about us.

Or, rather, has their time just passed by? Maybe once they were American letters; now, are they just musty relics, paddling madly under the surface to keep their heads in the limelight.

Or maybe these guys just were never that great, and spoke mainly to their cohorts--who happened to make up the reviewers, professors and critics of their time. As times change and everyone now can weigh in on anyone, perhaps they've lost their echo chamber cheering section.

Here's the Times' Michiko Katuni on John Updike's 'Terrorist' Imagines a Homegrown Threat to Homeland Security

John Updike writing about terrorism? The bard of the middle-class mundane, the chronicler of suburban adultery and angst, tackling Islamic radicalism and the call to jihad?

In theory Mr. Updike's shopworn new novel, "Terrorist," not only gives him an opportunity to address a thoroughly topical subject but also represents an effort to stretch his imagination — to try to boldly go where he has never gone before, as he did with considerable élan in his African novel, "The Coup" (1978), and with decidedly less happy results in "Brazil," his misbegotten 1994 variation of the Tristan and Iseult legend.

At the same time, it offers Mr. Updike a chance to explore some of his perennial themes from a different angle: to look at the sexually permissive mores that his other characters have embraced through the disapproving eyes of an ascetic, religious man, and to contemplate this man's absolute and unwavering faith, which is so unlike the existential doubts and tentative yearnings for salvation evinced by Mr. Updike's earlier creations.

Unfortunately, the would-be terrorist in this novel turns out to be a completely unbelievable individual: more robot than human being and such a cliché that the reader cannot help suspecting that Mr. Updike found the idea of such a person so incomprehensible that he at some point abandoned any earnest attempt to depict his inner life and settled instead for giving us a static, one-dimensional stereotype.

I don't know--I've never read much Updike aside from his looong short stories in the New Yorker; but I did hear him on the radio the other day talking about his new book, and he struck me as an intelligent, well-meaning but slightly befuddled man, someone who has to do research to find out that airport luggage-scanning machines aren't anything like x-rays and display in living color (reminds me of President Bush I and his supermarket scanners). I'm not sure how good he is at getting into the heads of people who aren't like him and his friends; in the same way that Thomas Wolfe's Charlotte Simmons reportedly read like an old man's idea of what young people are like.

It would once upon a time have mattered more that writers like Talese, Updike and Wolfe may no longer understand America, a society that to some extent has been shaped by their generation's literary works. But American letters is no longer dependent on their wise old heads; as evidenced by Toni Morrison's Beloved being chosen as the answer to the Times' question, What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?

It's an interesting choice--I've never read anything by Morrison, but it struck me that, as A.O. Scott wrote in the essay that accompanies the list (wait, when did he move from reviewing moving images to the written word?!),

With remarkable speed, "Beloved" has, less than 20 years after its publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a classic. This triumph is commensurate with its ambition, since it was Morrison's intention in writing it precisely to expand the range of classic American literature, to enter, as a living black woman, the company of dead white males like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain.

That kind of ambition, almost cold in its ambition, was the hallmark of the post WWII generation of great white male writers. It'd be fascinating to have been at the meeting where they broke the news that a black female, according to their own bible no less, wound up with the crown.

I think as the pool of American writers becomes ever-more diverse, the old boys club will be seen for what it was--a specific type of men who wrote certain types of books, that while notable and often inventive in their own right nevertheless painted a view of American society that was in reality their squinty look from where they sat.

Yes, some of them were great writers--I for one found Philip Roth's The Plot Against America just a step below some of Salman Rushdie's works. But they had the stage to themselves for a long time; and the critics of their day didn't see what they omitted and misunderstood because they themselves were guilty of the same sin, that of being all alike and thinking alike but mistakenly believing they spoke for America.

It does make me smile that men like Talese and Updike aren't going gently into the good night, but are at least making a belated effort to do things like visit China and examine Islam. They still have things to say, I think; and things worth hearing.

But it's nice that we're no longer dependant on a handful of white males of a certain age to tell us about our world.

Getty photo of Gay Talese, left, with E. L. Doctorow and Norman Mailer at a gathering in support of Salman Rushdie held by the PEN writers' group, Feb. 22, 1989 from the Times.