Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker [Hardcover]

Renata Adler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2000

From a legendary journalist and star writer at "The New Yorker" comes an insider's look at the magazine's tumultuous yet glorious years under the direction of the enigmatic William Shaw.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Renata Adler's fulminating, fascinating defense and prosecution of her longtime employer The New Yorker may not be the best book ever written on the subject. Brendan Gill's Here at the New Yorker remains the classic, and Nancy Franklin's profile of Katharine White in Life Stories is more graceful and insightful. But Gone is without doubt the hottest (as ex-editor Tina Brown might say) chronicle of the magazine's history: a scathing portrait of a world with the mad logic of Alice's Wonderland and intrigues as viciously intricate as anything in le Carré.

Adler's narrative zooms like a speedboat through decade after decade of controversy. Still, Gone is essentially a heart-shredding account of the fall of a dynasty--that of longtime editor William Shawn, one of the century's crucial journalistic geniuses. "Mr. Shawn was the father," recalls Adler, "Lillian Ross, the mother. The son was Jonathan Schell; the spirit was J.D. Salinger. This family, it seemed to me, was ferociously judgmental." Yet nobody is more ferocious than the author herself, who was taken into the bosom of this family and stomps all its members to smithereens.

According to Adler, she was one of the lucky few invited into the circle of Mr. Shawn's biological clan, not to mention the parallel world of his mistress and "office wife" Lillian Ross. The author is quick to take Ross to task for her own trash-talking memoir of Shawn. Yet Adler is hardly a whit less destructive in Gone, although she wields the shiv with far greater literary skill. Indeed, those who still worship at the late editor's shrine will be shocked at her portrait of Shawn as a cruel despot who nurtured and destroyed talent according to meticulously articulated, infinitely arbitrary, altogether lunatic rules adjudicated by himself alone. Apparently he had three main responses to criticism: silence, lies, and high-handedness cloaked as high-mindedness. Adler rages at Shawn's hypocrisy, citing his refusal to give his son Wallace Shawn a job on the basis of the magazine's "No Nepotism rule." Not only was this rule nonexistent but the editor rubbed salt in the wound by hiring Schell instead, who happened to be the younger Shawn's college roommate.

Adler notes that the writers who bullied the conflict-averse Shawn tended to prosper, while those who revered him withered away, unpublished. Amazingly, she blames literature's loss of Salinger on Shawn: the ever-elusive author of The Catcher in the Rye "said that the reason he chose not to publish the material he had been working on was to spare Mr. Shawn the burden of having to read, and to decide whether to publish, Salinger writing about sex." Space, alas, prevents full comment on all of Adler's red-hot disclosures. Suffice it to say, however, that like a certain Truman Capote piece she insists on trashing, Adler's memoir of her office family is written in cold blood indeed. --Tim Appelo

From Library Journal

A longtime New Yorker staffer follows up works by Lillian Ross and Ved Mehta, giving us her account of the magazine's history.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (January 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684808161
• ISBN-13: 978-0684808161
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #823,349 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

98 of 122 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Turgid, mean-spirited, clueless, January 10, 2000

By 

James Winters (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker (Hardcover)

Renata Adler, a writer, of exalted reputation, has produced, a terrible book. The writing, is amazingly bad: turgid, self-important, with commas, everywhere. She criticizes, meanness, in others, while mocking, people's little mannerisms. She reports calling people up, to wish them well, then uses their responses, to bash them. She calls people, humorless, in a book, without a single, remotely, funny line. She sniffs, about recent errors, in the New Yorker, while making dumb, mistakes herself, like placing the Watergate hearings, in 1976. In passing, she smears, people like John Sirica, and praises, people like Gordon Liddy, without offering, evidence, either way. She may, be right about both, but who knows? This is, a book, about standards, that doesn't, seem to have any. Finally, those commas, drove me nuts.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Beware the hand of fate, March 17, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker (Hardcover)

Imagine this: you are not a writer, do not live in New York City or Connecticut, did not even know that someone named William Shaw edited the New Yorker for a few decades before the "Last Days" of the book's title came upon the magazine, have not heard of or do not remember 95% of the other people mentioned in this book, but had at one time (before the "last days") read the New Yorker often and liked it very much. This is the perch from which I viewed Renata Adler's book and I am sure that I am not such an uncharacteristic reader of the New Yorker as I felt I was while reading her book.

I certainly must have missed many nuances which would have been caught by those more in-the-know about the American magazine business and its personalities. It is for these people, and not for me, an ordinary reader of the New Yorker, for whom this book was written. What was left out, therefore, was the story of why anyone who does not know Adam Gopnik should care.

Renata Adler's book strikes this semiconductor salesman as part rudimentary memoir, part sophisticated, almost sublime, hatchet job on those who she believes tripped the New Yorker, and part tenuous rumination on fate which shows a breathtaking lack of depth even after her 30+ years of writing and contemplation. The book ends with an inscrutable admission of ineffectiveness and a sad page-and-a-half of Ms. Adler's rationalizations about her own choices in life that seem to have very little to do with the New Yorker itself but underline why she cannot seem to make much sense of her experience there.

After reading about so many people I have never heard of, described only in terse yet 'knowing' terms such as "a fine writer" or "the owner", I was left with the impression that automatons ruled on "the 19th floor" (of which building she does not say). What kind of lives these people lead, whether they were married and had kids and believed in anything besides seeing their names in print, is made almost irrelevant. There is almost no real psychological or mythological insight applied to the whole business of a group of 100 or so very talented people putting together the most famous literary weekly in American history.

These people were not robots, surely, but they are systematically relegated to a state of being fixed to their tethers by some indomitable hand of fate, a dubious literary crutch that necessarily goes no where. Along the way, we are lowered into the Kafkaesque world of office politics -- complete with "office wives" and gossip about who will be promoted, who is out and in, etc.. It is the story of every office no matter the enterprise. Its presentation here as so much uncomprehended dross, by so esteemed a writer of our contemporary world as the book's jacket professes Ms. Adler to be, is startling. How can such thoroughly uninteresting people as here described by Renata Adler have created the unity and essence of the wonderful New Yorker?

I would direct the reader to a book by William McGuire, Bollingen, written about another American literary enterprise, which shows a far more insightful and satisfying balance between a good story and the personalities that made it so. Ms. Adler's reportage about the fall of the New Yorker shows a journalist's touch for detail, certainly, but misses the storyteller's touch for making anyone who doesn't already know the story, care about all those people who came and went.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It's flawed, but Renata makes her case, February 27, 2000

By 

Petsounds "petsounds" (The great Great Lakes) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker (Hardcover)

If you were ever one of those readers Adler describes--an automatic re-subscriber to The New Yorker--you can't possibly read this book without nodding many times in agreement with her thesis: that The New Yorker used to be a publication that led its readers, as opposed to the Newhouse marketing tool it became under Tina Brown (and to a lesser extent, Robert Gottlieb), a publication that sought to Find Out What The Hip Folks Wanted and Then Give It To Them. As those of us who loved the magazine for many years know, what Si and Tina created was a People Magazine with pretensions.

I found her view of magazine publication fascinating, and while I am more hopeful than she that some small part of what The New Yorker used to be can be--and is being--revived, I think she is right in saying that the unique and wonderful thing that The New Yorker used to be IS gone for good. She makes her case.

But I also agree with the reviewer who is an editor. There are sentences in this book that are simply impenetrable; the reader can easily get lost in them and, arriving at the period, wonder where the heck he or she is. It's also true that many of Adler's stated feelings appear to be contradictory. Why is she on the phone to Tina Brown, congratulating her on being named editor, when she must surely know what Brown will do with the magazine? But conflicting feelings are common in families, so perhaps Adler can be forgiven her ambivalence on that basis.

As to the reviewer who gave this book one star but admitted he hadn't read it, what on EARTH is THAT about? If you ever loved The New Yorker, I think you'll find this book interesting.