Customer Reviews

Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This book is terse, and I like it very much. Renata Adler has an interesting way of writing which combines extremely complicated sentences full of asides, commas, and em-dashes, with stripped-down delivery like, "He asked me to go to the meeting. I said that I would." Taken together her style is like ornate bullets. Adler obviously takes time to consider everything she puts on the page, and so she is a writer who is definite. The only drawback to this book is that it is too short--Adler is so good at portraying the bizarre and intricate relationships and politics at The New Yorker that I wish she'd taken more time to establish what the magazine used to be like, and why it is now "Gone." She's not even particularly snarky about the troops of fools who've been at the magazine, but gives an honest account of her experience.

As someone who has been writing complaint letters to The New Yorker since the age of twelve I relish Adler's astute sniping, and I will be sending the book at once to my mother, who has been writing letters of complaint for much longer (she used to routinely send back all of the subscription inserts to demonstrate how annoying and content-free they were). It is true that there was a type of article that was a New Yorker piece and now that standard has dissolved; and the magazine has been disappointingly dumbed down from a Literary Publication to a subscription-driven Conde Nast rag. Do read this book if you have ever wondered what happened to the New Yorker since Harold Ross. And the next time you want to blast off a letter to David Remnick, just send highlighted pages of "Gone" instead.

Henry Kissenger once said, or so it is claimed, that the reason the battles in academia are so fierce, is that the prizes are so small. Reading "Gone", the reader gets the impression that the battles at The New Yorker were even more fierce than those in academia, and the prizes, smaller still.

Growing up a home where the New Yorker was always present- my mother was a lifelong subscriber- IO began reading it almost from the moment I learned how to read, which means I've been thumbing through the pages for around half a century now. Though I still subscribe, I find the magazine of today very different from the one I read as a child, and then as a teenager and a young(er) adult. Back in the 1960s, and even on into the 70s, the New Yorker was a unique voice in the publishing world. Every week brought a mixture of sophisticated, but still laugh out loud funny cartoons and "casuals", along with interesting fiction, and some of the best extended, well thought out reporting and non-fiction writing. An entire issue- or even several issues- might be devoted to one story. Pieces were published for one reason only: That they appealed to the sensibility of the New Yorker's longest tenured editor, William Shawn, who took the humor magazine that Harold Ross created, and turned it into something unique in American publishing.

That all changed in the 1990s with the sale of the New Yorker and the departure of Ross in favor of a series of Editors from the Conde Nast stable who made major changes to the format and content of the magazine- few of them for the better. Adler was a New Yorker staffer at the time, and an intimate of many of the staff, as well as being reasonably close to Shawn. She provides not just an insider's view of those tumultuous times, but also a detailed, and not always attractive, picture of the people who populate The New Yorker and the New York literary world. Her portrait of William Shawn has been called an "attack" by some reviewers, and certainly it's not the same sort of fawning portrait seen in Brendan Gill's Here At The New Yorker, but all the same it's a very affectionate portrait, and even as Adler criticizes Shawn's capriciousness, and his secretive, sometime cruel style, she gives him a lot of a lot of credit for shaping her skills as a young writer.

Even when she criticizes someone who's work I've enjoyed, Adler strikes a note of truth. I am a fan of Adam Gopnik'sParis to the Moon but Adleer's dissection of his style- motivated, I think, by her opinion of what she perceived as his duplicitous behavior in office politics- is dead-on accurate. She paints a picture of Lillian Ross as a deceitful manipulator of Shawn in his later years, even as she acknowledges her friendship. Basically, Adler can't help but paint the world as she sees it, even when it goes against the Received Wisdom of the literary world; she's a likely to attack mendacity on the left as well as on the right. Her sympathetic portrayal of G. Gordon Liddy as a complex and nuanced individual and her attack on Watergate judge John Sirica didn't earn her too many friends in leftist literary circles. Nor did her depiction of the libel trials involving General Westmorland and Ariel Sharon. (Lest she be tarred as a conservative or worse, she also singled out Robert Bork as someone whose legal reasoning and oppinions she found especially objectionable.)

Ten year after the publication of this book, The New Yorker is still being published, still under the Conde Nast banner. After a good many editorial changes, the magazine has improved greatly over the days of Tina Brown's editorship, though it's still a far cry from magazine that Shawn edited. The Talk of the Town still begins every issue with a shrill political diatribe. While the magazine has acquired a number of excellent non-fiction writers, articles tend, for the most part, to be very short, barely touching some aspect of a topic. Humor pieces are rarely funny. Fiction is variable. The cartoons, though, once again are pretty good.

I hesitated before writing this review, given the rabid tone of much of what's been written here (and elsewhere) about Adler's book. And curiously, even though there are only a handful of reviews, there are hundreds of votes on the reviews- it's almost as if the word went out in the New York literary world to "get Adler" and all who would speak up for her ;-) One of the most negative reviewers even allowed as that he hadn't actually read the book (!) but how could a book critical of the New Yorker be any good? Amazing. That there is so much ill will still directed against Adler regarding what is, essentially, a trivial matter in the grand scheme of things, the curious reader may well want to read "Gone" if only to find out what all the fuss is about.

William Shawn, the former editor-in-chief of The New Yorker magazine, died in 1992, and since his death there have been a number of books published about him and his tenure at the magazine. Renata Adler's book Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker is one of these. Like most books about Mr. Shawn, Gone has failed at its main purpose, and in my opinion this has happened because Adler does not adequately support her hypothesis.

Adler believes The New Yorker was destroyed by Conde Nast, the publishing house which bought the magazine in 1985. Instead of letting the magazine lead the nation's literary intelligentsia, Adler writes, S.I. Newhouse instead chased trends, relying on demographics and market research instead of sound editing and writing. Circulation dropped, as did the prestige of the magazine. After a brief Indian summer under editor Tina Brown, the magazine again slumped. No longer is The New Yorker the magazine of record for American literature, Adler claims; it's just another rag.

Her premise is plausible. Before Shawn was fired, The New Yorker was the greatest literary magazine in the English-speaking world. It never bowed to trends or marketability, becoming an icon because of its complete dedication to content instead of image. When Newhouse replaced Shawn with an editor of his choosing who changed both the style and the substance of the magazine, circulation dropped, never reaching mid-1980s levels even during Brown's editorship. The magazine is now less than it was in 1985 in every way; this cannot be denied.

Yet Adler doesn't provide sufficient evidence for the connection between the change in ownership and editorship and the magazine's subsequent decline. Correlation is not causation, and the author doesn't take into consideration other factors such as the rise of 24-hour television news channels; the feeling among readers that a magazine should not feature both fiction and non-fiction; and above all the arrival of the Internet and all that has meant to publishing. Every magazine has lost subscribers since 1985. Adler never shows us why The New Yorker's losses are a special circumstance.

In place of a plausible argument, Adler instead gives the reader a number of interesting yet irrelevant anecdotes. For instance, at one point early in the book she explains in detail how William Shawn edited her work. She also wastes far too much space rebutting Lillian Ross's and Ved Mehta's books about Shawn, in the latter case displaying her total lack of understanding as to what Mehta was trying to accomplish. Her rebuttal of Ms. Ross takes up so much space and is so detailed (and so irrelevant to the topic of this book) that it should have been published in the New York Times Book Review instead.

I do not hold the author's cover picture against her, as some reviewers here have done. Anyone who has had the privilege of being photographed by Richard Avedon would be insane to use another photograph for their cover shot. De minimis non curat lex, as the lawyers say.

I don't know if I can recommend this book. I think Adler's thesis is plausible and I suspect her conclusions are sound, but she doesn't show how she gets from one to the other so I can't be certain. Read Gone with a grain of salt.

I picked up Gone because I had enjoyed Adler's Speedboat and I thought I could learn something about magazine publishing. I did not have a strong opinion one way or another about the current New Yorker.

Having read the book, I'm left to wonder how an author could say so little in such a convoluted manner. Her sentences are frequently atrocious and she needlessly repeats herself, a sin for which she criticizes others. For example, over the course of two pages she writes --

- Non-fiction pieces ... were thought to be in need of cutting.
- This assumption, that every article is too long and requires cutting...
- The notion that cutting means improving...
- This assumption that editing means cutting, and that every piece requires it...
- ... this assumption that the first thing a written work requires is cutting....

Clearly, Gone could have used some tightening of its own.

In addition the book contains one of the most glaring factual errors I've ever come across -- 1976 is given as the date for Nixon's resignation. Obviously Adler knows the correct date; still, this is a serious mistake in a book that focuses so heavily on the importance of editing and fact-checking.

(Incidentally, I think she also misidentified a scene in The Idiot as taking place in The Brothers Karamazov, but I wouldn't swear to it without some fact-checking of my own).

In the end, I did learn a thing or two from Adler's awkward and absolutely humorless book, but it wasn't really worth the effort. Read Brendan Gill's excellent Here at the New Yorker instead.

This book was a complete disappointment. For all of Adler's praise for her own writing, one gets virtually tangled in her inelegant, choppy prose. Each sentence in this insider's tale drips with too many commas and bad word choices. As a former journalist I live for dishy dirt on fellow toilers in this unappreciated profession, but this was too much. Adler drops names with great abandon, and to the determent of her readers. I could have appreciated a lament for the New Yorker that we used to know and love, but this was an unadulterated "look at me and how great I am" ploy for attention from a writer who obviously thinks her work has been overlooked. I would advise anyone who at any time cared for this journalistic institution called the "New Yorker" to leave this book on the shelf.

going, going, gone. i attempted to read this with an open mind, seduced by the prospect of tantalizing morsels of gossip and office intrigue, yet was benumbed and bewildered by the relentless kvetching and whining of this former staff writer. she doesn't have an axe to grind; she has a guillotine at the ready. this memoir spends far too much time replaying the sacking of shawn with as much flair as an autopsy report. this is a charmless rendering of a beloved institution that became too insulated and dysfunctional for its own good. adler's view is like that of a patient in primal scream therapy. slogging through this book with all of its pointless detail made me think of reading those interminable essays by ved mehta. one would read ved as an act of atonement, to see if one could actually read these multipart memoirs from start to finish. what triumphs in adler's memoir is style over substance; she puts together sentences well; it's the content, or rather, discontent that is completely lackluster.

Some of your other reviewers seem to take it amiss that Adler's book isn't written for everyone. Its written for people who are familiar with some of the basics of the history of the magazine -- who know and perhaps already have opinions about the works of Truman Capote or Hannah Arendt that first appeared in this magazine before becoming successful and extremely controversial books.

If that sort of book is not one that will interest you then, well ... this is not the book for you. But its rather goofy to criticize the author for having written a book for someone other than yourself, isn't it?

This is an excellent book given its target. Furthermore, I believe that even if I didn't fit the above description of this book, I might have learned a good deal from it about the craft of non-fiction prose. The discussion of the "characteristic structure" of Adam Gopnik's articles, on pp. 243-44, is a little gem of analysis -- and you don't have to have read Gopnik to appreciate it, since most people who read a good deal have reas authors who use the same faulty structure she describes here.