An ex-editor laments the death of the book -- by writing a wonderfully observant novel about an editor whose career and way of life are both coming to an end. Having been a senior editor at Pantheon for 15 years, unsurprisingly, has given Engelhardt an easy command of the tone and texture of the publishing world, but the graceful abilities he also demonstrates in bringing character, place, and mood achingly to life must be the gifts of the man alone. Engelhardt's narrator, Rick Koppes, has also been a New York editor for many years, at Byzantium Press-which has just been 'swallowed up' by a huge media giant, the Desmond & Dickinson Publishing Group. For Koppes-aged 56, cultivated, sensitive, thoughtful-this beginning of the end of life as he's known it contains also an unusual personal element; namely, that his own ex-wife of 20 years, Connie Burian, is one of the new firm's top people and sees the future of the book in far, far different ways than does Rick. Only at story's end will the true sorrow of Rick's life-and his love-be revealed fully, but along the way there will be forbodings galore, some so simple as lunch with another editor, a decades-old friend who's been 'remaindered'; a call from a hustler agent that, wonderfully, brings about a trip to the American Natural History museum and an unflinching consideration, among other things, of extinction; and, in the tiny hours after one odyssey-like day, a visit to the shabby West Side walkup of the conscience-ravaged daughter of one of the airmen who bombed Nagasaki-and who wants Rick to publish her book. Conscience, indeed, may also be Rick's most notable trait, helping determine what he sees and what he thinks about what he sees-from the look of the new Times Square to the loathsomely smug boy-emperor and boss of Desmond & Dickinson. A brilliantly realized cri de coeur, pulsing throughout with life, sorrow, and thought.

A mordant gem, at once elegiac and deeply witty. I can't think of another novel that so powerfully conveys the sense of what it means to be an editor who does such a labor out of love, and not out of ambition for an office higher in the corporate tower.

A satisfyingly virulent, comical, absurd, deeply grieving true portrait of how things work today in the sleek factories of conglomerate book producers... a skillful novel of manners -- of very bad manners.... [A] tone of amused, wistful Manhattan romance, like that of an F. Scott Fitzgerald brought up to contemporary speed.... "Though this novel can be read as an anatomy of the publishing business, year 2003, and a lament for...somewhat better times the characters depicted are not mere stick figures or roman à clef gossips. The scenes are vividly set, and this writer, made of stern stuff, was laughing through his tears.... The episodes in Engelhardt's account emit a sense of autobiographical anguish, seasoned with an ironic notch at one corner of his mouth.

A fiction that, uniquely, brings us into the mind of an editor -- a master editor at that -- and wittily shows us how much more is at stake in publishing than money and glamour. I found it moving and revelatory.

Engelhardt has written the rarest of books: a truly intellectual novel. This faux memoir uses the decline of quality book publishing both as landscape and metaphor to explore in ways that are often heartbreaking the failure of the sixties to drastically change the world and the devastating moral and cultural consequences of that failure.

Original, authentic, and compelling. Engelhardt is a smart, clear, and bold storyteller. He takes us on a multifaceted journey through a world in flux and renders it with vivid immediacy. Drawn with truthfulness and tenderness, his characters reveal the persistence of humanity.

A brilliantly realized 'cri de coeur,' pulsing throughout with life, sorrow, and thought.

A former editor at Pantheon Books, Englehardt (The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation) has penned an opinionated, nostalgic novel about the trials of a seasoned book editor in the information age. Rick Koppes, a literary purist, former commune resident and anti-Vietnam War activist, works at highbrow Byzantium Press. His publishing house has been taken over by German magnate Bruno Hindemann's Multimedia Entertainment, where executive David Marsden, many years his junior, hopes to capitalize on Koppes's lone bestselling author with videos and merchandise ("We want to brand him awesomely"). Koppes's ex-wife, a treacherously bottom-line-minded publishing exec, becomes his boss. He meets his old friend, Larry, a fellow longtime editor, for lunch and learns that Larry has been fired for not bringing in enough money. In his agitated state, Larry berates the waiter at their Vietnamese restaurant, while Koppes wonders silently whether the waiter had been tortured by American soldiers during the war. Woven through these apocalyptic snapshots are laments about the ramifications of electronic publishing and the decline of the reading public. The novel will likely try the patience of any reader not wholly fascinated with the publishing industry; though there are some emotionally vivid passages, the book often gets bogged down in descriptions of the minutiae of the business. Engelhardt seems primarily to be addressing his colleagues, but even those inclined to agree with his view may find his hero self-righteous and unsympathetic.