Gone : The Last Days of The New Yorker

Rating:
Summary: The Campaign
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Campaign
Review: I cannot imagine, or I'm afraid I can imagine all
too well, why people keep ganging up on this
altogether brilliant and moving book. For more than
two years now, Amazon.com has been publishing a
relentless, vicious,misleading and conformist party
line. (The Customer Review by the gentleman who admits
he has not read the book is a small sign of what is
going on here.)
Journalism's commissars, the pack of writers and editors
whose vanity and solidarity will not permit criticism, even
in a memoir, to go unpunished, have used every forum to try
not just to discredit but to stamp out this book and its
highly individual author.
Name-dropping. Envy. Indeed! How was Adler to write a
memoir, which is also a profound essay, about what was
once an important magazine without mentioning the people
who wrote for it? Some of them were famous. Others were
not. That's where the envy comes in. Adler herself is a
famous and distinguished writer, of fiction, criticism,
literary and political essays.The pack will not stand for
it. A certain level of readers feels threatened as well.
Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker tells us more
about the situation in contemporary letters than anything
except the reaction to it.

Rating:
Summary: Beware the hand of fate
Review: I may be marking myself as the rankest order of philistine, but I never much cared for the old pre-Tina Brown New Yorker. God knows I tried to like it and I often found pieces that I enjoyed, the stories of John Cheever, for example. However, John Cheever did not produce a new story every week and neither did the outstanding authors nurtured in the New Yorker's unique environment. No, at its worst the old New Yorker was under edited and frequently gave too much power to writers to go on for far too long about far too little to make much of an impact. Quite frankly, it frequently bored me and the magazine needed to be shaken up, regardless of what old timers like the author of this book thinks.

I suppose since I do not agree with the basic premise of this work, I might be considered a poor reviewer. There are several good things in this piece, I found the portraits of the figures of the New Yorker and its workings interesting. However, the writing is not as compelling or revealing as "The Years with Ross" or even "Here at the New Yorker" and "Genius in Disguise" (all of which I prefered, though the period and subject matter are vastly different). I would agree with other writers that I think that the prose is underedited and could have benefited with the severe blue pencil.

It is interesting, for a magazine of its limited circulation and appeal, there is far more material about the workings of the New Yorker than any magazine. This is probably a measure of its influence. I hope that this magazine which is is so necessary to fostering new literary talent continues to evolve and hopefully prosper.

Rating:
Summary: Gone and a good thing too
Review: I may be marking myself as the rankest order of philistine, but I never much cared for the old pre-Tina Brown New Yorker. God knows I tried to like it and I often found pieces that I enjoyed, the stories of John Cheever, for example. However, John Cheever did not produce a new story every week and neither did the outstanding authors nurtured in the New Yorker's unique environment. No, at its worst the old New Yorker was under edited and frequently gave too much power to writers to go on for far too long about far too little to make much of an impact. Quite frankly, it frequently bored me and the magazine needed to be shaken up, regardless of what old timers like the author of this book thinks.

I suppose since I do not agree with the basic premise of this work, I might be considered a poor reviewer. There are several good things in this piece, I found the portraits of the figures of the New Yorker and its workings interesting. However, the writing is not as compelling or revealing as "The Years with Ross" or even "Here at the New Yorker" and "Genius in Disguise" (all of which I prefered, though the period and subject matter are vastly different). I would agree with other writers that I think that the prose is underedited and could have benefited with the severe blue pencil.

It is interesting, for a magazine of its limited circulation and appeal, there is far more material about the workings of the New Yorker than any magazine. This is probably a measure of its influence. I hope that this magazine which is is so necessary to fostering new literary talent continues to evolve and hopefully prosper.

Rating:
Summary: It's flawed, but Renata makes her case
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Beware the hand of fate
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: "I said that I would."
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: An insider's tale
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Office Politics
Review: What a great book, fascinating, beautifully written. As a 25+ year New Yorker reader, I suspect Ms. Adler has it about right. (Obviously she has a unique frame of reference; that's OK, isn't it?) People who don't like this book just can't handle the ambivalence, ambiguity, potential for multiple interpretations, and contradictions that make life interesting. Anyone who works with a group of very intelligent, sensitive, competitive people will identify with some of the office politics Ms. Adler describes.