Avid Reader - Robert Gottlieb (2016)

This is the first book reviewed as a result of podcasts.  At a certain point, I am going to write a lot about podcasts, maybe.  Suffice to say, they have been an influence on me.

Because I was listening to WTF, I was turned onto the New York Times Book Review podcast, and because I listened to Robert Gottlieb talk about romance novels on that, I was turned onto his memoir.  I first became aware of Robert Gottlieb after I purchased the Paris Review Interview Volume I.  He was one of the interviewees featured in that volume, and I recall reading his with greater interest than most (at least, for say, Richard Price, Jack Gilbert, Robert Stone, and Elizabeth Bishop).  He couldn't hold a candle to Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, James Cain, Rebecca West, Billy Wilder, or Joan Didion, but he came across as one of the more engaging subjects.

I've just leafed through the first few pages of that interview, and I was struck by how I already knew a few of the stories from Avid Reader.  Like about how he renamed the main character Bob from Bill in Something Happened, or the novel Lilith and the emergence of its eponymous heroine 60-70 pages in and how he suggested renaming it after her to create anticipation.  Gottlieb has a lot of stories and he seems to tell many of them with a gossipy relish.  To be sure, he has had an extraordinary life in letters.  But it's almost as if he feels obligated to share all of these stories, lest they be forgotten to history.  Perhaps they are already marked down elsewhere.

In any case, when he started talking about the The Power Broker in the interview, I had to flip back to reality and remember that the portion on that biography and its author, Robert Caro, is one of the true highlights, just because of its outsizedness.  In truth I read this a few months ago and I have a backlog of posts and I don't recall many specific details of it.  I just remember it for some of the nastier things in it.  It almost seems to have a tabloid appeal at moments.  Much of the time, it seems as if Gottlieb is just bragging about all the great stuff he's done.  He basically goes through his life and different jobs and the writers he edited.     

Here they are:
Sybille Bedford (A Legacy)
Rona Jaffe (The Best of Everything)
Jessica Mitford (The American Way of Death)
Joseph Heller (Catch-22) 
Sylvia Ashton-Warner (Teacher)
Mordecai Richler (Barney's Version)
Edna O'Brien
Toni Morrison (Beloved)
Dariel Telfer (The Caretakers)
Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes)
J.R. Salamanca (Lilith)
Jetta Carleton (The Moonflower Vine)
Robert Crichton (The Secret of Santa Vittoria)
Chaim Potok (The Chosen)
Charles Portis (True Grit)
[not] John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)
James Thurber
Sid Perelman
Cynthia Lindsay
Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain)
Robert Caro (The Power Broker)
Brooke Hayward (Haywire)
Barbara Goldsmith (Little Gloria...Happy at Last)
Jean Stein and George Plimpton (Edie)
Gloria Vanderbilt (Once Upon a Time)
Lauren Bacall (By Myself)
Liv Ullman (Changing)
John Cheever
John Updike
John Hersey
Anne Tyler (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant)
Anne Rice (Interview with the Vampire)
Maria Riva (daughter of Marlene Dietrich)
Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook)
V.S. Naipaul
Roald Dahl
Anthony Burgess
Salman Rushdie
Antonia Fraser
Robert Massie (Peter the Great)
Barbara Tuchman (A Distant Mirror, The March of Folly)
Bruno Bettelheim (The Uses of Enchantment)
Bob Dylan (Lyrics--now he's edited 3 Nobel winners)
Irene Mayer Selznick (A Private View)
Katharine Hepburn
Eve Arnold (The Unretouched Woman)
Robert Townsend (Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits)
John Gardner
Cynthia Ozick
Don DeLillo
Denis Johnson
Robert Stone
William Gaddis
Gordon Lish
Harold Brodkey*
Alfred Kazin
Elia Kazan
Nora Ephron (Heartburn, I Feel Bad About My Neck, I Remember Nothing) (one of the highlights)
Dorothy Dunnett
John Le Carre (The Night Manager)
Katharine Graham (Personal History) (also a nice anecdote about Justice O'Connor)
Bill Clinton (My Life) (also one of the highlight)
Will Friedwald (Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers)

*: "And then there was Harold Brodkey--brilliant, maddening, tricky, self-destructive, troublemaking, irresistible; he and Gordon had tormented each other for years.  He was a sacred icon at Mr. Shawn's New Yorker, perhaps Shawn's favorite writer of fiction after Salinger, and Harold dazzled in the same way Salinger had--and with the same narcissistic obsession with childhood and adolescence. (The New Yorker fiction department was far from pleased with this favoritism of Shawn's.) Harold had embarked on what was meant to be, and was heralded (by himself loudest of all) as, a major work to be called A Party of Animals.
Lynn Nesbit was his agent, and she had sold the book to Joe Fox at Random House, but as time passed and the book grew longer and longer but not closer and closer, at Harold's insistence the contract was switched to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for more money.  It fared no better there, and when I arrogantly decided that I was the one who could wrest a novel from the material, it passed to me--in exchange for yet more money.  Harold had by this time married the writer Ellen Schwamm, whose two novels I had edited--the latter, How He Saved Her, being an account of how he took over her hitherto conventional life. (Harold, with his diabolical psychic potency and ambiguous sexuality, would not have been every woman's cup of tea.)"

Moments like this, followed by further anecdote, make me glad to have read Avid Reader.  Maybe I will never read How He Saved Her but it sounds hilarious.

After Gottlieb moves to The New Yorker, there are less anecdotes about famous writers, and more about the staff of the magazine in a constant rush to put out an issue per week.  I don't try to read The New Yorker but I appreciate what it does for society.  This is an interesting part of the book, noteworthy personally to me because he references handing off the reins to Tina Brown, who had published a memoir of her own about her time at Vanity Fair at the same time I was reading this.  I actually listened to her give interviews on two separate podcasts, and she referenced the same things about her interactions with Donald Trump on each.  Gottlieb later returns to Knopf and tells anecdotes about five more notable authors.

There is an amusing picaresque quality to the tales of his early life and first marriage, but his social life seems to be intertwined with many female friends that are part of the larger publishing scene.  There are just as many un-famous friends that he writes about as famous subjects, but in a review of a book that I would imagine few in the general American public would seek out, in the society we live in, in the medium this review takes, we have to stick with the famous.  It made me think about getting paranoid about writing a memoir and worrying that such and such person would be offended if I wrote something about them or didn't write something about them.  The next book that will be reviewed is Brix Smith-Start's memoir The Rise, the Fall and The Rise and at times, she will create pseudonyms for less famous friends of hers.  I don't want to spoil it but I will just say that I had a significantly better time reading Smith-Start's memoir than Gottlieb's.  In any case, Gottlieb's writing is much more prim and proper.  There were definitely a few sentences where I was like, "Wait dude, you're an editor?" But then I would re-read them and be like, okay, I can see how that makes sense, or is at least grammatically correct.  I'm not going to compare it to Smith-Start's anymore except to stay that this is better edited, and generally less compelling.

That said, Gottlieb has had an extraordinary life filled with amusing anecdotes, and the effect of this book is to be insanely jealous of him and his fabulous life.  It's not as if he didn't work hard for it, but he seemed to get very lucky, being in the right place at right time and befriending celebrities and literary icons. 

Gottlieb frames his narrative in several long chapters, "Learning," "Reading," "Working" (at Simon & Schuster, Knopf, and The New Yorker), and "Dancing."  Writing about dancing is an acquired taste.  There is a lot of writing about music that I like.  For some reason I find writing about dancing much less interesting, but that is probably because I am not into dance.  In a way, Gottlieb may sense this, and refrains from mentioning anything about it at all until that last chapter.  I skimmed through it.  (I did a similar thing with the final part of Brix Smith-Start's book, but I found her section--on fashion and running a high-end clothing store with her husband--more compelling).

Yet Gottlieb ends on a beautiful note, summing up his 85 previous years on the planet with a remarkable meditation on "retirement" and mortality .  I haven't read many books written from this perspective, yet I can say that Gottlieb writes with clarity, acceptance and gratitude for the life he has lived.  We should all aspire to his level of personal happiness.  I can hardly think of a better life to have lived--though I don't think I could read nearly as much.  If Gottlieb kept a blog like Flying Houses, he would probably have 10,000 posts in 10 years, not 350.  Publishing indeed may be changing, and Gottlieb may not be laying down a "how-to-become-an-editor," but I wish this book had been published in 2004 rather than 2016.  That's not to say I would have modeled my life on Gottlieb's, but it might have been fun to try.

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Another anecdote: flashback to 2004, a session of the creative writing class already referenced in an earlier blog post, officiated by a talented, vaguely depressive, former hotshot with latin roots. I invited a friend of mine to class with me, since he was visiting that week for his spring break. We exchanged a couple notes and a couple conversational asides during the process of a critique of my story. Our activity does not go unnoticed. A week later we receive our "notes" for the class--a rambling "free write" about the creative writing process that our instructor hands out each week and which more often than not, is quite compelling. This time it is extra special for me because I am singled out as an asshole. The instructor tells me that there is nothing more rude than talking to someone else while you are receiving feedback on a story. He takes a few more potshots at my character that I can't recall, though those notes are saved somewhere in my forgotten academic archives. He then goes on to discuss the writing potential of most of the other students in the class, calling some "baby writers," and talking about my ego being huge, and who knows, maybe I might make it one day, but I wouldn't bank on it. He then talked about his own experience. These details I remember. Having a book of short stories published early in his career, becoming a critical darling, making a good deal of money, moving to Manhattan Beach and playing volleyball everyday. Then soon after, realizing that he would need a real job, and working on the runway directing airplanes at LAX. (In retrospect I have to say, not so bad a job--at least the commute was easy). A year and a half later, I wouldn't be friends with that companion that caused me to get in trouble anymore, and two years later I would ask that same instructor for a letter of recommendation for my MFA applications and never receive a reply. None of this has anything to do with One Hundred Years of Solitude except the aforementioned "latin roots." Once in his notes he had written about running through Central Park to pick up Octavio Paz for an honorary ceremony at Columbia University. He also wrote stories for the class for us to critique, which I found extremely endearing, acting as if he were one of us. For one of the stories he said he had written it in my style and another student's style whose name rhymed with mine. That was a great compliment. The second great compliment was the only real piece of advice that did not seem tinged with malice of any kind. He said, "Before you ever try to write anything serious, you have to read One Hundred Years of Solitude. I can't recommend it enough."

The summer of 2004, I went to South Carolina and tried to read it. I made it through about a hundred pages and then had to return it to the library, I think. Now, five years later, it has finally been completed. It took me about two months, minus the time to read One L, which was about a week, making it the longest period I have ever spent reading a single book since the inception of this blog--a troubling development. This includes behemoths like Underworld and The Magic Mountain. I will say first of all that the long time it took me to read this has been dictated by difficult outside circumstances (LSAT 1 test results, job search, LSAT 2 prep, job found, applications imminent, "nerves") and second of all that while I did not find this book to be the revelation that so many before me have called it, I do believe that anyone who cares about improving their literary knowledge should seek it out at some point in their lives and experience it.

Here is my main problem with the book: it is a family saga, and it is a very confusing one. I find it hard to believe that a reader will be able to get through the first two hundred pages without skimming across a few for boredom or tedium or pure confusion. That is why there is a family tree on the first page, for your reference. And while studying this single page may help understanding, it could also give away a few secrets and spoil some parts of the book, but it usually doesn't. My main problem with One Hundred Years of Solitude is that I have read Buddenbrooks, and I would still recommend that family saga over this family saga anyday. However, both are responsible for earning their authors the Nobel Prize. And they are separated by some 67 years, which would make one believe that this one is more modern, but, and this is almost laughable, even Buddenbrooks is more modern.

I felt like quitting for the first 250 pages of the roughly 450 pages this version contains. Most tedious of all was the discussion of the civil war in Macondo, and the differences between liberals and conservatives that made almost no sense to me at all. Also frustrating were the repetitions of the male characters' names Jose, Arcadio, and Aureliano (the latter in particular has 5 characters named that, plus 17 other minor characters) which made me feel like character development was sorely lacking. But there were great parts in the opening 250 pages--for example, the character of Melquiades--who remains present for practically the entire novel and is the true masterstroke of the work. This book introduced the literary term "magical realism," and true, I have not read anything else that approximates this blend of the fantastic and mundane, but then again, I have not read Cervantes, nor any other latin writers--embarrassing, but something I hope to remedy over the years. One exception--I have read some Borges--but Borges still strikes me as more trustworthy than Marquez.

And in two separate afterwords to my edition, it is mentioned in both that this book had its origins in Marquez's childhood, a large part of which he spent living with his grandparents. His grandmother's habit of telling true stories with the same facial expression as when telling completely made-up stories is the device he sought to mimic in the tone of this book--and after reading that, it's clear to me that he has achieved his goal perfectly. Still, it is difficult for me to select any passages for quotation in this post because I did not find any description, exchange, or explanation particularly beautiful. I do believe the last page or two merits quotation, but it would not be right to do that--the ending is the single best part of the book, in my opinion, and well worth the journey to get there.

So I will recommend One Hundred Years of Solitude with reservations. You will have to know that you are getting into a novel that appears to play by no rules, only to find that around page 300, there has always been a relatively clear and focused modus operandi, though one that eschews traditional narrative detail. Marquez does not get sentimental about his characters. They are exposed to myriad punishments and suffering. Many of them do embrace solitude, but none are totally divorced from the outside world.

The reservations that I have about recommending this novel are primarily cultural. This book will not meet the same expectations as a book like say, American Pastoral will. It may be a Nobel Prize winning work of literature, but it does not fall in line with the concept of a "great American novel." It may be a great "South American novel," but for a person such as myself, it is difficult to feel very close to the characters, or to be deeply moved by their story. So for me at least, the greatest value of this work is its imaginative quality. It is almost like Marquez is a crazy grandfather that tells fantastic bedtime stories. And indeed an enterprising parent might read a chapter to their children before bed, in spite of the racier segments, and achieve a connection to an earlier part of society that is increasingly disappearing--oral culture. Whatever mechanism is used for the enjoyment of this text, it will ultimately impress by virtue of its scope. But I do find it hard to believe that every single word could be treasured, and that a reader would not find a single part slow going.