America has yet to recover from Andy Warhol. Since his death in 1987, celebrity culture has eclipsed or invaded nearly every corner of life in the U.S. – including, briefly, the New Yorker magazine. During the mid-1990s, Tina Brown gussied up the magazine’s writing staff, set it loose on pop culture and even invited celebrities to guest-edit. None of these developments went uncommented upon in the viper pit of New York’s media world, or in the provinces, for that matter. There are still folks angry about color advertisements.
In more ways than one, David Remnick, the magazine’s editor since 1998, is the man for these people. Educated at Princeton, the product of a 10-year apprenticeship at the Washington Post, he is a dutiful reporter and a stylish writer, who never lets one get in the way of the other. His reporting from Moscow earned him a George Polk Award, and his book about the last days of the Soviet Empire won him a Pulitzer Prize. For a treat he lets himself cover boxing.
And every 10 years Remnick also allows himself to assemble the pieces he writes at The New Yorker into a book. In 1996 he brought out “The Devil Problem and Other True Stories,” one of the best one-volume primers for a journalist shy of reading, well, back issues of “The New Yorker.” Now we have “Reporting,” a second collection of pieces, similarly preoccupied with people in transition.
Here are profiles of Al Gore, Vaclav Havel, Philip Roth, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Mike Tyson, among others – only Remnick doesn’t catch these figures at the top of their game, but entering the wilder and woollier region of semi-obscurity. Gore tries hard not to be a fool, and in trying so, becomes one; Solzhenitsyn holes up in the woods of Vermont finishing a work he feels will put the final nail in the Soviet coffin. Only once he returns to his homeland the funeral has come and gone.
In an age when every interview feels like a vague descendant of Andy Warhol’s “Interview,” this is cheerfully rigorous work – unglamorous, obsessed with context, and yet not without its flourishes. Solzhenitsyn “has an astonishing nineteenth-century face: a Tolstoyan beard; blue, almost Asiatic, eyes; thinning, swept-back hair.”
Following Tony Blair around London, antiwar sentiment rising, Remnick witnesses the prime minister’s “Halloween rictus, a practiced yet futile attempt to mask embarrassment or anger with a game expression that hopes to project sincerity, patience, and (the essential category of pollsters) likability.”
As with the best magazine writing, Remnick absorbs the energy around him and lets it wash over his prose. So his profile on Don Delillo is pure gimcrack New York as cast through the kind of gauzy blue filter of the novelist’s trademark paranoia. Around politicians Remnick’s sentences grow tense and skeptical, as one should be around politicians. Several long stories about post-Soviet Russia are Byzantine in their references – phlegmatically hopeful as if to say, hey, at least some of the oligarchs have been thrown in prison.
“Reporting” does not contain all of Remnick’s writings over the past decade. A 7,000-word piece on President Mubarak of Egypt didn’t make the cut for some reason, nor did any of the numerous comment pieces Remnick has written over the past five years – which seems odd, since in the wake of Sept. 11, the magazine’s role as a political organ has grown.
But for Remnick to reprint these pieces he would have had to address whether he, and to some extent, the whole magazine, fell too closely into lockstep with the Bush administration’s case for war. “The price of being wrong yet again could be incalculable,” Remnick wrote in February 2003, echoing the president. “History will not easily excuse us if, by deciding not to decide, we defer a reckoning with an aggressive totalitarian leader who intends not only to develop weapons of mass destruction but also to use them.”
Since then, The New Yorker has paid a sort of penance for this collusion, making news on several occasions with the reporting of Seymour Hersh, endorsing John Kerry in 2004 and allowing a wider leash for political columnist Hendrick Hertzberg. In the meantime, the magazine has continued to bring us the cultural news, sometimes a little late, almost always wittily, insisting that if you take a long enough look at somebody on their way out the door you learn just as much as them at the top.
“Reporting” reveals that no one there does this with greater devotion than the editor himself.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
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Reporting
Writings from the New Yorker
By David Remnick
Knopf, 481 pages, $27.95
