So Many Books, So Little Time

by Sara Nelson

  Floater is about a guy who fills in for vacationing, or otherwise absent, editors at a newsweekly, probably Time magazine, at which the author worked early in his career. It’s full of characters anybody who has ever worked in this business will recognize: the medical editor who routinely comes down with whatever obscure illness he just reported on, the tipster who is almost always wrong, the stringer who insists that two-thirds stockings for women are a trend but is unable to articulate which part of the leg two-thirds stockings are supposed to cover. The plot—the magazine is trying to find out whether or not the First Lady is pregnant—is even flimsier than the hosiery idea, but it doesn’t even matter: Trillin, who has since written many other books and is now an official “American humorist,” is all about character and riff. My favorite is Wolferman’s law (named after the staffer who devised it), a theorem that says the number of extramarital affairs going on in any office always remains constant (sixteen to nineteen couples), as some adulterers go back to their spouses and others step up to the plate.

  People don’t talk much about Floater these days—I’m such a loyalist I’m wounded, on Trillin’s behalf, that neither Hwang nor Davies nor any other latter-day pretenders allude to the Master in their jacket copy or interviews—but it made a lot of noise in my circle at the time it was published. Like Heartburn, it depicted a world my friends and I knew a little about and aspired to a lot, and like Heartburn, it was funny and arch and true. In fact, when I reread it this week, and discovered that one of my favorite Trillin lines was missing—I distinctly remember him once writing that the fee an author gets paid for an article should always, definitely, exceed the cost of the luncheon at which the article was assigned—I immediately e-mailed my old friend Joanne. (Joanne and I became somewhat estranged in the post-Heartburn days and only now, thanks to the ease and anonymity of e-mail, occasionally and affectionately communicate.) “Where’s the quote about the cost of the lunch?” I asked her. “Let me search my Trilliana and I’ll get back to you.” (See why I liked her so much for so long? Only Joanne could say “Trilliana” so casually and get away with it.) Two hours later, the verdict arrived: my favorite line was never in Floater at all, but in an essay Trillin published in a magazine—it later turned up in his collection called Uncivil Liberties.

  The highest compliment anybody ever gave me was that an essay I wrote reminded her of one from the great man’s Alice, Let’s Eat; if that’s true, I feel like I could die happy. But somehow, for all that I idolized Calvin Trillin and his work, I never developed Trillin envy anywhere near as intense as what I experienced with dear old Nora Ephron. Why? Partly, I think, because Calvin Trillin is a man, and it’s not nice to envy people who have only one X chromosome. Also, from all accounts—and that means from careful readings of virtually all of his books, the lack of gossip within the New York writers’ community, and the adorable dedications, almost always to his late wife, Alice—Calvin Trillin is a certifiably nice man. In fact, I recently met him at a book fair at Charley’s school. He lives in my neighborhood, and he just happened to have a new book out that he was signing and flogging. He seemed almost shy. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Trillin,” I said to him humbly as he looked down at his shoes. “I’m a big fan, particularly of Floater.”

  That made him look up.

  “Floater?” he said, as surprised as if I’d said I was his long-lost child. “Really?”

  “I bet you don’t hear a lot about Floater from people these days,” I said. (I was feeling pretty puffed-up, all of a sudden.)

  His response was vintage, deadpan Trillin. “I didn’t hear a lot about it when it was published,” he said.6

  But even if Trillin’s right and most people didn’t read, or don’t remember, Floater, there are an awful lot of unconscious imitators out there. I’m tempted to do a study, in fact, and see how many books about publishing are published every year. Right off the top of my head I can think of Men in Black, by Scott Spencer, one of the all-time great novels, about a guy who writes a book under a pseudonym and then has to travel the country promoting it as a person who doesn’t exist. And then, of course, there’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, which was almost as much about the writing business as about love and romance.

  And of course, this makes sense: many of the people who decide what to publish are frustrated writers themselves, and so they think either everybody else is as fascinated with our silly little business as they are and/or if they themselves ever get it together to write, they should take the advice they’ve been doling out to wannabe-published authors for years, to “write about what they know.” This would explain the seemingly disproportionate number of books about the relatively small book-and-magazine industry; I mean, I don’t find a lot of books about truckers landing on my desk. But as magaziney as Floater is, its venue is almost beside the point: the book, like all great satires, is about more than the sum of its characters and its admittedly thin plot. I venture to guess that anyone who has ever worked in an office, and that includes an awful lot of readers, would find herself enamored enough of Calvin Trillin’s masterwork to do what I did: attach myself to the book (purchased used over the Internet, since it’s long out of print) for three nights running and even break the hardcovers-stay-home rule and carry it around in my purse.

  But that still doesn’t explain why I retain such bonhomie toward Trillin, even if he did sign a copy of Tepper Isn’t Going Out for me last weekend. Why am I not jealous that he published a novel about our wacky, character-filled business and lived to tell the tale, even if he’s right and nobody except me and a couple of my friends have ever heard of it? For a long time I thought I wanted to do exactly the same thing, and for years kept in a drawer an outline for my very own publishing novel. It was about a women’s lifestyle magazine at which the health editor was a smoker who regularly took a break at four P.M. to gobble a candy bar, and the fitness expert was a lush whose idea of exercise was lifting a glass of wine to her mouth.

  But I never wrote that book, and once I read Floater, I knew I never would.

  I wasn’t envious of Trillin so much as grateful to him. He’d let me off the hook.

  After all, the definitive performance had been done.

  November 3

  Saturdays with Charley

  I tend to have a strong negative reaction to people who announce right off the bat that they’re contrarians. Contrary to what? I want to ask. I know, I know: they’re people who tend to buck the common wisdom, who pride themselves on not running with the pack, who go out of their way to disagree, often simply for the sake of disagreement. These people annoy me because there’s something smug about them: Who exactly are they to decide what the common wisdom is, and isn’t it just a tiny bit lazy to automatically disagree with it? They remind me of the publishing-course students I used to teach who would come up with ideas for magazines they could describe no more succinctly than to say, “It’ll be like The New Yorker, only better.” That’s not an idea, I’d tell them, it’s a reaction.

  Still, I’m a little bit contrarian on occasion, especially when it comes to books—but then, you already knew that. Obviously, I tend to get my back up when a book is hyped to death, and I have an almost instinctive ability to look at a book everybody else likes and find (or imagine) its flaws. Maybe it’s my reporter’s background, although people who knew me as a kid say I was always this way. “She’s going to be a lawyer,” they used to say. “She has an argument for everything.” Or as Leo says regularly now, using a metaphor I’ve never completely understood, “You could talk a peel off a grape.”

  But I like to think that I’m at least a little more sophisticated than the average contrarian, that on some occasions at least I don’t contribute to a backlash so much as begin the backlash to the backlash. Case in point: Now that it has become fashionable, after its enormous success, to dis a book called The Lovely Bones, I’ve become all the more adamant in my praise of it. Likewise, to those revisionists who suggest that Bret Easton Ellis’s Ame
rican Psycho is, after all, a great piece of real literature, I insist that it is, as just about everybody said at the time of its publication, a piece of trash.

  Last weekend, then, should have been a contrarian’s delight. Leo and Charley and I had been invited to visit my dear friend Maria at her lovely hand-restored farmhouse in upstate New York, the kind of trip we rarely make, thanks to Leo’s weekend production schedule and my—here it comes—inherent contrarianism. (Why should I drive two and a half hours to look at a tree? I think, remembering my two favorite lines about city folk in the country. “I am at two with nature,” Woody Allen once said. A colleague’s mother put it this way: “Nature? Who needs it!” ) But we had a lovely time: Charley played with Maria’s daughter, Isabelle, while Leo and T.J. and Maria and I sat around talking and drinking, with the emphasis on the drinking. Several bottles of wine later, I found myself wide awake in Maria’s pristine guest bedroom at four A.M., with Charley and Leo by my side. High as we were, Maria—as usual, the perfect hostess—had pressed a book into my hand as I staggered up the stairs a few hours earlier. “I loved this,” she said about Mitch Albom’s blockbuster inspirational title, Tuesdays with Morrie. “I got it from the library.”

  Five million Americans have read Morrie—in hardcover—but up until now I hadn’t been one of them. For me, the book had two strikes against it: it is a thousand times too famous (Did you know there is now a play based on it? What’s the matter? A major TV movie, produced by Oprah and starring Jack Lemmon, wasn’t enough?), and it was a spiritual, inspirational title, which just about never lands in my must-read pile. (The only exception I can think of is Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott’s collection of essays on faith; I did read that, and while I found it far less useful than, say, her Bird by Bird, even I could appreciate that her faith was completely heartfelt.) But that night, it also had two things going for it: it was short, and thus much more appealing in my tipsiness than the book I’d brought, and most important, Maria had given it to me.

  Like Mary, Maria is a relatively new friend; her daughter is in school with Charley, and despite the growing third-grade requirement that boys don’t talk to girls or vice versa, the two of them still like to play together. Maria’s a fashion designer—she makes spectacular handbags that strangers routinely stop me on the street to ask about—and a smart and thoughtful person. Maria once told me that her favorite author was Anita Brookner, because reading Brookner’s small British novels takes her on vacation from the hectic New York life she lives as a businesswoman and mother. She’s also the one who told me she read a couple of chapters of the copy of I Don’t Know How She Does It that I gave her, and then put it aside; like me, she felt it only took a couple of dozen pages to get the gist of the whiny-mother-who-can’t-quite-have-it-all novel everybody else is raving about. In other words, I have come to love Maria: she’s smart and she doesn’t live by the common wisdom. For all that she sometimes disparages herself as conventional and conservative, she never ceases to surprise me. In other words, she’s a little bit of a you-know-what, just like you-know-who.

  So when I wake up at four A.M., with both Charley and Leo crammed into the antique bed beside me, I pick up Tuesdays with Morrie and begin to read. I’m harboring the ultimate contrarian fantasy that it will, like all the best books and friends, turn out to surprise me, and that I’ll go home tomorrow brimming with insights about the bestseller that all my snootier book friends have avoided like the plague. I’m hoping I’ll be able to tell Maria at breakfast how much I loved the book, and how misunderstood it has been by the so-called intelligentsia, who’ve embraced the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, say, but turn their noses up at Morrie Schwartz’s and Mitch Albom’s homegrown Zen.

  But it becomes clear pretty fast that I’m not going to be able to do that. By page 20, I’m simultaneously bored and annoyed. This is the book that sat on the bestseller list for a couple of years, that was made into a very successful TV movie and that has made Mitch Albom one of the most successful journalists of our age? This book, the one that for 192 artless pages extols wisdom that boils down to (a) stop and smell the roses, (b) don’t sweat the small stuff, and (c) concentrate not on money or status but on love of family and community? Truthfully, I’m not that surprised by the book’s success—the unbearably treacly Bridges of Madison County was a megahit and practically spawned its own industry a few years back. I’m more depressed by it. Is it true, as a wise man once said, that you can never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the people? Or worse, am I so out of it, such a snob and so emotionally and spiritually deprived, that I’m missing the point of the book?

  Maybe I’m not trying hard enough to identify, I think. A friend who has been in AA tells me that one of the precepts of the program is that you should concentrate on the similarities in the drinking-life stories members tell and forget about the differences. So I try to find points of connection between Albom and me. Let’s see: we’re about the same age (he was at Brandeis when I was at Yale, at any rate); we’re both Jewish (I’m assuming); and we’re both fairly driven, achievement-oriented writers. Albom had been Morrie’s student in college, and is pretty honest about saying he found the professor and the sociology course he taught way too “touchy-feely” for him; I remember that in my circle of friends, we thought the whole sociology department was one big gut course. But the similarities end there, and not only because I can’t think of a single professor who would serve as my Morrie were I to need to find one. I completely lose patience with Mitch Albom because I don’t buy that even he buys what he’s selling: I don’t get the impression that he’s any more comfortable with all this touchy-feely stuff than he ever was and, well, I don’t like him very much. Say what you will about books like Traveling Mercies or the hundreds of how-to-be-at-peace tomes that come across my desk at the office, at least they read like the authors believe what they’re saying. Morrie, on the other hand, comes off as a cynical attempt to cash in on the spiritual self-improvement movement. I also don’t believe that a middle-class, forty-something, Brandeis-educated writer had to travel weekly across the country to learn the kinds of rules that were posted on Charley’s kindergarten classroom wall. In all his years as a struggling writer, through his own marriage and inevitable, universal interpersonal problems, had he never been told to slow down, share love, or seize the day? If not, then I feel sorry for Albom and worry at the state of American parenting today.

  Speaking of parenting, the whole time I’m reading Tuesdays, Charley is snoring softly beside me, one half-fist thrown casually over my shoulder. (Another reason I love Maria: While I was forgoing Penelope Leach to read Philip Roth, she was probably holed up with Anita Brookner, and so neither of us worries when eight-year-olds occasionally sleep in the same bed as their parents.) As I often do late at night, I stroke his beautiful round face and whisper silly endearments in his ear. But looking at him tonight, in a wine-and- Morrie-induced haze, I start wondering if I’ve been teaching him the right life lessons, or enough of them.

  I think I spend plenty of time and energy imparting my own style of humanistic wisdom to Charley, and I often hear my parents’ warnings against conspicuous consumption, meanness, and greed come out of my own mouth. From the time he was old enough to talk—which meant to whine and complain that he didn’t have every single one of the action figures he wanted—I developed my mantra. “You know, Charley . . .” it always begins. “I know, Mom,” he learned to say early and often, in pitch-perfect mother imitation, “there are other people in the world and you must learn to appreciate the privileges you’ve got.”

  So it’s not that I worry that Charley will grow up mean or angry or nasty; he’s a pretty good-natured kid, if unbelievably stubborn, and his teachers so far have all commented on his unusually mature sense of empathy. But neither Leo nor I practice any particular religion, and it occurs to me that we might need to work harder to make sure he gets at home the basic messages he’d get at church or temple.

  It occurs to me
, too, that we’d better start soon, before Charley grows up to be a forty-year-old man content to seek out and be satisfied with the easy lessons in this book.

  November 15

  Œuvre and Oeuvre Again

  Once upon a time, an editor friend gave me a book. It was a big book—850 pages—and it was by a writer I’d never heard of, a Dutch-born Brit named Michel Faber. The book, The Crimson Petal and the White, was “the best” the editor had ever published, she said, but I didn’t pay too much attention to that, because she’s the hyperbolic type and has said that to me at least a half-dozen times in the half-dozen years of our acquaintance. Still, after I opened the book in the cab on the way home from my lunch with my friend and read a few pages, I was so enthralled I knew immediately what I had to do. I had to put the book away and not think of it again until I had a week to hibernate with it. As a woman who’s been through her fair share of whirl-wind book romances, I knew that to get involved with Faber would mean days of no sleep, of stolen moments, of passion and obsession.

  But last week I was ready. I’d been on some disappointing dates—with Tuesdays with Morrie and others—and I was ripe to hook up with a book that would take my breath away. I pulled Crimson Petal down from the high shelf on which I’d hidden it from myself and began to read.

  A week later, I was still reading. I probably would have been finished if I weren’t a chronic dieter with a tendency to dole out my treats. The story of Sugar—see? Faber knew that she’d be addictive—the Victorian prostitute with a brain rather than a heart of gold, and William, her patron and lover, was so delicious I could allow myself only a little bit at a time. Two more chapters and then you just have to take a shower, I told myself on Saturday morning. Another five pages and then it’s time to go to work, I insisted on Monday. Even Charley, who has taken on some of his father’s obliviousness to my weirder reading habits, noticed something was up. “You usually leave books open all over the house,” he said, obviously having noticed my double-booking, “but you keep carrying this one everywhere we go.”