I’ve been a longtime subscriber to Harper’s Magazine — it’s one of my favorite magazines, from the clever scientific hodgepodge of the last page “Findings” to the fiction to the “Readings” to the articles.
But the March 2009 article, “The Last Book Party” was disappointing (Not online yet, or I’d link). It’s a piece that threatens to expose the steamy underbelly of publishing but never actually does.
It has a few decent lines, telling us things we already know: “CEOs pressured editors to buy big bestsellers, which developed into the form of mutual assured destruction that is the book auction, a sales device that leads to insupportable advances and thus to virtually inevitable disappointments.” (the M.A.D. is rather clever, I admit)
But mostly it’s about following Motoko Rich, the reporter for the New York Times, without actually telling us much about her. And describing how the sweat sticks Morgan Entrekin’s shirt to his body as he dances “like he and everybody around him just won the Booker Prize.” It also includes a ridiculous amount of clothing description, like Jamie Byng’s “graphite suit with a steeply angled ticket pocket over an open-necked cobalt shirt.”
If you know all these characters, the piece is semi-interesting as a gossip column, but even knowing Eli Horowitz and Andrew Wylie and Entrekin and Motoko doesn’t make this fascinating.
Overall, it’s a cynical take on the Frankfurt Book Fair, portraying it as a lovefest of book money and book deals than no writer would ever want to attend. Take this observation about the Booker Prize:
“I realize that the Booker shortlist is six titles because that is the smallest number by which the industry can ensure, given today’s tentacular corporate congestion, that every single person in English-language publishing will either win or just barely lose the Booker. It is a tremendous device for goodwill.”
On a last note, to shift gears to another section of Harper’s: Did anyone else find the fiction story by Diane Williams (“Seven Stories”) not only disconcertingly brief but maddeningly enigmatic? More poetry than prose.
Illustration Credit: Thomas Allen for Harper’s Magazine
4 comments
The link is here for subscribers:
https://harpers.org/archive/2009/03/0082428
And I have to agree with you. Both Harper’s and Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who is normally a decent writer, should have known better. For all of his complaints about Motoko Rich being a haruspex, well, he comes across as a guy who has chased all the entrails and hasn’t a clue as to how the publishing industry works. It’s not quite as bad as Boris Kachka’s article, “competently” cited in this piece. But it doesn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know. Or that anybody attending Frnakfurt couldn’t divine. What a missed opportunity.
I TOTALLY agree. After his knock on the New York Magazine article about publishing at the beginning, I expected some pretty intense insight into the publishing industry.
Such a dreary, idiotic piece! This is playground nastiness, bitch-style (“Did you see what she was wearing?”) not the commentary that’s worth the time of Harper’s readers.
I’d glad to hear people agreeing with me. I know some could level the charge that I’m misreading the article — that I had expectations that it would work more as an essay while it actually was more of a new journalism piece. I know Scott over at Conversational Reading liked the piece (https://www.conversationalreading.com/2009/02/gideon-lewis-kraus-frankfurt-harpers.html)
But I’d still hold that it was still a bit empty.