After the tall timber Collected nonfiction

Renata Adler

Book - 2015

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Subjects
Published
New York : New York Review Books [2015]
Language
English
Main Author
Renata Adler (-)
Physical Description
xiv, 515 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9781590178799
  • Preface / by Michael Wolf
  • Toward a Radical Middle
  • The March for Non-Violence from Selma
  • Fly Trans-Love Airways
  • Letter from the Six-Day War
  • The Black Power March in Mississippi
  • Radicalism in Debacle: the Palmer House
  • G. Gordon Liddy in America
  • But Ohio. Well, I guess that's one state where they elect to lock and load: The National Guard
  • Letter from Biafra
  • A Year in the Dark, Introduction
  • On violence, film always argues yes
  • Three Cuban cultural reports with films somewhere in them
  • House Critic
  • The Justices and the Journalists
  • The Extreme Nominee
  • Canaries in the Mineshaft, Introduction
  • Searching for the Real Nixon Scandal
  • Decoding the Starr Report
  • A Court of No Appeal
  • Irreparable Harm
  • The Porch Overlooks No Such Thing.
Review by New York Times Review

IN THE FIRST essay in this new collection of nonfiction, Renata Adler writes about the cultural role of her generation. Adler was born in 1938, coming of age after the heroism of World War II and before the antics of baby boomers. "In college, under Eisenhower, we were known for nothing, or for our apathy," she wrote in 1969. "We are unnoticed even as we spread clear across what people call, without taking account of us, the generation gap." Neither here nor there, she went on to explain, "we cut across," and in this function her generation found its purpose: "At a moment of polarization, and other clichés that drain the language of meaning, the continuity of the American story seems to rest just now in us." At least in the field of magazine writing, this turned out to be true. Unless one lived the era directly, to think now of "the Sixties" is to refer to the writing of people born in the 1930s: Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Jane Kramer, to name just a few. One generation removed from both their bewildered elders and the wayward youth, they narrated a social shift along a spectrum ranging from suggestive disdain to outright immersion. They were supported by the economic and cultural supremacy of the printed magazine. They were also very good writers, read generations later as much for their mastery of craft as for their subject matter. "Lacking slogans," Adler wrote, "we still have the private ear for distinctions, for words." Which is not to say that Adler would like to be grouped with everyone in this crowd. In the past she has not so subtly made fun of Talese's article "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" and accused Wolfe of making up facts. She wrote in 1969 that "I particularly detested, and detest, the 'new journalism,' " which she described as "a corruption of a form which originated in The New Yorker itself." During her almost 40 years writing for that magazine, Adler made her name covering many of the same subjects as her peers - the civil rights movement in the South, the hippies in California, the New Left - from a contrarian perspective she called the "radical middle." She registered as a Republican in 1964 to vote for Nelson Rockefeller in the presidential primary. "In the early days of political correctness," she wrote, "I liked to imagine ... that I was the only Republican reporter, not just on the staff of The New Yorker, but in New York." Until recently younger readers who had heard of Renata Adler knew only that with her book "Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker," she had engaged in some especially pyrotechnic bridge burning that estranged her from that publication; that she lived in a kind of exile in Connecticut; or perhaps that her novel "Speedboat" (1976) was included in one of David Foster Wallace's syllabuses, for a class called "Selected Obscure/Eclectic Fictions." The republishing of "Speedboat" and "Pitch Dark" (1983) by New York Review Books in 2013 led to renewed interest in her writing. Michael Wolff writes in his preface to "After the Tall Timber" that Adler "has become something of a cult figure for a new generation of literary-minded young women." But those of Adler's readers expecting more ennui aboard yachts and cocktails at Elaine's will not find such disaffected glamour here. "The self-referring piece by the resourceful, intrepid, self-referring writer, could not, no matter how amusing it might be, appear in The New Yorker," she wrote in "Gone." Adler joined The New Yorker in 1963. Early dispatches covering the march for nonviolence in Selma in 1965 and the black power march in Mississippi in 1966 show a writer wary of group movements even when she finds herself agreeing with a cause. In addition to observational descriptions of both the heroes and the lesser-known participants, she gives space to the tedium, inaudible speeches, disorganization and sunburns that have been neglected in Hollywood reprisals. In Selma, she speculates that since the marchers have already won federal permission to demonstrate and forced President Lyndon B. Johnson to advocate for voting rights, "the national commitment to civil rights would hardly be increased" by going through with the full march as originally planned. In Mississippi, she takes great pains to assure white liberals that "Black Power" is not meant to alienate their sympathies: "To the marchers," she explains, "it was a rallying cry for blacks to vote as a bloc, to take over communities in which they constitute a majority, and to exercise some political leverage in communities in which they constitute a large minority." Abroad, she covers the Six-Day War in Israel and the Biafran war with Nigeria with this same mix of anecdote and observation. As the '60s progress, however, Adler begins to observe less and criticize more. She calls the notion of mind expansion "a ghastly misnomer," describes the waifish teenagers gathering on the Sunset Strip as "economically unfit, devoutly bent on powerlessness" and, while covering the New Politics Convention in Chicago in 1967, laments its "spite politics" and the rise of "a new, young, guerrilla-talking Uncle Tom, to transact nitty-gritty politics with his radical white counterpart." Didion and Wolfe may have written better-known articles on similar subjects; Adler's show how Nixon got elected. The collection includes one of her most famous pieces of writing, her evisceration, in 1980, of Pauline Kael's "When the Lights Go Down" for The New York Review of Books. Now that the office politics of the era have faded (Adler and Kael were colleagues at The New Yorker), the review reads as scathing but well reasoned, firmly rooted in a close reading of Kael's words. The revelation of Kael's repetitious rhetorical tricks - "physical sadism," "the mock rhetorical question," "a form of prose hypochondria, palpating herself all over to see if she has a thought" - is harsh but unassailable. Less worthy of admiration is the appended "note by the author," which suggests that she wrote the review because Kael had become an "aging, essentially humorless woman reveling in unimaginative talking dirty." By the mid-1980s, after she earns a degree from Yale Law School, Adler's descriptive writing diminishes, replaced by critical readings of texts: of documents related to the Nixon impeachment; of the Starr Report; of the Supreme Court opinion in Bush v. Gore; of The New York Times's responses to mistakes it made in the cases of Wen Ho Lee and Jayson Blair and, she says, in articles written about herself. Of Kael, Adler wrote that she had "lost any notion of the legitimate borders of polemic." In the later pieces in this book, something similar takes place, as Adler's writing becomes increasingly like a series of audits by an exasperated accountant. The parsing of legal briefs and New York Times corrections starts to take on the dryness of the primary source material. Adler is persuasive when she contends that The Times uses the minutiae of its corrections page as a "substitute for conscience" about mistakes that have resulted in far greater injustices than the misspelling of a name or misidentification of a butterfly. But when she advocates for the publication of "long, verbatim transcripts," to reveal the shortcomings of reportorial synthesis and analysis, she seems to have lost faith in the task of journalism altogether. Adler is the daughter of parents who fled Nazi Germany. She was a friend and disciple of Hannah Arendt, the philosopher to whom she refers most often in these pages. She has consistently written from the perspective that extremism, and the passive collaboration that abets it, are ever-present threats. Her principled stance toward unchecked power, jargon, co-optation and obsequiousness, as in a critical 1970 article about the National Guard after the shootings at Kent State, reveals real dangers to democracy. But sometimes her vigilance clouds her ability to describe change, let alone helpfully interpret it. Then there are her orthodoxies about writing. For the callow reader, who might not have minded some repetitious bawdiness in a movie review, who enjoys nonfiction that reads like a novel, who has indulged in New Age metaphysics, who suffers white guilt or black anger, who fails to crosscheck the long, verbatim transcripts: It is not for such a reader to be disappointed in Adler; she has already expressed her disappointment in us. EMILY WITT'S first book, "Future Sex," will be published next year.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 10, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Renata Adler is a clarion, often controversial critic, reporter, and novelist highly visible in the 1960s and 1970s. She was as tuned-in to the zeitgeist and as intrepid in her interpretation and articulation as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. And she was just as photogenic with her signature long braid, no minor quality when it came to that era's superficial media response to female intellectuals. Yet Adler all but vanished from the scene, ostracized by her peers for her fierce candor. In 2013, an Adler revival began. Her epigrammatic and haunting novels, Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983), were reissued. Now this incandescent volume brings readers the fire and depth of Adler's trenchant nonfiction. Born in Milan in 1938 after her parents fled Nazi Germany, Adler grew up in Connecticut and pursued an arduous education, studying philosophy and German at Bryn Mawr, comparative literature at Harvard, and philosophy and linguistics at the Sorbonne. She then earned a law degree at Yale. Her braininess and training made her a rigorous observer, researcher, analyst, and writer. Facts matter to Adler, so does language. This assiduousness and devotion to the truth is the source of both her literary power and the fury she ignited. Adler became a staff writer at the New Yorker in 1963. She wrote book reviews for a while, then asked the now legendary editor, William Shawn, if she could go down south to report on the civil rights movement. She went to Selma, Alabama, and chronicled the long, dangerous march to Montgomery, the state capitol. She was in her element as a reporter, working in the long-form style the New Yorker perfected and popularized. The March for Non-Violence from Selma opens this collection, and it is a model of astutely witnessed, thoroughly considered, and calmly dramatic writing. In a completely different world and vibe, Adler captures the scene on Los Angeles' Sunset Strip in 1966. In Letter from the Six Day War, she chronicles life in Israel in June 1967 as the besieged nation, a geographical absurdity, defended itself a vivid report presaging the ongoing struggles for peace. She also traveled to Nigeria during the civil war and wrote Letter from Biafra. Though Adler was ensconced at the very epicenter of the privileged Left, she is scouring in her condemnation of its fuzzy thinking and pretensions, and she avidly traveled with G. Gordon Liddy, of Watergate infamy, on his book tour to write a lengthy, humanizing profile. Another knock-out piece is her delving history of the National Guard, written after the shooting deaths of four college students at Kent State in 1970, an essay freshly shocking in this time of renewed concerns about overly aggressive law enforcement. Adler brought her legal training and insistence on precision to her tenacious analysis of the Watergate case, the six-volume Starr Report on the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, and the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision. These deep immersions in difficult political terrain inspired her to roundly castigate the sloppy, craven commercial press. Eloquent indignation powers much of this tome, but Adler is also acerbically funny, especially in her introduction to A Year in the Dark, a collection of her reviews as chief film critic at the New York Times. And speaking of movies, here, too, is Adler's notoriously harsh review of long-reigning film critic Pauline Kael's collection, When the Lights Go Down (1980). This unforgiven New York Times critique, which contains an overlooked yet keenly thoughtful dissection of the challenges involved in being a staff reviewer on perpetual deadline, sent Adler into exile. Until now. After the Tall Timber is a sumptuously intelligent and exhilarating collection by a courageous and committed writer of integrity, artistry, and independence. A provocative and elevating book that recalibrates journalistic standards, and sharpens our perception of the recent past and its influence on our even more harrowing present. Readers will hope that Adler's triumphant return to print will open the way for new works. We need Adler's brilliance, wit, and lucidity.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Journalist and novelist Adler (Speedboat) offers what she considers the best of her essays in this large, bracing volume. She doesn't shy away from colorful details, such as "Dickensian characters" on the Sunset Strip or "picnics at the front" on the Gaza Strip during the Six-Day War, but she is at her best covering "turning points," from a Black Power march in Mississippi in 1966 to the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore. One of her favored methods of criticizing powerful, influential figures is making lists, such as film critic Pauline Kael's "favorite" (and overused) words, or Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong's references, throughout their book The Brethren, to the Supreme Court Justices' "moods and feelings." Adler's opinions are as reasoned as they are relentless. She assails with absolute conviction, as she proves in her rebukes of Kael and Robert Bork, among others. Perhaps the most fascinating piece is a lengthy, sympathetic profile of G. Gordon Liddy during a 1980 book tour. Elsewhere, she produces interesting juxtapositions with essays about the abuse of presidential power in the Watergate and Monica Lewinsky scandals. These selections, united by a persistent theme of the "misrepresentation, coercion, and abuse of public process, and... the journalist's role in it," demonstrate that Adler's uncompromising insistence on accuracy and accountability is what ultimately makes her writing so incisive. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A collection of articles by an outspoken writer.Vanity Fair contributing editor Michael Wolff (The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch, 2008, etc.) gathers 20 pieces of Adler's nonfiction, published between 1965 and 2003, which serve as a witness to history and evidence of her hard-hitting journalism. In the 1960s and '70s, Adler was prominent, opinionated and often controversial. Her career, Wolff writes, went "wrong, or at least astrayprimarily for not being able to hold her tongue." In 1968, working as a book reviewer for the New Yorker, she "no longer saw the point of reviewing other people's books" unless they were important. When the New York Times offered her a post as movie critic, she took that, only to become irritated by the obligation to review movies she thought unworthy of attention, her editors' stylistic strictures and the newspaper's objection to her "excessively scathing" reviews. She quit after 14 months, returning to the New Yorker, where she continued as a staff writer for 40 years. Articles on the Six-Day War; the 1965 civil rights march in Selma; a Black Power march in Mississippi, with deft cameo portraits of Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King; and Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court represent some of her work there. When the New Yorker changed ownership in 1985, Adler made enemies by writing a book that was harshly critical of its new editors and several prominent writers. She made more enemies after publishing an 8,000-word article in the New York Review of Books excoriating Pauline Kael's When the Lights Go Down, a collection of her reviews. Adler deemed the book "piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless." Adler's nonfiction has been available in other collections, whose introductions are included in this one. Although this volume amply reveals the author's attention to language and commitment to politically engaged journalism, many pieces seem dated, and a few are tediously long. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.