Gone

Some of your other reviewers seem to take it amiss that Adler's book isn't written for everyone. Its written for people who are familiar with some of the basics of the history of the magazine -- who know and perhaps already have opinions about the works of Truman Capote or Hannah Arendt that first appeared in this magazine before becoming successful and extremely controversial books. If that sort of book is not one that will interest you then, well ... this is not the book for you. But its rather goofy to criticize the author for having written a book for someone other than yourself, isn't it? This is an excellent book given its target. Furthermore, I believe that even if I didn't fit the above description of this book, I might have learned a good deal from it about the craft of non-fiction prose. The discussion of the "characteristic structure" of Adam Gopnik's articles, on pp. 243-44, is a little gem of analysis -- and you don't have to have read Gopnik to appreciate it, since most people who read a good deal have reas authors who use the same faulty structure she describes here.

This book is terse, and I like it very much. Renata Adler has an interesting way of writing which combines extremely complicated sentences full of asides, commas, and em-dashes, with stripped-down delivery like, "He asked me to go to the meeting. I said that I would." Taken together her style is like ornate bullets. Adler obviously takes time to consider everything she puts on the page, and so she is a writer who is definite. The only drawback to this book is that it is too short--Adler is so good at portraying the bizarre and intricate relationships and politics at The New Yorker that I wish she'd taken more time to establish what the magazine used to be like, and why it is now "Gone." She's not even particularly snarky about the troops of fools who've been at the magazine, but gives an honest account of her experience.As someone who has been writing complaint letters to The New Yorker since the age of twelve I relish Adler's astute sniping, and I will be sending the book at once to my mother, who has been writing letters of complaint for much longer (she used to routinely send back all of the subscription inserts to demonstrate how annoying and content-free they were). It is true that there was a type of article that was a New Yorker piece and now that standard has dissolved; and the magazine has been disappointingly dumbed down from a Literary Publication to a subscription-driven Conde Nast rag. Do read this book if you have ever wondered what happened to the New Yorker since Harold Ross. And the next time you want to blast off a letter to David Remnick, just send highlighted pages of "Gone" instead.

What a great book, fascinating, beautifully written. As a 25+ year New Yorker reader, I suspect Ms. Adler has it about right. (Obviously she has a unique frame of reference; that's OK, isn't it?) People who don't like this book just can't handle the ambivalence, ambiguity, potential for multiple interpretations, and contradictions that make life interesting. Anyone who works with a group of very intelligent, sensitive, competitive people will identify with some of the office politics Ms. Adler describes.

Renata Adler is tougher and smarter than everyone she has ever criticized. This book not only provides a unique inside look at literary life in Manhattan; it also offers a devastating critique of journalism in our time. Widely misrepresented as nothing more than an ad homininem attack on some of her former colleagues, "Gone" is actually something much broader than that: a lament for the decline and fall of American culture. Not since George Orwell has any journalist been so willing to speak so many unwelcome truths. That is the real reason her brilliant work has inspired so much vitriol.