Remnick and Morrison

By Benjamin Wallace Wells | Wednesday, October 28, 1998

I've got this sneaking suspicion that Toni Morrison taught David Remnick at Princeton. They were both there at the same time, and her quote covers the back of his new book (King of the World, a biography of Muhammed Ali) as her essays, stories, and even Talk of the Town pieces (equivalent in length of this paper's Week in Review) have covered the pages of the New Yorker magazine, which Remnick edits.

It's a nice little connection, Remnick and Morrison, because there's a contrast between Morrison, whose Nobel Prize makes her the noteworthy American novelist, and Remnick, whose New Yorker makes him the noteworthy sponsor of American literary non-fiction.

Morrison, I think, is pretty poor. Her stories are too overwrought, her themes too simple — and she's not funny at all. But Saul Bellow and John Updike and Philip Roth are getting old, so its Morrison who gets picked up as the American novelist of the moment, and Morrison who wins the Nobel Prize. Literature, it seems, has been politicized.

All of which is more than a little depressing.

Which brings us back to David Remnick. David Remnick is the best symbol of the lyricism and poignancy of contemporary American literary non-fiction, the shy cousin of a discipline, that is, at the moment, bettering lumbering fiction with success after success.

Remnick has just written a really fine book, a lucid and loving portrait of Muhammed Ali. He is really remarkable, though, for his association with the New Yorker.

Remnick took over the New Yorker this summer from Tina Brown, who seemed to conceive the nation's foremost literary magazine as a vehicle for soliciting advertisements from Helmut Lang . She updated the magazine graphically (hiring a cohort of very famous and very good fashion photographers) and ran a lot of pieces on happy glitterati like Donatella Versace and the special relevance of the handbag of the month. The serious pieces in her tenure tended to be either political or overwrought human rights pieces, and had a self-conscious feel to them, as if they knew their function was to legitimize Tina Brown's shmaltzy glitz.

Remnick's genius lies in his expansion of the traditional limits of magazine articles to play to the strengths of his writers. His best staff writer is Adam Gopnik.

Under Tina Brown, Gopnik, who began his career as an art critic, was confined to the sort of mundane political detail that was the lot of a European correspondant: French national strikes, reforms in the European monetary system, cabinet members and call-girls in unhappy trysts. Remnick has allowed Gopnik further afield; based in Paris, he regularly submits pieces on things like the crisis in cooking at his favorite restaurant and his decades-long relationship with his psychoanalyst.

The results are delightful, if eclectic.

Gopnik has a wonderful eye for character. He describes his psychoanalyst like this:

'He often indulged in strangely Johnsonian periphrases: once, talking about Woody Allen, he remarked, 'My wife, who was an extremely witty woman, was naturally curious to see such a celebrated wit. We saw him in a cabaret setting. I recall that he was reciting samples of his writing in a state of high anxiety.' It took me days of figuring — what kind of reading had it been? a kind of Weimar tribute evening? — to realize that Dr. and Mrs. Grosskurth had gone to a night club and heard the comedian's monologue.'

Gopnik also has a brilliant sense for the melodramas which we infuse into the little disturbances of our lives. Describing the decline of his favorite restaurant:

'It was a beautiful day, but ominous reports were coming in from all sides. Someone had had a doubtful sole, someone else had noticed that ouefs crevettes, hard-boiled eggs with shrimp, had been sneaked onto the menu (No, no, someone else said, reassuringly, the ouefs crevettes were there twenty years ago; it was really a restoration.'

The dominant mode of writing may have shifted from fiction to non-fiction, but the lyricism is there. Those who decry, with the faulty confidence of the intellectually hip, the decline of contemporary literature miss the point.

I think American writing is safe, for the moment, at least, as long as its borders are defined liberally enough. There can be literary brilliance in recounting the minute details of every doubtful sole and Johnsonian periphrase.

Remnick and Morrison

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