franciscovazbrasil: A Feast Of Literary Delights by Malcolm Jones Jr. and Ray Sawhill

A Feast Of Literary Delights

by Malcolm Jones Jr. and Ray Sawhill

It Was A Shaky Year For The Bottom Line In New York Publishing. But For Readers, It Was A Year Of Riches.

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Dec 29, 1997

BEYOND THE BOOK CRISIS

ON THE EVENING OF NOV. 28, 1966, A rainy Monday, an extraordinary event took place at the Plaza Hotel in New York City: a writer threw a party, a masked ball, in honor of Katharine Graham, owner of The Washington Post and this magazine. More than 500 of the nation's most powerful and famous citizens, from tycoons to movie stars to literary lions, were invited. And most of them showed up, making it the first time in history, and probably forever, that the rich and famous did the bidding of a writer. Of course, the writer was Truman Capote. He was then the best-known author in the country, having published "In Cold Blood'' earlier in the year. He was also the favorite court jester of high society both here and in Europe. Capote knew everybody, from the Kennedys to members of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, and he invited them all to his Black and White Ball.

Capote's guest list supplies a sharp snapshot of the way things were--and how much the times have changed. Not one person from the world of rock and roll made the cut. That wasn't hip then. Neither, for that matter, were young people. Capote invited about three people under 30, including Mia Farrow, who appeared in her capacity as Mrs. Frank Sinatra. Only three artists got invited. And a couple of publishers and magazine editors. But there were lots of writers on the list, those being the days before celebrity elbowed accomplishment off the stage.

Writers today dwell in an uneasy shadowland somewhere between the wax museum and the midway. When William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg died this year, they were universally hailed as grand old men of American letters, which essentially negated the very idea that made them famous in the first place--the idea of a loyal opposition, of writing to resist, bellyache and generally nose-thumb the dominant culture. But the very notion of a dissonant counterculture, as embodied by the Beats, is no longer comprehensible. Alternative to what? The culture has been democratized, and everything carries the same weight.

Writers in the mid-'60s stood at the red-hot center of things. When The New Yorker serialized ""In Cold Blood,'' readers haunted their mailboxes for the next installment. In 1968 Harper's devoted an entire issue to ""The Armies of the Night,'' Norman Mailer's account of the march on the Pentagon. George Plimpton, in his fascinating new biography of Capote, an oral history like the life he coauthored of Warhol acolyte Edie Sedgwick, suggests that Capote was the most well-known writer of the century after Ernest Hemingway. Not because people read what he wrote but because they'd seen him on television, a gay man-child with a catty tongue. Writers--Capote, Mailer, Gore Vidal--were once staples on the talk shows. They added a touch of class, and besides, they were characters. Writers today are largely absent from those shows, because when TV producers want celebrity they go straight to the real thing. So, more tellingly, do publishers. Morrow reportedly paid $6 million for Whoopi Goldberg's book this year, and Little, Brown handed over $3 million for O.J.'s girlfriend's story.

Both books were celebrated failures, and both were held up as evidence that the publishing business has lost its collective mind, paying too much for bad books and generally neglecting the cause of literature. Publishing, you will hear, is in a crisis. Sales are down. Chain stores are aggressively running independent booksellers out of business. And electronic booksellers on the Internet are scaring everybody. In truth, the real crisis in publishing is a loss of nerve, and it reflects a much more widespread crisis of faith in the culture at large. Publishers do not know who their audience is, because American culture has gone through so many convulsions in the last quarter century that uncertainty is its only constant. Unlike some other segments of the entertainment industry, publishing has had a pallid couple of years. Or so goes the conventional wisdom. To prove their case, industry Cassandras point out that last spring HarperCollins, in the most drastic version of the retrenchment going on throughout the business, lopped off more than 100 titles off its trade list, forcing its parent company, News Corp., to take a $270 million charge against earnings. In the past two years, some publishers saw ""returns'' (bookstores return unsold books for credit) run as high as 50 percent, when anything more than 35 percent is considered disastrous.

But most reporting on publishing concentrates on big houses in New York, when a broader sampling tells a much different tale. Look outside New York, and you'll find publishers going about their business in fresh and sometimes very profitable ways. Even that perpetually beleaguered creature--the serious midlist literary book--is finding a home at university presses and at such small houses as Vermont's Steerforth Press and New Jersey's Ecco Press, where sales are up 76 percent over the last two years. Steerforth and Ecco refuse to get involved in bidding wars, and run such lean ships that they can make money on a title that sells 3,000 copies. (A large commercial house has to plan on selling at least 15,000 copies of a book now to justify publishing it.) The philosophy of San Francisco's very successful Chronicle Books is to avoid big advances to authors, keep the prices low and manufacture books so beautiful they sell themselves, according to publisher Jack Jensen. Last year Chronicle sold almost 50,000 hardback copies of ""Under the Tuscan Sun,'' a memoir by Frances Mayes about fixing up an Italian villa. ""If you publish books well,'' Jensen says, ""you will eventually have a hit.''

There are, it should be said, plenty of people inside New York publishing who feel the same, and none more so than Morgan Entrekin, publisher of Grove/Atlantic, who this year enjoyed his first millon-selling book in 20 years in the business when a first novel by an unknown writer named Charles Frazier took out a long-term lease on the best-seller list. ""Cold Mountain,'' a novel with a generous but not exceptional first printing of 25,000 copies, won the critics' hearts, the public's affection and the National Book Award. It was the surprise of the year, taking off first at independent bookstores and then making the leap to the chains.

""One of the great things about the chain stores is that you have very good bookstores in communities that really never had bookstores,'' observes Entrekin. "Seven to 10 years ago, you could never have conceived of selling 2 1/2 million copies of "Snow Falling on Cedars' in trade paperback; 300,000 would have been a giant number. It shows that there is a huge literate reading public out there.''

Frank McCourt's literary memoir ""Angela's Ashes,'' now in its second year on the best-seller list, tells the same story. So does the continuing success of Oprah's Book Club. And in 1997 American writing had its best season, both critically and commercially, in years. Judging by the success of three novels in particular--""Cold Mountain,'' Don DeLillo's ""Underworld'' and Thomas Pynchon's ""Mason & Dixon''--it would seem that, for a change, people are looking to fiction to explain what is happening in American culture.

All three books are obsessed with American history, and all three try, in very disparate ways, to unravel the meaning of that history. Frazier's ""Cold Mountain'' is a romance, an antiwar novel and an adventure story, a tale of a man who deserts the Confederate Army in the midst of the Civil War to make his way home to the mountains of North Carolina. And while Frazier is the least didactic of writers, the point of his tale is clear: in the midst of the most convulsive moment in the nation's history, there were citizens who wanted nothing to do with that conflict--and that, paradoxically, it's of such disagreements that our nation's strength is made.

DeLillo's ""Underworld'' examines the dark side of that pluralism. A vast and faceted piece of fiction, it stalks the cold-war era from one end to the other to unriddle just how it was that society splintered in the last half century. Not coincidentally, DeLillo uses Capote's ball as a danse macabre, a sinister harbinger of things to come. Most ambitious of all, Pynchon rewrites the 18th-century novel, right down to the diction. A picaresque fantasia on the efforts of surveyors Mason and Dixon to draw their famous line between Maryland and Pennsylvania, Pynchon's tale seeks to isolate the verities of American life, from our addiction to coffee to our obsession with race. Amazingly, it is not a dour book. At heart it's a buddy story, sort of a deep-dish Hope and Crosby vehicle, and a wordmonger's delight. Ironically, while both Pynchon and DeLillo hail from the paranoid school of writing, both portray an America of buoyant vitality.

It is hard to despair of American publishing in a year when three such distinguished and challenging novels not only appear on bestseller lists but, in the case of "Cold Mountain,'' sell well over a million copies. Moreover, there was even more reason to smile last month when a modest amount of sideline brawling broke out over the National Book Awards (Pynchon was not even among the five fiction finalists, and when Frazier won over the favored DeLillo, DeLillo's partisans loudly complained). It was reminiscent of--surprise--the brawling midcentury, when Vidal feuded with Capote, and Mailer wanted to arm-wrestle everyone in sight. Then again, no one is throwing a ball, masked or otherwise. And if it's up to the publicity-shy Frazier and DeLillo and the downright reclusive Pynchon, they wouldn't even show up. The only thing we know for certain is that wherever the culture is headed, for good or ill, it isn't going back to the '60s.