My review of Renata Adler’s journalism (in which I have happily wallowed for much of the past year) is live at The Periphery. I also recommend The Periphery more generally for its commitment to publishing marginalized, talented writers (not me: I’m probably one or the other of those, but surely not both), including two of my favorite Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing contributors, Chris Dankovich and Cozine Welch.
In keeping with tradition, I hereby offer readers the following ranking of all of Renata Adler’s books.
9. Pitch Dark (1982)
Beautiful in spots, but I just couldn’t get into it.
8. After the Tall Timber: Collected Nonfiction (2015)
So here is the bad news: the title says “collected” but you still have to buy all the other nonfiction books. (There’s just too much good stuff left on the field.) And here is the even worse news: You still have to buy this one, too, because it has “Irreparable Harm,” her precise, savage evisceration of Bush v. Gore (2000). If you want to know what were all the problems with that decision besides whom it made President, she lays it out beautifully, and also, with unexpected help from Antonin Scalia, she spins out a secret history of the unconstitutional Office of the Independent Council. (Well, it was secret to me.)
7. Toward a Radical Middle (1970)
Dated, most of all by her the-system-is-slowly-getting-better optimism, and occasionally turgid, but she makes some solid and funny critiques of ’60s irrationalism (e.g. what she calls the “single-plane-of-atrocity view of Western man”) and its penchant for psychodrama (which makes a lot more sense after you read her piece on encounter groups). Also, her disciplined, quote-heavy, almost plodding, yet deeply inspiring pieces on the Civil Rights movement will show you that, however much you may in fact love them, you simply don’t, simply can’t love either Martin Luther King or old-fashioned journalistic scrupulosity enough. (I was delighted, in reading an anthology of King recently, to find him actually quoting from one of these pieces.)
6. A Year in the Dark (1969)
A lot of the recent Adler coverage talks about how her movie reviews are fun to read but that she has no feeling for the medium. They are fun to read (in particular, the introduction is a gorgeous mini-memoir in itself), but she has plenty of feeling for the medium. So much so that we can’t allow ourselves even momentarily to consider the main point she makes about it: that violence can’t be depicted without endorsement, because “the camera always says yes.”
5. Gone (2000)
… I know, I know. I know. I never wanted to be the kind of person who reads a whole book about William Shawn’s New Yorker and How We Lost It. Just the mention of the topic makes me feel resentful, like, “Why are you so sure I care?” Even knowing such books exist makes me feel like I’ve been drunkenly assgrabbed by the combined endowment funds of Harvard and Yale.
But this is one of the funniest books in the language.
In this book mere choices of typography make you laugh out loud. Look at what she does to poor old Lillian Ross simply by adding italics. I’ve never read Lillian Ross in my life and yet I totally know how she sounds when she talks, just from those italics. Look at the way she’s permanently damaged folks’ perceptions of Adam Gopnik with that one brilliant adjective, “meaching.” (I still read him, but with my guard up a bit against all those meaches.) This book is too trivial to be the highest evidence of her genius, but it does show her doing many things that only a genius could do. And the book isn’t even really that trivial, because it makes a point that I should have known, always had known on some level, but that a graduate education and TA training in English (with all that talk of Aristotle’s rhetoric and audience, audience, audience) had made it nearly impossible to say: that great writers, and great publications, don’t just reach an audience. They create one.
4. Canaries in the Mineshaft (2001)
Have you ever wondered what Renata Adler thinks of “Sesame Street”? Soap operas? G. Gordon Liddy? Monica Lewinsky? It’s all here, and she makes all of it seem every bit as urgent as the prospect of Grexit.
3. Reckless Disregard (1986)
You can read this book-length report on two simultaneous libel trials (Westmoreland v. CBS et al; Sharon v. Time) as a critique of the vague formulation of libel that emerged from 1964’s New York Times v. Sullivan, but more than that, it’s a critique of the American news media in the age of the byline (something my review discusses at length): how the desire to make oneself famous paradoxically causes the whole industry to move in a pack. That Adler picks two people that most of her target audience (me included) hates so much that it requires an effort of moral will even to care whether they were lied about just makes the critique more powerful, because by the end of the book you do care. And they totally were. Adler puts it better than I can (put anything):
As early as the first depositions in Sharon, it was evident that witnesses with a claim to any sort of journalistic affiliation considered themselves a class apart, by turns lofty, combative, sullen, lame, condescending, speciously pedantic, but, above all, socially and, as it were, Constitutionally arrogant, in a surprisingly unintelligent and uneducated way. Who are these people? is a question that would occur almost constantly to anyone upon reading or hearing the style and substance of their testimony. And why do they consider themselves entirely above the rules? These people were, to begin with, professionals, accustomed to speak with finality, never questioned except by their bosses; otherwise (in a field that, unlike, for example, true scholarship, suppresses second thoughts and confirming, or contradictory, inquiry) accustomed, in what they said or wrote, to being believed. In addition, these people had, in recent years, the power and glamour of the byline, and the contemporary notion of journalists as, in effect, celebrities bearing facts. What they were intellectually was in some ways surprising: better educated than their predecessors, they were not remarkable for their capacity to reason, or for their sense of language and of the meaning of even ordinary words. Nonetheless, they appeared before the courts not like any ordinary citizens but as though they had condescended to appear there, with their own conception of truth, of legal standards, and of what were to be the rules. As for “serious doubt,” it seemed at times unlikely that any of these people had ever entertained one—another indication that “serious doubt” cannot long continue as a form of “actual malice” in the law. What was true and false also seemed, at times, a matter of almost complete indifference to them. Above all, the journalists, as witnesses, looked like people whose mind it had never crossed to be ashamed.
Read Adler on the media, and you’ll never again wonder how Judith Miller got a job.
2. Speedboat (1976)
A hideous family pledged itself to margarine.
A
hideous
family
pledged
itself
to
margarine
Margarine to itself pledged family hideous a
I look and look at that sentence, and it just gets funnier.
1. Private Capacity (n.d.)
This was going to be Renata Adler’s book-length expose of the Bilderberg Group, an ultra-secretive yearly gathering of economic and political elites, the sorts of people whose self-importance the world has decided it agrees with. The fact that the book was announced for publication ca. 2002, then scuttled by mutual agreement between author and publisher, provides it with a far more aesthetically pleasing and appropriate ending than poor old words could ever do. But come on: I still want to see it. My favorite passage is probably the one where Jamie Dimon, Robert Rubin, and Dick Cheney use a small Latin American republic stage a live reenactment of the ending of 120 Days of Sodom.
Phil Christman 