Janet Malcolm. (Courtesy The New Yorker)

In 2011, Janet Malcolm underwent the literary rite of a Paris Review interview. As part of its tradition, the magazine permits interview subjects to reread and revise their words: they have an impressive degree of control over their self-presentation, which presumably makes the whole exercise more appealing. Often the effect is of a long chat on a porch in the Berkshires between an elder statesman and a respectful apprentice, who nods sagely at the importance of rising early to write.

But most interview subjects have not spent their careers contemplating the treachery of the interview. Most interview subjects have not made their names dissecting flattering self-presentation. Most interview subjects are not Janet Malcolm.

A regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Ms. Malcolm has written 11 books of nonfiction over the last three decades. Her latest, the collection Forty-One False Starts (FSG, 320 pp., $27), came out this month. While her subjects vary (from William Shawn to Gossip Girl), her preoccupations and techniques remain consistent. She’s interested in the way stories, especially ones presented as fact, are told. She has a dauntless appetite for the historical roughage—transcripts, letters, diaries, articles—that constitutes those stories’ raw material. And her portraits of the storytellers, with their squirmy foibles and agendas, are glorious.

The Paris Review interview is not among the new book’s selections from Ms. Malcolm’s recent work, which is perfectly reasonable but is still too bad. Her encounter with her interviewer, Katie Roiphe, makes a great Janet Malcolm piece—it’s riveting, excruciating reading. Ms. Malcolm communicates strictly over email. The exquisite tension of her exchange with Ms. Roiphe derives not from any hostility but from the reader’s constant awareness of the situation’s delicate, artificial nature. By substituting correspondence for conversation, Ms. Malcolm has kept herself firmly in the accustomed role of writer, as Ms. Roiphe acknowledges, and in the course of the interview Ms. Roiphe becomes, like many of the best Malcolm characters, a figure unshakably dedicated to an impossible, esoteric project. She does not provoke scorn, just vicarious anxiety. And Ms. Malcolm, even as she terrifies anyone who might ever hope to interview her, does not seem like a tyrant. Every Paris Review interviewee has the power she wields—it’s just that Ms. Malcolm declines to make any coy pretense otherwise. She prevents us from ignoring what’s going on.

In Forty-One False Starts, Ms. Malcolm directs our attention to an assortment of people mired in similarly fraught struggles over narrative control. There’s the painter David Salle (in the title essay), a fading art star who can’t resist getting in tight spots with the press, even when his critics are out for blood. There’s Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury’s historian as well as its heir, doing damage control after his sister’s bitter memoir. There are the old guard and new guard at Artforum in the ’80s, who all have a stake in how editor Ingrid Sischy runs her magazine. Ms. Malcolm depicts their vanities and conflicts with sympathy, diligence and wit.

The disciplines that she’s engaged at greater length elsewhere—psychoanalysis, legal procedure, biography, journalism—inform these essays on art (especially photography) and literature. In a profile of photographer Thomas Struth, Ms. Malcolm’s subject discusses the education he received from Bernd and Hilla Becher. They helped him understand his medium’s connection with other disciplines, Mr. Struth says; for example, “a typical thing Bernd would say was, ‘You have to understand the Paris photographs of Atget as the visualization of Marcel Proust.’” Ms. Malcolm asks what this means. Mr. Struth admits that he’s never actually read Proust, so he’s not quite sure. They agree it was probably a bad example. They both laugh. Later, she writes,

As we were leaving the café, Struth said, ‘I feel bad about Proust and Atget.’ Struth is a sophisticated and practiced subject of interviews. He had recognized the Proust-Atget moment as the journalistic equivalent of one of those ‘decisive moments’ when what the photographer sees in the viewfinder jumps out and says ‘This is going to be a photograph.’ I made some reassuring noises, but I knew and he knew that my picture was already on the way to the darkroom of journalistic opportunism.

Both emerge unscathed from this encounter, in my reading: it seems right, actually, to show them tacitly acknowledging the nature of their transaction, especially given its bearing on their respective professions. As Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, the moment provides a “final optical adjustment” on the piece.

But this is the kind of moment that drives Ms. Malcolm’s critics nuts. Her most infamous piece of writing remains the line that opens 1990’s The Journalist and the Murderer: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” This was the line that got her denounced as a traitor. (Twenty years later, a tellingly defensive Tom Junod was still fuming over her “utterly full of shit ... self-hatred.”) Yet it seems bizarre to take this at face value, as an announcement that her entire career is in bad faith. For one thing, nobody could read the remembrance of Joseph Mitchell included in Forty-One False Starts and not sense some journalistic fellow feeling. And even in tone (“too stupid or too full of himself”), it seems apparent that her gambit was more a provocative critique than a factual summary. Its primary function was to affirm her self-awareness—and self-awareness is central to all her work, because she gets away with her unforgiving reports on others by taking an equally unsparing view of herself.

I sympathize, though, with those who might find all that journalistic self-awareness a little tiresome after a while. In Iphigenia in Forest Hills, Ms. Malcolm’s last book, she was still writing of journalism’s malice (“its animating impulse,” as she calls it), while at the same time—much more interestingly—tracking her own crazy sympathy for the defendant in a murder trial, a woman who seems almost certainly guilty and at the same time deeply wronged. The malice-of-journalism passages read like warm-ups (or, less charitably, tics), as if Ms. Malcolm were revisiting some familiar exercises before moving on to the book’s real challenge: her conflicted emotional investment in the case.

This new collection finds her less insistent on truisms regarding narrators and their unreliability. The reader doesn’t get the impression that Ms. Malcolm has softened with time, just that she’s thoroughly established her terms and now feels free to work within them. There’s always been wit to her descriptions of weird insular worlds (psychoanalysis, contemporary art), but some of the pieces here have a looser kind of affectionate humor. Without any diminishment of her critical eye, she seems like she’s having more fun—when she describes Gene Stratton-Porter writing deranged children’s books, or Julia Margaret Cameron admiring England’s finest beards, or Blair Waldorf sulking over caviar at the Plaza.

“I would like to go on telling Blair stories until they are gone,” she writes of the Gossip Girl anti-heroine. I confess I feel much the same way about Ms. Malcolm herself.

editorial@observer.com

]]>

Janet Malcolm. (Courtesy The New Yorker)

In 2011, Janet Malcolm underwent the literary rite of a Paris Review interview. As part of its tradition, the magazine permits interview subjects to reread and revise their words: they have an impressive degree of control over their self-presentation, which presumably makes the whole exercise more appealing. Often the effect is of a long chat on a porch in the Berkshires between an elder statesman and a respectful apprentice, who nods sagely at the importance of rising early to write.

But most interview subjects have not spent their careers contemplating the treachery of the interview. Most interview subjects have not made their names dissecting flattering self-presentation. Most interview subjects are not Janet Malcolm.

A regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Ms. Malcolm has written 11 books of nonfiction over the last three decades. Her latest, the collection Forty-One False Starts (FSG, 320 pp., $27), came out this month. While her subjects vary (from William Shawn to Gossip Girl), her preoccupations and techniques remain consistent. She’s interested in the way stories, especially ones presented as fact, are told. She has a dauntless appetite for the historical roughage—transcripts, letters, diaries, articles—that constitutes those stories’ raw material. And her portraits of the storytellers, with their squirmy foibles and agendas, are glorious.

The Paris Review interview is not among the new book’s selections from Ms. Malcolm’s recent work, which is perfectly reasonable but is still too bad. Her encounter with her interviewer, Katie Roiphe, makes a great Janet Malcolm piece—it’s riveting, excruciating reading. Ms. Malcolm communicates strictly over email. The exquisite tension of her exchange with Ms. Roiphe derives not from any hostility but from the reader’s constant awareness of the situation’s delicate, artificial nature. By substituting correspondence for conversation, Ms. Malcolm has kept herself firmly in the accustomed role of writer, as Ms. Roiphe acknowledges, and in the course of the interview Ms. Roiphe becomes, like many of the best Malcolm characters, a figure unshakably dedicated to an impossible, esoteric project. She does not provoke scorn, just vicarious anxiety. And Ms. Malcolm, even as she terrifies anyone who might ever hope to interview her, does not seem like a tyrant. Every Paris Review interviewee has the power she wields—it’s just that Ms. Malcolm declines to make any coy pretense otherwise. She prevents us from ignoring what’s going on.

In Forty-One False Starts, Ms. Malcolm directs our attention to an assortment of people mired in similarly fraught struggles over narrative control. There’s the painter David Salle (in the title essay), a fading art star who can’t resist getting in tight spots with the press, even when his critics are out for blood. There’s Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury’s historian as well as its heir, doing damage control after his sister’s bitter memoir. There are the old guard and new guard at Artforum in the ’80s, who all have a stake in how editor Ingrid Sischy runs her magazine. Ms. Malcolm depicts their vanities and conflicts with sympathy, diligence and wit.

The disciplines that she’s engaged at greater length elsewhere—psychoanalysis, legal procedure, biography, journalism—inform these essays on art (especially photography) and literature. In a profile of photographer Thomas Struth, Ms. Malcolm’s subject discusses the education he received from Bernd and Hilla Becher. They helped him understand his medium’s connection with other disciplines, Mr. Struth says; for example, “a typical thing Bernd would say was, ‘You have to understand the Paris photographs of Atget as the visualization of Marcel Proust.’” Ms. Malcolm asks what this means. Mr. Struth admits that he’s never actually read Proust, so he’s not quite sure. They agree it was probably a bad example. They both laugh. Later, she writes,

As we were leaving the café, Struth said, ‘I feel bad about Proust and Atget.’ Struth is a sophisticated and practiced subject of interviews. He had recognized the Proust-Atget moment as the journalistic equivalent of one of those ‘decisive moments’ when what the photographer sees in the viewfinder jumps out and says ‘This is going to be a photograph.’ I made some reassuring noises, but I knew and he knew that my picture was already on the way to the darkroom of journalistic opportunism.

Both emerge unscathed from this encounter, in my reading: it seems right, actually, to show them tacitly acknowledging the nature of their transaction, especially given its bearing on their respective professions. As Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, the moment provides a “final optical adjustment” on the piece.

But this is the kind of moment that drives Ms. Malcolm’s critics nuts. Her most infamous piece of writing remains the line that opens 1990’s The Journalist and the Murderer: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” This was the line that got her denounced as a traitor. (Twenty years later, a tellingly defensive Tom Junod was still fuming over her “utterly full of shit ... self-hatred.”) Yet it seems bizarre to take this at face value, as an announcement that her entire career is in bad faith. For one thing, nobody could read the remembrance of Joseph Mitchell included in Forty-One False Starts and not sense some journalistic fellow feeling. And even in tone (“too stupid or too full of himself”), it seems apparent that her gambit was more a provocative critique than a factual summary. Its primary function was to affirm her self-awareness—and self-awareness is central to all her work, because she gets away with her unforgiving reports on others by taking an equally unsparing view of herself.

I sympathize, though, with those who might find all that journalistic self-awareness a little tiresome after a while. In Iphigenia in Forest Hills, Ms. Malcolm’s last book, she was still writing of journalism’s malice (“its animating impulse,” as she calls it), while at the same time—much more interestingly—tracking her own crazy sympathy for the defendant in a murder trial, a woman who seems almost certainly guilty and at the same time deeply wronged. The malice-of-journalism passages read like warm-ups (or, less charitably, tics), as if Ms. Malcolm were revisiting some familiar exercises before moving on to the book’s real challenge: her conflicted emotional investment in the case.

This new collection finds her less insistent on truisms regarding narrators and their unreliability. The reader doesn’t get the impression that Ms. Malcolm has softened with time, just that she’s thoroughly established her terms and now feels free to work within them. There’s always been wit to her descriptions of weird insular worlds (psychoanalysis, contemporary art), but some of the pieces here have a looser kind of affectionate humor. Without any diminishment of her critical eye, she seems like she’s having more fun—when she describes Gene Stratton-Porter writing deranged children’s books, or Julia Margaret Cameron admiring England’s finest beards, or Blair Waldorf sulking over caviar at the Plaza.

“I would like to go on telling Blair stories until they are gone,” she writes of the Gossip Girl anti-heroine. I confess I feel much the same way about Ms. Malcolm herself.

editorial@observer.com

]]> http://observer.com/2013/05/not-too-stupid-reflections-on-50-years-of-janet-malcolms-fatal-vision/feed/ 0 Janet Malcolm. (Courtesy The New Yorker) http://observer.com/2013/03/so-sorry-jonathan-dees-abundantly-apologetic-new-novel/#comments Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:15:55 -0400 http://observer.com/2013/03/so-sorry-jonathan-dees-abundantly-apologetic-new-novel/ Molly Fischer http://observer.com/?p=291298

Jonathan Dee.

In Jonathan Dee’s 2010 novel The Privileges, a secondary character named Marietta works in media relations, rehabilitating the public images of drunken heiresses and scandalous politicians.

“It’s a lot like being a lawyer,” she explains. “Or a lot like advertising. It’s a lot like most things, actually.” That might sound glib, but when Marietta gets drunk enough, she tends to start “talking in dead earnest about her job in terms of second chances and the desire to repent.”

Mr. Dee’s new novel, A Thousand Pardons (Random House, 224 pp., $26), takes this business—crisis management PR—as its subject, in much the same way that his previous books took advertising, or finance, or celebrity, or contemporary art as boldface shorthand for American life. But Pardons never achieves much more depth than Marietta’s summary, and even at a slim couple hundred pages, it’s less concise.

The book tells the story of Ben and Helen Armstead, who lead an affluent and unhappy life in the suburbs with their 12-year-old daughter, Sara. Ben practices law in Manhattan; Helen stays home and wonders where things went wrong. Every Tuesday, they tell Sara it’s Date Night and slip off for an hour of couples’ counseling.

Following a speedy, articulate meltdown at the marriage therapist’s office (“Every day is unique and zero-sum and when it is over you will never get it back, and in spite of that, in spite of that, when every day begins I know for a fact I have lived it before, I have lived the day to come already”), Ben takes an associate to a hotel room, gets beat up by her banker boyfriend and drunk-drives his Audi off the road. Amid Ben’s disgrace—which includes rehab, jail time and unemployment—Helen must find a way to support herself and Sara. She hasn’t worked in 14 years, but she finds a job in Manhattan, at the shabby offices of Harvey Aaron Public Relations.

“We tell stories to the public, because stories are what people pay attention to, what they remember,” Harvey tells Helen at her interview. “Why? Because when they were little, they had devoted, beautiful mothers like you, who told them stories, and stories are how they first learned to make sense out of the whole big confusing world.”

Her role is mostly to abet Harvey’s denial: if he hadn’t replaced his departing “Junior Vice President,” he would have had to admit his business was shrinking. Helen and her two fellow employees spend their days waiting for Google Alerts and reading gossip magazines. She gets her big break when Harvey brings her along on a meeting with the embattled owner of a Chinese restaurant. Mr. Chin’s deliverymen are unionizing and picketing for back wages; he’s being vilified in the press. Harvey wants to defend Chin as an American success story. Helen, however, finds herself suggesting a different strategy.

“You will not defend yourself,” she advises. “You will not contest any particular charge, because contesting it is what allows people to keep talking about it. Without getting into specifics, you will apologize, and ask your customers and the people of New York for their forgiveness. And they will give it to you. They want to. People are quick to judge, Mr. Chin, they are quick to condemn, but that’s mostly because their ultimate desire is to forgive.”

This scheme turns out to be just crazy enough to work, and Helen’s triumph unfolds in the prose equivalent of a makeover montage. Then Harvey dies, leaving Helen to save the firm.

Her subsequent clients include a philandering city councilman (“Basically, you will get up in front of the cameras and make an offering of yourself,” Helen tells him. “That is the only play. To ask forgiveness”), a grocery store owner with hazardous bananas (“If you take it upon yourself, if you just agree to own it, then they’re yours, then you’re the one making the choices that drive the story”) and Pepsi executives upset over a soda tax (“Here’s what you do: you admit it ...”).

Along the way, PR power broker Teddy Malloy of Malloy Worldwide arrives to tell Helen she has “an extraordinary gift” and to buy up the remains of Harvey Aaron PR in order to bring her to his firm.

“What you’re doing is the wave of the future,” Malloy says later. “I think we’re going to rewrite the textbooks for crisis management before we’re done.”

For the reader, though, Helen’s single strategy is repetitive, and then exasperating—really, no one else has thought of this? “In her faith in the tactic of total submission she felt herself delivering a kind of common sense rebuke not just to her ex-husband and his lawyer but to legal minds everywhere,” Mr. Dee writes. Yet even Helen is a little dubious: not about the rightness of her rebuke, but about the gifts it might imply.

“She got powerful men to apologize,” Helen thinks. “The thing was, she seemed to be able to do it without even trying that hard. She got them to confess because they didn’t seem to want to lie to her.”

Her great test case is Hamilton Barth, a dissolute movie star who seeks her help after a ruinous bender. Helen and Hamilton are from the same tiny town upstate, and when they meet by chance at a movie premiere, she recounts—almost recites—her memories of their shared Catholic school days. He becomes convinced that only Helen can save him.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church itself becomes a Malloy client. Mr. Dee has a weakness for heavily loaded names and loud allusions: Helen at one point represents a nightclub called Repentance. His characters speak with surprising insight, and in the rhythmic repetitions of a presidential speechwriter, about what they’re doing and what it means. But in A Thousand Pardons, Mr. Dee’s didactic tendencies aren’t offset by enough of his strengths—like inventively structured plotting or sharply observed depictions of social status. Bringing in an archbishop reminds us that we’re reading a book about confessions and absolution, but it doesn’t mean that book has anything to say.

“There’s lots of jobs out there that a smart, hardworking person can do,” a secretary accepting a buyout tells Helen. “Jobs are for making money, so you can take care of your own, and maybe give them something nice once in a while that you didn’t have. Isn’t that what it’s about?”

Unless it’s about the power of repentance, the limits of forgiveness and the absence of honesty in American public life. Amid the underlined Important Issues of Mr. Dee’s fictional working world, clocking in for a regular paycheck is practically subversive.

editorial@observer.com

Rosie Schaap. (Photo: M. Sharkey)

Rosie Schaap is a born regular.

The Drink columnist for The New York Times Magazine and author of the new memoir Drinking with Men (Riverhead, 288 pp., $26.95), Ms. Schaap has a gift for camaraderie—and excellent taste in booze. She’s also become the book industry’s resident bartender, if publishing holiday parties are to be believed (she mixed drinks at PEN’s bash in 2012), and judging by the often-bookish crowd at South, the Brooklyn dive where Ms. Schaap works day shifts.

Drinking with Men roves from Metro-North bar cars to rural Vermont to Dublin, describing the many pint-glass microcosms Ms. Schaap has found herself a part of thanks to her affection for a neighborhood haunt. It would be hard to call a Times columnist an outsider, but she does bring an uncommonly friendly face to New York’s insular book scene.

“She’s always been a part of this bigger literary community that doesn’t necessarily fit into the neat Park Slope package,” said novelist Jami Attenberg, a friend who first met Ms. Schaap at now-defunct Lower East Side bar Good World, one of the establishments described in the memoir.

And while there’s an easy appeal to pairing booze and prose—and certainly no shortage of real-life case studies—Ms. Schaap’s story mostly dodges hard-living artist clichés.

“For me, drinking and writing have never gone together that well,” Ms. Schaap, who turns 42 this week, said to me, adding that she was only able to get serious about writing when she got less serious about drinking.

And yet: “The intersection of writing and bar culture is so natural,” said novelist Kate Christensen, another friend. “Writing is an extension of talking, and talking happens in a bar.”

So I went to South Slope, where Ms. Schaap lives and works, to see a regular in action and do some talking in bars.

Narrow and snug, far enough afield that it’s not a destination for outsiders or a convenient stop for commuters, South is filled with regulars. Ms. Schaap works the day shift on Tuesdays. It’s mostly a beer and whiskey place, but word has gotten around that Ms. Schaap makes a fine cocktail, and as soon as one person at a bar orders a Manhattan, someone else is bound to decide against PBR. I asked Ms. Schaap to estimate how many of the people in the happy hour crowd she already knew. She paused to count.

“Three-quarters,” she said. That included some staff, but staff members hanging out off-duty are a good sign for a bar. Most of her co-workers are younger, lots are musicians, and a couple are transplanted Dubliners. One of the young Irish barbacks has to leave the country soon, but she’s already scheming to bring him back. She’s trying to talk him into journalism school and a student visa—she wants to make an “old-school” city reporter out of him.

“Just what these young Dubliners need,” she said, “is a pushy Jewish mother.”

Ms. Schaap’s own mother was a would-be actress, and her father was Dick Schaap, the prolific sportswriter and longtime ESPN host. Peter Falk, as in Columbo Peter Falk, introduced the pair. They split up when Rosie was 7, and her dad was often absent. But he served as an example, “a real worker-writer.”

“I grew up with this idea of a writer as someone who sat at a table—at that time, at a typewriter, a massive IBM Selectric II—and wrote all the time,” she said. “There was no real mystery or romance. It’s a job.”

And if her father set the example for writing, her mother set the example for talking.

“To everybody,” Ms. Schaap said. “You know, if we were waiting for a table in a restaurant, my mother would tell the maitre d’ that she’d seen the gynecologist that day.”

She and her mother did not always get along, but one of the book’s surprises is her mother’s impressive gameness in the face of teenage rebellion. Rosie drops out of high school and leaves home to follow the Grateful Dead on tour, and while her mother’s not exactly thrilled, she doesn’t disown her. She makes Rosie agree to get her GED, and checks up on her via her psychoanalyst. Ms. Schaap is at least a fourth-generation New Yorker, she points out, so naturally the psychoanalyst had been around since she was a teenager. Ms. Schaap said she knew she wanted to leave home the first time she saw the Dead.

“I understood that it was a ready-made, traveling community,” she said. By her first show in 1986, when she was 15, the band was already past its peak, but it didn’t bother her; that was only the music. “I was mostly there for the people,” she said.

It’s harder than you might expect to buy Rosie Schaap a drink, at least in South Slope. Bartenders tend to fill her glass on the house. (The hardest part of being a regular, she says, is meeting the credit card minimum.) And of course, drinking with Ms. Schaap in South Slope means sharing her attention with just about everybody else. She handles this with aplomb. On our way from South to Quarter Bar along Fifth Avenue, we passed Hector, who had a beret and several missing teeth and was in the middle of doing his laundry. Ms. Schaap greeted him warmly. He is, she said, “the real mayor of the neighborhood.”

Quarter Bar was empty, and we both ordered Two Bits, the house special bourbon cocktail. It has two kinds of bourbon, a touch of amaretto (“One of my favorite secret ingredients,” said Ms. Schaap—it sweetens without simple syrup), Angostura bitters, Peychaud’s bitters and an orange twist.

Ms. Schaap knows cocktails and she knows bars, but she considers the two mostly distinct. “They have almost nothing to do with each other, from my experience,” she said. “I love cocktails, but most of my bar life has not been about cocktails.” Ms. Christensen, her novelist friend, put her up for the Drink columnist job at the Times. The paper had asked her to try out for the job herself, but she had a better candidate in mind.

“It was just sort of an instantaneous realization that it should be Rosie Schaap,” Ms. Christensen told me later. “Rosie cared about drinking, as opposed to mixology,” Ms. Christensen explained. She was more interested in memories, associations and context. “She was really the person in all of New York City who was perfect to write this column.”

After what Ms. Schaap called “an amazing reality-TV-show-esque audition process,” the Times agreed.

“My mother was a real whiskey sour person,” Ms. Schaap said. “Just as Parliaments were my first cigarette because I stole them from her, a whiskey sour was probably my first cocktail, because I probably snuck a few sips of hers when we were in a restaurant and she went to powder her nose.” Because a whiskey sour reminds her of her mother, it makes her think of “a New York I didn’t live in,” she said. “A really glamorous late ’50s or early ’60s Truman Capote New York, where people wore great hats and had cigarette holders and, you know, scattered home in the daylight up Park Avenue at 6 in the morning.”

Pints of Guinness, of course, bring her back to Dublin: she spent one college summer drinking at a “smoky and cozy and welcoming” pub called Grogan’s and learning to love craìc, Irish bar banter. Manhattans are a tribute to her late husband, Frank Duba, who died in 2010: “I first drank Manhattans in Frank’s company,” she wrote in one column, “and now I drink them in his honor.” Jack Daniels was her preferred liquor as a teenager, and now it makes her sick: she hasn’t been able to drink it, she writes in the book, ever since the night on the Grateful Dead tour when she did 21 shots and woke up “on a greasy, flattened stretch of carpet in that cheap motel room in Inglewood with a nearly rigid disk of my own shit stuck to my backside.”

When Ms. Schaap gave up life as a Deadhead after 99 shows, she left Santa Cruz and went back east to go to Bennington. She had imagined herself pursuing an interdisciplinary mélange of Marxism and folklore and feminist poetry, but instead received a “very, very canonical English education.”

As she began to tell a story about a Blake seminar, Quarter’s owner, David Moo, arrived and joined us. He makes the Manhattans that Ms. Schaap wrote up for the Times. They compared notes on a mutual friend who had helped Rosie with a story for Lucky Peach. But it was time to move on. Trivia night was fast approaching.

Freddy’s, our last bar, is a neighborhood transplant. After a long fight against the encroachment of the Atlantic Yards, the bar ceded its longtime home in Prospect Heights and decamped to South Slope in the spring of 2011. As we approached, a friend flagged us down from across Fifth Avenue—John Eichleay, a musician Ms. Schaap got to know while working on her book at the neighborhood coffee shop. Usually local camaraderie is nice, but Roots Café eventually got “too friendly” for writing.

“I feel like the whole neighborhood has been with me through the whole project,” she said.

After college, Ms. Schaap wound up in the English Ph.D. program at CUNY. In retrospect, she wasn’t really ready for grad school, and she began a period of “very heavy drinking.” Still, she loved teaching. Her job at the Borough of Manhattan Community College was right down the street from Puffy’s, one of the first bars she loved in the city. She’d grade papers over Guinness after class.

But the Ph.D. didn’t work out. Ms. Schaap fell into a succession of jobs that were to varying degrees menial and meaningful. She worked as a community organizer for New York City Coalition Against Hunger; she got ordained as an interfaith minister; she served as a Red Cross chaplain after 9/11; and she was an editor at the inspirational magazine Guideposts when Riverhead bought Drinking with Men in 2008.

These are the jobs happening in the background of the book, which follows Ms. Schaap figuring out how to live the rest of her life while relying on the grounding presence of her barroom communities. Seeking literary precedents for the kind of story she wanted to tell, she found that drinking books by women tended to be tales of recovery. Mary Karr, Caroline Knapp—she had “tremendous respect” for their work, but hesitated to write that kind of narrative.

“Inadvertently,” she said, “they kind of confirm this message that ultimately this is a bad life for a woman ... I did some dumb things. There were nights I drank too much. I thought long and hard about whether I had a problem.” Tonight she’s had a Guinness, a shot of Jameson, a cocktail, and another Guinness. That’s “pretty good” for her, she said, these days.

“If I ever had an addiction, it wasn’t to alcohol,” she said. “It was to bars.”

editorial@observer.com

Richard Russo.

If “Jonathan” is shorthand for youngish white men of letters—Safran Foer, Franzen, Lethem, maybe Ames—“Richard” feels like its late-middle-age equivalent. Russo, Ford, Price, maybe Bausch: you’re browsing for a Father’s Day present, and the names conjure a fuzzy blur of teaching positions, screenwriting credits and possible altercations with Colson Whitehead.

Mr. Russo earned his Richard credentials with sturdy works of everyman realism like 2002’s Pulitzer-winning Empire Falls. And while readers might know what they’re in for when they pick up one of his novels—Northeastern small towns, marital malaise, a dash of slapstick—his first book of nonfiction is a step outside familiar territory, executed with less practiced skill and more uncomfortable complexity. A memoir, Elsewhere (Knopf, 256 pp., $25.95) finds Mr. Russo struggling to understand his mother. This doesn’t make for a good yarn or a tidy structure. Instead, the book offers a quietly riveting portrait of Jean Russo, who does not appear to have been an easy woman to understand or like—or ignore.

The necessary backdrop for that portrait is Gloversville, Mr. Russo’s hometown in Upstate New York, which bears obvious similarities to the landscapes of his novels. Gloversville once produced 90 percent of the gloves sold in the U.S., and the author’s postwar childhood coincided with its final days of prosperity. As a boy, he found its downtown too crowded to navigate by himself. When he graduated from high school, “you could have strafed Main Street with an automatic weapon without endangering a soul.”

Elsewhere depicts the tenacious grip that Gloversville exerted on mother and son alike: while her circumstances trapped her there, his success drew him back creatively—much to her bafflement. “She was deeply mystified,” Mr. Russo writes, “by how many people apparently wanted to read stories set in the kind of industrial backwaters from which she’d worked so hard to escape.” Endowed with a terrible sense of direction, Jean Russo was “a compass whose needle pointed due south,” according to one family joke—but, Mr. Russo later writes, “her hatred of Gloversville was like the North Star.” She didn’t know where she was going; she just knew that she wanted to leave.

Escape required independence, a quality she defended fiercely against daunting odds. Separated from Mr. Russo’s father (an unreliable gambler), she lived throughout her son’s childhood in a second-floor apartment above her parents’ home. Rather than work in the town’s glove trade, she commuted to an office job at General Electric in nearby Schenectady, paying for the carpool gas, and presenting her parents with a rent check on the first of each month. Broadening her son’s horizons “beyond the smug, complacent, self-satisfied, dimwitted ethos of the ugly little mill town” involved an unyielding code of conduct. She disapproved of untidy clothes, off-brand soda and anyone willing to content themselves with such day-to-day indignities. For example, Mr. Russo writes, she disdained what she regarded as the “slatternly, dumpy women who did shift work in Gloversville sweatshops”:

For them my mother felt pity that sometimes manifested itself as condescension, though she at least gave such women points for getting out of the house. She saved her real contempt for ‘homemakers’ … They had nothing that the world needed, or nothing, at least, that it was willing to pay a living wage for. If you were a woman who’d never held a responsible job, if you didn’t bring home your own paycheck at the end of the week and deposit it into an account with your own name on it, you had no right to criticize or interfere in the lives of those who did. Indeed, you had no opinions worth listening to.

Her attitude blends “stubborn confidence and acute anxiety”—an intense and uneasy combination. She identified, Mr. Russo writes, with Scarlett O’Hara. Her favorite scene in Gone With the Wind was when Scarlett made a gown out of the curtains.

As that suggests—and as Mr. Russo, growing up, soon realizes—there’s an element of fantasy in his mother’s hard-won self-image. She considers GE a model employer but earns less than her male colleagues; she carefully distances herself from her parents, but needs their help when times get tough.

Most persistently and painfully, she depends on her son. The heart of Elsewhere is the tightly knotted bond between mother and child, and its evolution from his childhood through her old age. “She’d never really considered us two separate people but rather one entity,” Mr. Russo writes. Hence the paradoxical lament of her later years: “If anything ever happened to you,” she tells him, “I’d have to say good-bye to my independence.”

By that time, she’s lived for years in a series of subsidized apartments near her son’s family as he pursues an academic career and writes. (She scorns the notion of “assisted living”; still, Mr. Russo’s family never leaves town “for longer than it took her milk to spoil.”) Their interdependence, however, was established long before that. In 1967, as Mr. Russo prepared to leave for college, she announced that she’d come with him: while he studied at the University of Arizona in Tucson, she’d work at GE in Phoenix. So mother and son set out for points west in an ineffectual Ford Galaxie, a harrowing cross-country journey that marks a decidedly anti-Kerouac-ian addition to the road-trip canon. She learned to drive in two weeks because the Southwestern sprawl gave her no choice.

But despite such moments of mid-century liberation, Jean Russo isn’t an easy-to-root-for feminist heroine. For one thing, she shared her world’s low opinion of female abilities. Despite her own pride in her work, Mr. Russo writes, “if there were two lines at the bank or the post office, she’d invariably queue up at the man’s, even if the woman’s was shorter.” As an old woman, she lectures her politely unreceptive granddaughters on proper gender roles in marriage.

And as Mr. Russo grows into adulthood, he begins to recognize the instability that accompanies his mother’s volatile plans and unshakeable opinions. Her “condition,” he writes, was semi-acknowledged within the family, but only as a little old-fashioned hysteria: “One word, ‘nerves,’ was evidently deemed sufficient to describe, categorize, stigmatize, and dismiss it.” The pathology begins in earnest after his father nonchalantly informs the college-age author that his mother is “nuts.” It’s disorienting for the reader, as it surely was for Mr. Russo. Yet over the course of Elsewhere, Russo comes to variously describe her as “unglued,” “unhinged,” “unraveled,” “unmoored.” We see her experiencing “manic” episodes, her thoughts growing “barbed and dangerous,” and learn of her obsessive concerns about contamination, her visceral aversion to all odors and to the color yellow. Ultimately Mr. Russo wonders about a posthumous diagnosis when his own adult daughter is treated for OCD.

The blurbs selected for Mr. Russo’s book covers tend to praise his fiction for its “affection,” “generosity,” and “compassion.” This would seem to refer to his sympathetic depiction of characters who blunder around while remaining stuck in place. Often those characters are wackily irascible or affably bumbling (his protagonists), or long-suffering and saintly (their wives). His mother fits none of these categories, and so writing about her with compassion must have been more challenging. Praising an author as “generous” suggests a benevolent deity—but in considering his own messy intimacy with his mother, Mr. Russo operates on a more modest scale.

At each of the homes his mother moves into and out of, he packs and unpacks her paperback library, a collection of mysteries and historical romances whose cohesive sensibility impresses her English Ph.D. son. His mother made him a reader, he writes, and her taste shaped the writer he eventually became—“one who, unlike many university trained writers, didn’t consider plot a dirty word, who paid attention to audience and pacing, who had little tolerance for literary pretension.” More importantly, though, her hunger for a world beyond the one she inhabited had emerged for her son (by “blind dumb luck”) as a career. “The same qualities that over a lifetime had contracted my mother’s world,” he writes, “had somehow expanded mine.”

Unhappily but relentlessly, she taught him to “muster that tough imagining.”

editorial@observer.com