James Goodale. (Photo By Don MacLeod)

James C. Goodale, the so-called “father of reporters' privilege” and the author of a new book called Fighting for the Press (CUNY Journalism Press, 255 pp., $20), was in his office at the Debevoise & Plimpton law firm, where he’s a partner, comparing Barack Obama to Richard M. Nixon.

“Nixon and Agnew were like listening to a Fox News program all day long, every day,” he said. “In their eyes, the Eastern establishment press were against them and they were against it and they were going to destroy it as best they can.” But, he said, “Obama has all these things that he’s done to the press on national security matters that Nixon never did.”

Mr. Goodale, 79, was the general counsel of The New York Times during the 1971 Pentagon Papers case, when President Nixon ordered the old grey lady to cease publication of excerpts from a 7,000-page document, which detailed America's involvement in Vietnam over the course of three decades. The Times published the first excerpt on June 13, 1971. By June 26, the case had reached the Supreme Court. Over the course of a few days, the justices ruled in a 6-3 decision that the U.S. government could not censor the Times. Nixon then convened a grand jury to indict the Times for conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act—"which really doesn't mean anything," Mr. Goodale said, rubbing his forehead in distress—but the case quickly fell apart. Fighting for the Press reads like a political thriller, with Nixon providing some dark comic relief. The guy was not exactly subtle: "As far as the Times is concerned," he said to John Mitchell, the U.S. Attorney General, "hell they're our enemies."

Now, the man who successfully fought Nixon says President Obama has an even more troubling record. He has indicted six leakers to Nixon's one, and just this week came word that federal investigators had seized two months of AP phone records without notice. Mr. Goodale believes that a grand jury has secretly indicted Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks and the publisher of the Afghan War Logs, one of the more substantial leaks since the Pentagon Papers. The father of reporter's privilege is doing everything in his power to make sure the case does not go forward.

“We’re going in a circle,” Mr. Goodale said. “When I talk to journalists about Assange—Jesus. They really don’t like him. They say, ‘He’s not one of us. We don’t care what happens to him.’ So I’m saying, ‘Wake up!’ If the government goes after him and gets him, that’s bad for everybody down the line. I'm way out on a limb in this book because it's three years after the grand jury was convened and it hasn't done anything. But I am quite confident the grand jury is alive. And I am confident that it has indicted Assange in secret. In any event, until the government tells us it's gone away, I feel like we have to speak out against it. This will set a standard. And I can’t seem to get through.”

The life of a First Amendment lawyer, and a general ally to journalists, is far different now than it was in 1971, when Mr. Goodale was still a young man. He's very much a holdover from a different era. For one thing, the days are long gone when a person simply read one reputable morning newspaper and then went on with the rest of their day. The proliferation of writing on the Internet has both increased the amount of libel that is published and desensitized the public to it, Mr. Goodale says.

“Privacy was something that everyone worried about, that they thought would blow up in their face,” he said. “We have a generational change with respect to privacy. The new generation really doesn't value privacy in the same way as the preceding generation. There was no Paris Hilton in the print days. Can you imagine The Observer printing a picture of Paris Hilton fornicating?”

(No comment here from the Transom, other than to say that Mr. Goodale raised his eyebrows in utter disbelief.)

When he represented the Times, the paper of record was in danger of going bankrupt. He helped found The New York Observer, offering a cautionary voice about its economic viability. He was George Plimpton's personal attorney when The Paris Review, by his account, "was four people around a desk in a basement that was dank and mushrooms were growing in it."

It was a decidedly fancier scene when the Review threw Mr. Goodale a party at their new offices in Chelsea last Wednesday. Lorin Stein, the Review's editor, praised Mr. Goodale's "irascible eye." Mr. Goodale offered a firsthand glimpse at it

"I wanted to reach a conclusion that would inform President Obama with respect to his actions on the relationship of national security to the press," he told the room, a mix of old lawyers and young writers. "He’s not been very good on it. But the idea was the national security claims do not hold up in the long run and the First Amendment protects journalists." He paused. "So don’t get involved in that mess!"

mmiller@observer.com

Saul Bellow. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

Born in 1915, Saul Bellow published his first novel, Dangling Man, in 1944. He would go on to write 18 books of fiction (14 novels, four story collections) which between them would win him the Pulitzer Prize (Humboldt’s Gift, 1975), a record-setting three National Book Awards (The Adventures of Augie March, 1953; Herzog, 1964; Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 1970), the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature and countless other accolades besides, not the least of which was mainstream commercial success. He died in 2005, 89 years old and on his fifth wife—a former student exactly half his age.

Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir is by Greg Bellow, Mr. Bellow’s oldest son by his first wife (Anita Goshkin). Greg was born the same year that Dangling Man was published. After a long and apparently successful career as a “psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist,” Greg—himself a man of some 70 years now—has, “despite my doubts about writing publicly … determined to learn more about my father, to reassess my patrimony as a writer’s son, and to have my say.” Bellow fils describes his discomfort over the many public laments for and lionizations of Bellow père that appeared after the latter’s death.

As soon as Saul died, his lawyer, Walter Pozen, set the tone for what was to come. Instead of calling the family, Walter phoned the public media. I learned of my father’s death on my car radio. The chosen speakers at Saul’s funeral were Martin Amis, the literary “son,” and Ruth Wisse, the dutiful Jewish “daughter.” Though no family members were asked to speak, I rose to praise Saul’s widow, Janis, for her devotion during my father’s last years. Strangely silent was another literary heir, Philip Roth, who, like a kind of brooding Hamlet, wandered the edges of the funeral in deep thought.

Greg Bellow’s anger and disgust are palpable (the chapter from which the quote is drawn is titled “Awakened by a Grave Robbery”), though they do not always arise in the places one might expect. Indeed, Greg is capable of showing great sympathy and reserve of judgment when discussing Saul, who required exorbitant portions of both—and often demanded more still. Here, for example, is Greg on Saul’s infidelity to Anita: “Saul was now well able to construct rationales to justify his sexual behavior. But his feelings toward women were grounded, I believe, in deeply maternal forms of love like that I find in the selfless, protective love of Grandma Lescha.”

It is an emblematic passage. Greg uses his professional experience (and its attendant lexicon and tone) as a way of accessing and attempting to understand—if rarely to justify—a father who was somehow always, as the man himself put it in More Die of Heartbreak, “knee-deep in the garbage of a personal life.” The pervasive calm is admirable, if a little bit strange, especially considered in light of the moments when the tranquility is broken and true, raw rage shines through.

The literary agent Andrew Wylie’s name alone, for example, is enough to send Greg around the bend. He quotes a memoir by Harriet Wasserman, his father’s longtime pre-Wylie agent, in which Ms. Wasserman claims that Mr. Wylie boasted he would turn Bellow “from a cash cow into a cash bull.” Mr. Bellow cites this as proof that his father’s legacy “was now clearly in the grip of the Philistines, people who emphasized money rather than culture, about whom he had complained for decades.” Well, maybe. On the other hand, if one is going to quote Ms. Wasserman’s memoir, it seems only fair to note that her book, Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow, was written and published as payback to Saul for firing her. (It ends with a likening of Bellow to King Lear and Wasserman, by extension, to Cordelia.) Whatever one thinks of Mr. Wylie and his aggressive courtship of aging authors with posterity on their minds (not for nothing is his nickname “The Jackal”), it is only reasonable to take Ms. Wasserman’s testimony with a grain of salt. Besides all of which, status and money were always on Saul Bellow’s mind.

Every Bellow novel of consequence takes the conflict between material and—presumably—nobler concerns as a central theme, but the result is typically inconclusive; the conflict never quite resolves. And status—in the old-school sense of being a public figure, but still—is consistently envisioned in Bellow’s work as a virtue in and of itself. More to the point, it is a prerequisite for being a protagonist in a Saul Bellow story. Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift questions whether he has compromised his artistic vision to achieve commercial success, but he never regrets the social capital that his achievements have granted him. He returns obsessively throughout the book to memories of dining at the White House and riding in a helicopter with Bobby Kennedy. Albert Corde in The Dean’s December is the head of a university journalism program; his career got a running start when, as a young man, he secured a spot covering the Yalta conference. Abe Ravelstein in Ravelstein, Eugene Henderson in Henderson the Rain King, Uncle Benn in More Die of Heartbreak (introduced to the reader as “B. Crader, the well-known botanist”); the list goes on. And nowhere in Bellow—anywhere, ever—does one encounter a character who abandons a social or economic position for the sake of a higher ideal (or for any other reason). George Eliot he wasn’t.

However much Saul Bellow’s death and public memorials (there were several of them, in New York and Chicago) may have upset Greg Bellow, it was probably no less than his father expected, anticipated, hoped for. Indeed, the son learning of the father’s death on the radio is a perfectly Bellovian detail, with the difference being that a proper Bellow narrator would have had his grief allayed by the thrill of being personally connected to a boldface name. 

editorial@observer.com

André Aciman would seem a prototypical ambassador of learned neither-here-nor-thereness, an Alexandrian Jew whose output as a novelist of nostalgia rivals his stature as a scholar of Proust. But if his well-received 1994 memoir Out of Egypt stood apart as a personal-political lament, Harvard Square, a semiautobiographical work of fiction, deals with an altogether different sort of longing.

 The exile at hand is hardly geopolitical—the furtive loneliness of a Harvard doctoral student in literature easing his monasticism with a magnum of Beefeater purloined from a department function. He doses daily from the bottle, drinking and sunning himself as he reads for his comprehensive exams. Our unnamed narrator, fearful of failing the tests a second and final time, is equally estranged from worlds  near (friendly yet unattainable neighbors whose cries of passion he hears at night) and far (not his coastal Alexandria, to which return is unthinkable, but Paris, the aspirational lodestar of his youth).

 It is an arid solitude, and Monsieur Kalashnikov punctures it in a chance Cambridge café encounter. He’s Kalaj, a Tunisian cab driver whose bottomless invective against civilization and its ersatz is more culture schlock than culture shock. Nobody is spared: “NATO, UNESCO, Nabisco, Ceausescu, Tabasco, Lambrusco, you name it ...” But Kalaj is a false radical whose rants have the affect of a cafe Casanova, and we see an intriguing and ultimately ill-fated summer friendship develop between the two men.

It’s a thoughtful mise-en-scène, though the pregnant symbolism may prove too distracting for some readers—including the Times, whose review stumbles on the book’s sly opening, “Cambridge was a desert,” dimly offering that the “hero is himself, like the author, familiar with the desert.” A less ersatz reading, however, reveals a delicately poignant interplay of desire and memory, and is Mr. Aciman at his greatest.

In 2007, The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl gave a talk at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in which he said that the hosting city was “a great place to be, if you have a particular reason.” He went on to call Chicago one of the “great receptor cities of the world” for all the artistic talent it sends to other places, maybe not realizing he had opened up old wounds inflicted by another New Yorker writer nearly 55 years earlier when the late A.J. Liebling proclaimed Chicago the “Second City,” behind Mr. Liebling’s hometown of New York. The most recent New York media potshot at Chicago was by Rachel Shteir, an ex-New Yorker and current Chicagoan, in a recent New York Times Book Review piece, “Chicago Manuals.” Ms. Shteir, who claimed not to be “some latter-day A.J. Liebling” in her attack on the city she has called home for the last 13 years, pointed out Chicago’s many faults, from rampant gun violence to the nation’s second-highest combined sales tax and the clear lines of segregation that zip through its neighborhoods. (Ms. Shteir's review generated titanic reaction from the media in Chicago, all of it wounded, which pretty much proved her point; she wrote about the experience for the Observer.) I left Chicago over a decade ago, but I still recognize these problems in my beloved hometown. And yet I wondered what city doesn’t have a laundry list of specific failings. 

Thomas Dyja, a Chicago native, doesn’t set out to change the view of contemporary Chicago with his latest book, The Third Coast. Instead, the book charts “When Chicago Built the American Dream” through a detailed look at postwar Chicago and how the Second City changed the course of America for good.

Of all the characters you meet throughout The Third Coast (and there are so many of them it’s hard to keep track), the German-born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe looms the largest, from the start of his ambitious career to the point at which he “resembled a medieval abbot ... trying to think his way into heaven” in the early 1960s. In a city built on industry and defined by the Democratic political “machine” (every mayor since 1931 has been a Democrat), Mies’s Modernist architectural perfection, which he himself acknowledged was sometimes viewed as “cold and rigid,” fit perfectly into the city’s framework and transformed the way major cities around the world put up buildings. He was the last director of the Bauhaus and “had chosen Chicago for practical reasons,” especially the state’s lax laws for professional education compared with New York or Massachusetts. But he moved to a city with an already rich architectural legacy, taking a position as the director of the Armour Institute (later to be renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology) in 1938. Within two years, the school was “becoming a kind of architectural monastery, producing a brotherhood trained to spread [Mies’s] word.”

Mies pops up throughout The Third Coast, whether directly or as an influence as the city assembles its skyline. Along with him is a mob of people, connected only loosely by geography, that threatens to overstuff an already large book: the author and historian Studs Terkel, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, the avant-garde jazz icon Sun Ra, the outsider artist Henry Darger, the Chess Brothers and Muddy Waters, a host of high-ranking political figures, low-level ward bosses, architects, magazine publishers and too many others to list here. But this unruly throng is the whole point: Chicago is whatever these people made of it—a city full of suckers to exploit, an easy place to make a buck, “that same old place,” as Robert Johnson would have it, a city of migrants blanketed by the façade of Midwestern permanence, a city of underdogs making good.

Mr. Dyja’s book gains heft from the city’s self-made men, like Mayor Richard J. Daley, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and Ebony publisher John H. Johnson. But its heart is the undercurrent of racial tension that you can feel dripping off nearly every other page. The term “hypersegregation” was created with Chicago in mind. The white population has historically been situated on the city’s north side, with the African-American population pushed to the south. Surprisingly, one of the book’s most endemic chapters takes place in Mississippi: the murder of 14-year-old Chicago resident Emmett Till while he was visiting relatives in Money, an unincorporated community in the Delta, which helped set off the civil rights movement when pictures of Till’s mutilated body were published by Chicago-based African-American newspapers and magazines with the headline “Black America reunited to witness Emmett Till’s body.”

Although Till’s murder took place nearly a thousand miles to the south of Chicago, his funeral was held in the city of his birth, and the story became an American dilemma. It is a perfect example of how a “prairie city with a waterfront,” as Saul Bellow called it, influenced the entire nation. Even the few paragraphs that Mr. Dyja devotes to the condensed version of how Ray Kroc turned one McDonald’s restaurant in suburban Chicago into “a global behemoth that represents to much of the world all that’s bad about America, and all they want,” demonstrates how the city is America in microcosm.

For Bellow, it was “that somber city,” but even he wasn’t “altogether clear” on what it stands for. And so the fact that the literary representative of Mr. Dyja’s Chicago is Nelson Algren, rather than the more famous Bellow, is appropriate. Algren’s life and work are chronicled through his professional disappointments and a doomed affair with Simone de Beauvoir. Although Algren was a brilliant writer and his book The Man With the Golden Arm won him the National Book Award in 1950, he was always coming in second to somebody else: Bellow was more acclaimed, de Beauvoir wouldn’t leave Jean-Paul Sartre for her American lover, and his contemporaries like John Fante and Charles Bukowski used similar formulas with much better results. Algren, like the great city that he grew up in, played second to many. And although Mr. Dyja makes that metaphor very clear throughout The Third Coast, you’re left to wonder why exactly these people are credited with building the American dream, save for the fact that they all called the same flawed and proud city home.

editorial@observer.com

At Paris Photo, which held its first American edition at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles last week, the mood was nothing short of giddy. Walking through the labyrinthine alleys of Paramount was simultaneously familiar and unrecognizable. The giant screen painted like the sky sitting in the parking lot seemed to lift the veil on a few open-air scenes from cinematic history. And the New York back lot—adorned with fake subway kiosks, fake brownstones and fake walk-ups with fake fire escapes—almost made me feel right at home, except that the kiosks didn’t lead to anywhere but a brick wall and the upper floors of the brownstones didn’t exist beyond the building facades. Dealers had settled inside, creating impromptu businesses that made the fair feel like a stroll through an under-construction gallery district.
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Nathaniel Rich. (Photo by Meredith Angelson)

Last Wednesday, U.S. Congressman Joe Barton, speaking before a House subcommittee that aims to fast-track construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, swatted down, with his Bible, any hope that climate change is a man-made phenomenon.

“I would point out that if you are a believer in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood was an example of climate change,” Mr. Barton explained. “That certainly wasn’t because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”

Meanwhile, in Kentucky, the state’s Tourism Board has tax-incentivized the construction of a $155 million Noah’s Ark-based theme park. Evangelical Christians offered assurance that the park will feature a “full-size” Biblical Ark, built to specifications. State Democrats promised that the park will produce 900 permanent jobs. A commissioner in rural Grant County, Ky., where the park is under construction, paraphrased both sides: “With every ark there is a rainbow, and at the end of this rainbow is a pot of gold.”

Chalk it up, if you want, to the prolonged Gore-ification of the media conversation over climate change, or the undeniable rise in flood-inducing hurricanes during recent years, from Katrina to Sandy. Last year at the movies, we watched Moonrise Kingdom and Beasts of the Southern Wild gloss the diluvian myth. Countless other films from the last decade—from schlock (2012) to avant-garde (Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark)—aired our national anxiety over ecological catastrophe by featuring floods or arks or both. There have been fewer novels, but Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital depicted a flood that drowns the world under seven miles of water, leaving only a floating hospital filled with sick and dying children in its wake, and Noah, by Swiss author Hugo Loetscher, reimagined the building of the ark as a Keynesian economic project, not unlike the theme park in Kentucky. That neither of these books aims at verisimilitude is part of the point; the onslaught of ecological disaster has been experienced by most of us (outside of New Orleans and Florida) as a media phenomenon. Of course, that’s all changing.

Nathaniel Rich’s entry in the flood-and-ark canon, Odds Against Tomorrow, hinges on a hypothetical conceit: what if New Yorkers lived through the diluvian travails of Hurricane Katrina? Though this is a fair reduction of the book, and an adequately shorthand way of getting friends to read a novel that hits on several salient themes, it is still a reduction. Never mind that Mr. Rich recently relocated from New York, his city of birth, to New Orleans, where the aftermath of the hurricane is a persistent fact of daily life; Odds Against Tomorrow eschews the flaws of speculative fiction mainly by being well researched. It also has the virtue of attempting to do more than recapitulate the national anxiety and shame felt after Hurricane Katrina.

The novel, Mr. Rich’s second, revolves around Mitchell Zukor, a quant nerd educated at the University of Chicago and the son of a Hungarian slumlord. Early on, Zukor’s mathematical gifts and weirdly unexplained talent for predicting devastation help him land a job performing risk analysis in the Department of Equities, Assets, and Derivatives at fictitious New York law firm Fitzsimmons Sherman. It isn’t long before the ambitious Zukor leaves the firm for greener pastures. Late one night he emails the ridiculously named Alec Charnoble of the firm FutureWorld, who, without really vetting him, offers Zukor loads of cash to help him scare corporate executives into retaining his company’s services for $850,000 a year. The entire scheme pivots around a limited liability clause that allows corporations to scapegoat FutureWorld in case of catastrophe.

Charnoble’s villainy is cartoonish (he has a “bony arm” and likes to twist his finger in his palm), but he’s not a far cry from the financiers and cronies who profited from government-sanctioned buck-passing over the last decade. His scheme forms the arc of the novel, and it allows Rich to collect a number of contemporary issues—the financial crisis, regulation, risk and compliance, speculation, big data—into a big, neat literary ball, one that rolls inexorably toward disaster.

Mr. Rich’s prose is detailed yet sterile, measured but unpretty, and thoroughly televised: it scans like a novelization of the film version of The Fountainhead. This may be because Mr. Rich is more interested in ideas than characters; even his minor characters come across as unintentionally allegorical. Zukor’s slumlord father represents being a slumlord. Elsa Bruner, a political and ideological Beatrice with a rare heart condition, eventually fades and vanishes from the novel’s list of concerns, though she is revisited perfunctorily in the book’s worst scene. Even Jane, Zukor’s love interest and the most sympathetic character in Odds Against Tomorrow, serves mostly to play out the link between sex and capital.

Still, Odds Against Tomorrow hits its stride in the middle section, where it becomes, by turns, one of the best rewritings of the ark myth. Flush with cash before he predicts a calamitous flood, Zukor, on a whim, buys a “Psycho Canoe,” which is basically what it sounds like, from a Manhattan art gallery. Later, when the levee breaks, so to speak, Jane and Zukor maneuver their tiny ark around the flooded city:

They were bobbing everywhere, lobster buoys in a Maine cove. And stationary objects – the studded plastic corner of a refrigerator door, a radiator’s white corrugated grill – protruded from the water like unnatural icebergs. On either side of the avenue, the steel beams of traffic lights were rotted trees bending into the river, their roots bundles of severed coppered cables. Where the floodwater reached its highest point it traced, along the sides of buildings, an uneven line of filth that continued the length of the avenue as far as they could see.

This is one of many tantalizing friezes wherein Mr. Rich imagines a waterlogged New York City, and it is here that his novel floats above its belabored, researched prose. It must be deliberate. For all their models and schemes and mathematical certainties, Jane and Zukor are ultimately rescued by a work of art.

editorial@observer.com

Renata Adler. (Courtesy Knopf/Richard Avedon)

“I guess I felt—and now feel—as though I was 19 when I wrote it,” Renata Adler said of her first novel Speedboat. “And maybe still am. And by Pitch Dark, I was maybe 19-and-a-half.”

In fact, Ms. Adler, a slight, bespectacled woman who was seated across from me a few weeks ago at a café near Grand Central, was turning 38 when Speedboat was published in 1976. Pitch Dark came out seven years later. Both, long out of print, have just been reissued by NYRB Classics, but not before other writers drummed up interest about Ms. Adler’s work. The National Book Critics Circle campaigned for Speedboat to be reissued, and David Shields, whose 2010 book Reality Hunger helped introduce a new generation of readers to Ms. Adler’s debut, wrote in an email to me, “A crucial part of the performance of her literary persona—in Speedboat and Pitch Dark and elsewhere—is how resolutely un-nice she is while remaining deeply civilized.”

In person, she’s friendly, occasionally pausing mid-thought, hooking her left thumb into the black belt of her blue jeans while she chooses her next words. On the page, she is calm, observant and logical; she is funny, with an eye for the ridiculous; she is rigorous and intelligent. And she is unabashedly honest.

It is hard to reckon her real-life generosity with her famously contrarian nonfiction, or even with Speedboat’s deadpan prose. Here is Ms. Adler—or rather, Ms. Adler’s very Adler-like narrator, a reporter named Jen Fain who lives in New York and works for a tabloid, the Standard Evening Sun:

All the men in the room had drinks in both hands. They had tried to extricate themselves from conversations by saying, “I guess I’ll have another drink. May I get one for you?” The trouble with this method is that it takes people right back where they came from; it is impossible to approach with one lady’s gin and tonic another lady who may be drinking Scotch. Escape procedures, however, were in full force. Some people, in a frenzy of antipathy and boredom, were drinking themselves into extreme approximations of longing to be together. Exchanging phone numbers, demanding to have lunch, proposing to share an apartment—the escalations of fellowship had the air of a terminal auction, a fierce adult version of slapjack, a bill-payer loan from a finance company, an attempt to buy with one grand convivial debt, to be paid in future, an exit from each other’s company at that instant.

Ms. Adler is—to tweak a line she used in a notoriously negative review of Pauline Kael’s criticism—page by page, line by line, and without interruption, brilliant. Few writers articulate as deftly the position of the clever, skeptical, frequently isolated outsider. She also has an impressive pedigree: graduate of Bryn Mawr, the Sorbonne and Harvard; recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship; winner of the O. Henry prize. Member of the special staff of the House Judiciary Committee from January to August 1974; staff writer at The New Yorker; New York Times movie critic from 1968 to 1969. And it’s not as though her novels, Speedboat and Pitch Dark, in which another Adler-like narrator, Kate Ennis, attempts to resolve her affair with a married man, didn’t have powerful allies. Ms. Adler’s original editor on Pitch Dark was Robert Gottlieb, then the editor in chief of Knopf. (Both novels were later licensed in paperback to HarperCollins.) Her agent was and remains the formidable Lynn Nesbit, who helped launch the careers of John Cheever, Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson. So why did she disappear?

“Frankly, in the ’90s, as publishing became ever more corporate, a lot of books went out of print,” said Edwin Frank, editorial director of the New York Review Books, who republished the novels at the end of March. “It is absolutely true that if you’re a novelist in America, you are to a large degree dependent on bringing out new books regularly to get ongoing attention for your old books.”

Ms. Adler followed Pitch Dark with Reckless Disregard, a nonfiction dissection of two libel cases, in 1986. In 1987, an essay collection called Politics was pulled at the last minute, after it had already made it into bound galleys. She wouldn’t publish another book for more than a decade.

The book she finally did release, in 1999, was Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker. Ms. Adler already had something of a reputation as a polemicist. In the introduction to her collection of movie criticism, 1969’s A Year in the Dark, she writes of a full-page ad taken out in the Times attacking her reviews. Her 8,000-word takedown of her old colleague Pauline Kael, published in the New York Review of Books in 1980, now reads as less of an assault and more of a boisterous and prescient examination of the perils of being a staff critic (or blogger). Ms. Adler writes, “By far the most common tendency, however, is to stay put and simply to inflate, to pretend that each day’s text is after all a crisis—the most, first, best, worst, finest, meanest, deepest, etc.—to take on, since we are dealing in superlatives, one of the first, most unmistakable marks of the hack.”

Gone—which begins, “As I write this, The New Yorker is dead”—occasioned a furious backlash in the journalistic community. A flurry of articles followed—in the Times especially, but also in this paper. (Mr. Gottlieb, whose tenure as editor in chief of The New Yorker was portrayed rather unflatteringly, wrote a response claiming that “her book reflects a dangerous arrogance.”)

Her essay collection, Canaries in the Mineshaft, was released in 2001, but since then, aside from a few articles (one, in The New Republic, on the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case, was republished as a pamphlet by Melville House) and an interview here and there (as with Robert Birnbaum for the website The Morning News), Ms. Adler has published very little.

Her relationship with book editors, she implied, has not always been easy. (One exception she specifically mentioned is Michael Denneny, who published Canaries in the Mineshaft at St. Martin’s Press.) “If you’re a prizefighter—which one is not—the guy in your corner should say heartening, encouraging things whether he means them or not.”

“This is really too much gossip,” she added, halting this line of thinking.

Despite her reputation (“Renata Adler is being disagreeable again,” begins an essay from August 2000 by Slate’s Judith Shulevitz), the critical judgments she makes often seem less disparaging than simply true. She has high standards. “Twice, at publications other than The New Yorker,” she writes in Gone, “I actually thought of going to the printer, armed with a rifle perhaps, and lying down, rather as political demonstrators used to do, and saying, They shall not print, in my name, this version of a piece.” (That was, she admitted, “a bit of hyperbole.”)

She maintains a level tone, only getting truly exercised by faulty arguments, the flaws of which she coolly lays out.

If her nonfiction is compelling for its certainty, it is a carefully cultivated air of uncertainty that has driven her fiction. In Speedboat and Pitch Dark, the facts are still there, still arranged deliberately, but it’s no longer clear where they lead.

Take this passage, from Speedboat, which sums up the struggle against calcified bits of received language: “‘Take off everything except your slip,’ the nurse said. ‘Doctor will be with you in a moment.’ Nobody under forty-five, in twenty years, had worn a slip, but nurses invariably gave this instruction. There they all are, however, the great dead men with their injunctions. Make it new. Only connect.” At the end of the novel, when Jen reveals she is pregnant with her boyfriend’s child and can’t figure out how to tell him, the scene in the nurse’s office takes on a new cast.

“If you ask me if I care more about what happens to Emma or what happens to Princess Casamassima, there’s no contest,” Ms. Adler told me. “I care much more what happens in fiction.”

The appeal of her own fiction happens on an emotional level. “I guess there’s a desperation in Pitch Dark,” she agreed. The book is partly about an affair gone wrong, but the threat of violence that seems to lurk beneath the surface hints at something darker. Ms. Adler writes: “Is it always the same story, then? Somebody loves and somebody doesn’t, or loves less, or loves someone else.”

“Part of the thing the character’s doing,” Ms. Adler said, “is trying not to live the stereotyped version of that story. There are many stereotyped versions of that story.”

Ms. Adler ran through the advice she might give her book’s hero if the character were a friend—Has she considered playing hard to get with her married lover? Has she considered getting pregnant?—before reiterating: “That character doesn’t want to keep playing out that too-familiar game.”

editorial@observer.com

That’s the cautionary tale behind a new book out this month, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks With the Sanitation Workers of New York City, in which author Robin Nagle reminds readers that we ought to be a little more appreciative of the men and women who clean up after us, lest we tempt such a fate—or, God forbid, have to deal with our own trash.

For the last 12 years, Ms. Nagle, a New York University anthropology professor, has been studying and advocating for the city’s “garbage faeries,” the vital yet largely invisible work force whose labor gets noticed only when it hasn’t been done. Sanitation workers have a higher on-the-job mortality rate than any other uniformed department in the city, she writes—including police officers and firefighters—yet their duties aren’t remotely as revered.

Thanks to traffic accidents and exposure to toxic waste, sanitation work is up there with deep-sea diving and logging as one of the 10 deadliest jobs in America. “I always get a little push-back when I say this, but it’s the most important uniformed force on the streets. We could show a little love,” said Ms. Nagle on a recent afternoon in her office at NYU, which is furnished, naturally, with a pair of captain’s chairs that she plucked from the streets—or “mongoed,” as insiders say—during her days embedded with the city’s sanitation force.

Ms. Nagle, a small, energetic woman, spent nearly two years lobbying the DSNY for access to the agency to write an ethnography. At first, her calls and letters went unanswered. Meetings were postponed. It wasn’t until Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office in 2002 that the city appointed a more amenable commissioner, John Doherty, who agreed to let Ms. Nagle go through archival budget reports and storm logs.

Robin Nagle. (Photo by Mitchell Bach)

She kept pushing and eventually got permission to enter the field. “My intentions were noble and my passions were real. I looked forward to an enthusiastic welcome from any Sanitation garage in the city,” she writes in the book. But, arriving at the M7 base on Manhattan’s West Side on her first day, she was greeted with a very different response: “[M]y presence delighted no one. Neither the sanitation workers nor the officers were even slightly interested in my research.” The only other women around were naked and in centerfolds taped to the walls.Despite discouragement from a few cynical colleagues, Ms. Nagle gradually picked up valuable lessons along the way. Sometimes these epiphanies were practical: “Clothes matter. Not wearing gloves or boots while picking up garbage is dumb.” Other times they were ontological: “Garbage Is, always. We will die, civilization will crumble, life as we know it will cease to exist but garbage will endure ...”

In time, Ms. Nagle proved that a middle-aged woman with a taste for knitting and turtlenecks could indeed hold her own as a “garbageman.” She passed her CDL test, learned to drive snowplows and broom trucks, to operate forklifts and to properly heave trash cans into a hopper.

The san men came around. “She was just extremely likeable, and she indicated a keen interest in what we do, which is not something we come across too much in our world,” said the city’s chief of refuse and recycling collection operations, Peter McKeon, a 31-year veteran of the department. “We’re usually ignored, and she asked a lot of questions.”

In 2006, the agency named Ms. Nagle its first and only “anthropologist in residence,” a title she plans to bear “as long as they’ll have me.” (As it happens, the DSNY also has an artist in residence, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who has held that position since 1977.)

Picking Up is the culmination not just of Ms. Nagle’s years researching the department, but of an even deeper-rooted preoccupation with trash that dates back to her childhood. In the book, she recalls a formative camping trip with her father when they set up their tent in the woods only to find a massive makeshift dump just 40 feet from the site.

“The memory is vivid because it was one of those awful childhood moments when a certainty is exposed as a lie,” she writes. “I had assumed that adults cared about respecting wild forests, but the woodland trash heap was proof that some people, even those who presumably liked to go camping, didn’t give a hoot. The realization left me angry and perplexed—and it became the catalyst for a lifelong fascination.”

Ms. Nagle might have pursued a career in the natural sciences, but said she was drawn instead to anthropology because “I want to know about the people.” In her mind, garbage itself represented “part of an infinite, orgiastic display of humanness at its most mundane, disquieting and mesmerizing.”

She befriended many of her co-workers on the job and makes humanizing them the book’s central mission. Still, her painstakingly ordered prose underscores the reality that her role is fundamentally that of a participant-observer, and she scrutinizes her subjects with a methodology that could just as easily apply to an indigenous tribe in the Amazon.

Like any community, she reveals that the DSNY has its own language (“san speak,” where “getting banged” is undergoing disciplinary measures and “disco rice” means maggots), kinship protocols (“except in truly dire and unusual circumstances (and maybe not even then), you don’t give up your partner”), normative gender roles (one “earns his membership in the Sanitation brotherhood with bawdy humor and coarse language”) and dress codes (gloves, boots, hoodie).

But if Ms. Nagle’s anthropological voice feels occasionally detached, it’s certainly not because she lacks any investment in what she calls “the cause.” Aside from writing the book, she has been collecting interviews with workers for an oral history project and is in the process of applying for nonprofit status to open a public sanitation museum. After all, such institutions already exist for the city’s transit, police and fire departments. She’s already thinking about her next book, an exploration of Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill.

In the meantime, Ms. Nagle hopes Picking Up will convince readers to think twice about what they put in their own trash cans. At her home in Harlem, she and her 13-year-old son take care to properly dispose of common culprits like broken Christmas ornaments, wire coat hangers and tin-can lids. And Ms. Nagle tries to reuse glass whenever possible, since it is the least efficient material to recycle.

Ultimately, however, her goal is even simpler: “If people read the book and remember to say ‘Thank you,’ that’s great. I’m happy.”

editorial@observer.com

Anne Carson

The Canadian poet and classics scholar Anne Carson began her 1998 “novel in verse” Autobiography of Red with the line “He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.” That is a perfect sentence. Its built-in double take is typical of Carson’s straight-faced comedy. Red Doc> (Knopf, 192 pp., $24.95), Ms. Carson’s new “sequel” to Autobiography, begins like this:

goodlooking boy wasn’t he / yes / blond /

                                                  yes / I do vaguely

                                                  / you never liked

                                                  him / bit of a

                                                                                                              rebel / so you

                                                                                                              said / he’s the

                                                                                                             one wore lizard

                                                                                                                                                                                   pants and

No, there aren’t any words missing, nothing to orient you—just this weirdly spaced dialogue. So Anne Carson might be a little crazy. I’ve suspected this for some time, but her new book confirms it. Not that I’m complaining.

Autobiography of Red tweaked the ancient myth of Geryon, a red monster killed by Herakles, until it became a teen gay monster romance, which is probably, by now, a genre with its own section at Barnes & Noble. Ms. Carson’s version is very loosely based on, or in other words has almost nothing to do with, the few surviving fragments of Stesichoros, he of the difficult interval: monster meets boy, monster loses boy, monster reads Heidegger in Buenos Aires. Now Geryon is all grown up, a musk-ox herder with red wings who goes by “G.” He is reunited with Herakles, fucked up by war and now known improbably as Sad But Great (“I’m / Sad / why / no it’s my / name”).

The obnoxious formatting of Red Doc>, mostly centered columnar prose that can’t be accurately reproduced here—“a result of an accident with the computer,” according to a profile in The New York Times Magazine: “Carson hit a wrong button, and it made the margins go crazy”—is tame by Ms. Carson’s standards. Stesichoros’s fragments, Ms. Carson tells us, “read as if Stesichoros had composed a substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat.” This is, not coincidentally, an accurate description of Ms. Carson’s own Nox, a literal box of elegiac poems, photographs, lecture notes and scraps of meat released in 2010. Ms. Carson’s last book, an idiosyncratic translation of Sophocles called Antigonick, was hand-lettered and had cartoons. I was hoping Red Doc> would be written in crop circles. But no, it’s just another book. With words in it.

With Anne Carson words in it. I didn’t pay too much attention to the plot, but who reads Ms. Carson for her narrative drive? It’s her phrases and images—half Simonides, half TMZ—that swoop and beguile like hidden messages. Cryptograms from other civilizations, or hoaxes perpetrated by pranksters by moonlight? Say what you will about Ms. Carson, she doesn’t play it safe:

Rain continuous

since the funeral a

wrecking rattling

bewildering Lethe-

knuckling mob of rain. A

rain with no instructions.

Listening to rain

he thinks how strange

all its surfaces sound like

they’re sliding up.

I can’t think of many poets who can pull off a line like “Lethe-knuckling mob of rain,” with its cod-Homeric tag. I’m not sure Ms. Carson does, but I’m glad she’s got the balls to try. And I’m almost certain the bit about rain’s surfaces sounding like they’re sliding up doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense (what would that sound like, exactly? Is it G’s imprecision or Ms. Carson’s?). But it tickles my mind.

Ms. Carson doesn’t skirt preciousness, she plows through it on an ATV, kicking up shadows and moons and “the ancient smell of ice.” In Autobiography of Red she calls an airplane, wonderfully, “this dangling fragment of humans.” Less wonderfully, in the new book, G is obsessed with Proust. Of course he is; in Autobiography he was always asking what time is made of. Better is his obsession with Daniil Kharms, and even better is when Ms. Carson doesn’t feel the need to prop up G’s passion with highbrow signifiers:

Time smeared

under the eyes of the

miners as they rattle down

into the mine. Time if you

are bankrupt. Time if you

are Prometheus. Time if

you are all the little tubes

on the roots of a gorse

plant sucking greenish

black moistures up into

new scribbled continents.

Time it takes for the postal

clerk to apply her lipstick

at the back of the post

office before the

supervisor returns.

That slide from Prometheus and gorse to “scribbled continents” and postal lipstick is echt Carson. Her preciousness usually doubles back on itself. When she goes for beauty—whether it ends in a swish or an air-ball—she follows up with a prophylactic dose of demotic. G and Sad visit a glacier (last time it was a volcano—Ms. Carson’s metaphors for emotional life are less than subtle): “A sort of cavern all / one color as if squeezed /
out of a tube. Wow the / blue says G.”

Autobiography of Red was sometimes annoyingly coy, but then Ms. Carson would nail Geryon’s loneliness to the page as if she’d had a heart all along. In Red Doc>, it’s G’s dying mother who provides the all-too-human relief. Ms. Carson doesn’t over-pollinate the death scene. G’s mother is worried about some whiskers on her chin, asks him to pluck them. Afterward, the requisite musing on death, but wow the blue:

Silly! Silly law! Look at

the hours stacked ahead of

you bales of time shining

in the sun—just reach your

arms in she must be there

somewhere maybe at

the kitchen table in the red

velour bathrobe crouched

over her coupons reaching

for her smokes he half

turns back—

But there is only “some / big old black crow just / now shuffling itself off / into flight.”

Red Doc> is about the transition to adulthood once youth is just a dream song, the downgrade from “acid and / Thunderbird wine and a / battered Karmann Ghia” to “Well not every day / can be a masterpiece,” from Herakles to Sad. From poetry to prose:

what is the difference between

poetry and prose you know the old analogies prose

is a house poetry a man in flames running

quite fast through it

Ms. Carson’s unevenness starts to seem integral to her insight after a while. She is writing the poetry that remains once our equations start making sense. A house > being on fire

Rachel Kushner

A few weeks back, when I called the author Rachel Kushner in Los Angeles with the number her publicist gave me, and the voice came on the other line saying “I’m sorry but the number you are trying to reach has been disconnected,” the first thing I thought—after noting that it’s an overly apologetic man who makes the announcement in L.A. instead of the stern-sounding woman you get in New York—was that it was all some kind of staged performance, a statement on the nature of interviews and profile writing and the futility of ever really connecting with someone. I was primed into this mode of thinking by Ms. Kushner’s new novel, The Flamethrowers, which is about a lot of things, but most of all authenticity and its frequent absence.

The Flamethrowers is set in Soho in 1977 and follows a young artist known around town as Reno because that’s where she’s from. She falls in with a group of artists who show at the Helen Hellenberger Gallery, whose proprietor tends to sleep with her artists, comes from a Greek family, and resembles the real-life Mary Boone, who created a gallery empire in downtown Manhattan in the late ‘70s. Reno is introduced to the group by Giddle, a woman who works at a skuzzy diner on Lafayette as a kind of living performance piece, “no audience to what she was doing, since it was so much like life, and no real friends since they were merely an audience to her performance.” Reno’s attentions become triangulated by her boyfriend Sandro, an idealistic artist and, despite his disavowals, heir to the Italian Valera tire fortune, and Ronnie, a photographer embarking on a doomed mission to photograph every living person. It’s a New York that’s familiar, “a mecca of individual points,” Ms. Kushner writes, “longings, all merging into one great light-pulsing mesh, and you simply found your pulse, your place.” But the author’s metropolis is slightly off, its own contained world of characters and hangers-on.

“I tried to metabolize everything I knew about the 1970s and then build something from that knowledge rather than a roman à clef, where people can recognize thinly veiled characters, or see bars and streets that they know about,” Ms. Kushner told me when we spoke. It turns out she simply forgot to pay her phone bill, and I quickly reached her at a different number.

Ms. Kushner was born in Eugene, Oregon, the daughter of two scientists whom she described as hippie beatniks. (The family lived in a school bus.) Her mother grew up an American in Cuba, on land owned by the United Fruit Company, which partly served as the inspiration for her debut novel, Telex from Cuba, about American sugar farmers driven out of the country by Castro’s revolution. Ms. Kushner’s aunt was friends with Gordon Matta-Clark and worked for Richard Serra, so she grew up around artists. She had a “formative set of sense memories of Soho being the kind of place that’s pitch dark at night and empty,” she said. “It was a kind of abandoned place that seemed ruled by artists.”

Some of the artists WHO rule Ms. Kushner’s Soho, circling like satellites around Reno, Sandro and Ronnie, are John Dogg, who makes films of “white on white ... white like bandages over nothing”; Stanley, more of a patron, a lonely drunk who spent the previous summer in the Hamptons but never made it to the beach because he was too busy making long recordings of his intoxicated ramblings; Stanley’s wife, Gloria, who recently staged a performance in which she sat alone in a small booth with a “curtained, pelvis-level opening,” wherein Ronnie accidentally gave her a genuine orgasm while giving a contrived lecture on the gendered etymology of the verb “to finger”; and Burdmoore Model, the former leader of an anarchist group called The Motherfuckers, a gang so bad, they beat up and pissed on Iggy Pop for “having a reputation for intensity though it was unearned.”

All of these people feel that the revolution—artistic, sexual, psychological—will happen any day now, and that when it does, they’ll be at the center of it. It’s something like how paranoia functions in the work of Don DeLillo, whose 1997 novel Underworld is a clear influence on Ms. Kushner. There’s a common belief in that book that the apocalypse will happen at any moment, a fear that seemed oddly prescient a few years later in the age of wiretapping and terrorist alerts. But in Underworld, nothing ever happens. The real apocalypse is the paranoia itself, being bogged down in it. No one wishes for the end of the world; they just want to be able to worry about it.

“I acquired Rachel’s then-untitled second novel four-and-a-half years ago, and when I read it last spring, I thought, ‘Rachel has written the great American novel,’” said Ms. Kushner’s editor, Nan Graham, who also works with Mr. DeLillo and edited Underworld. The Flamethrowers, she said, seemed to predict the New York of Occupy Wall Street the same way Mr. DeLillo “‘predicted’ 9/11.”

What sets Ms. Kushner’s book apart is that the revolution, in fact, does finally arrive, albeit slyly. Reno and Sandro travel to Italy so she can make a film with the Valera racing team. The anarchist Red Brigades are protesting the regime of Prime Minister Aldo Moro in the streets of Rome, chanting slogans like “Jeans for the poor!,” “We want nothing!,” “Down with the people, up with the bosses!” It’s all a joke, it seems, something performed, until they kidnap Sandro’s brother, forcing him to issue a statement in support of the anarchists, itself a kind of performance (“It’s not him,” Sandro’s mother says), before killing him and overthrowing Moro’s government. After catching Sandro cheating—with his cousin, no less—Reno joins the anarchists’ ranks, thinking half-heartedly that she’ll film their actions, only to end up accidentally destroying her Bolex camera. In the face of this, she participates for real.

With Ms. Kushner’s book in mind, I met with Ben Morea, a founding member of Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, the anarchist group that lived semi-communally in crash pads on the Lower East Side between 1966 and 1969, and served as the basis for the Motherfuckers in The Flamethrowers. I found an email address for Mr. Morea and didn’t expect to hear anything, but he called me on a Saturday night and said he was in New York, staying just a few blocks away from my office. We met the following Monday at a diner on Ninth Avenue. He looked the way I imagine Dennis Hopper would have looked if he hadn’t gone straight and become a Republican. He wore a cowboy hat and a flannel shirt with a leather jacket, a belt with a big silver buckle holding up his jeans. He had long, scraggly hair and a handlebar mustache. The bottom row of his teeth was almost completely missing. The real thing, I thought. I wanted to ask him about beating up Iggy Pop for being inauthentic.

“It was the MC5,” he said. “And it wasn’t ‘beat up,’ but I can see why she’d say that. The MC5 were friends of ours, and they had a line in one of their songs that went, ‘Up against the wall.’ We tried to tell them, this is not a song, this is real. There was an altercation at the Fillmore East.” The MC5, he said, showed up to the gig in a limousine. It turns out the Motherfuckers were the wrong crowd for that display of luxuriousness.

Mr. Morea had been underground for the better part of 30 years—he left New York for Colorado in 1969 because things had gotten “too hot.” He’d only recently re-emerged, while Ms. Kushner was writing her book.

“Revolution to me was not ideology,” he told me. “I lived it. I woke up that way and I went to sleep that way. There wasn’t any other life. I didn’t have a job. This might sound ludicrous, but we believed the revolution was imminent. There was a point we realized it was not imminent. So what does that mean? I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m not going to be a martyr. In other words, I wanted to bring this down, but if I lose my life doing it, I’m willing to, but I’m not just going to be a martyr. So I made that choice. I said fuck it. You want me? Find me.”