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

Mr. Chabon. (Ulf Andersen/Getty Images)

Michael Chabon has made himself a literary champion of commercial pleasures. His fiction in recent years has touched the same nerve as nostalgic pop favorites: detective novels, comic books, kung fu movies, soul music. And with Mr. Chabon’s new novel, the retail romance Telegraph Avenue (Harper, 480 pp., $27.99), this principle reaches a certain literal endpoint. Not just old-fashioned commercial entertainment but old-fashioned commerce itself—the scrappy, cozy, locally owned sort—becomes the object of his underdog affection.

Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, the book’s heroes, run a used record store in Berkeley called Brokeland, which offers “unlimited supplies of music and bullshit on tap.” It’s a den of colorful Telegraph Avenue idlers (one has a pet parrot; another, a lawyer nicknamed “Moby,” represents whales) and the store’s barely solvent owners have become the guardians of their own endangered species. “Brokeland Records was nearly the last of its kind,” Mr. Chabon writes. “Ishi, Chingachgook, Martha the passenger pigeon.” Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, wives to Archy and Nat, are also in business together: they “catch babies” as Berkeley Birth Partners. Aviva, we’re told, is “the Alice Waters of midwives,” which maybe makes Gwen a sous-chef with a nursing degree.

Telegraph Avenue transforms small-business ownership from a trusty American dream into a brand of idiosyncrasy by tucking it into what was once the bosom of ’60s counterculture. Gwen, Archy, Aviva and Nat are kindred spirits to the kind of geeked-out fanatic that Mr. Chabon has written of—and written of being—elsewhere. They weather the same sorts of delights and indignities: fits of fervor over their chosen niches, marginalization by establishment naysayers. And at the same time, they endure the trials of early middle age. Gwen is pregnant and Archy, ambivalent, is cheating on her. Nat and Aviva are facing the first hints of rebellion from their “sweet freakazoid” of a 15-year-old son, Julie; and Julie is nursing a crush on Titus, Archy’s illegitimate teenage son, whom Archy has never met. Archy’s own father, meanwhile, is using blackmail and city politics in an effort to revive his blaxploitation glory days as Willie Strutter, movie martial artist.

The book’s action is backdated to 2004, allowing for a little pre-recession nostalgia. Still, business isn’t easy: both Brokeland and Berkeley Birth Partners may be doomed. The main villain in all this does not seem, technically, to be a completely bad guy. Gibson “G Bad” Goode is a former star quarterback and the fifth-richest black man in America. He has parlayed his wealth and fame into an entertainment empire, and he wants to open one of his Dogpile Thang megastores right down the street from Brokeland. “Megastore” sounds ominous—but Goode’s Dogpile Thang is improbably high-minded and hard to hate. The proposed Thang will offer movies, books, and music with a focus on African-American culture; it will even sell used and rare vinyl. “The main idea of a Thang,” we’re told, “was not to make money but to restore, at a stroke, the commercial heart of a black neighborhood cut out during the glory days of freeway construction.” So this is a fairly rosy world. (There’s a Black Panther shooting, sure, but it seems surprisingly mundane and happens offstage.) If the stakes of his story do not always feel high, the author compensates by writing with prodigious energy.

Michael Chabon is a famous writer who hasn’t published a novel in five years, which means this book is an event, and Telegraph Avenue does not take eventfulness lightly. At every turn, verbal firecrackers go off, plot twists pile up like pie after turkey dinner, minor characters bear histories stuffed full as Christmas stockings. It’s a credit to Mr. Chabon that this mostly reads as exuberance rather than showboating, but either way, it gets exhausting. The reader ends up with the classic New Year’s Eve problem: few things are as boring as setting out to have a bunch of fun.

Mr. Chabon’s unstinting style gives the prose a kind of uniform chewiness. It forces the reader to proceed deliberately even when the story feels like it ought to be gulped down.  As the book reaches its climax, the teenage sons are on the run, their dads are in pursuit, the Oakland PD wants to talk to Nat, and Mr. Chabon describes an important phone call:

Little by little, Nat wound himself up, looping himself in yellow cord like a fork involving itself in a plate of spaghetti, Cleopatra sending herself to Caesar in a carpet. By the time his conversation with Archy was over and he went to hang up the phone, Nat had coiled himself all the way back to the kitchen and was as thoroughly tangled as Charlie Brown in a kite string.

The tangled imagery might be the point here, but this late in the game, 400 pages in, it’s hard to be sure. Three separate metaphors feel like Mr. Chabon’s standard equipment for describing a phone cord.

And his instinct for pleasing the reader occasionally crosses into excess. Barack Obama himself swoops in with an epiphany, a scene that reads uncomfortably like presidential fan fiction. Of course Obama is not yet a president (only a state senator) when he arrives to speak at the Kerry fundraiser where Nat and Archy’s band is playing. “Now, I would ask you to dance,” Obama tells a pregnant Gwen, “but I don’t think my wife would be happy if it got back to her that I was observed dancing with a gorgeous sister in your condition.” This is vaguely fun, but mostly it’s mortifying. The payoff, the dramatic irony—you know that guy’s gonna be president!—is cheap. Obama incarnates themes Mr. Chabon wants to explore: race, liberalism, dreams from one’s father. But the way he deploys the now-president makes him distracting rather than evocative.

Perhaps his setting is too idyllic to allow Mr. Chabon to really sink his teeth into a topic like race, anyway. Much of the present-day Bay Area manages to be extreme mainly in its pleasantness: it offers the comprehensive lifestyle equivalent of 72-degree weather. “Brokeland” refers to the Berkeley-Oakland borderland the record store occupies, which serves as a reminder of the area’s radical history and urban woes; Mr. Chabon has located a promising seam in Bay Area life, an opening tear into the soft world around him, where problems can feel like a thing of the past. In a different novel, this world’s easy, complacent charm would be a clear target for satire. But apart from some gentle fun at the expense of the Birth Partners’ clients, satire is not Mr. Chabon’s goal. The book predominantly represents an affectionate portrait of the place where the author has lived for the last 15 years. He considers his somewhat goofy hometown with the same care he gives his somewhat goofy characters and their somewhat goofy interests.

But Mr. Chabon’s feelings find a vessel in a crucial bit player, Mr. Nostalgia, proprietor of Mr. Nostalgia’s Neighborhood and purveyor of non-sports cards (ALF, Growing Pains and—most importantly—“Masters of Kung Fu”). Mr. Nostalgia is a man after the author’s heart when it comes to the melancholy pleasures of connoisseurship, and he offers what sounds like a modest half-apology for the book’s superabundance of bric-a-brac.

“Though Mr. Nostalgia loved the things he sold, he had no illusion that they held any intrinsic value,” Mr. Chabon writes. “They were worth only what you would pay for them; what small piece of everything you had ever lost that, you might come to believe, they would restore to you.”

editorial@observer.com

Mr. Tóibín.

“It is not our job to like or dislike characters in fiction,” Colm Tóibín writes in the preface to his new essay collection, New Ways to Kill Your Mother (Scribner, 352 pp., $26.00). “We can do that with real people and, if we like, figures from history.”

Mr. Tóibín, the author of six novels and some dozen books of nonfiction, says readers must consider fictional characters according to distinct criteria: their richness of texture and tone, the strength and complexity of the patterns they form. These are qualities that don’t generally concern us when we deal with actual humans.

And yet, we can consider real people (and if we like, figures from history) with a kind of messy, affectionate fascination that fictional characters don’t necessarily repay. New Ways to Kill Your Mother offers readers this second kind of pleasure: “A sebaceous cyst in my anus which happily a fart swept away before it became operable.” This situation is more urgent because it comes not from an invented line of dialogue but instead in a letter written by Samuel Beckett.

Assembling work previously published in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books and elsewhere, New Ways to Kill Your Mother bears the subtitle “Writers and Their Families.” This theme proves to be more than a convenient label for recycled material. Mr. Tóibín’s interests across the essays are cohesive enough that it’s jarring to come upon a line like “this new volume is invaluable” and be reminded that the writing at hand began life as a humble book review.

Of course, “family” is an exceptionally stretchy theme. In pieces on Beckett, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Mann, James Baldwin and others, Mr. Tóibín endows “family” with a range of meanings. Family is bound up in heritage, identity, name, class, nationality (mother tongue, fatherland). This last sense is particularly important in the first half of the book, which Mr. Tóibín devotes to his fellow Irish writers, but it also inflects his discussion of Jorge Luis Borges’s relationship to Argentine politics and Baldwin’s writings on America. Mr. Tóibín is interested in drawing out writers’ intimate, inescapable connection to their countries, often depicting it as a bond that (family-like) shapes them whether they like, or acknowledge, it or not.

Family also means literal relatives, and these emerge as interesting personalities in their own right, to varying degrees. Yeats’s wife, George, was less than half his age when she married the 52-year-old poet, and the combination of her interest in the occult and her anxiety over pleasing her husband led her to fake mystical “automatic writing” on their honeymoon. She admitted this (in so many words) after Yeats’s death, but later expressed discomfort with her own language. “I dislike your use of the word ‘Fake,’” she wrote to one Yeats scholar who had discussed the episode. “I told you this before [and] you had a happier phrasing in your book. However, I cannot ask you to alter this. The word ‘Fake’’ will go down to posterity.” Mr. Tóibín considers George’s conflicting impulses toward self-protection and candor and duty, and the result is a vivid portrait of a surprising character. This stands in contrast to, say, Hart Crane’s father, who is depicted as a standard-issue sketch of a philistine parent—sending his son letters from Ohio and nagging the poet to do something useful, maybe learn a trade.

The subtitle “Writers and Their Families” carries the suggestion that Mr. Tóibín might also address the families his subjects created in their work. But the piece that serves as the book’s preface, “Jane Austen, Henry James, and the Death of the Mother,” is really the only sustained discussion of these fictions. In it, Mr. Tóibín looks at the many aunts and aunt-like figures found in the work of these two authors. Addressing the mothers whom the aunts supplanted, he writes of James, “His connection to his mother, both close and tenuous, may be one of the reasons why he sought to erase so many mothers from his best work.” The essay is one of the book’s slack moments, and for the most part, Mr. Tóibín is more interested in reading writers’ lives in a literary way than in transposing those lives onto their work.

Some interesting patterns develop. There are, for example, an unusual number of haplessly ambitious dads behind the writers Mr. Tóibín chooses to discuss. We get to see excerpts from letters spanning five years written by John Butler Yeats to his son William. These letters concern a play that the elder Yeats wants to write, then is writing, and finally is very pleased to have written. His son resists responding for as long as he can. His eventual criticism (“You choose a very difficult subject and the most difficult of all forms, and as was to be foreseen, it is the least good of all your writings”) prompts this reply:

Your opinion of my play does not alter my opinion … I have no doubt you are overanxious, the play being by your father. That is only natural. Percy MacKaye, a man of some expression, was of all my critics the one that gave me the most encouragement. He did not see the actual play, but I told him all about it.

These fathers were men who modeled the wild confidence required to make things, even if they lacked the artistic genius to make truly great things. Mr. Tóibín considers this dynamic further in his essay on Borges (whose father wrote and privately printed a novel of his own), noting that failed-artist fathers seem to engender “a peculiar intensity” in their artistically ambitious offspring, for whom talent becomes a way of both making up for the father’s failure and of symbolically killing him off.

One dilettante-dad family in particular holds Mr. Tóibín’s attention: the Jameses, whom he smuggles into nearly every essay. In his 2004 novel The Master, Mr. Tóibín imagined the interior life of Henry James; with the essays in New Ways to Kill Your Mother, Mr. Tóibín often uses James as a lens through which to view all his other subjects. The Jameses serve a handy point of comparison: the Borges family traveled Europe, like the James family; Tennessee and Rose Williams shared a tight bond, like Henry and Alice James; George Yeats was interested in mysticism, like Alice James. But they’re also a kind of shorthand, present even where they’re not explicitly discussed. J.M. Synge is “a native of the Synge family,” Mr. Tóibín writes, repurposing William James’s characterization of his younger brother Henry in an 1889 letter: “He’s really ... a native of the James family, and has no other country.” Likewise, the protagonist of Sebastian Barry’s Hinterland is a man “on whom everything is lost,” rather than, as Henry James preferred, one on whom nothing is. “Writers and their Families” is an accurate subtitle; “Writers and their Families and Henry James’s Family” might be even better.

In part because the essays do seem so unified in their concerns, it’s disappointing that they don’t add up to a clearer argument about the relationships between these writers’ lives and their work. In fact, there’s a tendency within each chapter to shy away from taking a stance on such relationships.

“Synge’s family remains of considerable interest,” Mr. Tóibín writes, “either because of the apparent lack of any influence on his work, or because they may or may not hold a key to his unyielding and mysterious genius.” Yes, that would seem to cover the range of possibilities. Ambivalence is fair, but it reads differently when the object of your ambivalence is the ostensible topic of your book.

Mr. Tóibín’s approach serves him best in the book’s two essays on Baldwin, which depict the American writer engaged in a project that resonates with Mr. Tóibín’s own—questioning heritage, defining a literary lineage. And Baldwin, too, is a writer who repeatedly claimed Henry James. In 1962, The New York Times asked Baldwin to discuss the popularity of his novel Another Country, one of the year’s bestsellers. Baldwin wrote:

I don’t mean to compare myself to a couple of artists I unreservedly admire, Miles Davis and Ray Charles—but I would like to think that some of the people who liked my book responded to it in a way similar to the way they respond when Miles and Ray are blowing … I am aiming at what Henry James called “perception at the pitch of passion.”

In the first Baldwin essay, Mr. Tóibín describes the author as an ambitious young critic—“No young writers ever wish to give too much credit to the writers who could have been their father,” he notes. “They prefer to pay homage to grandfathers or to painters or musicians or ballet dancers or acrobats.” In the second, Mr. Tóibín places Baldwin alongside Barack Obama, reading Dreams from My Father, the president’s first memoir, against Notes of a Native Son. Baldwin becomes a kind of precedent for Obama, one he both evokes and resists:

Whereas Baldwin sought to make distinctions, Obama always wants to make connections; his urge is to close circles even when they don’t need to be closed or the closure is too neat to be fully trusted. Whereas Baldwin longed to disturb the peace, create untidy truths, Obama was slowly becoming a politician.

Mr. Tóibín enumerates the many similarities between the stories the two men tell about themselves, but ultimately their bond feels familial not because it’s obvious or easy but because it exposes an intergenerational tension. And their positions—as a writer concerned with politics and a politician concerned with writing—give Mr. Tóibín an ideal chance to examine a topic he keeps circling, the intersection of language and life.

editorial@observer.com

Meanwhile, The New Yorker obliges the impatient with links to a couple excerpts, plus some Freedom-related journalism by Franzen.

Slate helps you poop.

No, you cannot eat kangaroos or snow leopards.

Burnch with music sounds like too many things.

Memories of Ken Mehlman.

The Rumpus interviews Lydia Davis.

Isabella Rossellini: "Bed bugs have penises like knifes!"

"The author fails to find anything remotely insightful to say in these 11 amazingly underwhelming stories," declares PW, adding that several stories read "like Patrick Bateman from American Psycho fell into a Catcher in the Rye remix."

We find this image confusing (fell into a remix?), but we will be charitable and assume that it is intended to underscore the collection's "overall failure." Instead, we elect to focus on a particular adverb choice: "Amazingly." Even when James Franco fails, he does so to an amazing degree.

Lincoln Center and IMG both denied any affiliation with the account, but Racked tracked down the man behind FashionWeekNYC: His name is Nathan Stobezki, and he is just some guy. Stobezki graduated from Camden County College last year and now bills himself as a "Fashion Tweetologist." According to Racked:

"He's a friend of a CEO of a major retailer who doesn't go to any shows and, thus, gives Nathan his invitations," our tipster says. "He's just one of those wannabe guys who talks to actual industry VIPs like they've been working together for years when, in fact, they haven't."

His online exuberance has gotten him into some scrapes before, and a previous fashion-oriented Twitter account seems not have taken off in the way FashionweekNYC did.

In retrospect perhaps there were signs that the account was not the work of a hardboiled industry insider:

Success is not the key to happiness, Happiness is the key to Success! Happy Thursday!