Gay Talese takes OCD to new heights
I think Charles McGrath’s profile of the venerated founder of New Journalism was supposed to make the 74-year-old writer look good, but — and maybe it’s just me — instad it seems to do rather the opposite.
Take the fact that Talese’s new memoir appears in bookshelves next week after a 14 year gap, mostly a victim to his obsession with tinkering and revising. Take the so-called “bunker” he spends his days at because “as an old self-flagellating Catholic, I need to suffer, and something has to be hard to be worthy.” Or that the book is described as “not just one book but four or five, both a memoir and an emptying of the file cabinet” that incorporates the story of Chinese soccer player Liu Ying (whom Talese compares himself to?!) and a section about Lorena Bobbitt and her amputation of her husband’s penis — a story that Mr. Talese followed for months in 1993 while working on a New Yorker article that never panned out.
Yes, I know the man’s brilliant and I thought “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” was an amazing piece of journalism, but just reading the profile made me want to bang my head against the wall. Lord knows what kind of reading experience the book will end up being…(Ron, meanwhile, agrees quite intimately with the PW reviewer who observed, “This sort of thing can drag for long stretches unless you’re willing to simply follow along as Talese pursues his impulses wherever they lead him. No matter how frustrating it is as memoir, though, this is a near-perfect expression of Talese’s inquisitive personality.”)
Having said that, the New York Observer’s piece on Talese is a little more palatable, and somewhat more newsworthy in revealing that even he still has to pitch magazines on pieces.
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