Renata's Rant

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By Malcolm Jones

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Reading "Gone," Renata Adler's lament for the old New Yorkerbefore Tina Brown gave it "buzz"you just keep thanking your lucky stars she's never met you. Because even the people she likes come off badly in this book. Defending William Shawn, the legendary editor of The New Yorker for 35 years, she takes issue with recent accounts which, she alleges, paint him as either an "unctuous, pompous, humorless creep" or an "unctuous, pious, humorless creep." Weirdly, by the time she is done "defending" him, he is all of the above. Of course, just because she's vicious doesn't mean she's wrong. Most of what she says about the magazine is conventional wisdom: it was a paragon of American journalism so long as Shawn was editor. Yes, you sometimes got those five-part series on wheat, but sometimes you got "In Cold Blood." Adler thinks this journalistic heaven started declining when S. I. Newhouse bought the magazine in 1985 and went completely to hell after Newhouse fired Shawn two years later and replaced him with Robert Gottlieb, then Tina Brown and now David Remnick. Today, Adler sneers, it is "a magazine like any other."

That it may be. The problem is, Adler never really bothers to prove anything she says. She just asserts and asserts. How could anyone so assured be wrong? But already characters in her narrative, notably Gottlieb, are fiercely contradicting her accountfrom her dates and spelling to firings and fights that never happened. (To understand why people once cared about The New Yorker, see Ben Yagoda's forthcoming "About Town," a lively history of the 75-year-old magazine, or consult two new anthologies compiled by Remnick: "Life Stories" and "Wonderful Town.") Even minus the contradictions, there's something unbelievableand repellentabout Adler's tirade. Pious, pompous and creepy pretty well sums it up.

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