I’m Not Going to Do This Every Day

The excellent Jesse Ellison has a nice interview in Nwk with the author; I loved the book, and the interview is almost as good.

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George Packer: Fine, smart writer. But I’m curious about a section in an otherwise nice New Yorker piece this week about the contrasting political styles of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Take a look:

[In 1995], Clinton began writing a book about children and society called “It Takes a Village.” The thing that Washington insiders remember best about the book is Hillary’s failure to thank Barbara Feinman, the writer hired by Simon & Schuster, the publisher, as a collaborator. The truth, though, is more complicated, and shows Hillary to be less a Machiavellian liar than a woman whose guardedness leads to self-sabotage.

Editors at Simon & Schuster reacted to early chapters with dismay, and worried about the quality of Feinman’s contributions, but they kept their reactions private. Over the summer, a manuscript emerged, but neither the publisher nor Clinton’s aides—nor, especially, Hillary herself—were pleased with it. When Feinman left for vacation, Clinton, a Simon & Schuster editor, and a few key aides, working on their own time, continued on the book without her. (Feinman fulfilled the terms of her contract, and was never told by the publisher that her work was unsatisfactory.) In November, the Simon & Schuster editor spent three weeks at the White House, working intensively to expand and refine the material with the aides and with Clinton, who filled yellow legal pads with incorrigibly wonky prose, in “round, schoolgirlish handwriting,” the editor told me. In private, Clinton was strikingly relaxed, padding around the Book Room and Solarium in sweatpants and Coke-bottle glasses, the editor said, calling her “buttercup.” Clinton’s personality, the editor found, “is refreshingly sharp and clear—but she can’t show it.”

“It Takes a Village” appeared in January, 1996, with an acknowledgments page that mentioned nobody. Clinton had apparently given in to the urge to pay her ghostwriter back (as had Simon & Schuster, which considered withholding the last portion of Feinman’s hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar fee but quickly relented). Clinton’s omission aroused the enmity of powerful friends of Feinman’s at the Washington Post, and journalists began covering the slight, their suspicions roused by Clinton’s explanation that she had forgone names in the acknowledgments for fear of leaving someone out. Hillary’s triumphant return to the public eye became another embarrassment. As with so many other Clinton scandals, the press framed the story in the worst possible light, and got its essence wrong, suggesting that Feinman had written the whole book and that Clinton had stolen the credit. Instead, Clinton had micromanaged every aspect of the book’s development. The episode captures her habit of undermining herself, when the worst might have been averted by a little candor and grace—a tendency that has reappeared in the past few weeks, as her campaign has responded to the shock of Obama’s challenge.

Does this account seem a little, um, incomplete? How do we know this is what really happened? This is on the basis of the story of one, unnamed S&S editor who presumably did the work of rescuing a manuscript that neither Clinton nor the top editors at S&S were happy with. Really? What about the ghostwriter’s side of the story? We hear nothing from Feinman (and, if we’re to believe Packer, she may not have even known her editors were unhappy with her until reading about it in the New Yorker 12 years later).

T his is one of those stories that seems a little too self-serving to be entirely true, and there’s got to be more to it than this.

Um, well, no, though Dennis Johnson’s sprawling novel, about Vietnam, & etc. is getting the kind of critical praise that’s making me blush just to read it. And the people have spoken; in the past week, three people have approached me on the subway to ask me about it, which never happens (or, you know, I maybe I’m usually reading crappy books on the train, so no one cares). Still, it is a pretty amazing piece of work. I’m about 400 pages in, and I’m still not entirely sure where this train is taking me, but Johnson is such a beautiful writer that I’m happy to go along.

Typical is this passage, which actually made me put the book down while riding the D train the other day, it’s so nicely done:

Minh disembarked at the roadside and bought a roll and a cup of tea in a store whose proprietress remembered him and asked about his family and said the water taxis were running again these days, but not many. The ville lay two miles down the brown river. He walked. After the city, things smelled different here. the reeking water. The smoke from the burn piles of deadfall and trash had the odor of legend, the chicken droppings, even. Everything carried him off-where? To here. But not to this moment. Here he had fished from the back of a buffalo while beside him Brother Thu had held the string of a kite surging in the winds above . . . even then their lines plumbing opposite depths. One to high school and the air force, one to the monks.

He saw a little traffic on the water. An old woman with an old woman’s mashed-in face poled past in a skiff keeping to the shallows, every push of the pole threatening to steal her last breath.

Minh walked under a gray sky, sorrow biting at his throat. He stepped into a banana grove and tore off three of the fruits and ate, tossing the peels in the water as he and Thu had done in a better world.

He imagined his brother burning—he often did—Thu’s body in the flame, dreadful pain outside, going up his nostrils and in. And then as a monkey holds two branches for an instant, lets go of the first and clings to the new one, he was no longer the body, but the fire.