B E S T S E L L E R H E L L
W e r e a d ' e m s o y o u d o n ' t h a v e t o !
![[A book Not Fated To Last]](bestsellers970227.gif)
BY JON CARROLL
+ + + + "My Sergei: + + + + Have you read "My Sergei"? Are you glad you haven't? Mull it over with Jon Carroll in Table Talk. Bestseller Hell is published monthly in Salon |
in retrospect, it seems inevitable that figure skating
would become the next big thing. It's competitive enough to
fire the imagination of the most hardened sports fan; it's
graceful and passionate enough to slake the thirst for
beauty in all but a handful of Americans; it's interwoven
with enough issues (eating disorders, parental misconduct,
Cold War tensions, international corruption, gay pride,
sequin abuse, the commercial exploitation of children and
whether the children like it and, if so, should we deplore
it?) to keep a thousand chained pundits busy typing; it's
got more narratives than an entire season of "ER."
The saga of Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, for
example, has characters and shadings and covert skirmishes
of class and aspiration worthy of the best American tales,
sort of a cross between "The Great Gatsby" and "In Cold
Blood."
The story of Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov is
very different, although almost equally well-known. They were
Russian pairs figure skaters, winners of four World
Championships and two Olympic gold medals, married, one
golden daughter, wealthy, happy -- until Grinkov, just 28,
collapsed and died from a heart attack.
It was a real tragedy, of course, but it was also a
media tragedy, a fairy tale for the world (it is interesting
to speculate how many people in the global TV village cried
real tears at some point over this one death -- 200 million?
Twice that?). There was an official memorial on ice,
broadcast by CBS to fine ratings; there was not a dry eye in
the nation when Gordeeva skated slowly between the
motionless ranks of all-star skaters, "saying goodbye to
Sergei," as she writes.
And of course there is a bestselling book, a memento
mori, perhaps more valuable as a souvenir -- yes, I care;
yes, I was touched -- than as a piece of literature. A book
need not be read to have meaning. I am not prepared to say
that the other functions to which books are put are
necessarily ignoble.
But as a document, "My Sergei" is not much. Young
athletes do not lead interesting lives nor, as a rule, have
interesting thoughts. What is interesting about them is
already available, in public and in performance. Perhaps
later they will piece the experience together in complex
ways; at the time, though, there's just not much going on.
Figure skaters in particular work long hours doing the
same thing again and again. Even they report boredom at the
routine. They travel and stay in hotels. They win or they do
not win. They change choreographers and coaches. They
purchase automobiles and coats. They kiss and cry and go to
sleep. For a while, in "My Sergei," the knowledge that it
was all Not Fated To Last lends a certain edge to the
narrative, but that too eventually vanishes.
Guiltily, one skips to the end, impatient for the death
scene.
At times, the commercial calculation adds some
disquieting effects. The actual author of "My Sergei" is crafty old E.M.
Swift, a veteran Sports Illustrated writer, and it was
clearly his unenviable task to strike some sort of balance
between Gordeeva's simple, girlish vocabulary and the
demands of a book-length autobiography. But since the
putative author is a young widow of some ambition and
experience, the here's-my-stuffed-animal tone is either
Swift's cynical projection, which would be creepy, or a fair
representation of the actual human, which would be even
creepier.
The Gordeeva of the book exists in a kind of a fairy-tale world. The Russia of Leonid Brezhnev and the endless
war with Afghanistan is nowhere present. Gordeeva's homeland
seems like something out of "Speak, Memory," with pleasant
summer houses, cheerful parties, loving babushkas. It's an
alternate reality in which the state has already withered
away, leaving only a timeless troupe of Chekhovian
characters, drinking perhaps a bit too much and embracing
each other, sometimes secretly, sometimes not.
It's all very odd when one thinks about it, but one is
not supposed to think about it. Most people who buy this
book are, I think, contributing to the scholarship fund for
little Daria, now 5 and already the darling of a thousand
ice shows. It was not fair what happened, people are saying;
so talented, so much to live for. My $18.95 is perhaps not
much comfort in your hour of grief, but I give it freely.
And I will treasure this book always, its spine so
smooth, its pages so clean.
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