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T A B L E__T A L K

Is Hillary kicking butt on the defend-your-husband TV circuit, or what? Stand by your first lady in Politics

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R E C E N T L Y

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Spending 120 hours in blabberspace as the networks roll out the greatest show on earth
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BROWSE THE
MEDIA CIRCUS
ARCHIVES

DOUBLETAKE, ROBERT COLES' HIGH-MINDED RAG, ASPIRES TO SHOW ORDINARY PEOPLE -- BUT ITS WRITERS KEEP STICKING THEIR HEADS IN THE WAY.

BY GEOFF EDGERS

DoubleTake is a great idea. In an industry defined by stargazers, where celebrities often assign their own cover stories, Harvard professor and Pulitzer-Prize winning writer and documentarian Robert Coles founded this glossy magazine two years ago to feature the "voices and visions of ordinary folk."

At first glance, DoubleTake seems to fulfill that promise. No catty Q & A's, perfume ads or scantily clad rock 'n' rollers. Instead of Skeet or Gwyneth, the cover of the quarterly's current issue shows a regular-looking guy on its cover holding a paint can on a wooden ladder. And is this fellow ordinary! He's not wearing a shirt, for one thing, allowing his generous gut to hang over a pair of tight green shorts.

You want to like DoubleTake, if only for the choice it offers in a world of dumbed-down, star-centered, target-marketed glossies. But meaning well isn't enough. With all that DoubleTake has going for it -- a huge copy hole, access to the brightest writers, exquisite photo essays -- the magazine is a surprisingly dull read.

DoubleTake wants to focus on ordinary people, but its writers are naturally more interested in themselves. This, in itself, wouldn't be a problem except that these two sides, observer and participant, clash as they work toward a compromise. What we're left with is memoir mixed in with man on the street, a smorgasbord of top-rate photography, spotty fiction and academic prose. At times, it's hard to tell whether you should be entertained or taking notes.

Consider the three pieces with the most promise. Sue Halpern's portrait of a bicycle maker in Chicago is framed by reflections on her new set of wheels, the "Euclidean beauty" of "two tangential triangles resting on two perfect circles." Steve Faulkner's appreciation of the Kansas River bounces between his struggle to remain close to his children and a geohistorical lesson. ("The Otoe Indians called this sand-bedded, mud-banked river 'Topeka,' 'Good Potato River'...") Then there's James Alan McPherson's piece, the most disappointing if only because it contains such strong glimpses of a compelling story. McPherson, ostensibly writing about the importance of sports in the South, buries the meat of his essay -- his struggle as an introverted, transient black intellectual to fit in during the waning days of the Civil Rights movement. Why bog down a fascinating firsthand account with pages of heavy-handed "sports is life" musings?

The pitfall is DoubleTake's stated focus on ordinary folk. The photo essays, on City Hall weddings, the Great Plains and Mexican street kids, succeed by simply showing us those worlds. Nothing fancy, just sharp, neatly presented images. The writers, though, establish an almost collegiate relationship with the material, a coldness that comes from the intrusion of outside voices. The sensation you get is not unlike sitting in a top-notch sociology class; plenty of regular people on the syllabus, none in the lecture hall.

Just look at how the magazine deals with Elena Poniatowska, Mexico's version of Robert Coles: a gifted intellectual with a foot in high society and an admirable dedication to documenting the realities of the unnoticed.

DoubleTake features Poniatowska's report on the street kids in Mexico City, a world in which "everything is raw. Reality. Food. Eyes. Nothing has been processed. Everything is thrown in their faces. Aggressive nicknames, ruthless laughter, plunder, sneering, ridicule, the scars that never heal, the manhandling, the vulgarity. Broken bones heal by themselves. Children hate hospitals."

But that account, and the stark accompanying photo essay, come near the end of the issue. Before it, we're subjected to an unfocused, fluffy profile of Poniatowska which fails for the same reason as another in the issue, on Mexican Bishop Samuel Ruiz. Instead of developing a theme, and telling the story through it, the writers are so busy lauding their subjects for thinking about the poor that they ignore the sort of conflict that drives the best profiles. We are left with lifeless chronology and, in Poniatowska's case, no idea why a woman bred for society life spends her golden years tracking down Mexican street kids who like to sniff paint thinner. Instead, we learn of her "more than twenty books and sixty prologues or texts to accompany books of photographs, constant newspaper pieces, and talks."

"How," asks Poniatowska's profiler, Bell Gale Chevigny, "does she balance it all?"

DoubleTake's dilemma is not unlike that faced by Coles and his heroes, James Agee and Walker Evans -- how do you document a world of which you are not part? In effect, this saddles his magazine with an almost unsolvable moral conundrum. He'd be better off accepting DoubleTake for what it could be: Granta with lots of pictures.

That might not change the world. But it sure would make for a better read.
SALON | Feb. 2, 1998

Geoff Edgers is a writer in North Carolina.