Book 'em!
Five years ago, Jacob Weisberg savaged the incompetence of the publishing industry. Today, Weisberg is being published by the very house he trashed -- but the book biz's misdeeds continue
By DWIGHT GARNER
There's a lot to like about "In Defense of Government: The Fall and Rise of Public Trust" (Scribner), the new book-length essay by New York magazine's young political columnist Jacob Weisberg. It's smart, well-edited and generally plain-spoken. It's wonkily progressive without being wonkily aggressive; Weisberg calls for the return of activist government "to heal the injuries" of race and class in America, and he makes his point without burying his readers under an avalanche of meaningless facts. Even better, it's short -- intellectually, "In Defense of Government" goes from zero to 60 in under 200 pages.
What's really remarkable about Weisberg's book, though, may be that he managed to get it published at all. That's because, in New York publishing circles anyway, Weisberg is far less famous for his suavely centrist punditry than he is for being the author of a blistering attack, published five years ago in The New Republic, on declining standards in the book industry. Weisberg, a protege of longtime TNR editor Michael Kinsley, didn't take any prisoners. Not only did he expertly zero in on some nasty publishing world realities -- books have gotten longer and sloppier, many editors are too busy "acquiring" books to actually edit any of them, major houses are publishing far more fluff than they once did -- but more importantly, Weisberg took names. He lashed industry untouchables like Random House's venerable editorial director Jason Epstein and Simon & Schuster's rainmaking editor Alice Mayhew, accusing both of having too much on their plates to "spend time editing any one work."
So stinging was Weisberg's critique and so hostile the response ("Who is Jacob Weisberg, anyway?" harrumphed Sally Quinn; "You should be embarrassed," scolded Bob Woodward) that many in New York's publishing scene assumed that, well, he'll never eat lunch in this town again.
Actually, Weisberg says he's doing just fine since making the move from Washington to New York a few years ago, thank you very much. And if his appearances on "Charlie Rose" have been any indication, he's still managing to eat his lunch, too. "A lot of people made the joke that I'd have a hard time getting published -- that people would hold a grudge," he said in a telephone interview last week. "But no one impeded me in any way."
Weisberg is nonetheless alert to the irony in the fact that "In Defense of Government" is being issued this month by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, the house upon which he heaped so much exacting scorn in his TNR piece. ("For an author, working with Simon and Schuster is often a Faustian bargain," Weisberg wrote. Writers swap close attention to their text for "more money, strong backing in advertising and promotion, a big first printing, and thus a better chance at best-sellerdom.")
Rereading Weisberg's broadside today, you're left with a few distinct impressions. One is that The New Republic, under Andrew Sullivan's editorship, has published precious few pieces that come near it in terms of sheer intellectual brio and bite. More to the point, the publishing world certainly hasn't cleaned up its act in the years since Weisberg's screed. "If anything," he said, "these problems have gotten worse."
Books continue to arrive with errata slips that flutter out like magazine blow-in cards, and this spring's Random House catalog (among others) includes more fluff than ever, even if the size of most of the biographies has deflated to a slightly more manageable 500 or so pages.
Weisberg's point that magazines tend to edit a writer's work far more carefully and scrupulously than book editors do has never seemed more timely either. One particularly blatant recent example of this, as Tina Rosenberg pointed out in Sunday's New York Times Book Review, was St. Martin's Press' decision to publish "Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich," by David Irving, a Nazi apologist famous for (among other things) offering a $1,000 reward to anyone who can prove that Hitler knew of the extermination of the Jews before 1943. St. Martin's has since withdrawn the book, in the face of stiff public criticism. Yet as Rosenberg notes, "That St. Martin's could buy 'Goebbels' despite being unfamiliar with the author, and could then fail to do even the most perfunctory editing, shows double negligence."
The industry's worst books continue to be its most heavily-hyped. At last year's American Booksellers Association convention, Delacourt dragged around Nicholas Evans, the first-time author who'd received a record $3.15 million advance for "The Horse Whisperer" -- the worst book this writer has choked down in years -- like a show pony. The book's film rights had been bought by Robert Redford, and there was a buzz around the shaggy-haired writer. Delacourt's publicity blitz ("Believe" the cryptic ads read) cranked out a bestseller; "The Horse Whisperer" finished 1995 at number 10 on Publisher's Weekly's fiction list.
Rereading Weisberg, though, you're also left wondering if publishing houses are entirely to blame for their own descent into the realm of Deepak Chopra, aerobic exercise and New Age massage. As Publisher's Weekly noted in its March roundup of 1995 book sales, American's appetite for serious books has more or less fallen off a cliff. Last year's top five fiction bestsellers were, for example, nothing you'd want to be stranded on a desert island with: John Grisham's "The Rainmaker," Michael Crichton's "The Lost World," Danielle Steel's "Five Days in Paris," Richard Paul Evans' "The Music Box" and Danielle Steel's "Lightning." The nonfiction bestsellers weren't a more cheerful lot; as PW noted, "nearly all the top books are by very well-known personalities." Which is code for: Howard Stern, television stars like Paul Reiser, and Simpson-case flunkies.
As John Updike somewhat wearily observed in a recent interview with SALON, after noting that a few decades ago writers like Hemingway and Faulkner found a sturdy middle-class readership: "Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they're less comfortable with the written word. They're less comfortable with novels. They don't have a backward frame of reference that would enable them to appreciate things like irony and allusions." Given the state of American readers, maybe the editors at Random House and other publishers are simply shriveled and demoralized.
Whether it's the industry's fault or the readers', the book biz has not exactly engaged in profound soul-searching. Five years after his polemic, Weisberg admits that the vociferousness of the response still manages to shock him. "It was a bit like stepping on a land mine," he said. "I was an outsider intruding on this cloistered world, and they never expected that kind of criticism -- they were used to talking among themselves. It's a kind of hothouse industry that way."
The hothouse will be in full bloom at this year's ABA gathering in Chicago from June 15-17 -- it's a glitzy, glad-handing weekend that could use an intruder or two stepping among the land mines. Personally, I'm not expecting any explosions. But it might be nice to see someone make a few thousand copies of Weisberg's expose, anyway, and -- in a kind of publishing world reprise of Peter Finch's "I'm mad as hell" speech from "Network" -- shower them down from a balcony. After all, even publicists on junkets need something to read during lunch.