Behind the Times (60 page)

It was easy to dismiss complaints like his, and others’, as those of disgruntled employees: How many
gruntled
employees are encountered in large organizations? More than a hint of the Postal Service
wafts through the air at West 43rd Street. Like any bureaucracy, the
Book Review
has its paperwork procedures. Editors insert report forms, made out in quadruplicate, inside the books, noting whether they are recommending the title for review. Then there are the meetings; when one ended, another began. Because the
Book Review
is part of the news department, the book editor reports to the managing editor; in recent years, that means Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, the book editor since 1989, meets formally with Joe Lelyveld once a week. Sinkler apprises Lelyveld of what will be appearing on page one of the
Book Review
in the issue going to press, and discusses more general book news and publishing trends. Sinkler and her deputy also meet regularly to talk about what books to consider for reviewing, and to get these prospects into the hands of the previewing editors. The editor and the deputy then meet with the previewing editors, to get their recommendations. At midweek, editors meet to decide which reviews to run and when—the scheduling meeting. “We are all part of
a collegial process,” Sinkler said.

The core staff of eight previewing editors do the scut work of reading the books—or, minimally, riffling through the pages—to form a judgment. Levine took with him an enduring memory of the
Book Review
, an image composed of three elements: a previewing editor, with a pad of report forms and a desktop piled with books, the stacks so high they threatened to topple and bury the editor alive in review copies. “They claim to read them all, but they just can’t,” he said. Before the quadruplicate slips are made out, before the books reach the previewing editors’ desks, the major screening takes place as each day’s mail and messengers’ deliveries arrive—“elimination at the point of entry,” in Sinkler’s phrase. Out of the 70,000 to 80,000 books published annually in the United States in recent years, the
Book Review
reviewed or mentioned forty-five to fifty books on an average Sunday. Each year, then, Sinkler and her staff turned away thousands and thousands of books in the process of deciding which 2,500, give or take a hundred or so, to tell the public about. This elimination work is vastly simplified by the organizing principles of the
Book Review.
There were whole categories of books that the
New York Times
did not review, period. The overwhelming majority of books could be judged literally by their covers.

The annual book crop includes some obvious candidates for elimination, such as airline schedule guides, medical and scientific texts,
reference books, and vanity-press books. In addition, according to Sinkler, “We don’t review certain genres—romance fiction, he-man adventure, manuals, self-help and how-to books, the very academic or the Ph.D. dissertation packaged as book. We can tell very quickly that a given book is not worth our previewing editors’ time.” The
Times
is interested in mainstream books. While Silhouette Harlequin fiction, for example, was not a
Times
kind of genre, and is automatically passed over, the
Book Review
under Becky Sinkler looks at every first novel published by a reputable house. The editors wanted to be able to alert readers to the existence of a new talent. There is also a desire to avoid the embarrassment of failing to spot that talent. When the Pulitzer Prizes for best novel and the other big awards were announced each year,
Book Review
editors tended to greet the news with two questions: Did we review it? What did we say?

By restricting the world of the
Book Review
to mainstream trade titles, Sinkler estimated, the actual selection process came down to choosing from a pool of about seven thousand books a year. That still left it up to the editors to eliminate almost two thirds of the pool, as well as to decide who should do the review, at what length, and when in the publishing cycle it should run.

The formal system distributes this authority throughout the
Book Review
hierarchy, so that in theory several hands determine the outcome of any one review. The editor or the deputy editor approves the selection of books to be noted, supervises the assignments of the reviewers, determines the length and placement of individual reviews, and reads the major reviews before publication. The previewing editors recommend books for review and, once the book is assigned, work with the reviewer, doing the initial editing when the copy is submitted. After the select 2,500 titles make the editors’ first cut, they are sorted out into further selective categories. Each week, the editors designate six or eight books for major attention in reviews of up to 2,500 words; these reviews either begin on the front page or take up a full inside page. Another dozen or so books receive more modest display in a half-page review. Six or seven others warrant only “In Short” mention in reviews of about 250 words each (together, these brief reviews fill one page, usually divided between two or three novels and four or five non-fiction titles). The editors’ selective power works retroactively as well: a “New & Noteworthy” page for paperback reprints repeats in a paragraph what the
Times
review said when the original hardcover
edition came out, as if no other judgment counted. Finally, in an end piece in the back, a previewing editor with the time and inclination was able to mention five or six books he liked, offering short excerpts from them under the heading “Noted with Pleasure.” In August 1992, Sinkler dropped the feature. She explained that “the
Review
could use the space better, for more reviews.”

The end product, of course, carries the byline of the reviewer, theoretically leaving no doubt whose views are being expressed. Again, however, the theory could be at odds with the practical outcome. Several people, both from inside the
Times
and outsider reviewers, described the “nudging power” of the editors. Their examples came from the period of the last ten years, and involved past as well as present editors.

First, the
Book Review
editor, on the basis of a call from a well-connected friend or a publishing-world source, “might become excited about a new book.” The editor could convey that excitement to the previewing editor, “who has a certain status, but is open to suggestion and nuance.…” The previewing editor grasps the subtext when the editor says, “Why don’t we take a good look at …?” The previewing editor then can make the assignment with a strong positive spin—telling the reviewer, for example, “We’re hearing great things about …” The top editor can also call a reviewer directly and assign the review, without anyone in the system previewing the book. The next nudge can come in the choice of the reviewer. “We tend to assign books to a limited group of reviewers,” a former
Times
person explained. “We look for reviewers who were trusted, literate, on time with their copy”—like most bureaucracies, the staff tries to lower its stress levels—“and have a track record.” Another informant said: “If we get a book by a friend of a friend, say a first novel, we wouldn’t assign it to someone known to be ruthless to first novelists. You know, someone who hasn’t liked anything since 1975. Instead, we’d give that book to another first novelist.” A third form of nudging can accompany the assignment. If the editor asks for fifteen hundred or two thousand words, it signals that the
Times
expects the reviewer to deliver “a big review.”

All this could happen before the reviewer wrote one word. After the copy is delivered, the previewing editors do what editors everywhere are paid to do: ask for inserts and rewrites, or change words or phrases
(the
Book Review
copy desk worried about commas and
Times
style). How much of this fiddling was “normal”—aiming for clarity, for example—and how much had the effect of altering meaning or tone, depended on the editor and reviewer and their relationship. The anecdotal evidence was just that—anecdotes. Some reviewers have said that the editing toned down parts of their reviews; others said the editing made reviews sharper, more ascerbic. A few mentioned that they went along with most of the editing requests because they liked reviewing for the
Times
, and wanted to be asked back again; friends and coworkers saw their byline, TV news-show bookers were reminded of their “expertise,” other publications called with assignments, their deans, or their mothers, were pleased. The money was incidental; very few reviewers receive more than $750 for a big review; the more typical payment is $300 to $450, depending on the length of the review. Mostly, “Your name is just out there, part of the media buzz.” “Believe me,” one reviewer said, “you can be Justin Kaplan, published and tenured for life, and you still want the
Times
to call.” Even with impeccable writers like Kaplan, this informant added, “The tendency when writing a review was to think, ‘Why stir up too much trouble? I have my own book coming out … not that the
Times
would exact retribution.… They wouldn’t, would they?’ ”

The
Book Review
could decide not to run a problematic review at all—the ultimate controlling mechanism. That, however, would run the risk of an item for the
Village Voice
or
Spy
magazine. More subtly, the editors may simply hold the review, and plead a space squeeze when the reviewer calls to inquire what was happening. After several weeks pass—during which the book is reviewed elsewhere, or makes its brief appearance on a best-seller list, or comes and goes from the stores—the editor explains that, “as the book is no longer new,” it makes no sense to review it. This decision is delivered in a tone of regret, with as much sincerity as the system can generate. But these are rare cases; the entire assignment process is intended to eliminate surprises, and produce publishable reviews.

The process is different for the daily reviews by the
Times’
staff critics. Their reviews appear in the news columns of the Monday-through-Saturday paper. Almost by definition, these pieces are less literary, brisker, and more informative and newsier than the Sunday reviews. The daily reviews are, after all, a part of the hard-news report. Daily
critics are their own men, and women; their judgments came through as individual assessments rather than outcomes of the
Book Review
editing system. True, authors wounded in the daily reviews, such as
Gloria Emerson, saw dark deals going down. One aggrieved party, Gore Vidal, felt the
Times’
lash in his youth; for the subsequent half a century, he never let anyone forget his animosity, which he turned on and off like a faucet. Vidal was a one-man band of horror tunes about
Times’
reviewers, daily and Sunday. In 1946, when he was twenty-one years old, his first novel,
Williwaw
, was published to acclaim from Orville Prescott, the
Times’
daily book critic. “I was made,” Vidal later wrote. Then, in 1948, E. P. Dutton published Vidal’s novel
The City and the Pillar
, with its story of a homosexual love affair between “two ordinary American youths.” According to Vidal, an editor at Dutton was told by Prescott that he would never read, much less review, a book by Vidal again. “True to Prescott’s word,” said Vidal, “my next five novels were not reviewed in the daily
Times.
… I was unmade.” Vidal claimed that the curse of the
Times
continued to follow him when he took up, successively, playwriting (he said that the
Times
tried to “bloody” his play
The Best Man
) and electoral politics (a
Times
writer was “assigned to ‘bloody’ my campaign for Congress in New York’s 29th District”). Five decades later, Vidal still was turning out catchy one-liners about the
Times
—the Typhoid Mary of American journalism, he called it—and about its book pages, where “the air is alive with the sound of axes grinding.”

As a rule,
Times
staff reviewers don’t go around expressing their intentions or their homophobia, as Prescott did (if Vidal’s comments are to be believed). The
Times
has been more discreet and private, although there was one spectacular public exception. The episode involved a review by the book critic John Leonard. Given the circumstances of the Leonard review, there was no way that the
Times
could avoid public notice of the story. Leonard, then a book critic for the daily paper, reviewed two books on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. One was written by the New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner in the Oliver Stone motion picture
J.F.K.
), the other book was by a friend of Clay Shaw (the Tommy Lee Jones character in the film). Leonard didn’t particularly care for either book. He devoted the last third of the review, in his words, “to a sermon which began, ‘Frankly, I prefer to believe that the Warren Commission did a poor job rather than a sloppy one.…’ ” According
to Leonard, “What followed then was a list of questions about the two autopsies, the washed-out limousine, ‘grassy knoll’ witnesses, Oswald’s marksmanship, Jack Ruby’s strange connections.…” The review ended: “Something stinks about this whole affair.” Leonard’s review ran in the first edition of the
Times
of December 1, 1970, with the headline: “Who Killed John F. Kennedy?” In the next and subsequent editions of that day’s
Times
, the review ended abruptly right after the observation about the sloppy job and before the list of questions. A new headline read: “The Shaw-Garrison Affair.” According to Leonard, “Nobody from the executive editor to the culture desk to the bullpen to the composing room, would admit to this cosmetic surgery.” The mystery remained as the microfilms of the
Times’
first edition and final edition for December 1 found their way into reference libraries across the country. Over the next six months, Leonard remembered, he received some four hundred letters asking about the two reviews and expressing dark thoughts about various conspiracies in Dallas, New Orleans, Washington, and at the
New York Times.
In the years since, Leonard continued to receive similar letters, especially when a new book on the Kennedy assassination was published or when “another paranoid apostrophizes on another television talk-show.” For years, too, Leonard told his correspondents to direct their questions to A. M. Rosenthal, his top editor at the time.