Friday, Jul 25, 2008
These are minutiae. But minutiae are the semaphore of the New Yorker, a walled fortress that turns readers into Kremlinologists. (And certainly Kremlin expert Remnick knows well that Brown heralded her reign with eye-grabbing covers, from her first street punk riding in a Central Park horse cab.) To readers, the New Yorker is its minutiae; for instance, former fiction editor Frances Kiernan implored Remnick to cut -- hiss! -- "Tina Brown's crossword puzzle" (a one-column diversion that lowered the New Yorker into the knuckle-dragging company of Harper's and the Atlantic Monthly). So it's a little worrisome that Remnick's noticeable changes have largely involved turning back the clock -- tamer covers, no more photos in the contributors' section, restoring his mentor John McPhee, frozen out during the Brown era (with the pointed contrib note, "John McPhee was first published in the New Yorker in 1963"). Remnick may not mean to promise Tilleyphiles a soothing snifter of brandy after Brown's fizzy cocktail, but that's the message he's sending.
It's a message unfortunately reinforced in this competent, classy and utterly safe assessment of its home city ("There's no place like it anywhere else," Nancy Franklin boldly avers in the opening "Comment"). This New York, like Sorel's luxury liner, is almost all swanky Manhattan: Susan Orlean follows a real-estate agent selling pricey Manhattan apartments; Remnick himself profiles the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera; and the venerable Lillian Ross gamely covers teens dancing to the Offspring and Aaliyah at a private-school mixer (leading contender for the Wish I'd Seen That Story Being Reported Award for 1999: "their tiny, firm backsides revealed no gelatinous motion"). Meanwhile, Frank McCourt recounts his first encounter with -- what else? -- the New York Public Library main branch, with trademark naif's charm ("The librarians are friendly. Of course I can have a library card, and it's so nice to see young immigrants using the library" -- reading McCourt is like reading "Portrait of the Artist" if Joyce never dropped the "baby tuckoo"-speak of the opening pages).
All this serves a long-standing New Yorker function: literary demographic branding, providing a vision of comfortable culture for well-heeled Nora Ephron fans. Coincidentally(?), the sweet McCourt reminiscence about Irish immigration and reading comes with a Hibernian-themed platinum MasterCard ad ("Plane tickets to the town where she was born: $1,200 ... pints at the pub where she met your dad: $8 ... finally understanding where your mother was coming from: priceless") and a corporate-caring ad about Philip Morris' sponsorship of literacy programs.
And this picture leaves out the New York that people who live here see. You'd think a New York issue might acknowledge, for example, that the four outer boroughs are where Franklin's "people (who) come to New York because they're looking for something" tend to land nowadays. But Manhattan's satellites, in the "New York" issue, are simply where one finds exotics (Philip Gourevitch's excellent profile of a young Indian-American woman resisting an arranged marriage) and Serious Urban Problems (Hilton Als' affecting Brooklyn "Dope Show"), where Joseph Mitchell (profiled by Mark Singer) went prospecting for characters.
The classicists who rebelled against Brown resented her for recognizing what we know: that that sepia-toned Wonderful Town exists no more, if it ever did. It's too early to judge the Remnick Era, but it will be welcome when the magazine really starts reflecting his own new vision. (He might start by upgrading the paltry electronic insult that Condé Nast calls the New Yorker Web site.) It may be boorish to want change for change's sake, nor is all preservationism a bad idea, but Remnick is too accomplished, too smart and too young to be a caretaker.
Sorel's cover is an apt metaphor for Remnick's task; a vessel this size may be slow to turn, but why step up to the helm if you don't want to see what that baby can do at full throttle, even if you rattle the swells waltzing on the bow? Which, yeah, yeah, invites the inevitable "Titanic" jokes -- but that megadisaster movie, you'll recall, enticed a stampede of travelers to sign up for cruises. And I submit that that wasn't just because people are idiots. It is precisely the sense of risk, the possibility that you just might crash and beautifully sink, that makes the waltz so exhilarating.
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