Books I Read This Month: September 2023
Walter Isaacson • Gay Talese • Catherine Lacey • Robert Plunket
Elon Musk (Walter Isaacson)
Very early in his cinder block of an Elon Musk biography, Walter Isaacson, the Man Who Mostly Writes About Very Important Men Doing Very Important Things™, begins the profligate mythologizing, gushing over his billionaire edgelord subject the way Joseph Campbell might if encountering a goose-stepping Wookiee. The author, in wanting to separate Musk from mere us mortals, writes—earnestly, I swear—“you’d not be totally shocked if [Musk] ripped off his shirt and you discovered that he had no navel and was not of this planet born.” (Speak for yourself, bubala. I’d pepper spray the both of you.) That intermingling of images appropriated from the romance and sci-fi genres is an apt choice for a book which endeavors to simultaneously depict Musk as both wounded hero and the man who fell to Earth. It may be surprising to anyone who follows the tumultuous technologist that he would grant access to another biographer after he threatened to sue Ashlee Vance, a previous reporter whom he allowed into his life, even though that journalist in no way turned out a hatchet job with his 2015 tome. But you can’t keep a big ego down. As Steve Jobs before him realized, sitting for an official portrait by Isaacson is all but accepted in our media culture as entrée into some sort of pantheon, a way to achieve parity in the popular consciousness with Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci, a trio of the author’s posthumous subjects.
For his part, Isaacson has seemed in promotional interviews to have sobered up at least somewhat in regards to his subject, no longer quite as besotted. Perhaps Musk threatening to sue the Anti-Defamation League ahead of the book’s release was inconvenient? “It wasn't like I pursued him or he pursued me,” he told the New York Times in May, sounding like a teen protesting a little too much that he never really like-liked his ex. (He contradicted himself in a September Financial Times interview, acknowledging he did in fact take the initiative to phone Musk and request two years of access into his life.) Regardless, at the outset of the project in 2021, the author was all in. Just four months after the parties agreed to move forward with the book, Isaacson penned the “Person of the Year” cover story about Musk for Time, his former stomping grounds, writing that “Elon Musk might be the most interesting person on the planet. And given his passionate quest (so far surprisingly on track) to make humans into a multiplanetary species, he could someday become the most interesting person in the solar system.” It’s embarrassing copy coming from anyone purporting to be a journalist. You could say Isaacson was laying it on thick to ensure the ongoing cooperation he would need to complete the book, but he sure sounded sincere despite all the colossally crappy and wrongheaded things Musk had already done to workers, relatives, friends, strangers, pretty much anyone who’d crossed his path. The writer goes on in that same piece to compare Musk to Henry Ford, though there’s no mention of the pioneering automobile magnate’s virulently bigoted newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, which would have been guaranteed a blue check mark on Twitter/X.
Friendless, the boy retreated into video games, role-playing competitions and science-fiction, and he’s really never emerged from these fantasies.
Isaacson provides an account of his subject’s unpleasant family history, detailing how Musk’s maternal grandfather was an anti-Semitic Canadian daredevil and farmer who relocated his family to South Africa in 1950, drawn by the, um, political climate. Apartheid was not a bug for him but a feature. Musk grew up with a disgustingly racist and tyrannical father, an engineer given to believing all sorts of bizarre conspiracy theories, and a mother who let him and his siblings essentially raise themselves. He was a precocious but obnoxious child frequently bullied and beaten by peers, often in retaliation for calling them “stupid.” Isaacson goes to lengths to get us to empathize with Musk for being raised in the violent environs of apartheid-era South Africa of the 1980s, not even hinting that conditions were far more perilous for non-white South Africans because of families like Musk’s. Friendless, the boy retreated into video games, role-playing competitions and science fiction, and has never really emerged from these fantasies.
Musk escaped his depraved dad for college in Canada and then the University of Pennsylvania, studying physics and business, dreaming of having a civilization-altering impact on the world, the way his sci-fi heroes did. He was accepted into the Stanford PhD program in materials science in the mid-’90s but realized the early Internet age was his moment to strike, as Silicon Valley in the Web 1.0 era was being fueled by an irrational exuberance to match his own. He started the city guide software company Zip2 with his brother, Kimbal, eventually losing his post as CEO when investors believed he needed adult supervision. It was ultimately sold for a handsome profit. Next was the fintech start-up PayPal, which he collaborated on with the odious Peter Thiel, among others. Musk initially ran the show, but his fellow founders enacted a palace coup and had him deposed as CEO when he proved too erratic and quixotic for their liking. They all became fabulously wealthy when the business was subsequently acquired by eBay, but Musk to this day remains bitter over his ouster at the company, even if he reconciled with those who dethroned him. “Of course, if I had stayed, PayPal would be a trillion-dollar company,” he says with his customary modesty.
Hoping to put people on an irradiated, freezing planet in order to “save humanity” is not adult thinking.
Now wealthy beyond belief, Musk decided to risk it all on saving Homo sapiens from extinction or some such egotistical nonsense. He wanted to change the world, and whether those changes he hoped to deliver by fiat were actually good is not a question asked nearly enough in his biography. The Tesla electric cars were obviously a positive development, even if the intensive energy needed to mine resources for the lithium-ion batteries deduct a good deal from the ecological benefits. Overall, though, it’s still a net gain for the environment. If Musk had stayed in this lane, he could have been the automotive Steve Jobs in ways both boon and bane, a successful businessperson, if one who demeaned workers, put them in serious danger in his quest to realize his ambitions faster, and fired them on a whim. (Tesla, it’s also been alleged, has allowed racism to run wild.) He had bigger plans, though. Musk desired to create a Martian settlement and seed a multi-planetary species through SpaceX. It’s a scheme that’s beyond brainless. Putting Homo sapiens on an irradiated, freezing planet in order to “save humanity” is not adult thinking, probably no shock when you consider it’s coming from someone who earnestly says things like “wokeness wants to make comedy illegal, which is not cool.”
The last-ditch success of the SpaceX rocket Falcon 1 in 2008 ushered in a new era of private-sector companies flooding low Earth orbit with satellites, quickly creating a booming industry which will bring with it the aggressive militarization of space and endless spying from the sky, turning the planet into one big Internet that can never be escaped, a global panopticon that’s the dream of every totalitarian leader. Musk himself has already littered the heavens with 5,000 satellites, a scary number when you consider that on many nights there aren’t even that many visible stars. The radio waves from the satellites hamper the ability of scientists to make astronomical observations, but way more importantly, leaving this kind of power in the hands of an impetuous free-market weirdo can have dubious consequences, as we’ve seen with the Starlink shenanigans with Ukraine. (It’s funny that Isaacson’s fellow Musk biographer, Ashlee Vance, recently turned out a book about the commercialization of space, and likewise managed to feign obliviousness about the many scary pitfalls attendant to the “innovation.”)
The Boring Company, a concern that promised to create tunnels underground for cars—sort of like the subway, but not nearly as good—has been a huge flop as was expected by anyone with at least half a brain. “It became an example of a Musk idea that was overhyped,” acknowledges Isaacson, forgetting to remind us that he was one of those who overhyped the idea. The Hyperloop was a scam from the start, a fake space-age transportation system Musk pretended to care about in order to doom high-speed rail in California so that he could sell more cars. It was not a net gain for the environment. Musk is now asking for volunteers to receive his Neuralink implant brain chips, even after he killed 1,500 animals during testing, and then lied about their gruesome deaths. And Twitter/X, under his stewardship, has, of course, become a haven for white nationalists hatemongers—and not by accident.
“I fucking like humanity, dude.”
“I am pro-human,” Musk said angrily, when arguing with Google founder Larry Page, another guy who wants to put an implant in your brain, over the dangers of AI. “I fucking like humanity, dude.” You’d be hard-pressed to prove it based on his interactions with actual humans. As Isaacson reports, he’s still the brat calling people “stupid” and axing them from their jobs on a whim. Even as an adult he’s had rolling-around-on-the-ground violent fights with his own brother. “I fucking hate my cousins,” he exclaimed after firing his relatives from running SolarCity. When Paul Pelosi was attacked by an intruder in his home, Musk helped spread the unfounded rumor on Twitter that the husband of the then-House Majority Leader was the victim of a sex-for-hire tryst gone wrong. He tells his Boswell that he regrets further distressing the octogenarian Pelosi, who had his skull fractured by a hammer blow during the attack, but he spent a recent weekend on Twitter/X defending fellow bro Russell Brand from rape accusations, spitting out more groundless bullshit. “Of course, they don’t like competition,” Musk tweeted, suggesting that the very specific claims made against Brand from numerous women were some sort of concerted left-wing media campaign against the comedian because of his metamorphosis into an alt-right podcaster. (Musk was himself accused of exposing his genitals to a flight attendant, offering to buy her a horse to purchase her silence. She was finally paid a $250,000 settlement by SpaceX, which goes unmentioned in this book.) Musk spent the early and most perilous days of Covid promoting conspiracy theories and making clueless prognostications about the spread of the virus—“Based on current trends, probably close to zero new Covid cases by end of April,” he tweeted in March 2020—which likely made the father he hates very proud. Among his most vicious acts was endangering the life of Yoel Roth, making baseless claims online that the former head of trust and safety at Twitter condoned pedophilia, in retaliation for the former employee’s resignation and subsequent comments about working for Musk.
It’s fair to further question the accuracy of Isaacson’s depiction of Musk since his description of other public figures in the book is so often clueless. Joe Rogan, a conspiracy-addled juicehead who’s only come to grudgingly accept in the last decade or so that the moon landing was real and still believes most of the footage was faked, is described as a “knowledgeable and sharp-witted pundit.” Befuddled alt-right impresario Bari Weiss is deemed “an independent journalist who’s not easy to categorize ideologically.” Oh, it’s very easy to categorize her: She’s the Chairperson of the Dark Web Grifter Party and the bursar of a fake right-wing university. Yes, it is completely hilarious that Isaacson recounts how Weiss, when asked by Musk to be involved in the Twitter Files boondoggle, put him on the spot with pointed questions about free speech on his social media outlet in regards to China, getting the technologist to admit that he would restrict commentary on Twitter about Uyghurs being forced into internment camps because it could cost him Tesla car sales. He quickly added that there were “two sides” to the story of the Uyghur genocide. Being backed into a corner and outwitted by Weiss, who seems at best to have skimmed the notes the night before the test, isn’t as bad as bothsidesing human rights abuses, but it’s awfully embarrassing.
Here’s another theory: He’s just an asshole.
Musk is both a sadist and a masochist, someone who likes to make himself exhausted and miserable and to do the same to others. He desperately needs therapy and could afford billions of dollars worth of fifty-minute hours, but his massive ego tells him he’s saving humanity and that absolves him of all sins. Nothing can be as important as guarding the flickering light of human consciousness, so if he harms others, so be it, since he believes his damaged personality is a sort of superpower. Others in his orbit, almost all of whom are on the payroll in some way, relatives included—even our biographer, really—seem to agree. Many parrot his contention that he has Asperger’s Syndrome, even though he’s never been diagnosed with the developmental disorder by a doctor, as they try to explain why he’s an asshole. Here’s another theory: He’s just an asshole. Every last person I’ve ever met who has Asperger’s has been gentle, even with their difficulty in comprehending social cues. I’ve yet to meet one given to unremitting fury. The technologist also claims to be bipolar, likewise undiagnosed, self-medicating for whatever ails him with nonstop Red Bulls, red-eye flights, red rage, and who knows what else. Sometimes those in his inner circle refer to his more unhinged, angry behavior as “demon mode,” which is a more apt word choice, though it’s still used as a rationalization. Grimes, the pop star and mother of three of his eleven children, says, “Demon mode causes a lot of chaos, but it also gets shit done.” These are adults saying these things, I assure you.
Isaacson churns out lucid, uncomplicated sentences and brief chapters, a must for a long biography meant to immediately assume the number one position on American nonfiction bestseller lists. He certainly doesn’t paint a pretty portrait of his subject, though he makes it clear that in the big picture he approves of Musk. He also sometimes tries to portray his subject’s most innocuous comments as impressively profound. In a passage about Optimus, the technologist’s attempt at a humanoid robot, he pens this winner: “[Musk] had a serious point: the robot should seem fun rather than frightening.” You don’t say. But here’s the rub about this book on the man who Isaacson dubbed “possibly the most interesting person on the planet”: It’s boring. There’s some psychological insight and there’s one brief, intriguing chapter on a new process of developing autonomous ability for cars that Dhaval Shroff has developed for Musk, but mostly it’s a snooze. And despite all the fast cars and faster rockets, Musk himself is also boring, forever caught up in an endless loop of tantrums, drama, emotional abuse and sleep deprivation, as he tries to make up for the attention and love he lacked as a child, forever needing more spotlight. Isaacson listens patiently to Musk forever complain about surviving the turmoil he’s created because of his God complex, but for all the constant histrionics, he’s really not that fascinating, just sort of a damaged fame whore who’s convinced himself that he’s doing the most important work in the world and receiving no push back from his biographer on this dubious belief.
If Isaacson went into the project believing, despite a sky full of red flags, that Musk was some sort of real-life Ironman, a hero of our time, you’d assume he’d come out the ass end of this experience realizing that his subject is pathetic, even loathsome. But down to the final pages he’s still straining to depict his the engineer as merely an edgier Edison. There he is near his story’s end quoting the Bard himself on the complex nature of the best among us (As Shakespeare teaches us, all heroes have flaws…”), and vomiting the type of hoary Silicon Valley tropes—Dreamer! Innovator! Risk-taker! Visionary!—that strained credulity when they began being uttered confidently 25 years ago after that gross Apple ad campaign that utilized the image of Gandhi to sell aggressively marked-up consumer electronics. In the dozen years between Isaacson’s Jobs bio and this one, our author seems to have learned nothing. In that intervening period, we’ve seen Silicon Valley companies treat workers woefully, play footsie with neo-Nazis to make money, and be willing to risk democracy itself if that’s what’s best for profit margins. But Isaacson has his story and he’s sticking to it. I’m not really giving up any great spoilers when I share the book’s credulous final sentences about Musk and his ilk with you: “They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.” You’d have to have a chip in your brain to still believe such nonsense.•
Bartleby and Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener (Gay Talese)
Tabloid titan and New Journalism pioneer Jimmy Breslin believed that if you wanted to write a great article, you needed to avoid the winner’s circle. “Go to the loser's locker room, that's where the story is,” he advised. Gay Talese, now 91, has spent his 70-plus-year writing career operating on a different-but-related theory, often focusing on the “minor characters in major-league settings,” the usually nameless factotums who exist in the orbit of the A-list. The most famous example is, of course, his much-heralded 1966 Esquire article, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” a feature profile assignment he reluctantly accepted at the behest of the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Harold Hayes. It was a time in the tempestuous crooner’s career when he should have felt triumphant, celebrated as the king again at age 50, after a career downturn in the previous decade had left him a pawn for several years, sans recording and movie contracts. Always a diva on the verge of violence, Sinatra’s pugnacity was amped up even further when he reemerged in the spotlight during his roaring second act, particularly growing irate whenever it was suggested that he had links to organized crime (which he did). Add into the mix a sore throat that was making Sinatra’s voice crack as he attempted to record an anticipated TV special, and the obstacles were many for Talese as he fruitlessly waited in the wings for a sit-down.
There are few times in a journalist’s career when a profile subject turning down an interview would be considered serendipitous, but the ill-tempered star not being amenable to Talese’s entreaties forced the writer to get creative. He focused instead on the ecosystem that had been established in support of a star, the “subsidiary characters” in the performer’s life: haberdasher, body double, bodyguard, publicist, toupee toter, Learjet pilot, makeup artist, valet, etc. Even some of these figures in the singer’s employ were kept off-limits initially, but with enough persistence from the journalist and his editor, Talese was able to make Sinatra his grudging duettist even as the entertainer kept him at a safe distance. Nearly all of the article was “drawn from observations on the sidelines,” where the writer felt most at home, allowing him to understand how one person with a rare talent could upset an operation of hundreds of people, with millions of dollars at stake, merely by catching a common cold. Sinatra was too big to fail, but being made of flesh and bones, he was as prone to viruses as the rest of us. You learned way more about the artist-as-a-corporation via this alternate approach than you could have in a hundred Q&As.
It’s more than a rehashing; it’s a dissection of the very act of feature reporting.
Talese’s Bartleby and Me: Reflection’s of an Old Scrivener, a blend of memoir and original reporting, is divided into three sections, the center one a blow-by-blow account of how the Sinatra story slowly and agonizingly came together. It’s more than a rehashing; it’s a dissection of the very act of feature reporting. The opening section recounts how Talese, the son of a New Jersey tailor, came to be a journalist, thanks to his eye for unusual stories that were catnip for editors at the New York Times, as he navigated his way from copy boy to the sports department to the general news desk. He recalls some of the earliest articles he published at the paper, one of the most successful being a 1953 profile of the Times house electrician James Torpey, who was at the time a 25-year veteran managing the zipper, an electromagnetic apparatus which reported the news headlines in bright, moving lights that snaked around the Times Tower, visible to anyone within blocks. During his career as a latter-day town crier, Torpey announced the death of the Lindbergh baby, as well as other nation-shaking events, to his corner of Manhattan.
“Old New York” is an eternally amorphous term, depending on when you first lived in the city and the places and customs that have since disappeared, but such figures at the New York Times who toiled anonymously in the same jobs for decades, taking their sustenance at chophouses, are certainly Old New York characters now all but forgotten. You can only find them via research now because Talese decamped from the newspaper in 1965 for a staff writer position at Esquire, where he convinced Hayes to allow him to write a series of long articles about the obscure ink-stained wretches at his former workplace in exchange for occasionally profiling megastars like Sinatra. Both sides of the deal worked out spectacularly for Talese, as his long articles about copyreaders, editors, etc., were surprise hits for Esquire—a 1968 feature about the Times’ stalwart obituarist Alden Whitman landed the wordsmith on Johnny Carson’s couch—and, of course, the Sinatra piece cemented the writer’s status as a New Journalism luminary.
As was the case with the Sinatra piece, Talese had no access to his principal—Bartha died five days after the blast—which necessitated that it be another story told from the sidelines.
The final section, the sole completely new piece, is a deeply reported look at the strange 2006 demise of 66-year-old NYC doctor Nicholas Bartha, a Romanian émigré who blew up his Manhattan townhouse and himself rather than selling his beloved home as ordered by a judge to settle up his contentious divorce. Burrowing down into the story, which requires space and time, two assets in short supply in our current media world, Talese not only draws a fascinating portrait of the man at the center of the story, who took the most drastic measures imaginable, but also some of his friends, relatives and colleagues. The writer also introduces us to the history of the property, researching others who’d owned the lot dating back to the 1700s, and brings us up to date on the site in 2023, relating the experiences of the contractor hired in the aftermath of the razing to execute the construction of a new building. As was the case with the Sinatra piece, Talese had no access to his principal—Bartha died five days after the blast—which necessitated that it be another story told from the sidelines. The writer was once again in his comfort zone, and he delivers another knockout.
The Bartleby of the title is, of course, a reference to Herman Melville’s nihilistic short-story character, a scribe employed in a Wall Street office who one day answers his boss’ order to conduct a particular menial task with emotionless refusal, simply stating, “I prefer not to.” He’s a literary cousin to Franz Kafka’s “Hunger Artist,” another willfully inert figure who takes his denial of life itself to the furthest extremes, initially transfixing, then repulsing, those around him. Apart from working with a pen as Bartleby did, Talese actually bears little resemblance to the literary scrivener. Nor are most of his subjects Bartlebys, even if the author views them that way. It certainly applies to Dr. Bartha, who definitely preferred not to any longer, but while the author’s real-life characters may have been largely toiling in the shadows, they’re mostly dedicated and resourceful, wanting to accomplish the duties life handed them.
Talese profiled other subjects in addition to Sinatra that made his work easy to publish—Muhammad Ali, Fidel Castro, Joe Louis—and some of his topics were very marketable: sex (Thy Neighbor’s Wife), and the Mafia (Honor Thy Father), for instance, but he repeatedly reveals how his passion for no-names led to a surprising number of rejections, demythologizing the so-called glamorous life of a big-time reporter, even during the newspaper and magazine heyday. He’d spend years working on an article or book that ended up in the discard pile, rejected usually because they weren’t deemed saleable by editors or publishers due to their focus on “nobodies.” At least this volume made it across the finish line. Whether you’re an author or reader, every book can always be your last, and that’s even more true when you reach the age of 91, as Talese has. If this volume ends up being his finale—let’s hope not—he’s gone out on a high note, still writing with a voice that doesn’t crack.•
Biography of X: A Novel (Catherine Lacey)
A novel about painful rifts and uneasy reconciliations, Catherine Lacey’s formally cagey 2023 work has two main fractures on its mind, one personal and one political, as it follows a Citizen Kane trajectory of a journalist looking backwards for the elusive truth. The more orthodox fissure concerns a former New York City alt-weekly crime reporter who’s been left bereft after the sudden and unexpected death of her wife, an enigmatic multimedia artist who began a rise to great fame during the 1970s, riding an aesthetic that was equal parts Warhol and Solanas. Upset after an unauthorized biography of X, one she considers inferior and misleading, becomes a bestseller, the journalist travels across America and to Italy to conduct research to write her own, aiming to unravel the knotty past of her spouse who was beyond woolly about her early life and her many personae, realizing as she gets deep into the project that the woman she loved dearly was perhaps a “narcissistic maniac.”
C.M. Lucca, the reporter and widow, has her fact-finding mission complicated because of the aforementioned political division that has occurred in Lacey’s counterfactual version of the USA, in which a cataclysmic event in 1945 called the “Great Disunion” saw the South hastily build a modular wall during the waning days of WWII and secede from the North. In the 1950s, America officially trisects, dividing into the Southern Territories, a low-tech theocratic fascist region in which guns and prayers are mandatory and women subordinate; the Northern Territories, a progressive paradise which gets a newer New Deal after FDR Chief of Staff Emma Goldman pushes through a slew of women-empowering measures; and the Western Territories, which is something in between. X dies in 1996 just weeks before the wall is finally torn down, a Northern military campaign having defeated the South, which foundered economically after decades of plundering its environment for quick profits led to food shortages and a weakened defense. Old habits die hard, though, as the reunion is made fraught and the Reconstruction 2.0 shaky, by terrorist militias which have formed in the South to try to impede progress.
“There’s nothing suspect about me…I don’t hide anything,” Lucca recalls X telling her on their first date in late-1980s NYC, and untruer words have never been spoken. The most evasive and ambitious of fabricators, she inhabited no fewer than five guises as she created in different parts of the arts, working in the North and outside of America in costumes and under pseudonyms. A novelist, indie book publisher, essayist, screenwriter (for Wim Wenders), photographer, music producer (for David Bowie and Tom Waits) and sex-show performer, a small percentage of her work was mainstream—she wrote the lyrics for Bowie’s “Heroes”—but most of it is Downtown NYC performance art with a sharp edge and arcane photo exhibits with gnomic, deeply buried meanings. The characterization is a mash-up of notable female artists from numerous fields: Laurie Anderson, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Patti Smith, Susan Sontag, Renata Adler, Kathy Acker, Edie Sedgwick, Annie Sprinkle, Marina Abramović, and others. (Many of these figures show up in the novel, crossing paths with the titular character.) Until a career retrospective at MoMA in 1994, two years before her death, no one realized that X had been working under numerous aliases. Her chameleonic talents and shape-shifting is really her greatest art.
No one knew the real X, just pieces of her, and those jagged shards don’t often fit together neatly.
Lucca learns during her trips to the South and West that X was born in 1945 in Mississippi and was one of the few radicals opposed to the woman-hating, fascist theocracy who made it out alive, which she managed to do in the late 1960s. It’s no accident that she quickly made her way from dirty work in a Montana deer-processing plant into the open arms of a wealthy patron in NYC who buys her an apartment and funds her early work. Nothing is left to chance with X, who is always researching her next step and slyly insinuating herself into the lives of people who can help her grow her career, none of her seemingly endless fortunate meetings actually containing a kernel of chance. She’s driven by a monomaniacal quest for fame reminiscent of Madonna, forever trying to go viral and achieve celebrity, a feat she accomplishes, with magazine covers, one-on-ones with Barbara Walters on national TV, etc. Lucca interviews those who knew her spouse at different stages, including her parents and son who still live in the South, believing that their misbegotten Caroline Luanna Walker Vine, as she was known to them, was killed in a rebellion at the border when she was barely in her twenties. As Lucca learns, no one knew the real X, just pieces of her, and those jagged shards don’t often fit together neatly.
The main problem with the novel is that X, the global superstar, is drawn very unconvincingly, as if Lacey based her character on less-than-stellar material edited out of 1983 Bomb magazine Q&As. She displays none of the brilliance or wit you get from Laurie Anderson or Patti Smith or any of the other artists from which she’s drawn. Every quote from X that’s shared with us that’s meant to impress is trite. “Art is worthless,” she declares, sounding like the least talented person in the freshman dorm. “Reverence kaleidoscopes the ordinary into the magnificent,” X tells an interlocutor. Oh, okay. She laments that “to be rebellious and to distrust rebellion is the plight of the tragic artist.” How nice for you. She’s what people who’ve never met an artist think an artist would sound like.
“Why I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite as interesting,” one character exclaims about X, but her ideas for art projects, very meh and often creepy, aren’t exactly barn burners. One of her concepts is that she’ll have one of her stalker fans stalked and photographed and that series of pictures will speak to the nature of celebrity…or, I don’t know, something. Lucca seems to agree with my diagnosis. “Much of X’s art confused me, or perhaps I should just say it bored me,” she shares at one point. About her spouse’s celebrated retrospective, she writes this: “Quite frankly, I have never understood why ‘The Human Subject’ was seen by so many as a pivotal moment in twentieth-century American art.” It would be fine if Lucca was wrestling with a loved one who was a little-known artist, but X has become a massive icon everywhere outside of the Southern Territories, which is cloistered like North Korea, for her uninteresting ideas and commentary. Even in an alternative universe—in any alternative universe—this person would not be wildly famous, successful and wealthy.
Formally, Lacey is almost as devilish as X.
Formally, Lacey is almost as devilish as X, as within her covers she places what is supposedly the finished version of Lucca’s biography, with its own title page and copyright, which makes up the totality of the book. There are abundant footnotes of source materials, many of them attributed to high-toned essayists of our time, like New Yorker writer Merve Emre, giving them credit for articles that were written before they were born. It’s weird and discombobulating and it works. There are soft-focus Sebaldesque black-and-white photographs that punctuate key sections quite well. As far as the altered past Lacey has created for X and Lucca, the rearranging of history is entertaining as well as meaningful: the Vietnam War never happened; a mob of Southern separatists stormed a New York museum in 1943 murdering Duchamp, Kandinsky, Calder, Pollock; and Bernie Sanders was President in the 1990s. One of X’s accomplices when she successfully flees Mississippi is Kathy Boudin, the radical figure from the Weather Underground. (Boudin actually grew up in New York, but only impressions, not rules, matter in this book.) A fellow record producer of X’s is named “Brianna Eno,” which suggests he was either born in this counterfactual as a woman or, more likely, had transitioned. It’s a lot to process, but most of it is well done.
What’s excellent about this novel even beyond its impressively sketched-out altered past is the gradual way Lacey reveals that X remains in the most fundamental ways a woman of the South, as she gradually turns into everything she escaped, all that she had rebelled against. She becomes increasingly conservative and erratic over time, convincing Lucca into being a stay-at-home housewife, becoming a domestic abuser, continually committing infidelities, pulling a gun on her significant other, even calling for the North to embrace dictatorial right-wing fascism in a coke-fueled NPR interview in 1990 during President Sanders’ first term. Apparently, you can take the girl out of the Southern Territories but you can’t take the Southern Territories out of the girl.
“There were moments when I could see our life clearly and knew that everything was beautiful and nothing was right,” Lucca recalls of her marriage at one point, still unsure about what she’s experienced, and you might wonder how a clearly intelligent person, one who scored a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting, could fail to fully grasp that the object of her affection was, among other things, a shape-shifting opportunist who had a cruel streak and used people for sex, fame and money. But as the widow comes to realize while she gathers material for her bio, the glare can be really blinding when you’re standing so close to a star (and all of those we love are stars, even if no one else knows). “We cannot see the full and terrible truth of anyone with whom we closely live,” she writes, “Everything blurs when held too near.” In those situations, only a radical break, like death, can force a reevaluation. Lucca never seems to completely overcome what becomes the novel’s third fracture—the space that exists between subjective and objective judgment, especially when the two have pulled violently away from each other like a nation torn asunder. The final pages are moving and psychologically perceptive, creating a portrait of bereavement in which understanding is possible to a certain degree but closure is beyond reach. Memories remain open to interpretation, wounds never fully heal.•
My Search for Warren Harding (Robert Plunket)
A rueful refrain from some Americans these days in our allegedly woke country—you know, the oh-so-enlightened nation in which neo-Nazis protest proudly outside Disney World, drag queens are demonized for reading to children and school districts pull Toni Morrison novels from library shelves—is that “they wouldn’t be able to make that today.” That is some politically incorrect piece of art or entertainment that was usually created back when white people could still wear blackface ironically or say the n-word because they were edgy. Those were the halcyon days when we knew Gavin McInnes was a hipster asshole but were blissfully unaware that a hate group he would establish would someday try to overthrow the government. Truth be told, they shouldn’t make most of those works now. Progress is good, and people demanding they not be targeted based on their race or gender or body type, a step forward. It’s tricky, though, when we’re talking about preexisting pieces of culture, especially when the creators have (or had) a high degree of talent, when the works are unique and excellent. Philip Roth, among other Jewish novelists, argued vehemently in favor of the continued reading of the landmark 1932 realist novel Journey to the End of Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a French Nazi supporter during WWII, and one, it was recently learned, who felt that Hitler’s biggest mistake wasn’t concentration camps or gas chambers but his failure to wipe out England early in the war.
Those works that “couldn’t be made today” are quite often comedic creations, everything from the TV sitcom The Office (both versions) to Huckleberry Finn. Robert Plunket, whose 1983 comic novel, My Search for Warren Harding, fits neatly into the category, is currently having a moment, a very unexpected moment. The author was a retiree puttering around the snug confines of his prefab home in a Palmetto trailer park with his pug, Meatball, keeping him company, when his uproarious, offensive book, long out of print, was surprisingly resuscitated for a second act after a New Directions editor fired him off an email, offering to publish a new edition. Dog-eared and foxed copies had been passed around for decades among the comic-minded, especially by Hollywood writers. Larry David, a sociopathic antihero of our time, was among its biggest fans, the book’s influence on him massive. (Elaine Benes dancing like an extraterrestrial with delirium tremens takes its inspiration from Plunket’s back-in-print book.) The novel is smart, raucously funny quite often, and, yes, really objectionable, with an endless string of bigoted jokes and slurs directed, via its central character, at people who are fat, gay, Mexican, and Puerto Rican, among others.
“Suffice it to say that I teach at both Mercy College and the New School,” he tells us in the first person novel, “and I feel that speaks for itself.”
Warren Harding pilfers its plot from Henry James’ 1888 novella, The Aspern Papers, with both stories centering on a narrator who goes in search of personal letters of historical importance. Plunket relocates his predecessor’s story from Venice (the one in Italy) to Los Angeles, but that’s the least of the modifications. A ribald and aggressively abrasive picaresque, the novel has as its main character, Elliot Weiner, a Harvard and Columbia grad who decided to go all in on academia after seven years of employment as an assistant to a zookeeper, a position he deemed far below his rightful station. The Larry David adoration is no surprise because Weiner has BCE (Big Costanza Energy), operating as a frantic mess who doesn’t want to wind up on the losing end of the ledger in a country that most certainly keeps score. Unfortunately, his career as an academic historian focusing on the eminently forgettable President Warren Harding has heretofore been mediocre. “Suffice it to say that I teach at both Mercy College and the New School,” he tells us in the first-person novel, “and I feel that speaks for itself.” It’s funny braggadocio that speaks to his massive insecurities. Weiner likes his NYC girlfriend, Pam, even though she has “slob tendencies,” and he enjoys his participation in Morris dancing, a very manly English folk dance done by manly men, but none of it is enough. He needs to achieve some kind of success to make up for all that he lacks.
Weiner hopes to recoup some dignity by getting his hand on a trove of love letters penned by the 29th President, whose two-plus years in the Oval Office were stained by scandals both personal and political. There were mistresses, children born out of wedlock, and the Teapot Dome. The nation’s only other major Harding scholar, a Yale professor, has so far been unable to turn up the cache, so Weiner secures a modest sum of grant money and flies to Los Angeles to insinuate himself into the dwindling days of a very aged lady named Rebekah Kinney, who it appears is the same woman who was long ago Harding’s paramour and had his child. Kinney lives, if you can call it that, in a formerly impressive home that’s currently in a state of disrepair, with her granddaughter, Jonica, whose fat body and simple mind are the targets of most of the book’s relentlessly cruel barbs.
There’s nothing wrong with a fiction writer creating a misanthropic protagonist, but you can hold the same writer to account if they’re enjoying trading on the cruelty too much.
After renting Kinney’s ramshackle pool house to get closer to his quarry, Weiner realizes he needs to romance Jonica, a divorced mom whose fleshy folds he finds disgusting, to have a better shot at acquiring the valued missives. “It was like putting your arms around an armoire,” Weiner says, describing forcing himself to hug the stout young woman. When he realizes things will need to get more intimate with Jonica if he’s actually going to manipulate her into helping him, he describes the sex thusly:
Sex with Jonica was a trial. She kept affecting these impish little ways that were unbecoming to one of her bulk. Her favorite was to surprise me with a drawing of a butterfly or some such thing on her abdomen. I’d pretend to be delighted and try to keep from blowing lunch; she’d flutter her eyes and act seductive. God, what a sight.
And the sequence that has Jonica nearly drowning in the Pacific Ocean because she’s too fat to be easily pulled back into a boat by two adult men, and ends up hospitalized, is an extended set piece treated like a laugh riot. Part of the joke is that Weiner’s unabated revulsion to fat people and gay men is driven—surprise, surprise—by him being fat and gay (though he’s unaware of the latter until late in the novel). But let’s be serious: That’s only part of the joke. Simultaneous to having fun at the protagonist’s expense for his lack of self-awareness you are supposed to be laughing at the fat person, at the gay person, and the way the author creatively riffs on them. There’s nothing wrong with a fiction writer creating a misogynistic or misanthropic character, but you can hold that writer to account if they’re enjoying trading on the cruelty too much. No one else who’s recently reviewed the book seems very bothered by this meanness, but it wore me out.
In order to write a parody of history you have to first have a great understanding of it, and Plunket’s knowledge allows him a pitch-perfect voice in recreating early 20th-century America.
There are, however, two aspects of the novel that are funny without asterisks. One is Plunket’s creation of a Los Angeles milieu of delusional has-beens, never-weres and hangers-on, all of whom believe they’re one pitch meeting from being bathed in the warmth of a spotlight. It may not exactly be the day of the locusts, but everyone seems buggy in their own way. In his quest, Weiner is guided by his friend Eve Biersdorf, a onetime executive assistant to a Hollywood bigwig who’s now married to a movie producer. As she helps him scheme to acquire the Harding correspondence, the two make the rounds, interacting with some of La La Land’s loopiest. For example, there’s Eve’s lunkheaded aspiring screenwriter pal who “writes puppet shows” and models, and boasts that he was recently stopped at a supermarket and asked if he’d like to play Tarzan. He’s insulted by the offer he feels is beneath someone of his quality, the same way Weiner was belittled by the thought of working in the zoo. (As you can probably tell by now, a repeated theme in the book is that Weiner has a great deal in common with those he most despises.) There are outings to woeful avant-garde feminist theater performances and disastrous dinner parties. It’s a never-ending shitstorm and quite frequently hysterical.
The other truly very amusing feature is the author’s long pseudo-historical passages on Warren Harding. In order to write a parody of history you have to first have a great understanding of it, and Plunket’s impressive knowledge allows him a pitch-perfect voice in recreating early 20th-century America, even if his version of Harding’s political ascent and scandalous behavior takes many fictional and ridiculous twists. The Harding that Weiner sketches was an Ohio newspaper editor who only entered the political fray after his wife discovered he was frolicking naked in the woods with newsies and wanted him to redirect his energy elsewhere, so he ran for a state senate seat, the U.S. Senate and then President. (I haven’t consulted the history books on this one, but while Harding was an Ohio newspaperman, I don’t think the nude paperboy thing is factual.) There are also wonderful deadpan historical references, including one in which a rich mining family that aids Harding’s rise in the Republican Party has a child who is the godson of King Leopold II of Belgium. Yes, that King Leopold II. In these moments, Plunket’s wonderful absurdist touch is in full effect, his jokes timeless, with laughter that won’t make you feel bad, won’t make anyone feel bad.•