Getting poor quick; among media kings
American Sucker
By David Denby
Little, Brown, 337 pp., $24.95
Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures With the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media
By Michael Wolff
HarperBusiness, 381 pp., $25.95
The first time someone told me he felt ''embarrassed for the author" after reading a memoir, I didn't understand what he meant. To be made uncomfortable by too much candor I understood. But to be embarrassed for someone, a stranger, seemed to me a possessive, almost intimate feeling, and in that way more of a credit to the book than an insult.
But then I remembered Norman Podhoretz. When he published ''Making It" in 1967, he thought he knew what he had coming. He'd decided that ambition had replaced erotic lust ''as the prime dirty little secret of the well-educated American soul," and that it was his job to bare it. ''For taking my career as seriously as I do in this book, I will no doubt be accused of self-inflation and therefore of tastelessness," he wrote in the preface. ''So be it." So bold! And yet so wrong. Podhoretz was accused of all sorts of things -- but not for being shocking and Maileresque, as he might have hoped. One's own careerism and status longing may have been taboo topics, but to nakedly express them, it turned out, didn't come off as radical, just uncool. He'd missed the mark. We're embarrassed for memoirists, I realized, when they lose their grip on their subject.
Which, as the convergence of the Internet bust and the memoir boom has confirmed, is nearly inevitable when the subjects are money and ambition. Nothing like addressing a fin de siecle with a first-person narrative to bring home the fact that memoirists are not to be confused with social chroniclers. One traffics in personal insights, the other in the impersonal, and only in the most capable hands can the two approaches be meaningfully reconciled.
New Yorker movie critic David Denby, alas, is not among the chosen. ''American Sucker" purports to be ''a portrait of a single American living within money obsession," but really it is a portrait of a man escaping himself. His wife of 18 years had left him. In a desperate attempt to save what he could of his former life, and to avoid dealing with his current one, he dove headlong into the stock market in pursuit of the $1 million needed to buy out her share of their apartment. Instead, as the economy bottomed out, so did he, losing $900,000 of his and his former wife's money.
Denby is a critic, trained to turn his gaze outward, not inward. His descriptions of life among the Manhattan media elite, and of the financial stars he meets in the course of his research, make for great reading because they're social, not personal, observations. If only he had left it with that.
Instead, he hurls his individual experience at the zeitgeist, as if making his shame communal will make it grander, though really it only obscures his inability to come up with any meaningful personal observations. His shame over his wife leaving him is what fuels his book, yet his references to his failed marriage and limping private life are cursory. Witnessing his thrashing about as an amateur investor isn't nearly as painful as watching him try to get ahold of his real subject. His failure to do so is a minor spectacle.
Making a spectacle of himself is exactly what Michael Wolff doesn't do in ''Autumn of the Moguls" -- his own chronicle of the budding years of the millennium, as seen through the machinations of its media titans. Unlike Denby, Wolff is perfectly aware of who he is -- a media columnist for New York magazine, a gadfly, commentator, outsider. And as such, he sticks with what he knows: impersonal insights. Never having met Tina Brown and Rupert Murdoch myself, I can't attest to the validity of his observations, but they definitely make for entertaining reading.
A friend mentioned to me recently his embarrassment over Wolff's painfully insecure ''nose-pressed-against-the-glass thing." But to me, Wolff's exuberant interest in the world of media, his heightened awareness of where he falls in its cut-throat hierarchy, his easy admission of his own envy and social jockeying, are what make his story appealing. ''Why do we need the approval or the affirmation or the acknowledgment of the rich?" he asks himself at a party. ''Almost everyone here . . . needed that approval and affirmation. And if I was aware of everyone's need more than they were aware of it . . . did that reflect on the further tenuousness of my relationship here?" Undeniably. The difference is, he isn't derailed by the thought. He's in control of his subject. Saving this reader, at least, from that unpleasantly proprietary sensation that comes with feeling embarrassment for a stranger.
Kate Bolick is the deputy cultural editor of The New York Sun. Her column appears every other month.
