Scooped!

SHOLL, JASON

Scooped! Coming to the end of the novel about journalism. BY JASON SHOLL Anyone with an interest in the popular press will probably have ferreted out a few unfortunate truths about journalists:...

...small-town newspaper...
...In 1978, Michael Frayn quietly resurrected the genre with Towards the End of the Morning, a restrained comedy about life at an aging Fleet Street paper...
...During the mid-nineteenth century, just as the Romantic ideal of the poet was giving way to the modern ideal of the professional writer, several novelists found in journalism a convenient metaphor for shifting societal attitudes toward dictates of the commercial marketplace...
...and Ted Heller's Slab Rat, a slick send-up of scheming editors at a New York media conglomerate...
...MacVeigh's colleagues at the World-Beacon are journalistic misfits—guilty of everything from persistent misspellings to insipid headlines—and the only one capable of intelligent thought saves it for the end...
...The former takes as its subject the high-profile pretensions of the Washington media elite, while the latter deals with everyday absurdity at a Jason Sholl is a literary agent at Vigliano Associates in New York...
...the political editor who knows nothing about politics and the style columnist who knows nothing about style...
...In character, situation, and plot, the genre hasn't evolved much since the late nineteenth century...
...For such an overdrawn novel, it's a surprisingly timid complaint...
...Libel worries withheld publication of Muggeridge's The Picture Palace over half a century after the novel's completion...
...His diligence is soon rewarded with a plum assignment: investigating the possibility that creatures from Saturn have invaded the planet...
...He's cold enough to cost his hard-working father a pension for the sake of a minor story and narcissistic enough not even to recognize his own narcissism...
...Meanwhile, Maupassant's talentless rake marries into one of the richest families in Paris, is promised a baronetcy and a seat in parliament, and loses what little integrity he began with...
...In 1987 appeared Christopher Wren's Hacks, a light-hearted farce about correspondence journalism, and Malcolm Mug-geridge's The Picture Palace, a satire of political liberalism at the old Manchester Guardian, where Muggeridge had worked in the 1930s...
...Media criticism can capture the surface of the media circus, and journalistic memoirs can yield certain insights...
...In Honore de Balzac's Lost Illusions (1843) a provincial poet learns that his success as a big-city critic depends on a willingness to write what he doesn't believe, just as in Maupassant's Bel Ami a rakish young writer discovers that an ability with words counts for less than romantic savvy with publishers' wives...
...And it's no accident Balzac and Maupassant made their protagonists journalists...
...By the end of Lost Illusions, big-city decadence has ravaged Balzac's poet, who returns to his hometown penniless and suicidal, awaiting grace...
...As The Columnist unfolds, Sladder unwittingly reveals himself to be a loathsome indi-vidual—and a terrible columnist, to boot...
...The following year, the comic mystery novelist Donald Westlake produced Trust Me On This, a riotously overdrawn account of life at a tabloid, which he followed with two sequels...
...the overbearing proprietor...
...Indeed, what makes The Columnist a good book is that it's not just a journalism novel—for after a hundred and fifty years of repetitive burlesques and bitter parodies, there isn't a whole lot left to say about the hypocrisies, absurdities, and excesses of the Fourth Estate...
...Each protagonist's fate, in its own way, presents a savage indictment of modernity's effect on the soul...
...All of these novels contain some memorable images (A Vicious Circle's swanky Slouch Club, for instance, home to "authors on the razzle, agents on the dazzle, politicians on the frazzle"), and most offer some valid criticism of unsettling trends in contemporary newspaper publishing (Bilton, for instance, is set at a paper so bloated with trashy lifestyle supplements "that it was the boast of the Chief Editor in Chief that he never read a word of it...
...But there are some truths about journalism that only fiction can unearth...
...By convention, at least one character per novel must rise from the bottom of his trade to the top, learning along the way the rules of an unsavory game already in progress...
...Those who emerge more or less unscathed—the Brandon Sladders of the world—tend to do so only through blindness to their own misery...
...and in the face of an impending lawsuit, Craig's first publisher dropped A Vicious Circle, although the novel found a new home once its author toned down some of the more recognizable characters...
...BY JASON SHOLL Anyone with an interest in the popular press will probably have ferreted out a few unfortunate truths about journalists: that they occasionally get their facts wrong, that their opinions are often affectations, and that many of them aren't above betraying confidences or distorting the truth for personal gain...
...Not one in ten appears without the suggestion of some malicious, thinly cloaked insider dirt (early reviews of The Columnist, for instance, mention the names George Will, Ben Bradlee, and Leon Wieseltier, among others...
...Scoop arguably still holds title to the most outrageous media send-up...
...The Columnist effectively uses irony to transform banal scenarios into a comment on their banality...
...Writing without a modicum of self-awareness, Slad-der recounts how, born into a modest Buffalo household, he climbed his way to media eminence on the back of countless betrayals, blackmails, and self-serving seductions, winding up with a news spot on NBC and a political column syndicated in four hundred newspapers worldwide...
...If much of this sounds familiar, that's, because it is...
...the vividly detailed article recounting remarkable occurrences that never took place...
...The Grim Pig is nowhere near the same level of novel...
...As it opens, a small-town newspaper called the Grand-Valley World-Beacon finds itself under the charge of a new editor, a man with a reputation for market-savvy sensationalism who, addressing his staff, begins by writing the misspelled word "DESTINNY" on a giant easel...
...Amanda Craig's A Vicious Circle, a malice-filled roman a clef about book reviewing in London...
...Jeffrey Frank's The Columnist is the best of these recent novels...
...But thanks to the author's deft use of Sladder as an unreliable narrator—and hence the impossibility of taking any of Sladder's venom at face value—The Columnist is mostly a finely wrought satire of the pretentious and self-serving "insider accounts" that so many journalists seem to pen these days when they venture forth with books...
...The Columnist takes the form of a fictional memoir, penned by a puffed-up Washington pundit and first-rate boor named Brandon Sladder...
...And even the possibility of bringing familiar caricatures to new extremes was effectively eliminated with the publication of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop in 1937...
...So the book's hapless protagonist, a recovering alcoholic and failed book writer named Parker MacVeigh, goes chasing after stories about cloth...
...For decades following the publication of Scoop, the journalism satire all but disappeared...
...The novel skewers many other types in the media...
...Basing several characters on known Parisian newspapermen, Maupassant also established a far less savory tradition when, shortly after Bel Ami's publication, he was accused of slander...
...That's why the past century and a half has seen so many satirical novels about the trade of journalism—so many, in fact, that the satire has become more than a little tired...
...Dismissing all serious investigative journalism with a wave of his hand, the new editor demands that his reporters produce stories more likely to sell: pieces about the "exciting worlds of travel and romance and fine cloth...
...Both novels are expansive dramas about vanity, ambition, and the spiritual price of success...
...In a profession that offered rapidly growing influence over public opinion, but allowed its members largely to police their own activities, journalists felt the temptations of modernity acutely...
...By 1885, Guy de Maupassant's Bel Ami, an expansive satire of careerism and amorality in Parisian literary circles, had originated most of the archetypes that continue to cram such novels today: the lazy editorial office where skill at the gaming table confers greater prestige than skill at writing...
...Though it never tries to be a "big" book of Balzac or Maupassant's sort, it is finely wrought and contains some broad truths about the psychic costs of vanity: One senses that Brandon Sladder was born to his megalomania and would have achieved a similar destiny had he gone into insurance sales, oil speculation, or any of a million other ventures...
...or big guy getting caught cheating...
...They think a story is big guy getting screwed by government, or little guy cheating on welfare...
...In one of the novel's more memorable passages, the "highest paid journalist of the United States" sends several hasty dispatches about a nonexistent Balkan revolution (instigating a real Balkan revolution in the process), and ends up winning a Nobel Peace Prize for his work...
...The Grim Pig is mostly just banal...
...Each novel, in its own way, nevertheless reveals how thoroughly cliched stories of journalistic excess have become for the contemporary satirist...
...The genre hasn't always been so narrow an enterprise, however...
...But taken as a group, they have an essential sameness that's impossible to ignore...
...And by the late 1990s, you could add to the list Tim Heald's Stop Press, a screwball comedy about a jour-nalist-cum-media consultant who wreaks havoc on the British publishing industry...
...And a fair number even inspire threats of legal action...
...But it wasn't until the late 1980s, following the unexpected success of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (in part a parody of the New Yorker), that the newsroom reemerged as a fashionable setting for satirical fiction...
...They still do—or so one would gather from reading almost any media satire published in the past fifteen years...
...The genre's themes—that journalism corrupts, that sensationalism sells, that truth is relative—have also remained more or less constant since the turn of the last century...
...He has no eye for news, no ear for language, and no real understanding of culture or politics...
...Andrew Martin's Bilton, a zany tale about a Marxist newspaper columnist buoyed to fame by capitalism then toppled by it...
...In both style and substance, Jeffrey Frank's The Columnist and Charles Gordon's The Grim Pig couldn't possibly be more different...
...The paper's new management, she confides to Mac-Veigh, "don't define a story the way we do...
...There's Lionel Heftihed, for instance, the pretentious literary editor of The New Terrain who rarely reads "anyone but himself," and Julius Portino, veteran city editor of the Buffalo Vindicator and staunch believer "that the unexamined life is greatly to be preferred...
...By novel's end, such characters usually reap the rewards of public humiliation (as in Bilton), despair (A Vicious Circle), or even death (Slab Rat...
...We think a story is little guy getting screwed by big guy...
...And although both are set in and around Parisian newspapers, they could have been set just about anywhere else, trafficking in big themes specific to journalism without being specific to journalism alone...

Vol. 7 • December 2001 • No. 13


 
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