By Michael Miner
Writers used to be A-list celebrities, I remind him. Hemingway, the obvious example, was more than a critically acclaimed novelist the public read too. He was the man. He showed up in newsreels just for being Hemingway. He was something in America that these days no writer is.
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He and his pal Mark Gleason, who lives in New Jersey, are coming at them with an idea so old it’s new. They intend to encourage reading. “What we’re trying to do with Book is decidedly not another kind of pointy-headed intelligentsia-oriented magazine–the ones that tend to find their homes on the east coast,” Kramer assures me. “They’re great magazines–like the New York Review of Books. But we’re trying to do something more approachable by a wider audience. So people who may not think of themselves as passionately involved with books will get drawn in and find out that that universe is just as much fun to knock around in as Premiere for movies or Spin or Vibe or Rolling Stone.”
“Good question,” he says, having asked it himself. “In March I gave this guy in Seattle an outline of what we were doing. His initial reaction was, ‘I think it’ll work real well, but I personally hate it.’ But I don’t think we’re interested in fawning over people, creating celebrities. I was looking at the most recent Vanity Fair. There’s a delightfully nubile thing on the cover. She’s a nobody, but Vanity Fair is gambling she’ll be the next big somebody. My aspiration would be, rather, that if people like to read good literature–good fiction or nonfiction or whatever–and if we can find something printed with a 5,000 run in Canada and it doesn’t have a U.S. distributor but it’s a hell of a good book, I’d like to bring that book to somebody’s attention. I don’t think that’s celebritizing that book or author to a degree that will do it damage.”
Soon, if all goes well, Kramer will set off for New York to make America smarter, and my block will lose a visionary. Tom Wolfe, who looks a little like Brad Pitt if you look only at the lank hair, appears on the cover of Book’s first issue, and inside there’s a discussion of his big new novel, with which Wolfe “may be taking his final shot at literary immortality.” There’s a profile of Wally Lamb, who wrote a 900-page novel, I Know This Much Is True, plagued by the reasonable fear that it might be beyond him. Chicago author Stuart Dybek has a short piece, Anna Quindlen talks about the fiction she loves, and several reviews show up in the back of the magazine.
Death to the Dynasty!
The Bulls this reporter got sick of sound an awful lot like the team portrayed in the excerpts the Sun-Times ran this week of Roland Lazenby’s new book, Blood on the Horns–in which Phil Jackson is less sympathetic than he’s usually made out to be, Jerry Krause is less unsympathetic, and no one smells anything like a rose. “Everybody falls in line on that team with what Jordan wants to do,” the reporter told me. “The locker room opens when Jordan wants it to. Go to Bulls practices–even during the playoffs, when they are required to have media availability–and they blow it off. When the curtain goes up, most of the players you want to talk to are off the floor and out the back door. Phil Jackson, rather than talking to us when practice ends, he goes up to his office and keeps us waiting a half hour to an hour. They put up an extra curtain there so that all routes were completely cordoned off. You have 20 or 30 reporters huddled in the hallway, hoping someone will stick his head through the curtain.
