Ever since Bonfire of the Vanities we have been waiting for the next Great American Novel. Has Kurt Andersen written it? Michael Ellison meets the author
One of the persistent quibbles about Kurt Andersen’s first novel – the book du jour of Manhattan and an essential modern primer on money, the media and technology – is that it is far too long. But he is able to catch much of its essence in one sentence when he chooses.
“My characters, the people in my book, would feel obliged to buy, if not read, my book,” he says. Andersen knows these people well. After all, he is one of them – the brilliant comets of a creative elite who anticipate or direct the aesthetics of whatever is just beyond the horizon. They might not know everything but they know about everything.
Andersen has captured lightning in a bottle and is well aware of it. Maybe that’s why he uses the expression so much. Most of the reviewers of Turn of the Century (Headline) tell him so. “Anderson jacks you into the nerve centre of the media society and pins your eyelids open until you go nearly blind with overload,” said one. Another, making passing reference to Ulysses, said: “Most of the digressions are informative, wickedly satirical or outrageously funny and often all at once.” As if that were not enough, he has been described as “the first most promising novelist of the third millennium”.
Most promising novelist? At 44? He’s entitled to feel pleased with himself and he does, here in the Blue Bar of the Algonquin Hotel, no mention of which is possible without a nod to Dorothy Parker if only because Andersen would have met with ease the standard of repartee required in her circle. Much of what he says is in inverted commas, played for laughs or self- deprecating. Or at least that’s the way it seems.
The book’s main players are George Mactier and his wife Lizzie Zimbalist, who are not entirely happy with the moral dimensions of what they are doing but do it just the same, deaths in the family an inconvenient interruption in the rush of ideas and deals that drive their careers. He is a former journalist, now a TV producer on $16 575 a week, on a show that not merely blurs but obliterates the lines between fact and fiction; she, the conceptual brain behind a software house, is repelled by and attracted to an alliance with Microsoft.
Andersen strafes the story with the buzzwords and cadences, the wisecracks and gizmos of a generation whose lease on power might not extend far beyond his book’s 659 pages. Smart guy that he is, he has it both ways, in the club but on a sceptical membership card. One character, explaining the controls of a private jet, could be passing judgment on George and Lizzie’s world: “It isn’t real. The throttle levers are vestigial. Completely unnecessary. They’re just a sop to the pilots. Pure nostalgia. Welcome to the 21st century.”
Again, Andersen knows what he is talking about, as one of the co-founders of the satirical magazine Spy, an editor of New York magazine, writer for The New Yorker and Time, and sometime television producer.
Just in case the author is as readily defined by his environment and his choice of products as are the cast in his book, let me point out that his blue denims are parked on a rust-red leather seat, and when he is not smoking Marlboro Reds he is emptying a bowl of peanuts as quickly as phrases and ideas enter his head. He knows what’s coming and launches a perfectly amiable pre-emptive strike.
“The question `Are you tired of hearing all the same questions?’ is usually framed in this way, `Are you tired of questions about Tom Wolfe?’ My stock reply is, `No, those are very flattering comparisons.’ My last actual mild argument with the publishers was whether to have a reference to The Bonfire of the Vanities on the jacket cover. In the end I gave in and let them. It would be disingenuous to say that there was no anxiety of influence. I re-read Bonfire before I began writing to get clear about what that was, with 12 years’ hindsight, that I was worrying about. Yeah, it’s a big, fat social novel set mostly in New York, so what can you do?”
Just as Wolfe’s definitive Eighties chronicle of the city transcended the book review pages to assume the status of a cultural fixture, so Turn of the Century and its author have become starting points for any number of conversations and columns: the death of the traditional media is a favourite; he is fair game for the gossip columns; and a photograph of Andersen, a mere writer, has appeared in the public prints alongside a picture of the Teletubbies. It cannot be long before he is invited to write lyrics for Celine Dion.
But just when the success of Turn of the Century had been diagnosed, the backlash began. A peculiar piece appeared recently in the New York Times dedicated to the precept that, just because Andersen’s book is on most bestseller lists, that doesn’t make it a bestseller (you guessed: no, it’s not on the Times list). And in case the argument failed to prevail in the face of 75 000 hardback copies sold since May, the article also noted that the film rights had not been sold (they were, though, the day the story appeared).
Andersen pretends to pretend that he did not see the piece. “No, I missed that,” he says extravagantly. “It was a little too Jesuitical for me. I am loath to infer motives but Marty Arnold, who wrote that piece, is the last living New York Times man whom we regularly gaffed in Spy and there might be some baggage motivating that. Fortunately, he had the integrity to print the facts that contradicted his premise.”
Then there is the wholly negative review in the New Republic – appearing a sprightly six weeks after the book was published in the United States – which says, at its kindest: “Turn of the Century is a book about the media by a media person for the media. That is why we have it and that is why it has this month’s buzz. This is vanity publishing on the largest scale.”
Clearly, there is a price to be paid for being clever and clever-clever at the same time. “If someone I knew had managed to write a novel and gotten it published and gotten interviewed and gotten some attention, I’d be jealous,” says Andersen. “I wouldn’t commit that jealousy to print but I’d be jealous. I have a pretty high ambient level of self-doubt and criticism but no, I’m pleased with the book and feel it has got, and is getting, the correct amount of praise and sales. It’s been well within the correct proportions for my mental health.”
Andersen does not know what Wolfe thinks about Turn of the Century, only that he declined to review it for Time. He does know what some of the grand old men of letters have to say about Wolfe’s novels – that they are long works of journalism rather than bona fide literature.
“It’s `How dare this journalist presume at this advanced age that he can also do this?’ In my junior way, I’ve had a little bit of the same copping but not too much. When it stings it stings, and it hasn’t stung very much. When things are done out of bad taste, what looks to be transparent jealousy, the other monkeys declaring that this monkey can’t evolve into a Neanderthal, it seems kind of unsportsmanlike.”
The book is being published in German, Dutch and French. “And Chinese, which is my favourite. In 40 years you’ll see China has gone the wrong way and it’s all my fault.”
As we part (there are no peanuts left) it occurs to me that it would be mean if I did not mention that I enjoyed the book.
“Maybe it’s my arrogance, but I took that as implicit,” says Andersen over his shoulder. Don’t worry, he was sending himself up. Of course he was.