by J Hutcherson | June 9th, 2006
I’m currently trying to force myself to finish Gay Talese’s latest, A Writer’s Life. It’s not that the book is horrible, it isn’t. It’s not that it’s badly paced, it isn’t.
What Talese has done is simple: multiple projects at various stages of completion written since his last book (Unto The Sons). None of them had enough going for them to end up in print. There’s the restaurant book, the college years book, the civil rights book, and yes, the soccer book. All were left on the table for whatever reason, joined together here in the kind of narrative you would expect.
It’s like Talese has given us an expanded CV for the last twenty years of work product. A CV that is 430 pages long.
It doesn’t work. the stories are forcibly connected, like one of those made-for-TV biographies that has no trouble moving around in what becomes a disjointed narrative. The heavy sections are almost disturbing when they come crashing in. Talese’s style manages to under-stress major moments, one of the reasons he’s written some of the best magazine pieces ever written. But here the transitions seem forced, the stories not as related as Talese would have us believe.
When Bob Dylan’s Chronicles appeared and went on to sell massive quantities (books don’t usually move 300,000 copies) it changed the game for grabbing parts of a life and telling those stories. Talese sort of does that here, picking things he should know his readers likely could care less about compared to other parts of his life.
I care more about the back stories for the great DiMaggio and Sinatra pieces he wrote in the ’60’s than I do about his blown projects in the ’90’s. At least he gives me no reason to think otherwise.
This could have been a better book with the same concept, tighter editing, and less sentences that have me thinking Talese lost his fast-ball.
Dylan used Chronicles to revitalize an album Oh Mercy that his fans probably haven’t thought about since it disappointed them in 1989. Talese hasn’t managed to convince me that his blown narratives would have made great books. They’re just stories, and he’s told better ones.