THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 3, 1996 TAG: 9611040170
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL PEARSON
LENGTH: 74 lines
THE DEVIL PROBLEM AND OTHER TRUE STORIES
DAVID REMNICK
Random House. 404 pp. $25.95.
Some years ago David Remnick was a student at Princeton in John McPhee's ``Literature of Fact'' seminar. The influence shows. In Remnick's new book, The Devil Problem, coming two years after his first, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lenin's Tomb, he collects 18 stories written mainly for The New Yorker, where he learned his lessons from the master. Like McPhee, Remnick is a careful reporter, a clear stylist, a writer who is both incisive and funny, with an ability to explain complex subjects and the intellectual curiosity to follow his instinct for a story wherever it leads.
Echoing McPhee's sense of journalistic rectitude, he writes, ``Journalism is not allowed the liberties of the novel or the evidence of the psychiatric dossier. `Stories' can only be a part, a glimpse, of that fuller thing, the life.'' The glimpses that Remnick gives us in this gallery of portraits - a fascinating glance at the novelist Ralph Ellison or the exiled politician Gary Hart - seem more telling and resonant and, finally, more true than a 500-page profile by the likes of Joe McGuinness.
Remnick offers neither a rogues gallery nor a collection of hagiography. He does what any good reporter and writer should do, it seems to me. He engages in the research, enters the world of the subject, and returns to the reader with a vision of the man or woman who is at the center of the narrative. None of these stories seems weak or foolish. And some are simply remarkable - real storytelling, as interesting as good fiction with the advantage of being grounded in fact.
One tale, ``Hamlet in Hollywood,'' traces the legal and intellectual battle between Steve Sohmer, a Hollywood producer and recent Ph.D. from Oxford, and Mary Ann McGrail, a Shakespeare expert and professor from Boston University. Sohmer was suing McGrail over the rights to a theory of ``Hamlet'' that suggested the play was actually a subversive interpretation of Martin Luther's rebellion against the Catholic Church.
``Hamlet in Hollywood'' is laced with engrossing interpretations of the play, mini-summaries of critical history that make me wish more scholars were reporters or at least could write clearly. In addition, Remnick has an unscholarly sense of humor, describing the Huntington Library in California as the sort of place in which one ``expects to see the shade of Gloria Swanson being wheeled around, her face caked in curative muds.''
Remnick has the uncanny ability to find an image that seems to sum up a character or an entire experience. On the greatest basketball player who ever lived - ``Michael Jordan leads one of the grandest and most peculiar American lives since Elvis left the building.'' On USA Today - ``a sprightly brand of fish wrap,'' a newspaper that ``isn't much for brains or character . . . asks to be loved for its good looks and sunny personality . . . a bimbo.'' On ex-New York City Mayor Ed Koch - ``a voice creaking with complaint.''
Among the most interesting profiles in the book are those of Elaine Pagels, the biblical scholar who became famous for her work on the Gnostic Gospels and then, after the deaths of her son and husband, became fascinated with the evolving shape of the devil image in western culture; and of Ellison and his 40-year-long work-in-progress after Invisible Man.
This is the kind of book in which each reader will find his or her own favorite piece. For me, it was the final one, ``The Last Gentleman,'' a charming story about one of the least known great newspaper writers alive, Murray Kempton, a journalist who has ``seen Bessie Smith sing, Sal Maglie pitch, Westbrook Pegler type, Jean Harris weep, and Jimmy Hoffa fib.'' Remnick's description of Kempton's genius may very well describe his own talent: ``Kempton's sense of the absurd and his ability to sketch a scene in a few sentences, to deflate the pompous in a phrase, make the parade as rich as any great novel.'' MEMO: Michael Pearson teaches creative writing and literature at Old
Dominion University and is the author of two non-fiction collections.
His new book on John McPhee is due out in January from Simon &
Schuster/Macmillian. by CNB