Book Review: My Mistake

My Mistake: A Memoirby Daniel MenakerHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013Daniel Menaker worked at The New Yorker for twenty-six years, starting as a fact-checker and piece-proofer handling the impossible task of shepherding articles past the rudely mandarin rhetorical quirks and prejudices of the magazine's legendary impacted fistula of an editor, William Shawn, and the experience has pride of place in Menaker's gentle, almost pallid new memoir My Mistake, where a great deal of polite fun is had at the expense of Shawn's mincing, fastidious manner. "There is a whole list of words Shawn hates," Menaker writes at one point, "some of which someone has fashioned into this sentence, "Locating his gadget at the urinal, Tom Wolfe saw a photo of the intriguing, balding tycoon."Despite having a veritable Manhattan phone directory of names to drop, our author keeps his book moving along briskly, moving from the trauma associated with losing his brother and feeling responsible for it to his long stint at The New Yorker and his fledgling attempts at starting a career in writing novels and short stories. We are allowed to see none of the creative effort involved in making those stories (and there's enough "I fixed it and then it got published"-style taciturnity to make us suspect there wasn't any to see, which might explain why you can't off the top of your head name a single thing he's ever written), but the new-author's nervous lingering over reviews is perfectly captured:

"Don't worry about it - it doesn't mean anything," a colleague at The New Yorker says to me, radioactive with Schadenfreude. "He's obviously jealous," someone else says. "It says more about him than it does about the book." "He's the fiction editor at Esquire - he just has it in for The New Yorker." (This last is said sincerely, and just possibly with some degree of accuracy.) "Listen, most books don't ever get reviewed in the Times."

Menaker eventually became the fiction editor at The New Yorker until Tina Brown's coup edged him out, after which he entered the world of book-publishing, here very amusingly described in all its raging insanity. He eventually ended up doing a respectable stint at Random House, where you get the impression the wheeling and dealing and celebrity lunches sometimes made him feel apprehensive about the distance between his current position and the devoted, dollar-counting book-buyers crowding the floors of The Strand. There are periodic calmly insistent reminders:

People do read serious and worthwhile books. They don't have to be professors or editors or reviewers or the husbands and wives of people like that, or students or researchers. It's interesting to talk to [Diane] Sawyer about Virginia Hamilton Adair, the blind poet who has published her first, very good book, Ants on the Melon, in her eighties. Sawyer is transformed from star to fan instantly, with no huge erudition but with a good reader's intuitive grasp of the meaning and feeling of what she has read. As a publisher and editor, you can sometimes forget that intelligent and sensitive people in all places and occupations and personal situations make books part of their lives. Not most of their lives as you may do, but an important part of them.

It's an odd thing for a life-long editor to need to recall, and it signals the oddness of My Mistake in general, which is terse where most other publishing memoirs are bloated, understated where they're cliched, and refreshingly unassuming where they're, to put it mildly, not ("And then I told Scotty Fitzgerald, "Look, son, it just won't do!"). There are enough industry anecdotes to keep any book-person eagerly reading, but the deeper current - of a man genuinely assessing his life - will stay in the memory longer.