Passing the Torch in the Penny Press

This moment was bound to happen. It’s been approaching steadily for years, of course, and its tread has been especially audible in the last few months. But lots of other reading gets in the way, and the torrent of books never lessens, and it was easy to get distracted.

But then the moment comes: the first issue of the New York Review of Books with somebody other than Bob Silvers as Editor. The man in charge now is Ian Buruma, and his first full issue arrived in the mail as quietly and unassumingly as Buruma himself. I didn’t even think about it at first as I settled in with the issue; in the back of my mind, I was just reflexively thinking about “waiting periods” and “transition times,” and then as I was turning pages it hit me: no, the transition is over. This is an issue of the NYRB with neither Barbara Epstein nor Bob Silvers.

The first thing I noticed was the thing that felt most disloyal: had I not known, I would never have known. That same NYRB indispensable magic was right there on every page. The great Anne Applebaum writing about regressive European politics; Jenny Uglow writing about 18^th century history (in this case a new book about the thoroughly odious Hans Sloane); James Fenton, here writing about an art exhibit; Luc Sante writing a fantastic piece on the late John Ashbery. There were other names – Francine Prose, Tim Parks, John Gray, Darryl Pinckney (at one remove: a reprint of the fine introductory essay he provided for the new NYRB volume reprinting the collected criticism of Elizabeth Hardwick), Diane Johnson – and there will be more names, in upcoming months. Each piece on the Table of Contents had that same marvelous NYRB quality of being a little world unto itself.

There’s a distinct element of magic to a quality like that, and magic is the most perishable of the arts. I’ve been an editor for a long time, and a part of me was just always assuming that, depute the enormous talent-pool of the NYRB, despite the store of literary good will it’s amassed over the decades, such magic was an editorial creation. I’d been assuming that Bob Silvers was creating and sustaining it, that it was a vision more than a Standard Operating Procedure … and that, inevitably, it would die with him.

And yet here it was, in this new issue. Classics professor Hayden Pelliccia does a fantastic job reviewing two new translations of the Iliad. China specialist Andrew

Fionn Whitehead as a young British soldier in Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk

Nathan reviews three new books on China’s complicated and growing role on the 21^st century’s international stage. Larry Wolff reviews a new production of Rossini’s The Siege of Corinth. New York Times columnist Linda Greenhouse writes a searing piece on women’s rights. And the generally reserved historian Max Hastings writes a review of Michael Korda’s new book Alone: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat into Victory and Christopher Nolan’s new movie Dunkirk that bristles with sadness and anger over Brexit:

After Brexit takes place I fear that this time around we shall be unable to rely upon the Russians to stage a grand diversion in the East to spare us from the hideous economic, social, cultural, and political consequences of attempting to fight on alone, without the impeccable justification that Hitler has forced such a course upon us.

Even after I realized that I was reading the first Ian Buruma issue of the NYRB, I just kept reading, the slow, silent shock of it building but not intruding. I jumped around from article to article as my interest took me, and it wasn’t until I circled back to Benjamin Friedman’s review of a new book on the idea of universal basic income that I reached a little grace note I could no longer ignore. Friedman is a Harvard economics professor with a deep expertise on his subject, and I learned a lot from his review. Then I got to its final footnote:

This essay was suggested by my long-time friend Bob Silvers. I am sad that he is no longer here to give it the benefit of his wisdom and incisive editing. I miss him.

That’s when I stopped. That simple line, “I miss him,” stopped me completely. It made me identify the sadness that had been building as I read: it wasn’t that the NYRB had either radically improved or radically worsened with this issue, with “Bob Silvers,” a tireless caretaker who lived and breathed the magazine, now somehow reduced to a few words of fine print at the bottom of a couple of pages (seeing his name down there on the masthead next to Barbara Epstein’s, each one now with the two sets of dates, very nearly broke my heart). Instead, it was that the NYRB hasn’t changed much at all. It’s still varied, it’s still incredibly smart, it’s still a full meal of a reading experience.

It makes sense. After all, Ian Buruma treasured the old NYRB as much as anybody. No doubt his own imprint, his own kind of magic, will become evident as the issues go by, but for now, here’s the New York Review of Books, being its same old excellent and woolly and challenging and fascinating self. It turns out all that was possible without Bob Silvers ensconced behind a pile of galley copies in his office at one in the morning willing it all into existence. That should be a note of hope. In time it’ll certainly feel that way. But I finished this issue very nearly in tears.