Salon Books | Philistines at the Hedgerow

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R E C E N T L Y
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By Jeffrey Meyers
Nonfiction
(06/03/98)
Meditations from a Movable Chair
By Andre Dubus
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(06/02/98)
Be Sweet
By Roy Blount Jr.
Nonfiction
(06/01/98)
Now It's Time to Say Goodbye
By Dale Peck
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(05/29/98)
The Treatment
By Daniel Menaker
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(05/28/98)
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Punch drunk
By Vivian Gornick
Norman Mailer's collected essays reveal the sad legacy of a writer who couldn't stop fighting
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___ PH I L I S T I N E S_ A T_ T H E_ H E D G E R O W
________ p a s s i o n_ &_ p r o p e r t y_ i n _ t h e _ h a m p t o n s

Book cover

BY STEVEN GAINES
LITTLE, BROWN
NONFICTION
320 PAGES

BY CARL SWANSON | Steven Gaines' "Philistines at the Hedgerows" is a gossip-motivated social history of the ritzy cultural-elite beach towns on the eastern tip of Long Island -- although Gaines would hate the use of the word "gossip" to describe what his book's about. The former music journalist can still recite, off the top of his head, the first line of the March 28, 1994, Publisher's Weekly review of his notorious book, "Obsession: The Lives and Times of Calvin Klein": "Little more than a rehash of material that has appeared in supermarket tabloids over the years." After the manic and often shamelessly well-researched way he told the story of Klein's manic self-invention, in person, Gaines has little patience for people calling him a gossip. Which explains a lot about the ambitions of "Philistines" (which is a much nicer book), and about why it's an interesting read even if you live a long way from this satellite status-hell for Manhattan's pecking order obsessives.
Gaines is a sympathetic interviewer who pays exhaustive attention to detail, and he's undoubtedly in love with the wooded landscape of the Hamptons, from its dunes to its ancient, fertile fields. (These fields are now being carved into mini-estates dominated by the hulking manors of the newly rich.) The book is told in a series of independent sections that often trace some line of entropy; we learn how the area -- with its grand houses and unspoiled land -- became increasingly seedy before it was adopted and burnished by Klein and other ambitious, self-made Manhattan multimillionaires. Although Steven Spielberg, Klein, Truman Capote, Edgar Bronfman Jr. and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis all make cameos before Page 7, along with a litany of big-time New York swells that only close readers of Vanity Fair will have heard of, the real story of this book concerns a series of land-crazed people you've certainly never heard of.
The Hamptons have a long history, which Gaines traces back to the 16th century, when they were taken from the Indians. He includes accounts of libel trials and witch hunts along with stories about Jackson Pollock's drunken rampages. He also recalls the time the local arriviste-hating gentry arrested the recently arrived-from-Manhattan owner of a gourmet grocery for violating the aesthetic fascism of the town code by putting pumpkins in front of his store. The meat of the book is the struggle for peace between those who guard the area as a self-regulating WASP-y outback and the maddeningly resourceful waves of self-created men and women arriving from Manhattan -- the philistines of the title.
Gaines considers the victory of the new arrivals as inevitable, and does a particularly touching job of depicting the high-strung locals trying to hold them back. But he's clearly on the side of the landscape, and bemoans the fact that, as more and more people show up, there's less and less of the misty farmland that caused them to fall for the place to begin with. As an aficionado and an arriviste with bestseller money and movie rights income, he has it both ways. This contradiction is never resolved, and probably it can't be.
Gaines knows how to tell a story, and he knows how to dish. Even if "Philistines" sometimes reaches to be the "Our Crowd" of our current, real-estate-obsessed age -- and doesn't quite get there -- it's a satisfying comedy of manners about snobbishness and land-lust among America's overachievers.
SALON | June 4 , 1998
Carl Swanson is a reporter at the New York Observer.


	T A B L E+T A L K Bitches in literature: Discuss literature's less demure females -- from Shakespeare's shrew to Elizabeth Wurtzel -- in the Books area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Gary Cooper By Jeffrey Meyers Nonfiction (06/03/98) Meditations from a Movable Chair By Andre Dubus Nonfiction (06/02/98) Be Sweet By Roy Blount Jr. Nonfiction (06/01/98) Now It's Time to Say Goodbye By Dale Peck Fiction (05/29/98) The Treatment By Daniel Menaker Fiction (05/28/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SEARCH REVIEWS BY: title of book author publisher reviewer F E A T U R E Punch drunk By Vivian Gornick Norman Mailer's collected essays reveal the sad legacy of a writer who couldn't stop fighting (05/27/98)		___ PH I L I S T I N E S_ A T_ T H E_ H E D G E R O W ________ p a s s i o n_ &_ p r o p e r t y_ i n _ t h e _ h a m p t o n s BY STEVEN GAINES LITTLE, BROWN NONFICTION 320 PAGES BY CARL SWANSON \| Steven Gaines' "Philistines at the Hedgerows" is a gossip-motivated social history of the ritzy cultural-elite beach towns on the eastern tip of Long Island -- although Gaines would hate the use of the word "gossip" to describe what his book's about. The former music journalist can still recite, off the top of his head, the first line of the March 28, 1994, Publisher's Weekly review of his notorious book, "Obsession: The Lives and Times of Calvin Klein": "Little more than a rehash of material that has appeared in supermarket tabloids over the years." After the manic and often shamelessly well-researched way he told the story of Klein's manic self-invention, in person, Gaines has little patience for people calling him a gossip. Which explains a lot about the ambitions of "Philistines" (which is a much nicer book), and about why it's an interesting read even if you live a long way from this satellite status-hell for Manhattan's pecking order obsessives. Gaines is a sympathetic interviewer who pays exhaustive attention to detail, and he's undoubtedly in love with the wooded landscape of the Hamptons, from its dunes to its ancient, fertile fields. (These fields are now being carved into mini-estates dominated by the hulking manors of the newly rich.) The book is told in a series of independent sections that often trace some line of entropy; we learn how the area -- with its grand houses and unspoiled land -- became increasingly seedy before it was adopted and burnished by Klein and other ambitious, self-made Manhattan multimillionaires. Although Steven Spielberg, Klein, Truman Capote, Edgar Bronfman Jr. and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis all make cameos before Page 7, along with a litany of big-time New York swells that only close readers of Vanity Fair will have heard of, the real story of this book concerns a series of land-crazed people you've certainly never heard of. The Hamptons have a long history, which Gaines traces back to the 16th century, when they were taken from the Indians. He includes accounts of libel trials and witch hunts along with stories about Jackson Pollock's drunken rampages. He also recalls the time the local arriviste-hating gentry arrested the recently arrived-from-Manhattan owner of a gourmet grocery for violating the aesthetic fascism of the town code by putting pumpkins in front of his store. The meat of the book is the struggle for peace between those who guard the area as a self-regulating WASP-y outback and the maddeningly resourceful waves of self-created men and women arriving from Manhattan -- the philistines of the title. Gaines considers the victory of the new arrivals as inevitable, and does a particularly touching job of depicting the high-strung locals trying to hold them back. But he's clearly on the side of the landscape, and bemoans the fact that, as more and more people show up, there's less and less of the misty farmland that caused them to fall for the place to begin with. As an aficionado and an arriviste with bestseller money and movie rights income, he has it both ways. This contradiction is never resolved, and probably it can't be. Gaines knows how to tell a story, and he knows how to dish. Even if "Philistines" sometimes reaches to be the "Our Crowd" of our current, real-estate-obsessed age -- and doesn't quite get there -- it's a satisfying comedy of manners about snobbishness and land-lust among America's overachievers. SALON \| June 4 , 1998 Carl Swanson is a reporter at the New York Observer.