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crouch likes to call Brown a circus master. What she may really be, however, is journalism's most deft party host -- which might explain why the magazine's huge and tumultuous special issues, which she initiated, have often seemed among her most successful. With a few exceptions (notably the special fashion issue, which seemed to shimmy more for advertisers than readers), these are books that, as one publishing world observer put it, "no other editor in the world could have pulled together. They keep you in beach-house reading for weeks at a time." A special Hollywood issue in 1994, for example, not only dredged up work from the magazine's past masters (Benchley, Perelman, Flanner) but featured Nicholson Baker on movie projectors, Henry Louis Gates Jr. on the young black filmmakers the Hughes brothers, John Updike on Gene Kelly's moves and an extended interview with Pauline Kael. A fiction issue in 1995 snagged work from a huge swath of this century's literary killer elite: Roth, Styron, Ford, Amis, Oates, Doctorow, Updike, Naipaul and Theroux. When you have this much buttered popcorn, to paraphrase a Pauline Kael film review, it hardly matters whether every kernel pops.
The New Yorker's special issues don't appear all that often, however. And if Brown claims that she's finally slain her dragons, is finally having fun and running the magazine she wants to run, the real question is: What kind of magazine, week in and week out, is that?
For many readers, this one included, the New Yorker has long been defined by the back of its book, and the magazine's longer-term critics (Kael on film, Updike on books, Croce on dance) have influenced a generation of writers. Of the three most notable critics Brown brought in with her, two are imports from the U.K. -- Anthony Lane from the Independent and the American-born John Lahr, who also worked for the British press. Another, James Wolcott, tiptoed over from Vanity Fair.
Lane, who shares film reviewing duties with Terrence Rafferty, wasted no time in establishing himself as the magazine's most accessible, and probably most beloved, critical voice. A merry sprite, Lane strews comic riffs like pixie dust as he gambols along. ("To lap-dance," he explained in his review of "Showgirls," "you undress, sit your client down, order him to stay still and fully clothed, then hover over him, making a motion that you have perfected by watching Mister Softee ice-cream dispensers.") Lane also happens to be one of the few film critics remaining who can send you rushing out of your chair and into a movie you never thought you'd want to see -- "Speed," for example -- if only to share the giddy buzz in his cranium. Lane's most obvious fault is that, when he comes to a fork in the road, he'll always go low instead of high, settling for a hammy joke instead of reaching for something more exact. Entire truckloads of his cracks are already browning at the edges: "He's blond, and he's thoughtful," Lane chirped about the title character in Bernardo Bertolucci's Zoe Baird-era film "Little Buddha," "and his nanny, so far as we know, is not an illegal alien."
John Lahr has made a bigger splash with his profiles (Woody Allen, Roseanne), which he dashes off in a high style reminiscent of Kenneth Tynan's, than he has with his theater reviews. Wolcott is a special case. The most caustic cat in captivity, on a good day he's the most fearless and rangy critic alive. At the New Yorker, however, he was boxed into the TV beat, where he grappled futilely with an endless parade of talk shows and Fox sitcoms. (It was as if Brown had hired H.L. Mencken and told him he could only review breakfast cereal.) Wolcott has since fled back to Vanity Fair, where his eponymous column once again scorches a monthly hole in the coffee table.
The New Yorker's book criticism, oddly, leaves a slightly less distinct impression. John Updike's pieces are always worth seeking out, but other worthy bylines blend together. James Linville, an editor at the Paris Review, says "The world of letters needs a Robert Hughes, if not another Lionel Trilling or Alfred Kazin -- that is, an authoritative critic who addresses a wide audience on a regular basis. The first place one should look for someone like this would be the New Yorker, and they simply haven't given us that."
Linville does have praise for the New Yorker's fiction editor, Bill Buford, whom Brown hired away from Granta magazine in 1995. "With Buford's arrival they've dropped that sense of their own sacredness," he says, "and it's been exciting to see the vital currents of the culture, high and low, flowing through the magazine." Buford has kept many of the magazine's longtime contributors (Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore, Tim O'Brien) while opening the New Yorker's doors to younger writers like David Foster Wallace, Donald Antrim and A.M. Homes. Buford has also been scanning the horizon for international fiction, like the fine story by Vladimir Arsenijevic, a young Serbian writer, that ran in January 1996.
Linville -- and several other book-industry observers -- do have one beef with the current state of the New Yorker's fiction, however. "It gives you pause to see in their pages, in place of a beautifully made short story, a brilliant set piece from a hot novel that appears on the very week of a publisher's release," Linville says. A New York book review editor put it this way: "the New Yorker used to encourage fiction writers, and publish their best work well before it found its way into book form. Now they're often simply grabbing choice excerpts and publishing them as the writer's books appear. It's as if they're simply hoping some of that writer's glamour rubs off on them."
When it comes to the New Yorker's nonfiction, nearly every writer interviewed -- those who work for the magazine, as well as those who do not -- professed to have more respect for the magazine's longer reported pieces than for its profiles. "The profiles are always solid, but they are far more formulaic than they once were," says one regular New Yorker writer. "It almost doesn't matter whose byline is on top of them. They're like journalism school exercises."
If the magazine's profiles have grown more formulaic, one reason might simply be space limitations. When Jervis Anderson published a magisterial profile of Ralph Ellison in 1976, for example, you felt like he had all the room in the world to climb into his subject's soul -- his lovely, unhurried piece ran to what felt like (I didn't count them) 20,000 words. Anderson had spent what felt like weeks with this subject. In 1994, David Remnick revisited Ellison for a short, topical profile ("While the literary world awaits a second novel from Ralph Ellison, now eighty, his early work is once again in the forefront of black intellectual debate"), and while Remnick is as sure-footed as any journalist alive, his piece was a quick hit -- the kind of thing that any good writer could have tossed off with a few week's advance notice.
Anderson's long Ellison profile ran under the spare headline "Going to the Territory," with the novelist's name in small print under a line drawing. This makes an interesting contrast with the topical and almost comically leering headlines that are dropped on the magazine's literary profiles today. A piece about Ayn Rand was subtitled: "Ayn Rand -- cult figure, Nietzsche disciple, founder of Objectivism -- was also a girl who was crazy about boys." A profile of Iris Murdoch promised, "If you know Iris Murdoch's wild and dark novels, you won't believe her life with John Bayley."
The real competition, New Yorker writers say, is for the extended center-of-book reporting pieces. These articles may not be as lengthy and meditative as they once were -- "Thank God," says Stanley Crouch -- but the magazine continues to showcase, on a regular basis, the best literary
journalism being written in America. Open almost any issue and you find pieces like Lawrence Wright's on the mysteries of identical twins, Alec Wilkinson's on witnesses to Khmer Rouge atrocities who've gone blind, Jonathan Harr's on the "crash detectives" probing the causes behind the crash of USAir flight 427, Tina Rosenberg's on the legacy of Apartheid, Joe Morgenstern's on the confessions of the engineer of New York's towering Citicorp Center, who realized his building could be blown down, and Henry Louis Gates' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man."
Articles like Gates' have won over some of Brown's critics. "One thing I hated about the old New Yorker was that it had such a predictable, and very unsophisticated, white liberal perspective on race issues," says one contributor. "When Tina got there, to her credit, she changed that. She has hired not only many black writers but many gay ones, and there is no whiff of affirmative action. It's meant a great deal to me to see pieces by writers like Gates, Malcolm Gladwell and Hilton Als in the magazine. They make up for all of those Ken Auletta pieces about Michael Ovitz."
Brown's New Yorker has pushed other boundaries, too. Susan Faludi's long story about male porn stars introduced the phrase "waiting for wood" into the vernacular, and it featured long stretches of quoted dialogue -- a female star "can choose who she wants to fuck, when she wants to fuck, the script that she wants to fuck in, what day they are going to fuck" -- that almost certainly had William Shawn spinning in his grave. (Shawn was so sensitive to vulgarity, Louis Menand has noted, that he once coerced Kenneth Tynan into replacing the term "pissoir" in a theater review with the phrase "a circular curbside construction.") Shawn has been kept spinning -- the following week's issue featured an Avedon photograph of a half-dressed Nadja Auermann getting bonked in a doorway by a skeleton -- and he's not likely to be at rest anytime soon.
The New Yorker needed to unleash its language. But many critics have argued that the magazine's other attempts to be "provocative" -- that Avedon fashion spread, Annie Leibovitz's racy photos from the O.J. Simpson soap opera and some of Art Spiegelman's covers (an Easter bunny crucified on an IRS tax form) -- have often felt merely shallow and stagy. When longtime New Yorker writer George W. S. Trow handed in his resignation, he complained bitterly about the magazine's fascination with the Simpson case. "For you to kiss the ass of celebrity culture at this moment that way," he wrote, "is like selling your soul to get close to the Hapsburgs -- in 1913." To Brown's credit, she gave Trow's overheated letter a very public hearing at the magazine's 70th anniversary party in 1995. The actor John Lithgow read the letter, and then Debra Winger -- in what the New York Post described as "a suitably immaculate English accent" -- read Brown's response: "I am distraught at your defection, but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught."
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