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Is George Will a "pompous pansy"? Bash or defend the right-wing gadfly in the Media area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Under the Covers
Yellow journalism
Sob sister
Beyond monsters, addicts and subhumans
Stalemate
BROWSE THE
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He knows what you've been reading
BY LAURA MILLER | A friend recently told me he'd picked up a copy of that old '60s radical how-to manual "The Anarchist's Cookbook" in a small bookstore dedicated to African-American books. The clerk's hand hovered over the cash register keys for a moment before she asked, "You're not from the FBI, are you?" He guffawed, said no, and she responded, "I didn't think so. You're not wearing a suit, and they usually do." The federal government's ugly propensity for investigating citizens' reading matter has mostly been a worry for small bookstores like the one my friend patronized and for certain librarians, who a few years ago during a domestic terrorism scare were asked to keep track of materials checked out by "Middle Eastern-looking" individuals. But with Kenneth Starr's subpoena of Monica Lewinsky's purchases from two Washington, D.C., bookstores -- Kramerbooks, an independent, and the Georgetown branch of Barnes & Noble -- the practice emerges into the blinding limelight of the Clinton scandals. The special prosecutor is supposedly seeking confirmation that Lewinsky bought books as gifts for the president. Rumor has specified that one title was Nicholson Baker's erotic novel "Vox." Kramerbooks wavered a bit when first hit with Starr's request -- resisting was deemed likely to incur unaffordable legal costs. Now, with the backing of the American Booksellers' Association, and with Barnes & Noble, America's largest bookstore chain, also targeted, there's a concerted effort to deny the special prosecutor access to the records. "What a customer buys from us is privileged information," Barnes & Noble chief executive Leonard Riggio told the New York Times. Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers' Association's Foundation for Free Expression, which is providing legal support to Kramerbooks, argues that booksellers, who provide material protected by the First Amendment, should not be treated like "hardware stores ... It's extremely rare, if not unprecedented, that a prosecutor should do this. And we don't want to see a precedent set that everyone should have to fear that their book purchases could become known to the government." Like much of the Lewinsky investigation, this particular prosecutorial tentacle is coated in a slimy layer of innuendo. The origin of the report that Starr was seeking confirmation that Lewinsky had bought "Vox" remains mysterious. The rumor first cropped up, unsourced, in the Washington Post's gossip column, "The Reliable Source." Annie Groer and Ann Gerhart, who write the column, did not return phone messages inquiring as to the source of the rumor. Finan maintains that no records of Lewinsky's purchases have been handed over to the prosecutor. So where did the report that she bought "Vox" come from? Since Starr's office has a history of selectively leaking information that reflects badly on recalcitrant witnesses, that seems to be the likeliest source, but the special prosecutor's spokeswoman, Debbie Gershman, was not available for comment. Baker, the author of "Vox," is bemused by the situation. "It's always exciting to know someone bought one of my books and may have even liked it, but if Lewinsky did buy 'Vox,' she didn't want to tell me about it, or anybody else." Terse newspaper descriptions of "Vox" as "a book whose theme is telephone sex," while not technically inaccurate, hardly do justice to the novel's literary quality, its sweet intelligence and inventive wordplay. "It's a little, gentle divertissement, a bagatelle," Baker explains. "I wanted that book to be an exercise in privacy, asking what people would be willing to say given an anonymous, receptive listener and no one overhearing, except of course the reader. It's meant to be read in private, which is why I didn't sell the movie rights. That's the nice thing about books, their privacy." Instead, the suggestion that Lewinsky bought "Vox," perhaps as a gift for the president, seems to be intended to further brand Lewinsky as a shameless hussy in the eyes of the public. "The sordidness of this is too depressing," says Baker. "It seems to me that Starr is using the legal system to stalk Monica Lewinsky, to say, 'Even if you don't cooperate with us, your private reading habits will still be made public.' There's no crime at the center of all this. It's pure bullying." If Lewinsky did, in fact, buy a copy of "Vox" and give it to the president, what, in truth, does that imply? People who exchange flirtatious gifts may never consummate that flirtation (just as the two characters in "Vox" never actually meet). If Starr thought that characterizing "Vox" as porn might somehow lessen public outrage at seeing Lewinsky's book buying records rifled, he has made a prude's miscalculation. Baker's 1992 novel was a bestseller, and hundreds of thousands of American readers handed over their money for a copy. Surely very few of them would appreciate seeing that fact published in both the Washington Post and the New York Times.
In fact, Starr himself seems to be begging for an illuminating literary gift -- say,
a copy of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables," the story of a man, guilty of a
trifling crime, who is hounded for years by a policeman so obsessed with
apprehending him that he loses all sense of proportion, decency and
humanity.
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