Review by Booklist Review
During the New York newspaper strike of 1962, writers, especially new ones, had no place to publicize their work via reviews. However, out of crisis came opportunity, and literary heavyweights Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, Jason and Barbara Epstein, and Robert B. Silvers founded the New York Review of Books. Eleven years later, novelist and critic Pinckney (Busted in New York and Other Essays, 2019), then a brash poetry student at Columbia, bulldozed his way into Hardwick's creative writing class and a heady literary society that would change his life and give voice to his art. Hardwick became his mentor, adopted mother, and best friend; her circle, his extended family. Sitting on Hardwick's deep-red velvet sofa, Pinckney was enveloped in discussions of Rimbaud, Marx, Stein, Arendt, the Cold War, Vietnam, and the Black Arts movement. The guest list was a Pulitzer and Nobel name-dropper's paradise: Zora Neal Hurston, Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, Howard Brookner, Mary McCarthy. The recounted gossip here can be a bit much, yet as the years advance and these luminaries suffer the ravages of age, Pinckney's affectionate reminiscences capture their lasting brilliance. While Pinckney preserves an observer's distance between himself and most of these celebrities, his profound 20-year bond with Hardwick glows on the page like warm afternoon sunlight.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this sparkling memoir, novelist and playwright Pinckney (High Cotton) recollects his salad days in the 1970s and '80s in the vibrant circle surrounding the New York Review of Books. The epicenter of the action was the home of the novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, his English professor at Columbia and lifelong friend, whose affable presence and acerbic commentary--"You're the worst poet I've ever read," she observed after sampling his verse--pervades the book. Also in his orbit were Review editors Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers, essayists Susan Sontag and James Baldwin, and avant-garde documentarian Howard Brookner. Pinckney limns the intellectual ferment in the liberal literary establishment as it opened up to gay, Black men like him, swirling with dinner parties, readings, painful editing sessions, political protests, drugs, B-52s shows, innumerable witticisms, and, increasingly, AIDS deaths. His prose is entertaining, gossipy, and full of vivid thumbnails yet, in its loose-jointed way, deeply serious about literature and craft ("Then Susan was eating an omelette and talking about the fear when you think people will criticize you for writing about something you know nothing about, something she said I said when I was trying to write on Döblin"). The result is a captivating portrait of the writing life in one of its richest settings. (Oct.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Brilliant memoir of a sentimental education among the literati of a bygone New York. Pinckney arrived in Manhattan from his native Indiana a wide-eyed young man who quickly fell under the spell of mentor Elizabeth Hardwick. He was quickly instructed in the art of literary rivalry: "Had I read Allen Tate? A poet I'd never heard of. --You don't need him. Faulkner? The Bear. --You do need him. But don't ever do that again. --Excuse me? --Read Lillian." Hellman, that is, whom Hardwick hated even as she loved Mary McCarthy. Then there was Robert Lowell, Hardwick's ex-husband, a psychic time bomb; and Robert and Barbara Silvers, editors of the New York Review of Books, who gave budding writer Pinckney room to roam. Young, gay, and Black, Pinckney was discovering a different New York, one in which Susan Sontag might be on one corner and Sid Vicious on the other and in which AIDS was a constant threat. Pinckney writes in pyrotechnic flashes, stringing one memorable episode after another without much connective tissue. His memoir is both stunningly well written and stuffed with dishy gossip. For example, the critic William Empson stuffed his ears with chewing gum to "block out student noise," then couldn't get it out. The Silvers' "never left the office together, at the same time, or shared a taxi," racing to see who could get to that night's party first all the same. Stanley Crouch, "wobbly on a bicycle on Second Avenue," opined that Pinckney had influential White women friends because their husbands weren't sexually threatened by him. The book is also rich in literary instruction: why one should read Melville and Hawthorne and Woolf, why--Pinckney's husband, the poet James Fenton, insists--one should read prose and not poetic translations of Dante, and why one shouldn't trust a word Henry Kissinger writes. An essential document of literary history evoking an era of hope, youth, wisdom, and tragedy. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
