You wait for a great book then three turn up
Michael Wolff, Michael Lewis, and Walter Isaacson walk in to a bar...
Envy, as we all know, is one of the seven deadly sins. It is also a seldom-admitted condition of being a journalist. Envy of more successful rivals drips through bitchy reviews and critiques of the work of others — publicly or at the bar.
What got me on this track has been the reaction to three different and in their way phenomenal non-fiction books by three journalists. (Actually, I envy all three.)
Michael Wolff launched The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire — incredibly just as Rupert Murdoch “retired” — to bitchiness from less successful journalists who consider him at best frivolous and at worst unethical. (Actually, they say much worse.)
Michael Lewis launched his latest butterfly-on-the-wall blockbuster Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon on the day his subject, billionaire cryptocurrency wunderkind-turned-Omen boy Sam Bankman-Fried went on trial accused of epic fraud. Lewis faces ethical questions probably more to do with his success. (He’s gone far beyond the $10 a word he got at Vanity Fair).
Then there’s the doyenne of the great-man-of-history biography (to be fair, he did write one on a woman) Walter Isaacson whose tome on Elon Musk launched last month. He faced criticism he’d spent two years with the richest and potentially most fascinating man in the world and uncovered little and analysed less. The only real problem was an error or alleged error Isaacson corrected but which left a bad taste.
The reason I wanted to address these three men and their books is because the various reactions say something about journalism and journalists.
I have acknowledged I know Wolff and am fond of him — partly because members of what he calls the Church of Journalism despise him. He laughs all the way to his top-end New York apartment and Long Island beach house. In perhaps the most perceptive comment about Wolff, former New York Times media reporter Ben Smith noted that Wolff’s runaway success books on Donald Trump did so well they allowed “him to finally afford the lifestyle he had already been living.”
I know Lewis a little. I envied him when I first met him through a mutual friend. Lewis has just published Liars Poker, peeling back the curtain on his own greed and that of the entire finance industry in the 1980s. He was good-looking, clever, and smooth, and had a cute home in Hampstead built for Napoleonic war veterans. We met again at that friend’s funeral and Lewis was funny, handsome, witty. (Envy).
Isaacson, I don’t know but I admire his trajectory including his period running CNN where I worked much later. He has a patrician manner from his apparently privileged upbringing in New Orleans (as does the younger Lewis) and his southern accent masks his intelligence and layers it with what I assume is genuine charm.
Why I went down this path is to say a relatively simple thing: each of these writers is brilliant in their own way and each is as flawed as any writer or reporter. Each book is different in style and intent. If you want a better or different book do go ahead and try.
Wolff writes with a sweeping colourful access to insights and quotes that seem, and in some cases almost certainly are, miraculous. Lewis insinuates himself into the lives of his subjects and — as our mutual friend once said — “falls slightly in love” with them. Isaacson also has a method — patience, quietude, confidante, and a chronological approach he uses to diminish the risk of being seen to fall in love with his subject.
I read so many reviews of the Wolff book and excerpts of it and listened to so many interviews I wasn’t sure I could be bothered to read it. Yet, I got it on Kindle and have wasted hours devouring, relishing the high-speed psycho-analysis and surgical eviscerations of arseholes from Sean Hannity to a knickerless Kimberly Guilfoyle.
A friend gave me the Musk doorstop and I will no doubt read it though again I have read many reviews and listened to Isaacson forced to defend himself to lesser writers.
Maybe with the Lewis book (I’ve read Liar’s Poker, The New New Thing, The Premonition, and perhaps others and I guess I did watch the Brad Pitt movie version of The Big Short), I might wait for the movie or the outcome of the trial though I have read many excerpts and his almost real-time coverage of the SBF trial.
In an earlier post, I noted what I thought was a pretty silly review of the Wolff book by a journalist I admire — Dorothy Byrne — who clearly wanted a different book by a different author. It said more about her than the book. Here are some excerpts from other reviews of these three books which might explain why I’ve done this.
(To digress slightly, I loved a line in a New York Times story probing the Lewis method. In the report, Isaacson described a story Lewis had told about him at some event as “more beautiful” than he remembered it being. )Apparently, they will have the opportunity to face off soon and it will be delicious but in my opinion, with all three of these amazing writers and chroniclers, we need to cut them a little slack.
Recommended reads and a listen:
Michael Lewis Doesn’t Do Villains, is a beautifully reported but lofty New York Times feature essentially asking why Lewis is so bloody good and so damned successful when he doesn’t eviscerate the people he writes about. The story notes the old $10-a-word anecdote and the fact Lewis no longer gets an advance for his books, he gets half of it all. That’s before the almost inevitable movie or television rights. (Envy). The reporter asks: “What happens when a writer who is used to rapturous reception, with a knack for shaping stories, collides with an active public drama he doesn’t control?”
The insider: how Michael Lewis got a backstage pass for the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, is a more balanced though still incisive long-read in The Guardian by author Samanth Subramanian. (To be clear, Lewis is now a public person and his work and approach should be open to criticism and analysis in my view). Subramanian writes: “For all the unimpeded views he gets of the seamier sides of society, Lewis constructs his books along peculiarly uplifting lines. In The Big Short, a posse of investors makes money off lying, mercenary bankers; in The Premonition, doctors foresee pandemics and plan for them – only to see their advice being neglected during Covid-19. Lewis offers these stories as stirring rather than depressing – as triumphs against adversity, even as American life crumbles in the background.”
Succession without a sense of humour, is a review of the Wolff book in The Guardian by another journalist I know a bit (it is an incestuous job), Andrew Anthony. It is a much fairer assessment that the biting Bryne review which was more biting at thin air than what was actually in the book or Wolff, as if he could give a damn.
“No one emerges from these pages with much credit,” Anthony writes with fabulous English understatement. “It is like an unfunny version of Succession, populated with cowed senior executives, desperately trying to parse Murdoch’s every mumbled utterance for some kind of directional sense, and then, on failing to square the circle of taming a highly lucrative but out of control “news” channel, lining up somebody to blame and sack before they can be blamed and sacked themselves.”
(I’m 208 of 321 pages into the Wolff book and it is delicious and scurrilous. I say that as someone whose idea of fun is reading history with proper footnotes such as the equally racy The World: A Family History of Humanity by Simon Sebag-Montefiore.)
Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People, is the New York Times book review take on the Isaacson book.
“Isaacson, whose previous biographical subjects include Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs, is a patient chronicler of obsession; in the case of Musk, he can occasionally seem too patient — a hazard for any biographer who is given extraordinary access…,” The Times reviewer Jennifer Szalai asks, not unreasonably, adding later: “it would have been nice if Isaacson had pushed him to answer a basic question: What on earth does any of it even mean?”
If you want a defence of his approach from Isaacson himself it might be worth listening to him on a podcast with Kara Swisher who at least tries to pin down why he didn’t appear to ask Musk more difficult questions. There’s also an amusing Lunch with the FT with writer Gillian Tett talking to Isaacson in a New Orleans restaurant.
“‘I never wanted to be either his therapist or adviser.’ Fair enough. But their relationship does highlight the challenge of writing about a living person: how do you get close enough to capture their essence without being captured yourself?,’ Tett asks him in the interview. Fair enough indeed.
This might be a bit self-indulgent so do let me know. I’d love to know what you think of these books — any of them — or my contention about envy. Also, I reckon Michael Wolff would emerge from the bar alive and sober and with an amazing ability to recall what was said while Lewis and Isaacson would still be talking and charming each other over cocktails.
Great stuff and more please! Michael Lewis is a LEGEND!