Geoff Wisner

A Few Good Voices in My Head

by Ted Solotaroff. Bessie Books, Harper & Row. 304 pages, paperback, $10.95.

Ted Solotaroff ranges widely in the course of his new book, from Eastern Europe to Greenwich Village, from Philip Roth to Philip Caputo, and from the personal essay to the jeremiad. But his varied material is unified by a plain, vigorous prose style and a distinctive point of view.

Accounts of the early careers of writers are often suffused with a falsely cozy promise of eventual success. It is comfortable to read about Hemingway's hungry years in Paris -- catching pigeons in the park for dinner -- because we know what he went on to do. Solotaroff starts his book with something more unsettling -- the story of how he failed to become a fiction writer. Refusing to recognize the funny, brutal, raffish life that surrounded him in New York, the young Solotaroff persisted in a fanatical dedication to "fetishistic notions of detachment and purity of style and covertly placed meanings." The stories he wrote were meant to contain "a circuitry that was switched on only at the end by an epiphany that was supposed to cast a subtle retrospective light. Or something like that." Meanwhile his determination not to "sell out" by writing anything else but fiction had sunk him into poverty. "Trying to put a foot down in Bohemia," he says, "I had fallen through to the Depression."

This experience, added to ten years as editor of the New American Review, occasional stints of teaching, and a career in book publishing, gives authority to Solotaroff's unsparing assessments of today's young writers, of creative-writing programs, and of the publishing industry. "Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years" conveys the tough but necessary message that to write well takes an investment of years, sometimes many years, and that "rejection and uncertainty and disappointment are as much a part of a writer's life as snow and cold are of an Eskimo's." The successful writer will be not just the talented one but the stubborn one, the one who in Fitzgerald's words is something of a peasant. Another essay sets out a detailed proposal for changing graduate writing programs from what often amounts to a "boondoggle" and a "scam" into a rigorous course of professional training. In Solotaroff's program, writing students would be admitted only after spending some time outside the university. Students would be required to read widely and deeply in more than one language, and to write in several genres.

In "What Has Happened to the Publishing Industry" he etches in acid the tale of how discount chain bookstores, buyouts by conglomerates, and the IRS tax on inventory have combined to drive good books out of print, to create "an atmosphere of fear, cynicism, rapaciousness, and ignorance," and to glut the stores with diet books, celebrity biographies, thrillers, and romances. The quest for the fast buck, he says, has "plugged the high voltage of Hollywood into the delicate circuitry of established author-publisher relationships, shorting out a good many of them and creating overloads of publishers' advances and authors' expectations from which both groups are still recovering." (Solotaroff is partial to electrical metaphors.)

Here, too, he offers concrete proposals, though they don't seem equal to the task of reversing these trends. Bloated corporate salaries should be cut, the glitz removed from the National Book Awards, good book-discussion programs should be aired on PBS and National Public Radio, and a modest portion of publishers' budgets set aside for the intelligent promotion of serious books.

A Few Good Voices also contains a few reviews and critical pieces like those collected in Solotaroff's first book, The Red Hot Vacuum. As a literary critic, his special concern is for writers who take on the political and social issues of our time, and for the worthy books that slip through the "coarse net of the fall book season." (Women authors, however, get fairly scant attention.) It would be good to have more literary criticism from Ted Solotaroff, but to judge from what he says in this book, he is needed more urgently in publishing.

Published in the Harvard Post, March 18, 1988.



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Geoff Wisner A Few Good Voices in My Head by Ted Solotaroff. Bessie Books, Harper & Row. 304 pages, paperback, $10.95. Ted Solotaroff ranges widely in the course of his new book, from Eastern Europe to Greenwich Village, from Philip Roth to Philip Caputo, and from the personal essay to the jeremiad. But his varied material is unified by a plain, vigorous prose style and a distinctive point of view. Accounts of the early careers of writers are often suffused with a falsely cozy promise of eventual success. It is comfortable to read about Hemingway's hungry years in Paris -- catching pigeons in the park for dinner -- because we know what he went on to do. Solotaroff starts his book with something more unsettling -- the story of how he failed to become a fiction writer. Refusing to recognize the funny, brutal, raffish life that surrounded him in New York, the young Solotaroff persisted in a fanatical dedication to "fetishistic notions of detachment and purity of style and covertly placed meanings." The stories he wrote were meant to contain "a circuitry that was switched on only at the end by an epiphany that was supposed to cast a subtle retrospective light. Or something like that." Meanwhile his determination not to "sell out" by writing anything else but fiction had sunk him into poverty. "Trying to put a foot down in Bohemia," he says, "I had fallen through to the Depression." This experience, added to ten years as editor of the New American Review, occasional stints of teaching, and a career in book publishing, gives authority to Solotaroff's unsparing assessments of today's young writers, of creative-writing programs, and of the publishing industry. "Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years" conveys the tough but necessary message that to write well takes an investment of years, sometimes many years, and that "rejection and uncertainty and disappointment are as much a part of a writer's life as snow and cold are of an Eskimo's." The successful writer will be not just the talented one but the stubborn one, the one who in Fitzgerald's words is something of a peasant. Another essay sets out a detailed proposal for changing graduate writing programs from what often amounts to a "boondoggle" and a "scam" into a rigorous course of professional training. In Solotaroff's program, writing students would be admitted only after spending some time outside the university. Students would be required to read widely and deeply in more than one language, and to write in several genres. In "What Has Happened to the Publishing Industry" he etches in acid the tale of how discount chain bookstores, buyouts by conglomerates, and the IRS tax on inventory have combined to drive good books out of print, to create "an atmosphere of fear, cynicism, rapaciousness, and ignorance," and to glut the stores with diet books, celebrity biographies, thrillers, and romances. The quest for the fast buck, he says, has "plugged the high voltage of Hollywood into the delicate circuitry of established author-publisher relationships, shorting out a good many of them and creating overloads of publishers' advances and authors' expectations from which both groups are still recovering." (Solotaroff is partial to electrical metaphors.) Here, too, he offers concrete proposals, though they don't seem equal to the task of reversing these trends. Bloated corporate salaries should be cut, the glitz removed from the National Book Awards, good book-discussion programs should be aired on PBS and National Public Radio, and a modest portion of publishers' budgets set aside for the intelligent promotion of serious books. A Few Good Voices also contains a few reviews and critical pieces like those collected in Solotaroff's first book, The Red Hot Vacuum. As a literary critic, his special concern is for writers who take on the political and social issues of our time, and for the worthy books that slip through the "coarse net of the fall book season." (Women authors, however, get fairly scant attention.) It would be good to have more literary criticism from Ted Solotaroff, but to judge from what he says in this book, he is needed more urgently in publishing. Published in the Harvard Post, March 18, 1988.