Chasing the Zeitgeist

What's hot? Please stop telling me.

Substacker Stephen Robinson wrote an interesting essay on a new book that seems to be causing a bit of a ruckus inside publishing if nowhere else: Lindy West’s new memoir of polyamory, Adult Braces. Until Robinson’s essay, I was blessedly unaware of the discourse, and I haven’t read the book. Not many people have—3,000 according to BookScan, the industry’s point-of-sale tracker—and that was the point of the piece. And the fact that the book has garnered two in-depth pieces in The Atlantic, plus coverage in The New York Times, New York Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal.

“Surely, the assignment editors at these publications do some research into how a book is selling before approving lengthy think pieces,” Robinson writes. “That’s how you avoid covering a local junior high talent show. However, it seems as if people were determining relative news value based on chatter within that tight bubble. Slate ran a profile about West and her book — which triggered an ugly response from West’s husband who everyone loathes now — that was filed under the category “Fame.” That seems like a stretch.”

Nice burn. Anyway, I put fingertip to keyboard because this paragraph shook loose something I learned about the big-time book and mag biz back when I toiled in Manhattan’s carpeted hallways in the mid-1990s. Something that is fundamental to both of those industries, and why they have so much less throw-weight now than they once had. And the realization is counterintuitive, especially if you’re a reader — a person who loves books and magazines, and believes in them as something that lasts.

Books and magazines are not published for readers. They are published as part of a complex kabuki going on inside corporations, to benefit the people inside the book imprint or magazine. It’s not simply that Lindy West is someone who clearly matters to people in New York publishing—and I hasten to add that I have read her online work, and also her 2016 memoir Shrill, liking both. It is that “polyamory” as a topic is something that the precise type of person who works in New York publishing is going to be fascinated by. People have been coupling in all sorts of interesting ways for as long as there have been people; “polyamory” on the other hand, is practically Greek for “Brooklyn.”

To survive as an editor at a publication or an imprint is a social accomplishment. I don’t say this disrespectfully, and don’t think it’s ever been much different (with the caveat I explain below). At least that’s the way it was in the Nineties; I remember being shocked when I discovered that a girl I was dating had been put in charge of Cosmo’s sex quizzes without ever having gotten past third base. (We soon rectified that and, bona fides earned, she dumped my sorry ass.)

What gets published, and once published, promoted, is pretty much up to the whims of a hierarchy. These decisions are achieved not by data, but by the perceptions of power, of potential, of “heat”—in other words, the story around a book. Which makes sense, everyone in publishing is a sucker for a story, and with every book they are trying to create the story that sells the product.

The other thing is, because careers in publishing are so financially difficult, the caste of people who can become editors, narrow in the Nineties, is almost certainly narrower now. I remember my first conversation with a headhunter, back in 1991. “What kind of salary are you looking for?” I paused for a second, and added up the monthly nut for the studio on 88th Street between 1st and York I was sharing with my girlfriend, who was working at Christie’s auction house. “$31,000,” I said.

She laughed in my face. “Where the hell did you get that number?”

“My monthly bills.” I still don’t know why I blushed.

All this is a long way of saying, Lindy West’s book was published not because there was a guaranteed audience for it among book-buyers, but because it appealed to the real audience: book editors, publicists, and apparently, assigning editors at major newspapers. Those people are not readers. Readers are assumed (often wrongly).

In his piece, Robinson speaks of the days when words-on-paper was a truly mass taste—before, I’d argue, readers had been purposely and systematically trained to divorce content from commerce. He mentions that Lewis Grizzard, a successful newspaper humorist of the second-rank, used to move the kind of numbers today’s writers would commit murder on BookTok for. “1979’s Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You: A Good Beer Joint Is Hard to Find and Other Facts of Life (his titles were famously long-winded and this parenthetical explanation hasn’t helped) sold 75,000 copies in its first week,” Robinson wrote.

There are a million reasons why humor books don’t sell like they did 47 years ago, and as the publisher of a humor magazine (and now books), I can list them all. There are a million more reasons why newspapers are pretty much a spent force, and magazines more a lifestyle signifier than something that moves our culture. But there’s one reason that I never hear mentioned, and it’s what I thought of when I read Robinson’s piece.

Among people who still care about such stuff, Esquire of the 1960s is considered to be the high point of American periodicals. I still remember the day I discovered the tall, colorful, ridiculously bountiful issues in the old Periodicals Room at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library. Even though I had no time—in September 1987, a history degree was still a matter of reading endless pages of print—I ate bound volumes until the librarian kicked me out at midnight. In that era of New Haven, being anywhere but your bedroom at midnight was a physically dangerous proposition, but I was a man ensorceled.

As beautiful and influential as his magazine became, Hayes had not been any kind of sure thing as editor; in the late 50s, Esquire’s aging bowspirit Arnold Gingrich had two deputies: Hayes, and a man named Clay Felker. Both men were brilliant editors, but very different people. Felker was urbane where Hayes was rumpled, Felker socially prominent and well-connected where Hayes was a literary ex-Marine. The biggest difference—to me, at least, and I suppose 39 years of editing later I suppose my opinion counts for something—was Felker’s interest in the “zeitgeist.” Felker was obsessed with identifying, and if necessary, creating, the micro-trends that shimmer through certain influential groups of people at certain times. After all, Felker was part of those groups; he always had been. Hayes was not. I seem to recall Felker once saying, “What Harold doesn’t know could fill a book.”

I’m overstating this dichotomy for the purpose of brevity; Hayes could and did traffic in zeitgeisty features (1970’s post-Manson “California Evil” has stuck with me across the decades), and Felker pulled off tons of old-fashioned journalism. And the boundary can be cloudy; an authentic shift in the zeitgeist is authentically news.

Gingrich picked Hayes, and launched that magazine into the stratosphere. Felker, stung, first moved to the Sunday magazine of The New York Herald-Tribune, and then to New York magazine, which he co-founded in 1968. Felker’s obit in the New York Times—he outlived Hayes by nineteen years—summed up his take on magazines nicely: “[At New York, Felker] adopted a tone that was unapologetically elitist, indefatigably trendy and proudly provincial, in a sophisticated, Manhattan-centric sort of way.”

Hayes’ Esquire was tremendously influential within the mag-biz, but Felker’s book was even more so—New York spawned the modern city magazine, each one crawling with editors and reporters looking for the next trend. And by the time I prowled the carpeted hallways, basically every magazine (save The New Yorker) was one big zeitgeist-hunt. From Wigwag to Seven Days to Out, every big magazine was now a kind of fashion magazine, and the editors who rose within them were not necessarily enamored with words or ideas, but people obsessed with questions of taste. The one piece of essential equipment for any post-Felker magazine editor was to have an endless desire to tell one’s readers—peons who clearly didn’t know better, or lived in some benighted town where the editor is sure they’ve never even heard of “polyamory”—exactly what to do, eat, wear and think. To be hip.

If you sense distaste, you’re right; there’s nothing more boring than this week’s hot restaurant, or more useless than one guy’s opinion how some movie or TV show fits in with “how we live today”—itself a meaningless, bogus, brain-rotting concept. At best it’s snobby; usually it’s voicey bullshit, like a virgin writing a sex quiz.

What started in magazines swiftly moved to books—The Preppy Handbook is an example of this actually working, 2.3 million copies worth—and eventually to newspapers. By the advent of the Web, publications had replaced many of their facts, which are time-consuming and expensive to ferret out, with opinions handed down by star editors or writers desperate to mimic Seventies gadfly gods like Lebowitz and John Waters. Ah, the Seventies, zeitgeists were big enough to surf back then, when the Boomers were all living one version or another of the same kind of life. But by 1995, all many Boomers had in common were their memories (cue Rolling Stone), and my own generation, X, recoiled in horror at the very idea of something tying us all together (which of course was our zeitgeist, endlessly mined and commodified). But as media fragmented and the miners mined, it became harder and harder to hit upon authentically new trends and ideas; The Preppy Handbook has launched a thousand clones, none of which has sold or endured like the original.

The publishing business I encountered was a place where you studied the editor—how he wore his leather jacket, or what bags she owned—and attempted to replicate their taste, in how you dressed, talked, thought, and wrote. I don’t know what Esquire in the 60s was like, but the magazine itself shows it wasn’t like that; Shawn’s New Yorker was a cult only slightly less devoted than The People’s Temple, but there was enough intellectual curiosity in TNY’s self-conception to keep the worst elements of Zeitgeist-hunting at bay. (A lot of the furore about Tina Brown was precisely this tension, and the things that injured her, like having Roseanne Barr guest-edit the mag, were examples of zeitgeist-editing gone awry.) But the hunt continued because by the 1990s, if a magazine was big enough, and respected enough, it could define the zeitgeist. Regardless of format, that’s where the real money and prestige can be made.

Then again, every time it guesses wrong, the magazine, book or newspaper loses a little authority. It’s a gamble. What does Trump mean? We went to a diner in Sheboygan—

So what do all these late-night thoughts have to do with Lindy West? Simply this: we have a generation—or two, maybe three?—of editors who do not see their jobs as journalism or any kind of cultural caretaking. Instead, they have spent decades honing their ability to sniff out trends and, if necessary, make them. When it works, it’s just business as usual. But when it doesn’t—when you mistake the obsessions of your own very narrow priestly caste as something important, something meaningful—you get Lindy West’s memoir.

Which will, I can assure you, be nothing more than a single disappointing line item on this season’s list. She might not even get paid less for the next book. There will be no embarrassment; no sense of what else might have been published instead; no sense of ignoring things that really must be talked about; no sense that Ms. West was sabotaged by the current process, or her readers trained to be a little dumber. The chase will simply begin again, with the P&L’s hauled out and the fingers stuck into the wind…what was it that Simone said at brunch? What was it that just opened in the West End? And all those smart people will chase after something that does not matter, well-shod ants creating that daily pile of nonsense called The Discourse. The better to keep the job, increase the paycheck, and avoid all the things that we really should talk about, before the world explodes. ◊

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MICHAEL GERBER is the Editor and Publisher of The American Bystander. His books have sold 1.25 million copies in 25 languages. Maybe he’ll write another one someday.