Shawn's intriguing wife, Cecille, the comments of their movie-famous son Wallace (coauthor of My Dinner with Andre), and the bilious dinner-table and office gossip that Mehta lets us overhear. The best stuff in the book is its portrait of Mr. Mehta takes us to the parties where the phenomenally repressed Shawn "cut loose" (who would've guessed this was one of his favorite phrases?), pounding out "Anything Goes" and "Don't Fence Me In" on the piano in a rocking stride style. But Mehta was a sort of surrogate son to Shawn, not only part of the innermost circle of the xenophobic publication but sometimes the sole non-family member invited to the Shawns' Thanksgiving feasts. Shawn presents special difficulties because he worked in mysterious ways and thwarted attempts to cast light on him as effectively as a black hole in outer space. And only a guy like Mehta could describe the specifics of Shawn's invisible art of editing and the human maelstrom that swirled around him. Only in the New Yorker, kids, could anyone in the magazine biz get away with the sky-high idealism Mehta eloquently describes. It speaks volumes about the nature of the New Yorker that Mehta is capable of saying-apropos of one of his articles about theologians-that "writing about God presented special difficulties, both because of the nature of the subject and because of the sensibilities of the various believers." Mehta is dead serious here, as he apparently always is. That's right, it's more revealing than Brendan Gill's classic Here at the New Yorker, Jay McInerney's cocaine-edged satirical roman à clef, Bright Lights, Big City, and Here but Not Here: A Love Story, by Lillian Ross, the mistress of the mag's legendary editor William Shawn. But his vivid, eccentric, almost Thurberesquely embittered memoir of his life there stands as the most revealing book yet on the most fascinating magazine in modern history. Ved Mehta has often been accused of being the least lively, most irrelevant writer at the New Yorker magazine.
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