The big news to hit publishing after New Year’s — news big enough for one
editor to shout a “holy shit!” when he heard about it — was the business
going down at Random House Inc.
The bottom line: On January 16th, without warning, Peter Olson
(Random House chairman) fired Ann Godoff (Random House
president/publisher/editor), citing Godoff’s failure to deliver
the goods: i.e., a long-enough string of best-sellers and the revenue Random
House parent company/media conglomerate Bertelsmann was banking on.
So much for Godoff’s track record (Midnight in the Garden of Good and
Evil, The Alienist, White Teeth) and so
much for Godoff’s spending habits. (Three million for rights to
The Nanny Diaries, based on three sample chapters. A good bet,
it turned out, for what would indeed be a best-seller … still, 3 million?)
So, in January, Random House, the house that Cerf built, the house
that Faulkner called home, went to Gina Centrello, president/publisher/editor
at Random House Inc.’s Ballantine division — Centrello, who
can deliver the goods: i.e., a good long string of less than
“literary” but profitable hardbacks (see in
June: Star Wars: Shatterpoint: A Clone Wars
Novel) and a longer string of trade-size and mass-market cash cows in paperback.
So: Godoff’s gone (along with some faithful authors?) with no immediate
replacement; Centrello’s head of a new entity called the
“Random House Ballantine Publishing
Group”; Ballantine’s featured fiction for March is
Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons by “beloved
author” Lorna Landvik (who wrote, you remember, the “sensational sleeper hit”
Patty Jane’s House of Curl); and the seating chart at
1745 Broadway, Random House Inc.’s new headquarters, has been anybody’s guess. As
columnist Joe Hagan pointed out on page one of
The New York Observer on January 20th,
“According to a company newsletter, Random
House was to reside on the 16th and 17th floors, Ballantine on the 22nd and 23rd, and
Knopf on the 21st.”
Knopf: another division of Random House, literally, then, in the middle. Knopf’s
editor-in-chief: Sonny Mehta, recent star subject of
a two-page spread in Vanity Fair, where he
sat with star writers Richard Ford and Robert
Caro. But something says Mr. Mehta sits where he pleases (screw the no-smoking sign), and
here’s reason why: four New Year/spring titles to
add to Knopf’s fine reputation before and under Mehta. They are:
1) Samaritan by Richard Price,
about which by this late date so much has been written it’s useless to add another two
cents, but here they are: If you can find better streetsmart dialogue centered in and
around a New Jersey housing project, inside a New Jersey high school, and inside a New
Jersey police department, show it. Show Price the money. Movie rights for this
hard-boiled, page-turning crime
story-slash-multiple-character study: gotta be astronomical.
(Ms. Grier? This is casting calling.)
2) Abandon by Pico Iyer, about which
I could but would have to stop short saying good things, because I stopped reading one-third
the way through, because I happened to open …
3) Shroud by John Banville and
dropped everything. It’s about a literary scholar with
an international reputation who’s also a major alcoholic, tyrant, and fraud. The causes of
Alex Vander’s eventual unmasking, undoing: A) a madwoman in Turin young enough to be
his daughter, old enough to become his lover; B) Vander himself, who isn’t “Vander” at all
but who is approaching his own unfine madness. Irishman Banville’s performance here: “old
Europe” at its best: elliptical, foreshadowy,
dream-state in intensity. Eggheady? Bite me.
4) The King in the Tree by Steven
Millhauser, Pulitzer Prize-winner for Martin
Dressler, and here the author of three novellas, the second
a new installment on the Don Juan myth, the third a straightforward retelling of
Tristan/Ysolt (a retelling even a kid could love), but the
first an unnerving house tour conducted by a widow for the “other” woman’s (and your) creepy
enjoyment. Wondering: Millhauser’s
“Revenge” will take just how long to show up in
creative-writing classrooms?
5) Sons of Mississippi by Paul
Hendrickson, a thoroughgoing look into and behind the
faces in Charles Moore’s photo of seven sheriffs on the campus of Ole Miss the week
James Meredith sought to become that school’s first black student in 1962 — a book
that demands more than this mere mention.
But the abandoned Abandon … Iyer’s protagonist has an interesting
thing going as a grad student in search of a secret Islamic manuscript that
may or may not contain a lost fragment of Sufi master Rumi’s poetry. But this
wigged-out California girlfriend he hooks up with … She’s key to some Sufi
mystery/manuscript, and she splits the scene, and already I’m wondering if I’m
not thinking good riddance. But Iyer’s a great essayist, and Mr. Mehta knows
good writing. Ann Godoff did too. Pretty sure she still does.
