The Amateur : An Independent Life of Letters

Rating:
Summary: Lesser is More
Review: Only a sourpuss could dislike this engaging, enlightening and well-crafted autobiography by Threepenny Review's founder and editor, Wendy Lesser. In two dozen essays, we not only learn about the great obstacles inherent in starting a literary journal, we see how Lesser developed as a reader and observer. This is a delightful read filled with Lesser's wonderful observations on love, art and publishing. I highly recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: A disappointing, unengaging autobiography
Review: The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters by Wendy Lesser is a semi-autobiographical book of short essays. The chapters are in a loosely chronological order, only some pertaining directly to the author's life and career path; the others are simply essays on topics that interest the author. The confusing format of the book -- part memoir and part essay collection -- is a macrocosm for what is wrong with not only the book as a whole but the writing in particular. The book follows no plan or path, and arrives at no ultimate destination, fitting neither genre snugly. Moreover, the essays themselves are unfulfilling, leaving out much detail and ending or changing direction abruptly, neither satisfying as a group nor as individual pieces.

The cardinal rule for writing an autobiography is that the author should have led an interesting life that the reader will want to learn and read about. This is the first major problem with Wendy Lesser's book. She has written about her life and no doubt her close friends and relatives will enjoy reading about it, but I did not. She is a native Californian daughter of divorced parents who was educated in the lofty surroundings of Radcliffe College and in the company of some illustrious classmates (most notably Benazir Bhutto, the future president of Pakistan, whom she then affectionately called "Pinkie"). After college she spent time as a consultant to various liberal and governmental organizations advising them on the more esoteric aspects of social justice policy. She finally found her calling as a writer and editor, and has published several books, in addition to founding and editing The Threepenny Review, a literary journal. I'm not sure why, but I found myself saying repeatedly to myself, as I read this woman's memoirs, "Who cares?" It may be that Lesser focused too much on the details of her life that would have been more appropriate in a journal, while ignoring the more interesting bits. I would have liked to have read more about the genesis and life of her publication, The Threepenny Review, rather than about her childhood, her hobbies, her self-admittedly insignificant consulting career, and her opinions about culture.

Lesser's writing on any one subject, whether it interested me or not, lacked cohesion and sometimes even a point. Her sentences were often abrupt and choppy, and lacked explanation. For instance, in describing her college days at Radcliffe, she whets the reader's appetite with her mention of "Pinkie" Bhutto, initially describing her as "innocently giggly and high-spirited," and later "brassily ditzy, bubble-brained," but then says "long after I had ceased to see her, she all at once dropped the mask and became a serious, wily politician, her father's rightful heir. The change seemed sudden; yet if you had asked me, even as a freshman, to guess who among my acquaintance would eventually become a world-famous political figure, I would not have hesitated to answer, 'Pinkie Bhutto.'" And there she ends her narrative, leaving me asking, "Why did you think that?" That is a question I found myself asking repeatedly throughout her book.

Another failing of Lesser's writing is that it seems not to have been edited all that well -- a supreme irony since Lesser's main claim to fame is that she is an editor -- and many times I was left to wonder why she included certain sentences or whole passages, since they made no sense to me. I found myself writing "What? and Huh?" in the margins a lot, when for instance she described a boyfriend's studio thusly: "The smell of the place was close and oppressive, as if several pairs of sexually active old shoes and socks had been closeted together for weeks." What does this mean? Another egregious error in editing comes as she inadvertently draws a metaphor for her own inept writing, when she writes: "For a year or two I had been writing monthly book reviews for a local organ called the San Francisco Review of Books, which ranged in quality from the somewhat interesting to the truly atrocious (ranged within each issue, I mean). She probably meant that the books ranged from somewhat interesting to truly atrocious, but her misuse of syntax makes this sentence mean that her reviews ranged in quality. Unforgivable for a self-styled wordsmith to write this way, and even less forgivable for a self-proclaimed editor not to have caught the mistake. Moreover, the author seems not to grasp the basic Strunk and White rule about when to use "I" or "me," which she bungles on the very first page of her book and again in the second chapter.

Finally, Lesser has a truly annoying habit of assuming information in referring to certain literary or artistic works in a shorthand way that makes the reader seem ignorant if their significance does not leap to mind. She also is a name-dropper, a pretension that is unnecessarily belittling to the reader. I do not recommend reading The Amateur, precisely because its title holds the key to why it was so poorly written.

Rating:
Summary: Not very interesting
Review: The author's observations are simply not very interesting, and her life is rather blase, although she, herself, finds it endlessly fascinating. She strikes me as a wait-to-talk, rather than listen-and-respond, luncheon companion.

Rating:
Summary: a different approach to the essay
Review: Wendy Lesser has written an engaging book or half-critical, half-personal essays, a form that has gone out of style. She should be commended for reinvigorating it.

Rating:
Summary: a different approach to the essay
Review: Wendy Lesser has written an engaging book or half-critical, half-personal essays, a form that has gone out of style. She should be commended for reinvigorating it.

Rating:
Summary: Most engaging.
Review: Wendy Lesser's book is a dream! The author is founder-editor of the famous Threepenny Review, a gifted practioner of the essay form. In this book she has turned a string of occasional pieces into an autobiography, a genuine encounter with a person that I for one, simply want to get to know. Ms. Lesser also writes in that spare, plain style that makes direct contact with the reader, and brings immediacy to whatever she is writing about. Here is an immensely attractive life, a person who knows who she is and who is willing to let us into a little of what she has known and thought, while preserving dignity and prudence. She is above all skilled in the fine art of discrimination.