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If reading is like traveling, then reading Gay Talese's A Writer's Life is like going on a long trip with a great storyteller who doesn't know where he's going or how's he getting there.
The sprawling, stylish book is part memoir and part explanation of why it took 14 years to finish. Talese doesn't suffer from writer's block as much as writer's detour. That's a pain for him and his editor but a delight for patient readers.
At 74, Talese is a master of non-fiction that reads like a novel. He's revered for his magazine profiles of Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio (collected in The Gay Talese Reader, published in 2003).
Talese has written four consecutive best sellers: The Kingdom and the Power (1969), a social history of The New York Times, where he once was a reporter; Honor Thy Father (1971), about the Mafia; Thy Neighbor's Wife (1980), a history of sex; and Unto the Sons (1992), a family history about his roots in Italy.
His next book was supposed to be a sequel to Unto the Sons, which ended when Talese was 16. Instead, it turned into five books in one.
Autobiographical sections deal with Talese's years at the segregated University of Alabama; about reporting on Bloody Sunday in Selma in 1965, when civil rights protesters were beaten by police; and Talese's return to Selma 25 years later.
He writes about his obsessive curiosity with a Chinese soccer player and the history of a Manhattan building that's a graveyard for a series of 10 restaurants that boom and bust despite Talese's constant patronage.
He also traces his attempt to chronicle the story of Lorena Bobbitt, the Virginia manicurist, or "nail sculptress," as Talese puts it, who sliced off her husband's penis in 1993 after she said he raped her. (Both were later acquitted.)
He tries to sell his version of the story to The New Yorker. Editor Tina Brown signs on but ultimately rejects the article.
A more commercial writer would have followed Brown's advice to write a short book. Instead, Talese keeps reporting, then files away his material.
A lesser writer would be accused of emptying his files and notebook, but Talese's book is carried by his writing and seamless transitions. He writes the way his father worked as a tailor:
"He made each suit stitch by stitch, avoiding the use of a sewing machine because he wanted to feel the needle in his fingers. ... He hoped to create the illusion of seamlessness, to attain artistic expression with a needle and thread."
Of himself, Talese writes: "I always linger over a sentence until I conclude that I lack the will or skill to improve upon it, whereupon I move on to the next sentence and then to the next. Ultimately -- it could take days, an entire week -- I have hand-printed enough sentences to form a paragraph."
A Writer's Life is for unhurried readers who appreciate literary back roads, who value the journey more than just getting to where they're going.
A Writer's Life
By Gay Talese
Knopf, 430 pp., $26
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