In a great interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick from 1999—wherein he says,
I don’t think it’s a diminishing number that wants something like the New Yorker. I think it’s expanding number for the same reason that audiences for the opera, jazz and books are expanding. I mean, walk into the best independent bookstore on a Saturday afternoon in Berkeley or San Francisco, or Borders or Barnes and Noble! Look at the crowd there!
Remnick also remarks, “Adam Gopnik wrote about the Starr Report as if he were, God forgive me, deconstructing Pamela or Clarissa.”
What did Gopnik write? Here’s a copy of the full ‘literary critique’. Some parts are delightfully amusing. Excerpts:
[I]n the spirit of “Tom Jones,” the first great novel, “The Report” is a text that ultimately, though against its will, makes a favorite moral point of the English novel: in a narrative of the ins and outs of bourgeois love, a scapegrace hero is almost more appealing than a moralizing narrator.
[...]
Like Poe far more than like Melville, this text—whose tone recalls “The Tell-Tale Heart” (the throbbing organ that keeps the narrator uneasily awake) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (all those windowless rooms!)—uses an obsessional voice to tell what is, in all other ways, a relentlessly ordinary story of adultery. A supposedly dispassionate account of a man’s sins becomes so overwrought that the reader gradually realizes that the point of the story is not that the hero is wicked but that the narrator is mad.
[...]
The book’s epilogue becomes increasingly frantic. The narrator’s voice intrudes, postmodernly, insisting that the hero is guilty because of his unwillingness to cooperate in the creation of the text. In a strange way, the narrator begins to compete with the disappointed lover. He, we realize—another postmodern touch—has taken her voice: “This office extended six separate invitations to the President to testify.” Why won’t you respond to my requests? Why won’t you return my phone calls? You do everything you can to avoid me. And, finally: I will not be ignored. The plaint of the rejected disciplinarian (Clinton “spurned six invitations to testify”). Hell, our chagrined hero learns, hath no fury like a woman scored (“You want me out of your life… I guess the signs have been made clear for awhile—not wanting to see me and rarely calling”), except that of an independent counsel spurned.
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