In the Penny Press! Laugher and Loss in Vanity Fair!

We go from the ridiculous to the sublime in the October issue of Vanity Fair, and if the word 'ridiculous' has appeared, surely the words 'Sarah Palin' can't be far behind?

In this issue we're told that Levi Johnston, the meh-looking aspiring model former boyfriend of the former John McCain vice presidential Hail Mary pass, really wants to "tell his story" and so has consented to have his first-hand gossip of life with the Palins in Wasilla ghost-written by VF. Poor preoccupied Levi has no doubt forgotten that he's already told his story a few times (we've covered the, um, highlights here), but no matter: good gossip is good gossip, and besides, anything, no matter how silly or ambiguous, that helps to keep Sarah Palin away from national politics is worth reading.

So Levi tells the story of what it was like to be called by his then-girlfriend, the daughter of the Alaska governor, and told to be ready: her mom's gone national, and she's taking them with her! One can only feel sympathy for the image-masters and meat-handlers on the McCain staff when they first confronted the, shall we say unrefined piece of Alaskan manhood that Levi represented and (charmingly?) continues to represent: unshaven, unapologetically mulletted, cheek bulging with chaw, posture better suited for blasting black bears with automatic weapons from miles away than for walking on stage with America's most certifiably insane former POW. Those handlers did the best they could, with the boy and the governor, and the nation teetered as close as it's come to a full-blown Oval Office nightmare since a certain admiral forgot to turn on his hearing aid during a nationally televised debate.




The piece is full of backstairs gossip about what Sarah Palin was like at home in Wasilla, and none of it comes as a real surprise - she was narcissistic, whining, and phony (Levi's outrage when he comments that her stance as a huntswoman was purely for the cameras is palpable - he tells us in disgust that as far as he knows, she's never killed an innocent animal with automatic weapons fire from miles away). That she could also be crass (you'll have to read the piece yourselves to learn the exact context of the line "No, I don't want the retarded baby - give me the normal baby!" - but honestly, can such a line ever be saved by context?) also comes as no surprise, and the greed isn't a shocker either (Levi isn't 100% sure the Palins gave back all the neat stuff the McCain campaign gave them to spruce up their image).

(No, once again all the surprises are about Levi himself, who despite what could only be called a broad array of personal shortcomings, still comes across as a decent, likable young man - a devoted father and fairly unassuming guy. If he had an ounce of sense, he'd parlay his brush with near-fame into the very modest, low-key kind of dividends that can pay off handsomely for a lifetime - find a sports magazine and write a 'Hunting Life' column every month for the next forty years, or do the video equivalent for the Hunting Network - but alas, according to this and every other article about him, it appears Levi has delivered himself into the hands of handlers, and such creatures always dream of world conquest ... a hardcover memoir, a 'reality' TV show, followed almost immediately by the burnout of the public's always-minimal interest, after which a hapless and overweight Levi finds himself on the fifth season of Celebrity Organ Donations - Live! wondering what happened).



No, the saddest thing about the sordid revelations in this piece is that they probably won't make any difference to the large number of voting Americans who've embraced the whole concept of Sarah Palin. They swallowed the package presented to them by the unmitigatedly evil McCain campaign - of a 'hockey mom,' and average-jane who's sicka them professional slicker politicians in Washington an' wants to show 'em how normal, honest, hard-working people do things. Ten years ago, I would have looked at the shallowness of that package and said there's no way the American voting public could put that package in the Oval Office. But then again, ten years ago I was reading a Barbara Bush interview in which she looked out at her gathered family and said, "That boy has got himself a shit-covered view of the world," and I chuckled, because a mother always knows. Guess who she was talking about?

The primacy of the public image carries over to the other article of interest in this Vanity Fair, Sam Kashner's piece on the ordeal William Manchester went through writing The Death of a President and then vetting it past various ranks of Kennedy family members and retainers. Kashner does a fantastic job, and the piece is gripping reading (a little too VF-ish at times, true, but you can't expect him to take their money without goosing up the prose at least a little! Still, you can take it from me: the familiar Hollywood scene in which Jackie the impeccable hostess, in the middle of hugging one guest, leans close to another and coldly whispers, "I'm going to ruin you"? That never happened, thank goodness).

The main impression it conveys isn't of an author fighting valiantly against the black forces of censorship, though - it's the impression of a whole bunch of stunned, shocked, grieving people reacting in the weird, intense, often prolonged spasm-patterns that unexpected grief often imposes. So Bobby Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy only grant Manchester permission to write his book if they get final say as to what it says; so Manchester works on it for fifteen hours a day, day after day, until his fingers literally bleed; so Jackie and her defenders reflexively fight the finished product, even though virtually everybody in the publishing world who saw the manuscript reacted the same way, calling it a monumental masterpiece, something that would only do the dead president credit - indeed, though nobody said it, exactly the kind of detail-heavy work of history the JFK himself liked to read.

The whole story sputters sadly to a kind of odd non-finish: Death of a President is out of print, and the manuscript sits in the Kennedy Library. Bobby is gone, Manchester is gone, Jackie is gone, now even Ted Kennedy is gone, and the pages and pages of written objections Kashner faithfully documents - and Manchester's sometimes deferential, sometimes contentious responses - all seem like so much minor quibbling now.

I can attest to those of you who might be curious that Death of a President is a huge, incredible book, one of the greatest and saddest of the massive works that were born in the first massive convulsion of Kennedy-grief. My copy has many, many underlined passages of really quite lovely prose (and of course I'd be happy to obtain copies of it for any of you who might want to read it - Penguin did a very sturdy trade paperback decades ago), and my hope is that this article will reach the right people, open the right minds, and get that volume brought back into print.

Fact and Fiction in the Penny Press!

With a post title like that, you're all probably expecting me to turn right away to this week's People magazine, which features a corporate hack-job "profile" of Gossip Girl rancid tobacco addict boyequin Chace Crawford as one of the summer's "hottest bachelors" ... since the piece hyperventilates quite earnestly about how hot Chace is, how funny Chace is, how romantic Chace is, and how straight Chace is (and since the profile never alludes either to the stench of tobacco or the fact that Chase is life-splittingly hung over every single morning, that he wasn't even blow-dryably close to photographable for the first two or three hours of the shoot), it certainly qualifies as an example of the grey nether-ground between fact and fiction.



But no, I leave such vitriol for others (including the good folks at IHateChaceCrawford, who've certainly got their work cut out for them with this vacant-brained piece of pork rind)! We've got slightly bigger fish to fry in this installment of In the Penny Press, and we'll start with the Fiction end of the spectrum, which brings us to the latest issue of Esquire. This issue has some other interesting stuff in it (although it's once again simply loaded with stupid mini-articles giving tips about grilling, and once again simply loaded with full-page ads for cigars, for all the world like we lived in an alternate reality in which none of the magazine's hip young go-getter subscribers know that smoking causes mouth, lung, heart, kidney, throat, brain, and skin cancer, not only in you but in all the people you smoke near)(top-notch habit, that - ever so attractive), but the clear highlight from a marketing perspective certainly has to be the short story by Stephen King. It's called "Morality," and it's a big-boy work - as its title implies, it's a little morality play about normal people facing abnormal moral choices, with not the slightest hint of the supernatural anywhere to be seen.

Quite apart from its merits or lack of them, "Morality" only solidifies in my mind a conviction that's been growing for some time: sooner or later, American readers are going to have to figure out what to do with Stephen King.

It was one thing when he was just churning out progressively unreadable schlock horror novels - plenty of people do that, and it's easy for those so inclined to ignore. That got a little more complicated when he bought a picturesque mansion, let Sunday magazines photograph his enormous library, and most of all started donating serious amounts of money to worthy causes. These are literary warning signs, the kinds of things a schlock horror novelist does when he's beginning to want to be taken seriously as a writer.

Uproarious laughter is the proper response from the publishing industry, accompanied by a brayed version of the rhetorical question, "If you wanted to be taken seriously, why'd you write about friggin killer clowns?" But it's been a long time since the publishing industry had what's known in bull-riding circles as "a pair," and so King's steady encroachment on the lower slopes of Parnassus hasn't been endured stoically - it's been actively encouraged. In 2003, the National Book Foundation gave King a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and psychics from every state in the Union were bombarded with the same message from Nathaniel Hawthorne: "What the fuck?"

There's been a book of essays on the craft of writing; there's been a couple of novels with only nominal horror-elements (if you don't count the prose); there've been straight-up fiction stories in mainstream quasi-literary magazines, and now there's "Morality" in the latest Esquire.

Reading the story doesn't help us know any better how to think about this new, emerging Stephen King. It's the story of a struggling young couple in New York - Chad is a substitute teacher who never gets enough work to pay the bills, and his wife Nora is an in-home care-provider for a wealthy stroke victim named Reverend Winston. The two of them are living a life of quiet desperation, always on the edge of solvency, when Winston makes Nora an offer she at first wants to refuse: all his life, he's been a perfectly good, moral person, but before he dies, he'd like to know what it feels like to commit a sin. Since he's recovering from a stroke, he's not really able to do the actual committing himself, and that's where Nora comes in. If she'll perform his sin by proxy, he'll pay her an enormous sum of money, enough to solve the young couple's money problems. She agonizes over the idea, Chad agonizes over the idea, and then they decide to do it.

The sin? Nora is to enter a playground, walk up to one of the little children, and punch him squarely in the face, while Chad films the whole thing for the Reverend's viewing pleasure. Nora does it, they collect their money, and then King hauls in a rather predictable array of moral aftershocks. And by that point, any reader of short fiction that isn't by schlock horror novelists with Nobel aspirations will see more problems than can be readily counted, starting with the biggest three: 1) the entire story is based on coincidence, 2) all three main characters in the story behave in ways no real person would ever behave, even for a moment while very drunk, and 3) the act the good reverend chooses for Nora to perform might be a crime, but it's sure as Hell not a sin.

1 & 2 are the real problems here, though: King might want to try his hand at mainstream fiction, and certainly everybody in America is entitled to try a little self-reinvention, but there's no getting around the fact that King's apprenticeship for writing conventional fiction is nearly 40 years of writing schlock horror novels in which lazy, shopworn contrivances of the worst ilk are standard reading fare, in every book, on every page. You can't snap your fingers and suddenly be a writer who didn't learn his trade that way - and no matter how many high school water polo teams King underwrites, he doesn't strike me as having one-thousandth the humility necessary to re-learn writing from the ground up.

And if he's not willing to do that, we're all going to see more variations on "Morality" from him - in Esquire, in The New Yorker, and who knows where else - "serious" tales of ethics and suburbs and characters lunging at three-dimensionality. None of it will be any good - how can it be, when all of it was learned in a candle-lit House of Wax? - but all of it will want to be, and when one of the top-selling novelists of the 20th century so loudly wants something, every reader is pulled into the melodrama of it.




And really, that same theme of overreaching finds its way into the "Fact" portion of the Penny Press this time around. In the latest GQ (the with a naked Sacha Baron Cohen on the cover, advertising his upcoming film, the most-hyped/least-funny film since, come to think of it, Borat), John Jeremiah Sullivan (think of that wedding! talk about schlock horror!) does his level best to write a serious, probing piece about a subject who was a walking punch line from the moment he first shuffled onto the public stage: Levi Johnston, the wavy-haired lantern-jawed bo-hunk who impregnated Bristol Palin, the idiot daughter of Sarah Palin, the idiot Alaska governor John McCain, in a desperately irresponsible gimmick-trick, picked to be his vice presidential candidate in the last election. The pick alone forced the majority of voters to confront the fact that McCain was just plain insane, and that probably cost him the election, and the entire world stepped back from the edge of an unthinkable abyss - but even before then, Levi and Bristol were "on the rocks," as the tabloids say, and once the votes were counted, the Palins pried him off the skin of their family like a bloated tick.



Cast off, cast out, no longer part of the apparently ongoing story of the Palins (Jeremiah Sullivan makes a horrifying offhand reference to a "2012 run"), and, touchingly, no longer allowed to be much part of the life of the child he engendered with Bristol - that's where this article finds young Levi. Jeremiah Sullivan meets up with him in small-town Alaska, where Levi does what can only be referred to as a sinful amount of bear-hunting but appears to have no job and no job prospects (beyond the offhand mention of a possible reality-show about hunting)(all these heart-stopping offhand mentions combine to make this piece considerably more frightening than King's story). Our author does a wonderful job of conveying what virtually every small town in Alaska makes a visitor feel:

It is a shithole surrounded by such loveliness. Stand there and blink back and forth, shutting your left eye, then your right. Left eye: spit of highway, aggressive proliferation of half-abandoned strip malls, a few roads dwindling off to little houses. Right eye: the mountains, the expanding sky, the shadowy crevasses, a bald eagle. Highway, strip malls, little houses; mountains, sky, crevasses, eagle. Highwaystripmallslittlehouses; mountainsskycrevasseseagle.

Both eyes: Wasilla.

And he's equally evocative on that sharp, nauseating moment in American history when all these various Wasilla people suddenly threatened to matter:

It takes some mental effort to recover the feeling of how much he seemed to mean at one time, and practically yesterday. Obama has made him seem kitschy already, has stolen his power to signify. Not presuming anything about one's politics - referring instead to the sheer dynamism of events since the election. We are a couple of beads further along the necklace of cultural time from Levi. We are post-Levi. It's decadent to think of him now. But the chemical traces remain of a plausibility structure inside which his very face seemed full of information and even warning. Something was happening to the country, it was splitting in two. Levi looked like a place where the ripping might start. We were laughing at him then too, of course - that was largely it. If McCain's choosing Palin had been cynical (as born out by their recoiling from each other in defeat), not until his embrace of Levi did it become farcical. .... We knew he was there only because it had been deemed worse for him not to be there. That gave him a curious magnetism. And John McCain, fine, he was trying to win a campaign, he's an opportunist. He's also a United States senator and a war hero, and there was something in how he greeted Levi - how for a second it mattered whether he greeted this boy, and in what manner - like an acknowledgment. Not of one man to another, exactly, but of one force to another. It was either the beginning or the end of something. Briefly recall when you didn't know which.

That's just about as good as hopped-up Red Bull deadline-prose gets, and the whole article shines with it. For the brief span of its pages, we can indeed recall when we walked around every day wondering very dark things about our own countrymen, urgently asking ourselves the same questions over and over again: Can't they see what's happening here? Can't they see what's at stake here? Are they REALLY going to treat the most important presidential election in modern memory like an evening of 'American Idol'? "Hey! The grumpy old guy picked a hottie hockey-mom who's JUST LIKE US!"

Then you stop reading, and you close the magazine, and reality reasserts itself. Fact separates from fiction and both start behaving themselves again: John McCain will never be president, Obama is alive, in charge, and still enjoying popularity in the polls. Sarah Palin will not, cannot ever be taken seriously as a candidate for national office, and apart from reading a very entertaining magazine article by John Jeremiah Sullivan, none of us needs to think about Levi Johnston at all.