Books, Arts & Manners: Printed to Fit

The Kingdom and the Power By Gay Talese World, $10 You can see them Sunday mornings on the Upper East Side, in the Village, in Brooklyn Heights, chicly dressed but sleepy-eyed, hastening to the newsstand where waits, in towering piles, the Sunday New York Times. Home it goes, a five-pound slab of newsprint that by dusk has dissolved into a wall-to-wall strew in the livingroom, leaked into the bathroom, gotten mixed in with the rumpled bedclothes, leaving its readers glassy of eye, sour of stomach, hung over, listless with an almost post-coital tristesse. The day is gone. They might have fixed the faucet, played some tennis, flown a kite with the children; instead they have read the Sunday Times. T hey seem to have derived little pleasure from the act. It is a duty—a religious duty, Gay Talese would jump to say: The daily Times is prayers, the Sunday edition is Mass (sheer mass). Talese is fond of metaphor-stretching— beginning with the title, his book is peppered with facile religious allusions: the Times is ruled by “Ochsian fundamentalism”; Ochs’ relations and descendants are bound to “an orthodoxy stronger than their religion”; he himself, after death, can “live long in the liturgy”; even the copyreaders on the foreign desk are “supplicants at the altar of the wire-god”—but, in fact, reverence is the only word for what the Times evokes. Put the Times reader at a houseparty weekend in thither Vermont, or transfer him to the Omaha branch, and he will fret. He misses those eight drab columns with their constipated headlines, the magisterially self-assured editorials, the agate listings of arriving and departing ships, visible satellites, out-of-town buyers, debutantes, English football results. “You don’t have to read it all,” the paper’s promotion department assures us, “but it’s nice to know it’s all there.” How nice? Is the absent reader fretful in part because amid his loss he feels a teensy bit relieved?

There are, after all, other newspapers, many of which offer as much hard news as the Times, many of which are far more readable, a few of which are even more infuriating. But there is Only One New York Times, one revered newspaper, one Institution.

CS

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C. H. Simonds

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The Kingdom and the Power By Gay Talese World, $10 You can see them Sunday mornings on the Upper East Side, in the Village, in Brooklyn Heights, chicly dressed but sleepy-eyed, hastening to the newsstand where waits, in towering piles, the Sunday New York Times. Home it goes, a five-pound slab of newsprint that by dusk has dissolved into a wall-to-wall strew in the livingroom, leaked into the bathroom, gotten mixed in with the rumpled bedclothes, leaving its readers glassy of eye, sour of stomach, hung over, listless with an almost post-coital tristesse. The day is gone. They might have fixed the faucet, played some tennis, flown a kite with the children; instead they have read the Sunday Times. T hey seem to have derived little pleasure from the act. It is a duty—a religious duty, Gay Talese would jump to say: The daily Times is prayers, the Sunday edition is Mass (sheer mass). Talese is fond of metaphor-stretching— beginning with the title, his book is peppered with facile religious allusions: the Times is ruled by “Ochsian fundamentalism”; Ochs’ relations and descendants are bound to “an orthodoxy stronger than their religion”; he himself, after death, can “live long in the liturgy”; even the copyreaders on the foreign desk are “supplicants at the altar of the wire-god”—but, in fact, reverence is the only word for what the Times evokes. Put the Times reader at a houseparty weekend in thither Vermont, or transfer him to the Omaha branch, and he will fret. He misses those eight drab columns with their constipated headlines, the magisterially self-assured editorials, the agate listings of arriving and departing ships, visible satellites, out-of-town buyers, debutantes, English football results. “You don’t have to read it all,” the paper’s promotion department assures us, “but it’s nice to know it’s all there.” How nice? Is the absent reader fretful in part because amid his loss he feels a teensy bit relieved?

There are, after all, other newspapers, many of which offer as much hard news as the Times, many of which are far more readable, a few of which are even more infuriating. But there is Only One New York Times, one revered newspaper, one Institution.