Books, Arts & Manners: The Evil of Banality

The New Yorker has been with us for sixty years, 34 of them under the direction of Mr. William Shawn. That makes Mr. Shawn (who never appears in print without his honorific) America’s longest-tenured editor-inchief. He is also America’s mostrespected editor-in-chief, for reasons that are widely known, even legendary. When Mr. Shawn receives a manuscript, he is back to his writer, with his comments, the next day. He is thorough, solicitous, unfailingly polite. Mr. Shawn’s writers don’t produce stories, as if they were factories; they are encouraged to nurture them, as if they were ewes. Why then does his magazine stink?

The stories that greeted The New Yorker’s recent change of ownership covered every other aspect of the magazine—industry gossip on details of the sale; the fears and anxieties of the employees; the eccentricities of the magazine’s operation. Everything, except the central fact that confronts the reader, week after week: the boring, annoying, impenetrable waste of time The New Yorker has become. Not a total waste (nothing ever is). That, no doubt, is what keeps us going; charmed by a caption, or a filler, or the fussy look of the thing, we continue to hope, against all the evidence of experience, that it will get better. It never does. Its dullness has moral, as well as aesthetic consequences. This is a reader’s cry of pain.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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The New Yorker has been with us for sixty years, 34 of them under the direction of Mr. William Shawn. That makes Mr. Shawn (who never appears in print without his honorific) America’s longest-tenured editor-inchief. He is also America’s mostrespected editor-in-chief, for reasons that are widely known, even legendary. When Mr. Shawn receives a manuscript, he is back to his writer, with his comments, the next day. He is thorough, solicitous, unfailingly polite. Mr. Shawn’s writers don’t produce stories, as if they were factories; they are encouraged to nurture them, as if they were ewes. Why then does his magazine stink?

The stories that greeted The New Yorker’s recent change of ownership covered every other aspect of the magazine—industry gossip on details of the sale; the fears and anxieties of the employees; the eccentricities of the magazine’s operation. Everything, except the central fact that confronts the reader, week after week: the boring, annoying, impenetrable waste of time The New Yorker has become. Not a total waste (nothing ever is). That, no doubt, is what keeps us going; charmed by a caption, or a filler, or the fussy look of the thing, we continue to hope, against all the evidence of experience, that it will get better. It never does. Its dullness has moral, as well as aesthetic consequences. This is a reader’s cry of pain.