This holiday, while shopping for other people at Chapters, I did what any good gift giver would do and bought something for myself: David Remnick's new collection of profiles, Reporting. The crispness of the title suggests Remnick's style of writing and the self-assuredness of anything associated with The New Yorker. But more than that, it points to the star of this book, which isn't the world leaders and great writers Remnick profiles, but his out-of-this-world-tour-de-force reporting.

The review of the book in The New York Review of Books lauds Remnick for his timeless character sketches. And then it ends on the following note:

"One thought that emerges from the finely done portraits of writers in Reporting is that exertion--notoriously--does not always guarantee literary brilliance and brilliance--
unfairly--can flower without exertion. Marvelous literature can arrive in disconcerting ways. Idleness, a taste for drinking and laughing in pubs with hangers-on and pretty women, even the loss of keyboard time wasted by appearing on TV chat shows or becoming the president of a small republic, do not disqualify a writer. They merely mean fewer books get written."

This quotation comes after a section of the review focused on the profiles of great writers: Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, etc. But unfortunately, I don't think the same idea holds true for reporters, like Remnick, who could only have built the omniscience and authority he has in these stories by the most dedicated kind of reporting. Still, it's an interesting and somehow comforting notion to chew on for anyone in the realm of writing. Maybe you don't necessarily have to feel guilty about choosing the pub over another paragraph: it may just mean you'll write less but not worse...