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L.A.'S BATTLE OF THE BOOKS | PAGE 1, 2 Wasserman's mandarin approach has its admirers. Grove/Atlantic publisher Morgan Entrekin says that Wasserman is "pairing terrific writers with terrific subjects." Critic Greil Marcus says, "Here's a section that trusts its writers to stretch out on a topic, and to review different books. Who needs another 750-word review of 'Cold Mountain'?" John Leonard, the former literary editor of the Nation, adds that while he hasn't read the section carefully -- it is still hard to find on the East Coast -- he "loves the idea of all that gray type. It goes against all the prevailing notions in our visual culture." Many other readers, however, say the revamped section lands on their coffee tables like a weekly sack of oatmeal, utterly devoid of wit or charm. "Who is he editing this for?" one Los Angeles writer asks. "It's not a section for this city's readers." (Like many book industry figures who'd like to see their work favorably reviewed in the Times, this writer declined to speak on the record.) A West Coast editor says: "Los Angeles has long had an intellectual inferiority complex, so the initial response to Steve's section was, 'This is just like the New York Review of Books!' But that's unfair to both New Yorkers and intellectuals. It's an extremely narrow section that wouldn't work anywhere. He defines intellectual topics so narrowly that there's no room for fiction. He attracts big names, but there's a similarity of tone. There are no surprises. Plus he misses big books. The section didn't review either 'Into Thin Air' or the new novel from Kem Nunn, who is a significant figure in California's literature." Says yet another L.A. writer: "This may be the country's biggest book market, but that's not because people are buying the kinds of books the Times is now reviewing." Wasserman turns the elitism charge right back around at his detractors. "That criticism is so full of condescension toward ordinary readers as to leave me almost speechless," he says. He admits he sometimes avoids popular books -- the kinds of books that, as it happens, would bring advertising into the section -- because "books that have large publicity budgets aren't the books that need more name recognition." He's happy to admit, too, that he's reviewing fewer books than most sections. "There were 62,000 titles published last year in America. We have space to review about 600 of them in our daily and Sunday sections. It's impossible to cover the waterfront." He compares himself to a surgeon on a World War I battlefield: "It's triage every day." Wasserman has drawn the most fire for ignoring Los Angeles' literary scene, and for running a section that many feel is oriented largely toward white male academics. "I think the great failing of the section is how overwhelmingly male it is," says Kit Rachlis, a senior projects editor at the L.A. Times. "It's a scandal, in this day and age, to have so few women represented." Wasserman concedes that the section needs to have more female voices. "But if you want to get down to the nasty business of quotas," he says, "we are doing slightly better in this regard, in terms of ratio, than the New York Times Book Review." (Maybe. But in an extremely unscientific survey, Salon counted the number of male and female reviewers in nine recent issues of the New York Times Book Review and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. The New York Times came out ahead, if not by much. Out of 164 full-length reviews in the New York Times, 46 of them -- or 28 percent -- were written by women. Out of 62 full-length reviews in the L.A. Times, 14 of them -- or roughly 23 percent -- were written by women.) "I hope that someone is also counting the numbers of Jews and gentiles who are reviewing," Wasserman added. (Charles McGrath, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, declined to be interviewed for this article.) Wasserman is happier to cop to criticism that his section pays less attention to West Coast authors and critics. "I'm someone who believes the republic of letters sees no regional or national boundaries," he says. "Whether your zip code is 90210 or 10021, it doesn't matter." To that end, Wasserman has been searching for ways to raise the L.A. Times Book Review's national profile. Nearly 5,000 copies each week are distributed to Barnes & Noble stores in Manhattan, where they're given away free, and Wasserman has hundreds more copies hand-delivered to select book- and media-industry types in New York. Many book industry people, in both New York and Los Angeles, have a hard time separating their feelings about the new L.A. Times Book Review from their feelings about Wasserman. Greil Marcus calls him "a brave and rigorous man, both intellectually and morally." D.T. Max, a New York writer, says something similar. "I was on a radio show with him once, while he still worked for Random House," Max says, "and he was being very candid about his anticonglomerate feelings. He was telling hard truths, at a time when it could have hurt him. The man has cojones." Others, when talking about Wasserman, throw around words like "egomaniac," "vindictive bastard" and "the most hated man on both coasts." According to the New Times article, Wasserman is mocked at the Times for wearing "'dandy' cream-colored suits like Tom Wolfe" (he spoke with Salon via the cell phone in his car) and is often referred to as "the naked book duster" for his admitted fondness for wandering into his home library late at night and dusting his book collection in the nude. Other Times staffers complain about his endlessly long and self-involved speeches at the paper's regular Friday story meetings. (According to several staffers, when a meeting was cut short by the news that Mother Teresa had died, many in the room nearly began clapping -- Wasserman was next in line to speak.) Times staffers also like to titter about the large black-and-white photo of himself that hangs prominently on Wasserman's office wall. "It's one thing if it's a photo of your family," one Times employee says. "But this is so narcissistic it's scary." Another L.A. book figure reports that, at the regular meetings of a group called L.A. People in Publishing, "The first 15 minutes of each session are given over to griping about Wasserman. He doesn't return phone calls, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. He treats people very badly." Given the animus that exists in some circles toward Wasserman, many are watching his section closely, looking for missteps. Twice Wasserman has made news for assigning books to reviewers who appeared to have a conflict of interest. Gossip columnist Liz Smith reported on Dominick Dunne's fury when Wasserman assigned his novel "Another City, Not My Own" to a writer, Gary Indiana, who had savaged a Dunne-like character in his own earlier novel. More recently he assigned a new book about film producer Don Simpson to Peter Biskind, who had just released his own competing book about Hollywood excess. Wasserman's reply? "We seek to give books to appropriate reviewers. It's an error for Dominick Dunne to see his reflection in someone else's work. That way leads to madness." Wasserman was also criticized recently when, in an issue devoted to the paper's Festival of Books, he printed a full page of blurbs about his section from nationally known writers such as Joan Didion ("consistently original"), Joyce Carol Oates ("first rate"), Cynthia Ozick ("a weekly gift") and Paul Fussell ("the best in the country"). "I received almost all of those comments unsolicited, out of the blue," Wasserman says, and he denies that he's now indebted to those writers in any way. "I'm well-known as a man who bites the hand that feeds me," he says. Media critic Jon Katz demurs. "It doesn't matter that the blurbs were unsolicited," he says. "Readers don't know that. How is a reader supposed to separate indebtedness from opinion?" Both Wasserman's admirers and his detractors admit he's running, for better or worse, pieces that few other weekly book reviews would touch. These include a 4,000-word essay by Roger Shattuck comparing aesthetics and ethics in the work of Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Baudelaire and Quentin Tarantino, and Jeremy Bernstein's similarly long (and scathing) review of Lillian Ross' and Ved Mehta's new books about former New Yorker editor William Shawn. "What I don't understand," an L.A. writer says, "is why this section is becoming so remote and elitist at a time when the Los Angeles Times itself is trying to reach out to a broader, more multicultural audience." (The Times' new chairmen and CEO, Mark Willes, who has made this kind of outreach a priority, did not return telephone calls seeking comment last week.)
Wasserman, who says his section is both turning a profit and scoring high marks in readership surveys, says he's still trying to perfect the book review. But he feels he's already reached many of his ultimate goals. "I've always felt that reviews should be more than haiku stitched together," he says. "Readers should remember the next day what they read the previous day. I think we're giving people a section worth remembering."
Goodbye, SC3 The departure of wishy-washy editor Shelby Coffey III completes a top-down housecleaning at the Los Angeles Times.
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