Steve Wasserman’s "Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie"

A review....

The literary essay is a tradition of long standing in English. The authors’ own books themselves bring you to whatever truths they may contain. But the essayist can add to that truth, help explain it, and aid the reader’s understanding of it.

That is, when the essayist knows what he or she is doing.

Steve Wasserman is one who does. His new book, Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays, covers a gamut of subjects. There are several thoughtful portraits of friends or acquaintances of his, including Susan Sontag, Tom Hayden, Jacqueline Kennedy, Orson Welles, Robert Scheer, Christopher Hitchens, and Gore Vidal. Wasserman’s descriptions of these people are always respectful and never hero-worshipping. He approaches each subject with open eyes, respect where it is deserved, and well-considered observation where it may not be.

There are also essays on the importance of reading, various contemporary historical figures, individual books and/or writers, history (the 9/11 attacks, the Black Panthers) and much else, all written in expressive prose that makes all these things clear…or at least Wasserman’s takes on all these things.

Steve Wasserman has been the editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the editorial director of New Republic Books as well as of Times Books at Random House, of Hill and Wang at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and as an editor at large for Yale University Press. He has also been a literary agent, at Kneerim & Williams. So, his pencil has been well-sharpened for the tasks he now performs as the publisher at Heyday, the fine California company founded in 1974 by Malcolm Margolin.

Given that history, it came as no surprise to me to read the half-dozen Wasserman essays on the current state of the publishing industry in the United States. The changes in the publishing of books between pre-computer times and post- are in many ways revolutionary, and Wasserman’s take on those changes and what they have brought—or will bring—to the process are essential.

In his essay “Good-bye to All That,” he writes about the disappearance of newspaper book review sections: “Famously, books contain news that stays news. I believed when I was editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review—as I believe now—that there is no more useful framework for understanding America and the world it inhabits…. Readers know that. They know in their bones something newspapers forget at their peril: that without books, indeed, without the news of such books—without literacy—the good society vanishes and barbarism triumphs.”

Wasserman wrote this essay in 2007. Most newspaper book review sections are gone now, a shameful fact in the history of journalism. (A very few, though, have come back.)

In his essay titled “The Fate of Books,” Wasserman writes about what the future may hold for printed books, given the development of the internet, e-books, online publishing, et. al. After a brief description of these new technologies and what they are, he offers a dreadful notion: “Today it is the book itself that is thought to be on its way to extinction.” He then describes the reading habits of a young girl named Susan Sontag: “She would lie in bed looking at her bookcase against the wall. She had begun to read her way through the writers published in Random House’s Modern Library editions, which she’d bought in a Hallmark card store, using up her allowance. Gazing at that bookcase, she recalled, was ‘like looking at my fifty friends. A book was like stepping through a mirror. I could go somewhere else. Each one was a door to a whole kingdom.’” (A note: I myself had a similar reading experience as a high schooler, with the Modern Library collection at the Oakland public library.) The rest of this essay is a treatise on what printed books really are and what they can actually do for the reader.

In this essay, Wasserman also discusses what the e-book and e-reading can do to harm personal knowledge. He quotes historian David A. Bell: “’The Internet Revolution is changing not only what scholars can read, but also how they read—and if my own experience is any guide, it can easily make them into worse readers.’ Why? Because, argues Bell, the computer urges sampling and surfing, and this is where the greatest dangers lie, because ‘information is not knowledge, searching is not reading; and surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns.’”

Wasserman offers much-considered advice to the reader: “The terrible irony is that at the dawn of an era of almost magical technology with a potential of deepening the implicit democratic promise of mass literacy, we also totter on the edge of an abyss of profound cultural neglect…. And how will the arrival and ubiquitous spread—indeed the likely coming hegemony of the World Wide Web—affect and shape the very ecology of communications and our habits of attention and comprehension? Does the ethos of acceleration prized by the internet diminish our capacity for deliberation and enfeeble our capacity for genuine reflection? Does the daily avalanche of information banish the space for actual wisdom? ‘Change is good’ is the mantra heard everywhere. Perhaps, but arguably only up to a point.”

Wasserman wrote this essay in 2010, and our experience now offers growing proof of what he could see then.

If the essay is a favorite literary moment for you, read this book. Wasserman does know what he is doing, and he divulges that knowledge with deep intelligence, fine writing skills, and prescient advice.

Copyright © 2024 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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