Review of The Paris Review Book: of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, ... and Everything Else in the World Since 1953 (Paperback)

I bought this book mainly for the interviews the magazine has had over the years, and some of them with notoriously reticent figures like Nabokov and Hemingway.But I was disappointed, because what really distinguishes a Paris Review interview from those of other magazines is how well they're edited, and how beautifully and naturally the conversations flow.All we get here is single paragraphs, usually just anecdotes, funny stories, little opinions: sometimes they're profound (see Edmund White's page) or just convey the author's personality well (Faulkner, Hemingway), but all of them just made me upset about not being able to read the rest of the interview.

Of course there's not enough space.But I would have thrown out most of the other material.I doubt there was any way to make this collection totally succesful: if you pick only the famous stuff that the magazine has published over the years, it's sort of a waste, since most people would either have read the selection already or wouldn't want to read just an excerpt.A first chapter is useful to get you excited about an upcoming book, but unnecessary if the book's already been published.If you limit yourself to the more obscure material, well, it'll be good, but there's a reason that some people remain obscure.

Not that I didn't get a lot of pleasure out of this book.Heather McHugh's poem, for example, is beautiful, and I never would have run across it if I hadn't picked this up.There are little wonders sprinkled throughout, but too much of the rest is familiar, just okay, or an unsatisfying little piece of something larger.

I hesitate to put forward this criticism, since I have no idea how I could do it better - but I do know what book I would rather have read.If anyone down at the magazine (which I hope will rebound from the sad loss of Plimpton) can put together a big volume of complete, untruncated interviews, I would pay a princely sum for it.I've seen earlier collections, but nothing that covers the entire Plimpton era, and I think it would be easier to pick just the great interviews than to squeeze thirty plus years of wonderful material into this enjoyable but probably ill-advised collection.



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