Long-form reporting in the New Yorker

In his profile of Larry David in this week's New Yorker, James Kaplan finishes with an anecdote. David is sitting in his editing suite, working on a scene where he gets egged by a carful of teenagers. He can't work out whether to cut to the teenagers driving away, or to leave the camera lingering on his egged face. "I don’t know," David says. "I mean, it’s kind of fun to see them drive away. On the other hand, it’s fun to see that egg.”

That anecdote, as I just wrote it, takes 68 words to tell. In the magazine, as Kaplan writes it, it takes 439 words. We learn who's operating the Avid machine, and what he's wearing. We learn the colour and brand of the director's shoes. We learn that Avid systems involve both a keyboard and a mouse. We inwardly scream "get on with it, already!" about half a dozen times.

The New Yorker prides itself on its in-depth features, and the fact that it is able to devote a lot of space to subjects which in any other magazine would be drastically truncated. Increasingly, however, I've found the magazine devoting equal amounts of space to subjects which desperately need truncating. We learn virtually nothing about Larry David in this 6,559-word article, which probably earned Kaplan a good $20,000.

Weirdly, the piece actually feels brutally truncated in places. We follow David and Jerry Seinfeld into an NBC meeting where they pitch a sitcom, for instance. We're told that "At first, the idea was to have two comedians walking around in New York, making fun of things, and in between you’d have standup bits." The NBC people didn't like it – and next thing we know, the show's been going for three seasons.

Kaplan also doesn't seem to have a clue how much technical knowledge he expects us to have. One minute we're expected to know the difference between a one-camera sitcom and a three-camera sitcom; the next we're being told how many frames of video there are per second.

David's show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, is incredibly self-aware, doing a magnificent job at skewering the hubris of television types in Hollywood. Yet when its director launches into hyperbole – something which I'm sure was accompanied by no small measure of sarcasm in real life – Kaplan simply reprints his comments verbatim, making him look like just another LA asshole with no sense of perspective.

The show’s pivotal moment came in the third season, in 1991. Charles remembers walking with David from the “Seinfeld” offices in Studio City up to Fryman Canyon to try to break a story: the library-cop episode, in which Jerry is investigated for keeping a book out for twenty years. “We had a couple of strands, and I don’t know if it was the oxygen from the walking, but we were very exhilarated,” Charles said. “We went, ‘What if the book that was overdue was in the homeless guy’s car? And the homeless guy was the gym teacher that had done the wedgie? And what if, when they return the book, Kramer has a relationship with the librarian?’
“Suddenly it’s like—why not? It’s like, boom boom boom, an epiphany—quantum theory of sitcom! It was, like, nobody’s doing this! Usually, there’s the A story, the B story—no, let’s have five stories! And all the characters’ stories intersect in some sort of weirdly organic way, and you just see what happens. It was like—oh my God. It was like finding the cure for cancer.”

It seems clear, from reading the piece, that Kaplan never really got what the New Yorker editors had hoped for when they sent him off to spend a bunch of time with Larry David and talk to the people around him. Yet after investing all that time and effort, the magazine evidently felt that it had to publish something.

Critically, that's where the general rules of the New Yorker feature well became a large liability. This is a profile, it's appearing in the New Yorker, and New Yorker profiles run between 5,000 and 10,000 words. More, if they're Joe Klein on Bill Clinton. Even if the amount of substance in the piece would best be conveyed in a 1,500-word "Larry David's show is back on TV, here's a little story about him" piece, the New Yorker evidently feels incapable of doing that.

So we end up with vast amounts of ill-constructed padding. "“Seinfeld” was scherzo, its fun stemming from the constantly shifting play among its troupe of four," we're told. "David’s new form was" – and here, of course, one expects another musical metaphor, to close the circle. It never comes: "David’s new form was simpler and starker".

I've worried, recently, about the front of the book; now I'm worried about the features. The New Yorker under David Remnick is certainly very good at timeliness, and covers foreign affairs magnificently. Newsier subjects in general are excellently done. But the kind of thing the New Yorker is famous for – long articles about people and subjects you didn't know you might ever be interested in – have been very weak for a long while. No one cares about John McPhee's fish, and, as TMFTML so eloquently put it, "enough with the fucking bags already" when it comes to picaresque tales of picking up litter.

We're told that the New Yorker has recently moved into the black, after costing Si Newhouse some exorbitant amount of money – much of which went on catering to Tina Brown's every whim. It would be a great shame, however, if financial success came at the expense of the great long-form reporting in which the magazine specialises. Weak long-form reporting is no replacement.

Posted by Felix at 12:34 EST

Comments

I hate those McPhee fish stories. I tried to get through one in my earlier days of subscribing to the New Yorker. I figured it was Culture and I would be an Ignorant Boob if I didn't give it a shot. After about three pages, I decided to watch a cop reality show on Fox instead.

Posted by: jame at 10:06 EST, January 18, 2004

Your point about New Yorker profiles is worthy, if overlong. (Ha ha, only kidding.) I'm a New Yorker subscriber; I find myself thinking often about starting a magazine to provide them with some competition. Their self assurance has aged into something approaching self indulgence. I recall all that baloney about the 'Newyorkistan' cover; every issue issuing injunctions to give them 500 clams for a colour photocopy in a bad frame. And every second or third ad is for Humvee or Philip Morris, usually wedged between excoriating articles on same. At 33, I'm at an uncomfortable age for reading. Nothing really fits. Does anyone know of a magazine that's like the New Yorker but for a somewhat more restless mind? Would anyone care to start one? Bueller?...Beuller?...anyone?

Posted by: ben at 14:47 EST, January 18, 2004

Ben, I think I might have just the magazine for you.

Posted by: Felix at 14:52 EST, January 18, 2004

Larry's subtle method of mixing mentally retarted individuals with an islamic woman in a berka is pure comic genius. What does he mean to say by this coy mix of symbols?

I just wanted to say that the show is a bit off this year so far.

Come on Larry, I know you have it in you!

Posted by: Ben Dover at 19:42 EST, January 19, 2004