Flexibility Is Key in Publishing Careers, Says NYT Book Review Editor

By Christina Anderson

Special to the Gazette

Prepare for change! was the message that Charles McGrath, editor of The New York Times Book Review, delivered to this year's Radcliffe Publishing Course participants on July 7 in Agassiz Theatre. "You will no doubt change jobs many, many times," he added.

Three years ago Joseph Lelyveld, executive editor of The New York Times, recruited McGrath from The New Yorker to take over as editor of the Book Review. McGrath had been at The New Yorker for 23 years, climbing the ranks from night copy editor to deputy editor, working with writers like Raymond Carver, John Updike, and Alice Munro. He saw the magazine through the vastly different editorial leadership of William Shawn, Bob Gottlieb, and Tina Brown.

"I have now become a great apologist for and champion of change. I think all of you should go into publishing understanding that change is what's going to happen," said McGrath, who has hired Radcliffe Publishing Course graduates over the years. He spoke about the climate in publishing and the role of the book review to the 100 students participating in the six-week summer program.

The landscape in publishing is shifting because the days when the structure of a corporation remain the same over an employee's lifetime are gone, said McGrath.

McGrath's persona suggests a different era too. Raised in Cambridge, soft-spoken and bespectacled, he seems a quiet, sophisticated "New York" type. Wearing a dark blue blazer, gray slacks, a blue and white pin-striped shirt, and the requisite red tie, he lamented the lack of energy surrounding the release of a new book today.

"Twenty years ago people used to talk about books -- the new Roth, the new Mailer, the new Bellow," he said. "I saw people split up because they disagreed over a book. That kind of vibrancy doesn't happen now."

When a student asked him how the industry will be affected by the conglomerate publishing houses, he said, "I'm not as gloom- and doom-ridden as some people. On the other hand, it can't be good that the number of free and independent outlets is reduced and that more and more of these imprints come under corporate control." He added, "In truth, publishing is in a rut. Nobody's making any money. I suspect that the future of publishing will leave the field open for other kinds of publishing that won't be so corporate."

Today, books compete with a glut of other diversions and sources of information: movies, TV, the Internet, to name a few -- all of which offer an instantaneous kind of gratification, he said. To top it off, McGrath said that some of the larger chain stores expect books to perform like blockbuster movies. "A book opens and if it doesn't happen in a couple of weeks they bundle it up and ship it back. And there simply is not enough time for that old thing -- word of mouth -- to happen." The great dilemma facing publishers and all of you, he said, is getting the news out about books in an environment where there is so much else competing for our attention.

Book reviews are one way of getting the news out. Since McGrath took over at the Book Review, he has paid more attention to commercial fiction, arguing that commercial fiction tells us about ourselves. He has also made it his first priority to improve the level of writing. He said the easiest way to get a good review is by getting opposites to review one another, like having Gore Vidal reviewing Norman Mailer.

"A book review ought to be a lively, entertaining, stylish, self-sufficient piece on its own. I think it's a perfectly honorable function for a book review to give you enough information to talk about [the book] at a cocktail party without having read it."

This summer, students heard lectures by 40 industry people, including publishing honchos Peter Olson, head of the Bantam Doubleday Dell conglomerate (also known as Das Group), and Jonathan Galassi, editor-in-chief of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A senior manager from Amazon.com also spoke this summer reflecting the changing trends in the book-selling industry.

Radcliffe Publishing Course Director Lindy Hess said that the program has changed as drastically in recent years as the publishing and book-selling industries. "But what's happening in book publishing is the same as what's happening in other areas of retail. It's just that book publishers are the gatekeepers of ideas so people have to pay attention to them," she said.