Alex Abramovich

Twenty-one years ago in the LRB, Julian Barnes accused J.D. Salinger’s erstwhile biographer, Ian Hamilton, of ‘reverse reductivism’: ‘Normally, the biographer establishes the course of a writer’s life and then uses it to “explain” the work,’ Barnes wrote. With Salinger’s life largely unavailable, or where available obscure, Hamilton finds himself doing the opposite: deducing the life from the work ... ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’, one of Salinger’s most elusive stories, is discussed in terms of a. Salinger’s visit to a hotel at Daytona Beach; b. the history and genealogy of the Glass family; and c. the stylistic break it represents from ‘The Inverted Forest’, published a month earlier. ‘Bananafish’, Hamilton records in passing, is ‘spare, teasingly mysterious, withheld’.

Earlier this week, three of the Velvet Underground’s surviving members gathered for a moderated panel discussion at the main branch of the New York Public Library. The band’s fans formed a long and winding queue along the building’s stairs; Andy Warhol’s amanuensis, Billy Name, who looks a bit like Santa Claus now, held court at the head of the line. To passers-by, it must have looked like Christmas on 42nd Street. The occasion itself was a bit of a miracle: For one thing, the moderator was a journalist – and anyone with opposable thumbs can tell you that Lou Reed, who doesn’t care for journalists, takes evident pleasure in his venomous and/or monosyllabic replies to their questions. (‘Journalists are morons, idiots,’ he’s said. ‘You can hit them, stab them, kick them in the shins, abuse them and outrage them and they won’t even notice.’ Click here and here to compare Reed’s style, as an interview subject, to Warhol’s.)

It’s strange to find the New York Times Book Reviewdevoting three full pages to yet another round of the Gordon Lish/Raymond Carver spat, previously addressed (at length) in, for example, The New Yorker, Slate and the New York Times’s own Sunday magazine. Stranger still to see it come down so heavily against Lish, one of the more accomplished editors of the 20th century. The byline is also odd: Stephen King – who was once praised (by the same publication) for his masterful reworking of the ‘evil-car motif’. Really? I don’t mean to pick on King.