Gay Talese Leaves Me Cold

Is it OK to not go gaga over a writer recognized as part of the journalism canon?

Let me first say that I think Gay Talese is a very good writer, an excellent writer, in fact.

But it’s the depth of his reporting and not the virtuosity of his prose that made him a star of New Journalism. What’s notable is that the best work in “The Gay Talese Reader” are the earliest, before he became an entrenched inhabitant of the Upper East Side.

You can “hang around the fringes” delving in the lives of your subjects only so long before it starts to looking like slumming. I think he’s a much better observer of those in his own milieu – like “Looking for Hemingway” – than athletes or doormen.

Talese is the Meryl Streep of journalism: a consummate professional whose craft is so well practiced you can actually see where they oiled the wheels to make them glide.

Unlike Streep, however, Talese’s creative output has increasingly diminished. After a prolific youth, he’s turned out, what, three books in 35 years?

I do love “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” because the reader gets to know Sinatra in way that is perhaps more telling and accurate than if Talese had interviewed him. But all things considered, when it comes to New Journalism I’d prefer to read Norman Mailer or Hunter S. Thompson.