2.1/The Historical Frame/The Decade in Events and Forces

What a Literate Person Would Know, 1989–2001

The Power to Kill a Story

The literate New Yorker of the period ran on a fixed diet, and the diet was legible to anyone who shared it. The daily Times was the floor of the arrangement, read for the news but also for the byline economy — who had gotten the assignment, who had been moved off the beat. Above it sat the weeklies and monthlies: The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and, for the ones who followed the trade closely, The New Republic and New York. CNN ran in the background of the working day, on but rarely watched closely, and PBS’s NewsHour ran in the evening for people who wanted to feel they had done their duty. The reader watched some HBO, went to the correct restaurants, saw the wrong blockbusters and pretended otherwise, and could produce, on demand, an opinion about a film that had passed through an art house six months earlier. The equipment was not casually acquired. It took hours a day to maintain, and the maintenance was itself a marker of membership. All of it arrived on paper or over the air, with nothing to search and nothing to retrieve once it had scrolled past, so that a good memory for who had written what, and when, and where, was a professional asset.

What the equipment produced was less a body of knowledge than a shared set of references that could be deployed without explanation. The reader did not need to gloss Do the Right Thing or Twin Peaks or the Anita Hill hearings; they were common property, and the argument about them — whether Spike Lee’s film would incite a riot, which was the wrong question; whether a Black conservative on the Court was a betrayal or an advance, which had no comfortable answer — was the actual social currency. Culture arrived as material for argument. An album release, a novel everyone was expected to have opinions about, a Best Picture that felt wrong the moment it was announced — Driving Miss Daisy over Do the Right Thing, Dances with Wolves over Goodfellas, and later Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction and Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan — these were the counters in a game whose real subject was the standing of the players. To have the right opinion about the wrong winner was to demonstrate that one saw past the Academy, which was the entire point.

The bookshelf was part of the same apparatus, read in the three seconds it took to cross a living room. A wall of black-spine Penguin Classics said one thing; a run of Knopf hardcovers with the Borzoi colophon said another; the small black-and-white chapbooks of Semiotext(e) said a third, and none of the three needed a word spoken over it. The counter-canon was read as fluently as the canon. A shelf carrying the full Knopf run of Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Patricia Williams’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights, and a pencil-marked Their Eyes Were Watching God told a practiced reader that its owner knew the tradition, knew the tradition that ran against it, had read the theory, and would not be condescended to about any of it.¹ The shelf did the introducing before its owner opened her mouth.

The Decade Explaining Itself

The period wrote about itself constantly and got most of it wrong, which did not stop the writing. Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, published by St. Martin’s in early 1991, named the cohort and its affect and handed the magazine class a vocabulary it used for years — “McJob,” the “veal-fattening pen,” the register of the affluent slacker.² The same spring, Vintage published Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, which Simon & Schuster had dropped the previous November after the National Organization for Women called for a boycott; Patrick Bateman’s catalogues of status objects — the Valentino suit, the reservation at Dorsia, the correct business card — were a savage early prosecution of a brand-knowledge economy that had not yet reached its peak.³ Ellis had itemized the status literacy the reader lived inside and made it monstrous.

The argument culture had its own machinery, and for three years it ran on a single fight. Susan Faludi’s Backlash, from Crown in the autumn of 1991, won a major nonfiction prize and put its author on the cover of Time beside Gloria Steinem the following spring.⁴ Against it stood Camille Paglia, whose Sexual Personae had come from Yale in 1990 and who spent the next several years as the contrarian pole of every panel and profile.⁵ Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth was the third leg of the stool.⁶ The fight ran in Vanity Fair, New York, The New Republic, and The Atlantic on a roughly six-week cycle, and to follow it was to be current. Above the fight ran a larger and more flattering idea: Francis Fukuyama’s argument that history had reached its terminus in liberal capitalism, published as a book in 1992, gave the decade a frame in which it was the end of something rather than the middle.⁷ The launch of Wired in 1993 and the Netscape offering of 1995 supplied the counter-mood — not the end of history but the beginning of a Long Boom — and the magazine class held both moods at once without strain.

The class’s own institutions were the material it watched most closely, and in the middle of 1992 they gave it its defining spectacle. Tina Brown left Vanity Fair to take The New Yorker, arriving that September, and the magazine world talked about little else for weeks. She rebuilt the magazine’s text around timeliness and celebrity, over the objections of an older guard who saw the reorientation as a surrender, and she brought in a generation of writers — David Remnick, Malcolm Gladwell, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Hilton Als, Lawrence Wright, Jane Mayer — who defined the magazine’s next phase.⁸ The covers announced the change: an Edward Sorel drawing in the autumn of 1992, and, on the Valentine’s issue in early 1993, Art Spiegelman’s image of a Hasidic man and a Black woman kissing, a direct reference to the Crown Heights violence of the preceding year and a half. The industry argued about whether the most literary magazine in the country had been saved or coarsened, and the argument was, itself, the class talking about the only subject it never tired of, which was the class.

What the decade thought it was living through was the end of the Cold War, the culture wars, and the arrival of a new economy. What it was living through, underneath, was the consolidation of finance into a structure that cracked at the decade’s close; the slow erosion of the advertising model that paid for the magazines doing the narrating; the treatment revolution that, in 1995 and 1996, left a generation of AIDS survivors alive and permanently bereaved; and the early gentrification that was pricing out the artists who had made the city worth writing about. The decade told itself it was a conclusion. It was a hinge.

The Floor Moving

By the last years of the period the intellectual equipment itself had begun to feel inadequate to the moment it was meant to describe. The theory that had powered the late-1980s academy and the magazine-friendly critic — Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble from 1990, the October circle, the first English translations of Žižek — retained its prestige and lost its grip.⁹ The instrument that broke the grip was not a rival theory but a technology. The gatekeeping function that had made the magazine intellectual necessary — the power to decide what reached the Atlantic-to-Harper’s audience — was dissolving. Salon launched in late 1995 and Slate under Michael Kinsley in the middle of 1996; Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s arrived in 1998, mocking the house style of the very magazines it was staffed by; and the arrival of email forwards and Usenet threads meant a critic could no longer stand at the only gate, because there was no longer only one.

The breaches came fast and were legible even from inside. An internet site posted the story the same month, sourced independently and beyond anyone’s authority to hold. That September the Starr Report was released and available online within the hour, the first major government document distributed that way, and the magazine class read it at their desks off their own screens. The criticism registered the shift in its own vocabulary. James Wood, writing in The New Republic in the summer of 2000, coined “hysterical realism” for the maximalist contemporary novel — Zadie Smith’s White Teeth chief among his examples — and accused it of “knowing a thousand things but not knowing a single human being.”¹⁰ David Foster Wallace had already written the prescription, in his 1993 essay on television and fiction and in Infinite Jest in 1996: a media-saturated consciousness, irony hardened into a defense, the lonely interior under the connected surface.¹¹ Smith’s novel, from the same season as Wood’s essay, had proposed that the multiethnic city was now the central subject and that no single frame — postcolonial theory, multiculturalism, identity — was adequate to it.¹² What almost no one on the floor had registered was where the argument had already gone: to the first weblogs, up and running by 2000 — Andrew Sullivan, Jason Kottke, Mickey Kaus writing kausfiles on Slate — where a person with a free account and no masthead could outpace a tenured professor on the day’s news. The magazine intellectual felt the floor moving and did not yet know what was below it.

The Invisible

Against the immaculate foreground ran a set of blind spots so consistent they amounted to a second structure. Talk radio was the largest of them. The magazine class knew it existed and had, as a rule, never listened to it; the hosts assembling a national political audience three hours a night were, on the floor, a rumor rather than a sound. Adjacent to it lay the whole country the reader thought of, when at all, as flyover: country music, stock-car racing, and evangelical Christianity as an organized political force rather than a private eccentricity. When a paleoconservative won better than a third of a New Hampshire primary and gave a speech at a national convention declaring a culture war, the floor filed him under fringe. The coalition he was describing governed the decade’s culture fights. The largest financial story of the early years ran at the same distance: the collapse of the savings-and-loan industry, hundreds of institutions failing at a public cost running into the hundreds of billions, most of the wreckage in Texas and the Southwest and therefore mostly filed as a regional business item rather than a national reckoning.

Closer to home ran the economy the reader lived inside without seeing. The immigration wave of the period staffed the restaurants where the arguments happened, cleaned the offices where the magazines were made, and drove the cabs that carried editors home, and it entered the coverage rarely and late — surfacing, when it surfaced, as a grounded ship off Rockaway or a fire in a Bronx social club rather than as the standing condition it was. The precinct-level city was invisible by the same mechanism. The reader lived in a New York of doorman lobbies and safe blocks and understood it to be the city; the city it actually was ran block by block, and the great decline in its murder rate had begun years before the administration that claimed the credit for it.¹³ What crack had done to the neighborhoods the reader never entered, and what the police were doing inside those neighborhoods — the corruption a city commission spent the middle of the decade documenting — reached the floor as statistics and headlines rather than as knowledge, if it reached the floor at all. What the floor knew, it knew with precision and in company. What it did not know, it did not know it did not know, which is the more durable kind of ignorance.