'After the Tall Timber' a Tall and Terrifying Collection

Renata Adler’s writing is not for the lily-livered. In the preface to “After the Tall Timber,” a new collection of her previously published essays, Michael Wolff, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and fellow New York journalist, writes “I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that her writing is some of the most brutal ever directed at journalism itself.” Adler, a former staff writer for The New Yorker, one-year chief film critic of the New York Times, and author of two novels, has a sharp tongue and sharper pen. Her journalistic and critical writing in this collection is generally acute, invigorating, and informative.

By Courtesy of New York Review of Books

“After the Tall Timber” draws a broad, compelling sample from three collections of Adler’s work, “Toward a Radical Middle” (1970), “A Year in the Dark” (1969), and “Canaries in the Mineshaft” (2001), as well as featuring previously uncollected work. In 21 essays, she tackles all manner of topics: representations of violence in movies, the Starr Report, Watergate, Civil Rights marches, and journalism itself, to name a few. The phrase “After the Tall Timber” comes from her introduction to “Canaries in the Mineshaft,” included in this book. As part of a larger cry against journalists seeking name recognition, Adler writes, “There still existed what Mary McCarthy, in another context, called ‘the last of the tall timber.’ But the tall timber in journalism is largely gone—replaced, as in many fields, by the phenomenon of celebrity.” The irony of course is that Adler has become a figure of some celebrity, in part for pieces like this, and the ambivalence of the title powerfully captures the fraught and controversial nature of her own position as a journalist, author, and celebrity.

The complexity of Adler’s role as a journalist in part stems from her unique political perspective. She positions herself at once as a centrist—the ultimate insider—and a radical—the ultimate outsider. She puts herself forth as both a populist and iconoclast, as a renegade writer and as an articulator of the most fundamental, broadly agreed upon American values, which makes for complicated, fascinating writing. In her introduction to “Towards a Radical Middle,” included here, Adler stakes out a space for what she identifies as an as-of-yet-unarticulated political position: a radicalized centrism. She feels that both the radical left and right of the ’60s have their failings, and she is interested in rearticulating certain centrist beliefs in a forceful and powerful way. “Our values are corny ones, reason, decency, prosperity, human dignity, contact, the finest, broadest possible America.” Her political analysis is not entirely convincing in that it relies on a false appeal to a majority, but the position she sets up for herself as a journalist and cultural critic is intriguing.

Adler’s exploration of the contested outsider-insider, centrist-radical dynamic is particularly prominent in her two essays about Civil Rights marches, included in this collection: “The March for Non-Violence from Selma” and “The Black Power March in Mississippi.” She thrusts herself into the thick of events and reports them as they are, in a thorough, unsparing fashion. Her coverage often comes off as unduly harsh—she has a talent for collecting unfortunate and unflattering quotations. In one instance, she cites a student concerned about Maoists who defines them like so: “A Maoist. You know. From the Mau Mau.” What is redeeming about these essays, however, is that the writing is grounded in firm, morally sound convictions. Adler ends her essay on the Black Power march with an an inspiring gesture of solidarity: “The black man’s rights are law—and for the white community to resist or ignore the law implies the collapse of an entire legal and moral system. It has become intolerable to the black man to win so slowly what is his by right.” That Adler’s criticisms here, as elsewhere—of what she views as stupidity, falseness, and any other number of sins—stem from this strong moral core keeps them from slipping into the merely vitriolic or vituperative.

The author is equally unsparing in her representation of her field and her critiques of her peers, in part because she has such high expectations of and hopes for the craft. This collection includes what Wolff terms “the famous or infamous piece”: “House Critic,” a lengthy, powerfully vicious takedown of The New Yorker’s iconic longtime film critic, Pauline Kael. Adler is no fan of Kael’s writing, not merely because she finds it bad but even more because she feels that it threatens some of what she loves most. “What really is at stake is not movies at all, but prose and the relation between writers and readers, and of course art,” she writes. These are heavy accusations, but they are largely substantiated by the essay. The essay is therefore not merely invective against Kael, though in one large section it is simply quotations from Kael’s work. “House Critic,” a meticulous, unforgiving recounting of what Adler views as Kael’s flaws, is an exhilarating read, a quality that stems in no small part from the schadenfreude Adler invokes.

Adler’s writing is far from flawless. Her essays are often overlong and overstuffed. Sometimes this is more forgivable: In “House Critic,” she says of writing after reading Kael’s work that “it becomes hard—even in reviewing Ms. Kael’s work—to write in any other way.” Sometimes it is less so. Her political analyses often miss the mark, and her trademark viciousness can be written in too heavy of a hand. But when Adler’s writing coheres into something merciless yet moral, centrist yet radical, it soars. “After the Tall Timber” is almost always an absorbing, enlivening read.