Lane - Nobodys perfect: writings from the New Yorker

Praise for Anthony Lanes

Nobodys Perfect

Anthony Lane must be the fizziest critic around. Each paragraph tickles the nose like a flute of champagne. His ebulliently active mind and wonderfully cluttered memory work to make us laugh aloud while he slips in the dirk, its edge painlessly keen, of urbane, humane opinion.

John Updike

None can match the turn of phrase, the wit, the appreciation for absurdity and the flim-flannery that Lane brings to the page. He is incapable of writing a dull sentence or of making his subject less than interesting.

San Francisco Chronicle

Nobody writes with as much wit and intelligence about anything as Anthony Lane writes about everything.

Adam Gopnik

Like the best culture writers, he doesnt only forego elitism for humility and curiosity; he makes his concoction of those virtues dance on the page.

The New York Sun

A big, fat, entertaining and informative book.

San Jose Mercury News

To be seduced by Anthony Lanes very necessary humor is to miss, at times, his often touching and always deep fidelity to his subjects, and his even deeper desire to understand why mans need to tell stories is, on the one hand, delusional, and on the other, the most moving form of self-reflection and self-discovery there is.

Hilton Als

Anthony Lane is funnier than the funniest critics, and smarter than the smartest critics. Nobodys Perfect is a gem.

Malcolm Gladwell

Anthony Lane

Nobodys Perfect

Anthony Lane was born in 1962. He joined The New Yorker in 1993.

For Allison

Y ou are holding a hunk of old journalism. The prospect is not immediately appealing. Who, like Oliver Twist, will have either the nerve or the appetite to ask for more? Yet Oliver did want more; he knew what would land on his plate, if the beadle consented to his request, but he asked anyway. Even gruel has its uses, and so, more alarmingly, does a half-forgotten film review. There is surprising nourishment to be had from revisiting earlier judgments, if only for the pleasure of reversing them, wondering what curious conditions led one to cast them in the first place, or serving them up with relish to those who are constitutionally doomed to disagree. If this book has any concrete effect, it will be, I hope, in a small back room in a country town, where a reader will suddenly jump up and down in unprecedented fury, enraged by my appraisal of Speed or The Bridges of Madison County, and bang his head on the ceiling.

The book contains a selection of work from The New Yorker, at which I arrived in 1993. That I have now been with the magazine for almost a decade means that, if all goes well, I can soon expect to outgrow the status of stumbling novice; beyond that lie the ranks of the merely bewildered, and, forty years down the line, a cherished post as an acceptable part of the scenery. As a rule, writers should be treated like rubber plantslightly pruned, occasionally watered, but basically left to do their own thing in a corner, away from direct sunlight. Even now, people ask wonderingly how my original appointment came about. All I can say is that, at some point, there must have been a clerical error of such embarrassing proportions that the magazine has spent the last nine years trying to cover it up. I myself wonder whether there is another and far more qualified Anthony Lane living quietly with his frustrations in a distant land, still waiting for the call from Tina Brown; in that case, I am a kindred spirit of William Boot, the malleable hero of Evelyn Waughs Scoop, who, after a mixup with the true Boot, was hired by the Daily Beast to cover a complex African war, when all he really knew about was voles.

The manner and protocol of my appointment, likewise, remain fogged in mystery. I was sitting in London when the call came from Tinas office; I think I actually stood up to receive it, much as I would if a letter had come from the Vatican. It transpired that Tina had dispatched her scouts and spiesher roving monsignorson a mission to find a new film reviewer, and that some hapless soul, presumably under torture, had croaked the name of Lane. So I mailed a sheaf of smeared photocopies and followed them to America, where Tina had summoned me to a breakfast meeting. This was a brilliant move on her part, since she must have gathered from her sources that, like Bertie Wooster, I am congenitally unable to speak before ten in the morning, whereas she has always made it her business to be neck and neck with the lark. The plan, I imagined, was that she would make all the running while I would sit there, breathe my tea, and nod my jet-lagged assent. At stake was a deal of great pith and moment: she needed a movie critic, and I needed the French toast with maple syrup and a gathering of seasonal berries.

Things did not go as expected. For one thing, I got the job, which was hardly part of the blueprint. Second, and more important, I didnt eat. So brisk and genial was Tina that she was out of there and heading to the next meeting, a few sips of coffee the stronger, while I was still debating whether I should try to eat grilled bacon, never the quietest of foodstuffs, in the presence of a public figure. Time, I am happy to say, soothed this difficult etiquette, and I gradually became one of the few men in America who could order pancakes in her presence and stack em high. Quite why I failed to join in the paralyzing awe of Tina that prevailed elsewhere is hard to say; maybe because she offered better value as a friend, but mainly because all my fears were displaced on to the magazine itself.

Nowadays The New Yorker perches high in the Cond Nast building on a corner of Times Square, an unenjoyable comb of offices that is redeemed only by Frank Gehrys infamous pod of a lunchroom, where diners fight to suppress the sensation that they have wandered into an episode of The Jetsons. Along the ovoid barriers of its salad bunker and sandwich barricade we slouch, in varying degrees of disrepair, behind the flawless begetters of Allure and Vogue, the synchronized rise and fall of whose hemlines remains, for those frozen to their iMacs, the one reliable guide to the shifting seasons outside. Yet The New Yorker of Forty-third Street, its previous residence, was no less arctic; long, hard corridors, doors as thick as logs, and a whiteness of wall that struck me as close to medicinal. Working late at night, I would listen out for the squeak of an institutional sneaker, convinced that Nurse Ratched had marched out of the movie that bore herOne Flew Over the Cuckoos Nestand into the wards of The New Yorker. The intimidation had begun on my first day at the magazine, as I was courteously shown into a small office, which was to serve as my temporary base camp. The door swung shut behind me with a