David Remnick - The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of Affluence

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to all the New Yorker stafferseditors, assistants, librarians, fact checkerswho work with such care and attention. Thanks to Henry Finder, who edited so many of the pieces here and helped with every detail; to Dorothy Wickenden, whose judgment was also crucial; and to Pamela Maffei McCarthy and Ed Klaris, who made this book happen, from idea to publication. Thanks to Dana Goodyear and Brenda Phipps, who were of great help to me in this project. Above all, my gratitude to the writers.

INTRODUCTION

DAVID REMNICK

N ot long ago, Bill Gates built himself a mansion on Lake Washington. The house is a short drive from the Microsoft corporate headquarters, in the city of Redmond, Washington. It is most famous for its electronic gadgetry, for screens that show near-exact replicas of great works of artCzannes Mont Sainte-Victoire one moment, Matisses bathers the next. The rooms are programmed to suit a guests taste in music, cuisine, temperature. And yet in this house of so much modern technology there is one relic of the pre-E-book age. In Gatess library, a sentence from The Great Gatsby unspools around the dome: He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. A fascinating sentence, considering Jay Gatsbys fate as a contradictory symbol of aspiration, self-creation, wealth, and hollowness.

The New Gilded Age, this American moment of prosperity, satisfaction, and self-satisfaction, is rife with such contradictions. The first, and most basic, has to do with the nature and the extent of its gildedness. The American record of economic growth is unprecedented and, since March 1991, uninterrupted, and has inscribed itself on the landscapethe McMansions of suburbia, the princely constructions along the oceans, the real-estate manias from Manhattan to Palo Alto. And yet its origins remain a subject of debate. Reaganites ascribe the boom to the tax cuts and other fiscal policies of the eighties; Clintonites give credit to an administration that slashed deficits and made accommodations to the bond markets in 1993 and later. To Silicon Valley dwellers, the answer seems equally obvious: a technological revolution has not merely accelerated growth but created an entirely new economy, a new world, one with its own rules and without economic or imaginative limits. Yet how many will be invited to join this new world? There is the population that has prospered (though to wildly varying degrees), and then there are those who have fallen further behind; no one remains untouched.

The New Yorker has tried in the past few years to capture something of this ageits leading figures, its manners, its mechanisms, its politics, its ironies. This book collects the articles resulting from that effort. Over the decades, The New Yorker has published a variety of anthologies. Many of them are retrospective; they look back on a theme and the way it has been expressed (as in a book of love stories, edited by Roger Angell), or they look back on the development of a form, on the evolution of the short story or the Profile. This collection is quite different, for it represents attention paid to a historical moment while we are still living it. And the pieces here, while they stand on their own, are also tiles in a larger mosaic.

At first glance, ours seems an utterly blithe and lucky time, lacking the tumult and trauma of, say, the war years or the sixties. But it is not so easily understood as either its boosters or its bashers would have it. Some of the pieces in this collection, like Mark Singers Profile of Donald Trump and Michael Specters Profile of the humble shoemaker Manolo Blahnik, record an era of excess and self-absorption. Others, however, strike different notes. John Cassidys Profile of Alan Greenspan explores the peculiar history of a man who is the wizard of this American Oz, a Wall Street banker steeped in the objectivist principles of Ayn Rand, who now fiddles mysteriously with the gears of the American prosperity. Joan Didion, in her sly appreciation of Martha Stewart, David Denby, in his fevered diary of stock speculation, Susan Orlean, in her walks with a New York City real-estate broker, and David Brooks, in his surveys of the new class structures, are among the writers here who look at the ways that American ambitions, anxieties, and manners have shifted in recent years. Larissa MacFarquhar and Malcolm Gladwell go beyond the stock portraits of the New Economy (the young men in backpacks with a hundred million dollars in the bank and a quart of milk in the fridge) to the subterranean rules of the new world, the new networks of business life, the way humanand commercialconnections are now achieved. And John Updike, Daphne Merkin, Arthur Krystal, and Adam Gopnik are among the writers who react personally to the age. A century ago, at the height of the first Gilded Age, Henry James came home from Europe and described his fascination with the density of American decoration: the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria, the hall of mirrors in Peacock Alley. There was, as Gopnik points out in his piece Metamoney, a solidity to the age and to the gold itself. In the late 1990s, as the New Gilded Age took hold, the government issued redesigned bills with a stripped-down aesthetic. The New Money looks like our Gilded Age, Gopnik writes. In its combination of overkill and emptiness, the New Money evokes the new midtown hotels, with their black-and-white Deco marble lobbies, wedged into tiny lots, and then the cold sealed rooms immediately abovethe luxury falling off as soon as youve checked in.

Invariably, Manhattan and Silicon Valley are central precincts here, but they are hardly the only precincts of the New Gilded Age, and celebration and irony are hardly its only moods. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, a young scholar and writer, spent years hanging out in the South Bronx to produce her remarkable narrative, Landing from the Sky. Just as Jacob Riiss portraits of the Lower East Side were part of the literature of the Gilded Age, LeBlancs work is part of ours. Nicholas Lemann reports from Philadelphia on the way the structures of old eastern cities and old money have disintegrated. Bill Buford reports from the sweatshops of Lower Manhattan and the Garment District. And William Finnegan, in After Seattle, goes on the road with a young woman who is helping to lead the passionate, if often inchoate, political fights against the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and, generally, the New Economys rosiest assumptions.

The New Yorker, which recently celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary, began publishing the same year that The Great Gatsby appeared. Both the fledgling magazine and Fitzgeralds novel set a gimlet eye on an age of money: its attractions and its costs. We cannot know when this age, the New Gilded Age, will end and what will signal the end. Here and there the market plunges, forcing us, if only for a moment, to consider its impermanence. It was Gatsby who used to dream each night of the universe of ineffable gaudiness, and to him those dreams were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairys wing.

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