Three cheers for Walter Kirn–the novelist, critic, and my friend and former colleague from Spy-–who slaps around David Denby in today’s New York Times Book Review in his review of Denby’s new book Snark:
Denby pronounces Tom Wolfe and Maureen Dowd masters of “snarky mimesis” and settles on two epicenters of snark located on opposite sides of the Atlantic: Private Eye, a British publication that he deems an outpost of postcolonial Anglo bitterness, and Spy, the aforementioned American magazine whose golden age was the late ’80s and whose editors, Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen, are sniffed at as new-to-New York City provincials stuffed with dreams of metropolitan glamour and disgust for the “wicked” city they ended up in. As someone who worked at Spy and knows a bit about what went on there while Denby wasn’t present, I find his portrayal of the place inaccurate — and his charges against it frail and dim. “The editors wanted to find out where the power was, though their fascination was severely limited in range. Finance and the media . . . obsessed them.” To take on New York’s two most conspicuous, intimidating and seemingly invincible industries wasn’t limited at all, of course, but, if anything rather predictable and obvious. Denby then engineers an accusation that’s even more moronic and meaningless. “Spy . . . did not want its victims to disappear. It wanted them to hang around so they could be attacked again and again. The magazine and its subjects were mutually dependent on each other.”
How very true. As The New Republic is dependent on the government and Motor Trend on General Motors, Spy indeed relied upon its subjects. So as to have subjects, like any magazine. One, the main one perhaps, was Donald Trump, who consistently outpaced the efforts of even his most fanciful critics to lampoon his own persona, climaxing in the series “The Apprentice,” whose explosive, ill-mannered, grotesque main character raised and doubled every snarky charge that Spy ever hit him with, and seemed proud to do so. Would Denby have rather had the magazine pick targets less maniacally vain and clawingly ubiquitous? If Spy on Trump was quintessential snark, then snark is mandatory in certain cases.
When I read Denby’s comments about Spy, I, too, thought his depiction inaccurate–inaccurate, wrong, uninsightful, selective and tortured. He just didn’t get it, and more to the point, he’s very proud that he never got it. Which is a very different think than not liking it, or even hating it. I’m afraid he has revealed himself to be fatally square.