Kurt Andersen

This morning I happened to be looking through the May issue of Portfolio, which is a magazine that turns out to be a lot more compelling eight months after publication. A little info-graphic subtitled “How Investment-Bank Executives have split their donations to presidential campaigns” is especially interesting in hindsight, because two of those banks no longer exist and we now know how the election turned out.

Merrill Lynch was the ideological outlier — 86% of its top executives’ campaign donations as of last spring had gone to Republicans. Citigroup’s management group was the most bipartisan: 62% Democratic. And Barack Obama did best, relatively speaking, among the people who ran Lehman Brothers.

But what’s most interesting — bizarre, actually — is that the three most Democratic banks were Democratic to precisely the same degree: 93% of the campaign contributions from the top executives at each of J.P. Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley went to Obama, Hillary Clinton, et alia. As if we needed another data point to confirm the astonishingly sheep-like behavior of people on Wall Street.

How extremely curious it is that Bernard Madoff — uncannily successful investor and manager of billions for the rich and famous, Wall Street bigwig, generous philanthropist, important civic personage, New Yorker of consequence and stature for decades — was a virtual nobody until the second Thursday of December, according to the paper of record. Before he announced his crookedness, Madoff’s name seems to have been mentioned in The New York Times all of six times, and in each of those instances only very passingly: as a best man at a wedding in 1960, and then in five brief news articles about technical stock-trading issues between 1992 and 2000.

Which tells us something about his shrewdness, I suppose — if you’re engaged in a massive criminal enterprise, it makes sense to stay out of the spotlight. But just how and why on earth did the Times‘ business staff, for all those decades, neglect to run a longer piece about him and his remarkable firm and his enormous reputation?

In the discussion of “electability,” and which broadly defined constituencies are and aren’t drawn to Barack Obama, the focus has been on what has turned out to be Hillary Clinton’s strongest constituencies — working-class whites and people over 65. There is conversely a tendency to consider Obama’s reliably enthusiastic constituencies — black voters, voters under 30, voters with college degrees — as an insufficient coalition on which to base a winning presidential campaign.

But do the math, and this default piece of common sense doesn’t look so convincing. College-educated people are more than a quarter of the population (and an even higher fraction of those who vote), people under 30 are 15%, and African-Americans are 11.5%. In other words, those three groups combined make up half the electorate.

In an NPR interview yesterday, Hillary Clinton was asked whether she was “willing to win ugly.” Instead of answering, she complained that the premise of the question represented “a double standard,” since Barack Obama is not being asked whether he will fight dirty to get the support of superdelegates necessary to win the nomination. “He has [only] a slight lead,” she said.

Every time I hear that piece of Clinton campaign spin — that Obama’s lead is small or slim or slight — I wonder: in what arithmetical universe? Of the pledged delegates elected so far, Obama leads 53% to 47%. After the remaining primaries and caucuses, that lead might be reduced to 52%-48%. In no election I know about has a margin of four or six percent ever been considered “slight.”

On Friday the New York Public Library announced their list of the 25 best books of the year. Among the eleven 2007 novels honored were those by Jim Crace, Junot Diaz, Denis Johnson, David Leavitt, Edmund White…and — holy cow! — me, for Heyday. And this week the Langum Charitable Trust is announcing that Heyday has won their annual Langum Prize for the best historical fiction of 2007.

As one of my daughters said about the news, “Woo-hoo!” (And as another artist said in 1985, “I haven’t had an orthodox career, and I’ve wanted more than anything to have your respect…I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!”)

I want to thank all the readers who’ve written in with what they thought were errors in Heyday. So far, none of them have successfully busted me. But I’m still accepting submissions.

I’m voting for Barack Obama in the New York primary on Tuesday. There are all kinds of excellent reasons to do so, which I don’t need to rehash here.

But for wafflers and fence-sitters and even more or less committed Clinton voters who happen to be white, here’s another reason: every white vote that Obama gets will be counted by the media (and historians) as a bit of proof that America is measurably and truly moving beyond its most tragic history, and every white vote that Hillary Clinton gets will be counted as a race-based anti-black vote. Unfair and unfortunate, but that’s the way it is. In this instance, perception will be reality.

So: Clinton voters need to understand that if their candidate wins, they will be part of a depressing morning-after metric rather than a hopeful one.

I’ll be heading out across the country — to Atlanta, Nashville, Columbus (Ohio), Denver, Salt Lake City, and Portland (Oregon) — for readings and discussions and signings in bookstores. (To find out exactly where and when I’ll be appearing, you can see my schedule here.)

Now, a confession and an offer. There were two tiny factual errors in the hardcover which I’ve corrected in the paperback. To the first person who tells me what they were (at emailandersen@aol.com) — or, failing that, to whomever finds either one of them by April 1, 2008 — I’ll send a personally inscribed copy of the book plus the unabridged, 22-CD BBC Audiobooks America edition.

Happy hunting, and hope to see you soon.

The paperback edition of Heyday was published this week. It’s a very gratifying object, and not just because it’s swaddled in page after page of bits of critical praise. The cover image is the same as on the hardback — a photograph of an anonymous circa-1848 young man. But the cover has a quarter inch sliced off its right margin, so that the bright red edge of a second cover is visible beneath, this one featuring the young woman (one Kate Chase Norcross) who’s on the back of the hardcover edition.

By the way? During the last few weeks the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and Christian Science Monitor all put Heyday on their best-books-of-2007 lists; the Monitor calls it one of the 19 best novels of the year.

So: happy new year!

And now, back to work on the next one.

I have absolutely no axe to grind with Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times’s chief book critic. I know her slightly, like her personally, and have never been reviewed by her.

But over the years I’ve thought I noticed a tic in her writing — that is, an extreme fondness for the adjective “hallucinatory.” And when I saw a variation in the first sentence of her review of Denis Johnson’s new Vietnam War novel Tree of Smoke (”reads like a whacked-out, hallucinogenic variation on…whacked-out, hallucinogenic Vietnam classics”), I decided to search the Times archives and make a tally to see if I was right.

I was. In her thousand-odd pieces in the Times these last 25 years, she has, by my count, used hallucinatory in 63 of them, not counting a couple of references to literal drug experiences. She used to do it even more frequently — seven hallucinatorys in 1985, six in 1990 — often with only a few days separating instances. Since 2002 she has limited herself to no more than three a year.

Before Tree of Smoke, she had, in descriptions of fiction about Vietnam, defaulted to the word eleven times — and in three different earlier pieces had described Johnson’s 1985 novel Fiskadoro as “hallucinatory.” Apart from the Vietnam War, the work of Gabriel García Márquez (and fiction about Latin America generally) is the most reliable trigger: in writing about Márquez she has resorted to “hallucinatory” eight times.