Books & Poetry

In these days of shrinking editorial space and zealous PRs, it’s difficult to imagine any reporter spending days with a celebrity and then being indulged to write a novelistic, 20,000-word piece on the experience. It makes this collection of novella-length features by New Yorker editor David Remnick seem like the work of a chain-smoking ’60s hack, banged out on an antique typewriter – except that he’s writing old-style New Journalism on the likes of Mike Tyson, Tony Blair, Al Gore, Vladimir Putin, Vaclav Havel and Don DeLillo; lengthy interviews shaded in with forensic analysis and woven into compelling narratives.There are no gonzo pyrotechnics: Remnick writes in the crystal-clear prose that is the New Yorker’s stock in trade. But not a word is wasted. Read his 22 pages on Benjamin Netanyahu from 1998 and you slowly realise that you’re getting a sly psychological study of Bibi’s relationship with his ultra-hawkish father, a primer on Israeli military history and a psychopathology of the Likud Party.

The book closes with five chapters on boxing, that old dick-swinging fave of journalistic heavyweights. Remnick enters the inner sanctums of Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis, but also uses the boxing ring as an arena for racial and gender politics, particularly the way in which black boxers ‘fight intricate wars over shifting notions of masculinity, decency and class’. When he compares Lewis’s unconvincing stylistic imitation of Muhammad Ali to ‘Raymond Chandler doing Hemingway’, you sense Remnick is daring the reader to compare him to Norman Mailer. He doesn’t come off too badly, either.