My mistake /

DANIEL MENAKER LOVES words, and you can see it in every clause, in the rhythms of his language, even in the length of the sentences in his bracing memoir, "My Mistake." A veteran editor at The New Yorker and Random House, an insider who has always felt like an outsider, he was jolted by lung cancer several years ago into re-examining his past. He grabs the reader with urgency as he grapples with big questions: What shaped me? Where did I go right and wrong? What has my life meant? His clever, fast-paced prose makes you stop and think and wonder, meandering down your own by-ways, contemplating the ways his story reverberates. Menaker's memoir braids together three narratives: family history, literary life, cancer. A red-diaper baby in Greenwich Village in the 1940s, he was the son of loving but irresponsible parents. His mother, a pioneering copy editor at Fortune, had affairs, and his father, a furniture designer and salesman, liked his alcohol. They often left him in the care of a beloved Southern black nanny or a lefty uncle who ran a Jewish guest camp (charades, folk dances) in the Berkshires. Menaker was a smart-aleck kid, as ruthlessly competitive as he was insecure. He studied philosophy and poetry at Swarthmore, picked up an MA. in English at Johns Hopkins, taught private school in Manhattan but felt lost. The mistake that haunted his life, and that gives the book its title, occurred over Thanksgiving in 1967. During a family touch football game, Menaker goaded his older brother, Mike, who had bad knees, into playing the backfield on defense. Mike, a lawyer who was newly married, tried to block a pass and tore a ligament. This should have been the kind of sibling-rival spat they joked about years later. Instead, after surgery to repair his knee, Mike developed septicemia and died. Menaker still cannot forgive himself. He would later suffer from panic attacks. He landed at The New Yorker as an overqualified fact checker, and then became a copy editor. Menaker was so driven to show off his erudition that he overstepped his place and earned the ire of the vaunted William Shawn. Told to leave the magazine but without any timetable, he lingered on in limbo for a few years. Eventually he was rescued by the fiction editor William Maxwell, who shepherded into print Menaker's short story inspired by his brother's death. Maxwell then used his influence to boost him into a fiction editor's job. The back-stabbing of the Shawn era has been well chronicled by others, but Menaker cannot resist a few tasty takedowns. After 26 years at The New Yorker, he is eased out by Tina Brown, who apparently arranged a cushy landing for him at Random House, then run by her husband, Harold Evans. To Menaker, Tina and Harry resemble "the duke and the king in 'Huckleberry Finn,' floating down the Mississippi, affecting noble lineages, and fleecing townspeople right and left with their cons and impostures." Make no mistake, this is an angry book. Menaker is angry at himself for his character flaws (a flippant one-upmanship that alienates others), and he is thinskinned, remembering every slight. As a former executive editor in chief of Random House, he is proud to have nurtured writers who went on to win literary acclaim (the Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, the National Book Award winner Colum McCann). Menaker is understandably upset over being ousted from that job in 2007, but what seems to truly infuriate him is being shunned by the publisher, Gina Centrello, during a transition period. The tone of Menaker's writing changes when he enters his cancer years. In describing his devastating diagnosis and a recurrence, he uses free-associated sentences that run as long as 115 words. It leaves the reader breathless, a deliberate choice by this onetime copy editor, who wants to rush through these excruciating episodes yet convey in lyrical fashion what he feels. There are times in this volume when one wishes Daniel Menaker, the writer, had been edited by Daniel Menaker, the incisive editor. There are bits that should have been left on the cutting-room floor, such as his description of one New Yorker editor as "gay, I think." Either he was or he wasn't, either the fact is or is not relevant, but as written, what's the point? Menaker devotes seven pages to William Maxwell but only a few paragraphs to his 33-year marriage to the writer and editor Katherine Bouton. But these are quibbles. At publication time, Menaker had received the encouraging news that he is, for now, cancer-free. As an admirer of his earlier, underappreciated 1998 novel, "The Treatment," I hope there will be much more of his energetic and exhilarating wordplay yet to come. MERYL GORDON is the director of magazine writing at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. Her biography of the copper heiress Huguette Clark, "The Phantom of Fifth Avenue," will be published in the spring.

Menaker has been steeped in language his entire life, as the son of a copy editor, a perceptive reader, an incisive and witty writer, and an editor for the New Yorker and Random House. He now contemplates the origins, happenstance, and consequences of his devotion to literature in a warm, humorous, on-point memoir. Amiably self-deprecating, Menaker is a deft sketch artist, vividly portraying loved ones (especially his older brother, who goaded him to excel and whose early death is the source of depthless sorrow) and colleagues (his portraits of New Yorker staff are hilarious, barbed, and tender). His insider view of publishing is eye-opening and entertaining. What elevates Menaker's clarion reminiscence is his eloquently affirming appreciation for the humanities: Everything in your life is enriched, everything has a more universal human context. And his illumination of the exacting work of a New Yorker editor can serve as a veritable guide to the practice of getting things right in life, word by word, realization by realization, as we open ourselves to facts and art, truth and compassion.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

Menaker, once an editor at the New Yorker and Random House, grew up in the now-endangered class of New York communist intellectuals that had the nerve to call an elementary school (his alma mater) Little Red. He writes here of his hectic childhood with well-preserved romanticism. The result is charming. The memoir's title phrase-it recurs, songlike, throughout-refers primarily to Menaker's small but pivotal role in his elder brother's sudden death when they were both young men. That event stands in sharp contrast to Menaker's own slow battle with lung cancer. Mortality, that "Great Temporariness," haunts this humble book. Menaker is at his best when irreverent: chuckling at aptronyms (people aptly named), or deflating New Yorker legends (William Shawn and Tina Brown, most notably). Still, in this book of years, gossip is secondary to the writer's own musings and memories. Menaker leaves the reader with a sense of the vast triumph that is a life well lived. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A well-known editor's funny and thoughtful memoir of wrong turns, both in and out of publishing. As Menaker (A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation, 2010, etc.) sums up his life, he can't get past his mistakes--the big ones he'll never stop paying for and the small ones that changed his life. As a young man, he goaded his older brother during a game of touch football, leading to his brother's fatal injury and leaving himself with a lifetime of guilt. He smoked, quit and got lung cancer years later. He began working for the New Yorker, where it was easy to sweat the small stuff under the famously idiosyncratic editorship of William Shawn. Urged to find another job, he stayed for 26 years, skating on thin ice even as he climbed the editorial chain. There were rules of decorum ("You don't say 'Hi' to Mr. Shawn--you say 'Hello' ") and regular surprises on what would or would not pass the Shawn smell test. When Menaker suggested ending a story with a mild pun, Shawn told him it "would destroy the magazine." "What you want to write is an article," Shawn admonished him at one point, "and the New Yorker doesn't publisharticles." On the plus side, Menaker learned high-level editing, not just from Shawn, but from the contrasting examples of magazine stalwarts Roger Angell (rough and tumble) and William Maxwell (kind and gentle). After the Tina Brown coup, Menaker moved on to Random House, where he eventually became editor-in-chief, wrestling to stay afloat and to stay alive. Menaker doesn't just recount experiences; he digs away at them with wit and astute reflection, looking for the pattern of a life that defies easy profit-and-loss lessons.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.