This is a beautiful, beautiful
book. I came across this book through a review on The Guardian. The book is Memoirs
of Joanna Rakoff, taking the reader into her life in “The Agency” - a literary agency which represented J D Salinger, standing on
the cusp of a change as the Agency moves from the age of Typewriters and Dictaphones
to Computer. The perspective of the
story is very new. It doesn’t rely on the typecast characters where the young
woman is either a world-changing activist or a hopeless romantic or a soul-less
woman. She is as real as a woman (or a man, for that matter) can be. She has
many things to do, to build a career, to write poetry, to fall in love. Not one
of the things, not many of the things, all of the things which engage the mind
of young people. She joins the Agency expecting to slowly slip into a literary
career. She writes poems in the morning and like an ill-paid apprentice deliberates
about the lunch to be had. Her sense of description and observation is
profound. The descriptions are not clichéd, which could be probably because Joanna
as she tells Salinger over phone, She writes poetry “in the morning” much to
the pleasure of Jerry. She describes her boss in such an enchanting manner when
she writes that “My boss, as far as I
knew, had no children, and she like a certain breed of adult- appeared to have
never been a child herself, but rather to have materialized on earth fully
formed, in a taupe-hued pantsuit, cigarette in her hand “ when she tries to rationalize her inability to
appreciate the work of Judy Blume. Who
would not get charmed by that and who would not identify the hurt of being
reminded of the money parents spent on raising us, something which always felt
we had a divine right to.
She is given Form letters to
respond to people who try to reach out to Salinger, the brilliant, legendary and
still, asocial writer. But then, there are tremendous demand greatness impose
on legends. She explains the mild directions which her colleagues take, in
terms of being friendly and not. But always very careful of not to fall in the
trap of typecasting her characters, she always leave them at the point where
they come across as very real people, thriving through their grays. As per very
explicit instructions, she writes form letters, bears with Don, her current
boyfriend, holding out on her own, without becoming a gender fanatic. She
drives clear of the clichés, balancing her work, her bills and her mental
calculation before each meal she has. On account of a mishap in her boss’s
life, she ends up being in the thick of discussion of Salinger with a
lesser-known publisher- The “Hapworth affair” as they call it in the agency.
Much to the dismay of her boss, the matter proceed towards almost certain
publication of a Novella of Salinger, after a gap of close to a decade, till
the time when the news becomes public on account of an, hopefully, innocent
leak by the publisher which saddens Jerry who considers him as a friend. Joanna
sells a story, and is finally accepted as one of the Agency’s own. The
romanticism and the desire to change the world is slowly subdued in splashes of
realism as she gets angry responses to the deviation of the form-letter,
wherein she tried to be kind to people writing mails to Salinger.
Joanna reminds one of the poetic
style of Scott Fitzgerald, and one cannot but disbelieve her when she laments
not having read Dickens, or Dostoevsky, Or Proust. The poetry lingers sweetly
through the prose with sentences like, “My
voice had fallen to almost a whisper and the wind picked up, whipping my hair
and skirt around.” She contemplates her own place in Don’s life and in the
world in general with such disarming honesty when she write about Don, “He surrounded himself with fools – the broken,
the failed or failing, the sad and confused – so that he might be their king.
Which, obviously, made him nothing but king of fools. But what did that make
me?” In utter humility, she doesn’t even
believe herself to be extra-ordinary or uniquely placed when she writes that “the city was full of boys and girls like me,
clamoring at the gates of literature.” Anyone who has read this book wouldn’t
agree, however. She is not one of those boys and girls. She is one with the eye
for details, a heart that could feel those details as they form contours of her
own life and a pen to write. She ends the story with a sad note with “a family
in mourning, the world in mourning” as her father prepares to die.
If you love a sweet story which doesn’t
pretend to be world changing, which does not clamor for attention; if you love
poetry which doesn’t intrude the prose, if you love being young and being naïve
and truthful, this is a book you will love. While those who are intrigued by writing and publishing will like it, anyone who has ever done the first job will not be able to escape the charm of innocent, honest story. One doesn’t come across such
stories always. It is a fresh, morning breeze, as feeble and as gentle and as
refreshing.
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