It’s hard to wrestle with Gay Talese. At 93, he is old but spry, and his sentences are so quietly, consistently effective that you may not realize he has you pinned.
Reading a new collection of his New York-themed reportage, A Town Without Time, I wondered if we had been taking Talese for granted, the way we took Gene Hackman for granted, or that one red sauce restaurant with the very good amatriciana that is supposed to never close — until, suddenly, it does. In its wake comes a new Chipotle. In literary terms, that translates into the latest batch of Iowa-educated essayists of the Leslie Jamison variety, burrowing ever deeper into their own pathologies. You start to wonder, reading their work, if some of them have ever been outside.
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