Here's a tasty excerpt.
Janson-Smith whispers to me that she’s the daughter of wealthy Baltic-Jewish émigrés to Great Britain and her husband is a lord, Baron Gould of Brookwood. As we—Sonny, Stu, Patrick Janson-Smith, and this billowing cloud named Gail Rebuck—stand around in idle chat, Markus Dohle, the printer from Hamburg who’s just replaced Peter Olson as CEO of Random House USA, is receiving new guests as they arrive. Olson had a reputation for being a little cold but being, at the very least, a voracious reader; Dohle has a reputation for being a printer. Rumor is that Gail was his chief competitor for the position, and it’s very hard to look at both and not consider Random House’s decision a grave mistake. Dohle is a towering wolfpack of muscles tapering to a freakish trapezoid; his suit jacket is tailored too tight across the bunchy expanse of his Teutonic Lou Ferrigno back, and he leans on the balls of his feet in an about-to-topple or -wrestle posture. These things conspire to make him seem elevated from a high rear center of gravity, as though he were hanging on a meathook between his shoulder blades. In this tableau, I realize, is the story of how slangy Jews and the landed gentry are ceding the book business to steroidal technocrats from Germany. There’s probably an argument to be made that the chief engine of Anglophone high culture since Disraeli was the cheery antagonism and shared admiration of the Jews and the Wasps — the debate and friendship between Mailer and Buckley. But now, in place of Lord Weidenfeld and Roger Straus, we have an army of eager Visigothic accountant-printers. The very location of the Frankfurter Hof, in the overlapping deep shadows of the Commerzbank and the European Central Bank, seems a cruel and heavy-handed reminder that while we were assembled at the Maginot Line they flanked us through Belgium.The essay appears in the March 2009 issue.
