Character Studies: Encounters with the Curiously Obsessed

Oh, Mark Singer, I really wanted to love Character Studies: Encounters with the Curiously Obsessed. I liked your "Talk of the Town" pieces on an amateur nudie photographer, and got caught up in the glamour of the New Yorker Festival that put your book on its convenience marketing table. Maybe the early headiness was too much. I expected too much from the relationship before it had a chance to blossom.

Oh, well. Mild disappointment aside, my issues probably aren't as much with Mr. Singer as they are with the problematic aspects of profile writing. In magazine format, it just comes across so much better. Maybe it's that the expectations are different: structure is rarely as important in a feature than it is in a book, where you know that you're investing a certain number of pages' worth of attention in any given chapter/story. So when the pieces are taken wholesale from a magazine as they are here, the transition feels bumpy. (I assume the pieces were left largely unaltered from the original appearances, although I find it difficult to believe that the New Yorker would run such long articles. This is untested, as I haven't yet caved in to buying the Complete New Yorker software to check these pieces, and apprently couldn't be bothered to drag my ass to a library that could help with such research.) The pieces feel rather rambly and unfocused--and for a book that promises obsessiveness in its title, that's not so much an asset.

However, Singer gets a gold star for effort. While some of the subjects are no-brainers (Martin Scorsese and Donald Trump, for example), others obviously took some roundabout thinking and random connection-making (like an upscale produce farming family in California, or a quirky book dealer in New York). Also to his credit, he pretty much allows the subjects to speak for themselves. He emerges periodically as an "I"--enough to establish voice--but never lets his perceptions color anything gleaned by the reader.

The pieces themselves are pretty uneven. A few are recommendably entertaining: the one about Trump basically lets him hang himself with his own blowhard noose. Another, about Martin Scorsese ("The Man Who Forgets Nothing") shows what a freak the man is. But in a good way, since said freakiness has given us Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Casino. It makes him look like a lunatic, but an amiable one. It's also a little sad, though, because the timing of the piece frames Gangs of New York as the big push for lifetime achievement. After reading about his "process," it's easy to see how Mr. Scorsese would blame himself for losing out on the big prize--and that he's gone even more years without that piece of validation seems even worse. Maybe this year, Marty.

The chapter on the Japanese-American farm family in California, selling fancy eggplant and lettuces to Wolfgang Puck and roadside stand customers alike, is also interesting, but draws out the story way too long. Is it about these adult children who remain on the family farm, afraid to trust the family business to strangers? Is it about a family that survived the horrible US internment camps during WWII and went on to create something successful? Or is it about how an obsession with food quality is an art unto itself? Singer never really comes down in any quadrant that might focus and refine the story.

Same deal with a piece on Ricky Jay, a fascinating magician/performer/magic librarian whom I unfortunately only recognized due to his more pop-ish TV and movie work. At first it seems like a piece about a guy whose sleight of hand is so good that it seems uncannily real. Then it's a profile of someone whose art has been corrupted by the likes of David Copperfield. Then there's a lot of grousing about the nature of magic book collection. Lots of fantastic detail, but very little narrative to hold it all together.

Other pieces are just not as good, period. One, about a group who may or may not have stolen Pancho Villa's skull, I stopped reading about five pages in. There's also an extremely long one about a cult of Tom Mix obsessives. Maybe it would have been more interesting if I knew who the hell Tom Mix was--but I didn't, and not much effort was made to get me to care. The personal and descriptive details are cute, but not really grounded in much.

But the language is sharp, and that redeems several of the negatives. So while it'll be a long time before I pick up one of Singer's anthologized books again, I do look forward to reading his new stuff in my overmentioned favorite magazine.

Some fun bits from the book:

From "Trump Solo":
"As Dr. Ginger, out of earshot, manipulated the sore back of a grateful [Trump resort] member, I asked Trump where she had done her training. 'I'm not sure,' he said. 'Baywatch Medical School? Does that sound right? I'll tell you the truth. Once I saw Dr. Ginger's photograph, I didn't really need to look at her resume or anyone else's. Are you asking, 'Did we hire her because she'd trained at Mount Sinai for fifteen years?' The answer is no. And I'll tell you why: because by the time she's spent fifteen years at Mount Sinai, we don't want to look at her."

From "Secrets of the Magus":
"When he had performed several dazzling illusions and seemed ready to retire, a guest named Mort said, 'Come on, Ricky. Why don't you do something truly amazing?'
Baron recalls that at that moment 'the look in Ricky's eyes was, like, 'Mort--you have just fucked with the wrong person.'
Jay told Mort to name a card, any card. Mort said, 'The three of hearts.' After shuffling, Jay gripped the deck in the palm of his right hand and sprang it, cascading all fifty-two cards so that they traveled the length of the table and pelted an open wine bottle.
'OK, Mort, what was your card again?'
'The three of hearts.'
'Look inside the bottle.'
Mort discovered, curled inside the neck, the three of hearts. The party broke up immediately."

From "The Book Eater":
"The rest of the room was occupied by scores of unopened cartons of pamphlets, dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, which Zinman acquired almost four years ago from an ephemera dealer who had procured them, for the price of scrap, from the New York Public Library. This was material that the library had recorded on microfilm as part of a 'preservation' program that deemed the original documents expendable. In 1997 and 1998, Zinman--unable to resist the impulse to rub a great institution's nose in its ill-considered behavior--dispatched to friends, as well as to the library's trustees, poster-size holiday greeting cards devoted to the theme of the library's 'trashing' of its own collections."