The Receptionist: An Education at the New Yorker by Janet Groth. Algonquin Books: June 2012
[Library copy.]
I could sum up this book in one quick blurb: Pretty blonde takes advantage of an informal meeting with literary giant E.B. White to beg for a position at The New Yorker. Being a kind man with a generous soul, he passes her along to the head secretary, who offers her a position as a receptionist, a job she held for twenty-one years without ever advancing at the magazine. She meets a few great writers (poet John Berryman, essayist Joseph Mitchell and novelist/playwright Muriel Spark) with whom she spends a lot of time hanging out in their off hours. Over the years she earned advanced degrees and now she's Professor Emeritus of English at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. She never managed to write her "great book" but had a hell of a lot of fun at cocktail parties.
And that's basically it, along with an awful lot of filler details I could hardly care less about:
"I decided to wash my hair. Mr. Propopoulous was prevailed upon to put in motion a set of operations that eventually yielded hot water. When, hair washed, I expressed a wish to dry it and asked if he had a blow-dryer, Mr. Propopoulous pointed to the top of his house: "No such apparatus, but perhaps the sun?"
Riveting.
I was pulled in by the rave reviews, forgetting those are "I'll scratch your back" empty, hot air rote phrases roughly 90% of the time. I'd imagined the book would be about a woman who started as a secretary, working her way up the ladder at The New Yorker, a woman who defied the odds in a male-dominated literary world, breaking through the proverbial glass ceiling to become... Oh, I don't know, an editor or something? Anything? I wanted to read about the inner workings of the magazine, stories of a bustling literary powerhouse accompanied by off-beat, insider anecdotes only someone inside the circle would know.
Unfortunately, it's not the book she wrote.
I'd recommend this book to a specific niche group of readers if I could come up with one for whom it would be enlightening. Honestly, I don't know what niche group that would be. If the topic interests you, my advice is skim through it. Get it from the library, flip through for key words of interest, read the occasional paragraph, then return it. You'll thank me for saving you the money.
David L. Ulin of the Los Angeles Times:
Groth can be charmingly offhanded: anecdotal, gently gossipy, although she goes out of her way not to reveal anything too intimate. This reticence, she suggests, may be what held her back as a writer, a point given unintended resonance by the tone of her reflections here.
Heller McAlpin from the The Washington Post:
Readers looking for juicy tales of the quirky denizens of West 43rd Street will find a few — including accounts of weekly lunches with blocked writer Joseph Mitchell, and courtship by poet John Berryman, who tried to convince Groth that she would make a good third wife for him. Much of the book, however, concerns her extracurricular rather than professional life, including her many self-destructive affairs seeking a replacement father figure and husband, and her subsequent struggles with the “dumb blond cliche.”
The Complete Review:
As far as The New Yorker-gossip goes, she sprinkles some in throughout, but often it amounts to little more than name-dropping:
When J.D.Salinger needed to find the office Coke machine (there wasn't one), I was the girl he asked. When Woody Allen got off the elevator on the wrong floor -- about every other time -- I was the girl who steered him up two floors where he needed to be.So, yes, there are disappointingly few good insider stories or revelations about The New Yorker here (which, again, is fine -- except that the book is being very much sold as ... An Education at The New Yorker).