Editor's Note

Cocktail Party Fluency

by Brian K. Mahoney and photographs by Fionn Reilly, October 26, 2010

In Noah Baumbach’s debut feature, Kicking and Screaming (1995), Eric Stoltz plays Chet, a professional student who tends bar at the local watering hole where all the would be and could be professional students gather. Chet is the resident philosopher and wisdom dispenser of the group, tossing off bon mots like “If Plato is a fine red wine, then Aristotle is a dry martini.” (Baumbach, a Vassar graduate, has built his career around writing lines like that, from The Squid and the Whale to this year’s Greenberg with Ben Stiller.) Chet's most memorable comment,which has stayed foremost in my mind these many years, was about reading. In a discussion about books—in particular a novel neither of the conversants has read yet are opining about at length—Chet says, “I don’t read books anymore. I read book reviews.”

At the tender age of 25, I actually already knew the inherent brilliance of this strategy, being a longtime reader of the Book Review in the Sunday Times. Reading the Book Review, I could dip my pinky toe into the world of 20 or 30 books a week, achieving at least a conversational familiarity with the works—what I’ve come to call cocktail party fluency. So while I have not read Jonathan Franzen’s latest great American novel, I know the plot line, the similarities and contrasts from his previous work, and why some female writers are up in arms about all the attention he’s been getting.

The fact of the matter is, while I did just download Freedom onto my Kindle, the number of books I find time to read a year seems to be in direct reverse proportion to my age. It trends like so: At 20, I read 40 books a year. This year, I'll turn 40, and I’ll be lucky if I read 20 books. By the time I’m 80, I’ll have stopped reading books entirely, cowed by the overwhleming digital clutter and merely scanning Twitter posts and Facebook updates, or whatever the digital variant of these devices will have evolved into.

Knowing this about myself, and looking wistfully at the pile of unread magazines on the bedside table at my house sitting next to the untouched books, I came to the conclusion that this month, I would offer some snapshots of articles for those lacking the time to read the entire magazine, but wishing for cocktail party fluency. Some talking points below, then, for when you're mingling and you want to appear informed about the November issue of Chronogram.

David Means is BFF with Jonathan Franzen.
Our books editor, Nina Shengold, describes the short story writer David Means's new collection, The Spot, as possessing “a magisterial bleakness, leavened by prose of surpassing beauty.” Means, who teaches at Vassar College, is a close friend of Jonathan Franzen, whom he met in the 1980s, and Means is noted on the Acknowledgments page of Freedom.