Everything you’ve been doing is bullshit. Underlying every one of my stories was the traditional belief that you’re in a democracy and the power in a democracy comes from being elected. Yet here was a man, Robert Moses, who had never been elected to anything, and he had enough power to turn around a whole state government in one day. And he’s had this power for more than forty years, and you, Bob Caro, who are supposed to be writing about political power and explaining it, you have no idea where he got this power. And, thinking about it later, I realized: and neither does anybody else.
You’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.
The women who lived that life, a life before electricity — millions and millions of them — of course are almost all dead, and they can’t tell their story to their descendants If in even small measure I told it for them, these women of the American frontier, and in order to accomplish that, ‘The Path to Power’ took a couple of years longer to write, well — so what?
everyone else, minds rotted from overconsumption of narrative media: conviction! passion! belief! / me, only reading nonfiction and poetry (a kind of nonfiction): administrative capacity
I've said many times now that Robert Caro has ruined me for the vast majority of non-fiction [1]; I think it is only recently that I've really internalized the fact Robert Caro more than any other writer, thinker, or public intellectual has changed my understanding of the world and my place therein. Caro is a crusader but not a zealot: he believes in the possibility of institutions to make great things, and he thinks it is important to understand how those institutions operate and the process by which individuals can capture, change, and subvert those institutions. He understands — and teaches the reader — that things do not Happen, but are part of a fractal and infinite web of cause and effect, and that the footnotes of history — the footnotes of life — are littered with fascinating and terrible and honorable people, all of whom had loved and lived and grieved and died — sometimes on the periphery, sometimes in the far far distance.
It was hard for me to get around to reading Working, despite all this. This book, from a distance, felt like the kind of — I don't want to be unkind and call it a cash grab, but maybe a collection of b-sides from an artist spending a long time in the studio, something that doesn't detract from the ouevre necessarily but still feels somewhat cheap in the holding. (I am thinking specifically of Murakami when I say this, who I still love dearly but the guy has never seen a quick-hit book deal he doesn't like.)
And, to be clear, Working is very much that kind of book. I think it's fair to only say half of it is truly new material from Caro; a third of it is a collage of (good, but repetitive) interviews and press clippings from the past few decades, and a sixth of it is passages from his earlier (and perfect) work.
The new material, though! It is reductive (Caro's first job; how Caro moved to the Hill Country; why Caro takes so long between books; Caro's writing routine) and somewhat anodyne, and I don't really care. I think everything Caro publishes is valuable; I think reading this book felt akin to reading a blog of his, and in that light I was happy to do so.
Take, for instance, Nixonland, a perfectly fine book that I'm currently reading whose author seems to revel in the pace at which he lightly and swiftly hops from cursory subject to cursory subject, seemingly more interested in connecting the dots between various Wikipedia articles than pursuing any sort of inner understanding. ↩︎
★★★★
