By Jesse Kornbluth
Founder, HeadButler.com
I worked with Ron Fried on Tina Brown's "views magazine" on CNBC for about a year and a half. I came in one afternoon a week and wrote clever lines for Ms. Brown to say on the Sunday night show. Fried, a senior producer, came in every day and did much of the heavy lifting. I'm still working on my novel. Fried, in that year-and-a-half, wrote two.
It's amazing that I don't hate the guy.
There are three things in Ron Fried's favor.
First is that his novels are short. Christmas in Paris, 2002 (The Permanent Press, 2005) weighs in at a slim 148 pages.
The other is that they're terrific -- smartly narrated and terrifyingly insightful. (To say nothing of the fact that there's not a wasted word.)
The third thing is the biggest of all: the rich characterization. Ron Fried can write women. He can even understand them. And does he ever know about men.
"Christmas in Paris: 2002" begins with a taxi ride from Charles de Gaulle airport into Paris. I've taken that taxi; if you've traveled to Paris regularly, the ride is like a trip through your past, rushing you past hotels you've stayed in, reminding you of the person you used to be.
So it is for Joseph Steiner, a New Yorker who first came to Paris 30 years earlier. Now he's married, living in Manhattan, with a 20-year-old son off at college. He and his wife are staying in the apartment of married friends who are, like him, in the TV news business. One was "in a place where there'd just been a war." The other was "on her way to a place where war was coming soon." The war that everyone knows is coming is a large presence in this book; it's a bookend to 9/11 and to the general question of American heroism.
Steiner's wife, Mary, runs a small publishing imprint and has commissioned a book about Islamic radicalism. It's been selling briskly; Mary's savvy and quite successful. Steiner is less so; he's just lost his job.
For Steiner, getting fired looms even larger than the drumbeats announcing impending war in Iraq. Steiner has some money saved, but the loss of a vocational identity is a body blow -- and it isn't helped, in the borrowed Paris apartment, when he plucks some books from a shelf and discovers that they're signed by the authors. There's also a framed picture of the cast of a popular TV show. Everybody's somebody. But, Steiner has to wonder, who is he?
We spend a fair amount of time in Joseph Steiner's head. Reliving the experience of being fired. Thinking about Balzac, his favorite writer, who reminds him that "money became more important as you got older; it cushioned you from the world." And musing about Paris, a city he's visited as often as possible, because going there "was a bit like cheating on your wife without the burdens of deception or the pleasures of young flesh."
Paris is a theme park, a stage set, a spread-out shopping mall for people who hate real malls. Mary springs for a leather jacket, and Steiner, though unemployed, also does his share of shopping. ("If Fitzgerald was correct and character was action, Steiner was in big trouble: He'd done almost nothing. But if shopping was character, then Steiner was a Hemingway hero.") The Steiners go to dinner with friends. (The conversation is a deadly accurate portrait of accomplished people talking shop.) Later, they pause in front of a store with a display for Karl Lagerfeld's new diet book. Steiner is astonished by the designer's weight loss; Mary wonders if the book has an American publisher.
Not large events -- but hey, the Steiners are on vacation.
You could thus easily conclude that this is a book about a small man and a shaky marriage. Wrong. It's the story of a real man in a real marriage. It's like journalism tricked up to read like fiction. Because Steiner does know a few things. "He knew that his wife was beautiful and Lord knows she always tried to speak the truth ... And there was still something beautiful within America, though darkness was falling all around."
These are not the exciting truths of the young. They're the home truths of middle age. They acknowledge loss, but not defeat. They're the guiding principles of people who lead middle-management lives. Put another way, they're the truths that power the lives of people we know -- of the people we are.
Reading Ron Fried, I began to think he could read my mind. He doesn't miss a beat, and he's terrific at describing worry and pride and vanity. He can do bitterness. He can recreate sadness. And in what looks like a little book about a ho-hum week in Paris, he can deliver a rich, satisfying portrait of two people who will make you think in a whole new way about yourself and your choices.
A masterful book, Mr. Fried. Time to quit your day job.
Jesse Kornbluth is a New York-based journalist and founder of Head Butler.com, a cultural concierge site and free daily e-mail featuring information on new and classic books, movies and music.
Check out Kornbluth's review of The Number: A Completely Different Way to Think About the Rest of Your Life and The Nick Adams Stories.
