A ringside seat

This new collection of essays from the editor of the New Yorker is divided into five parts, to account for David Remnick's aray of interests. From politics to media, to writers, to boxing. Remnick aims to reveal those who are reluctant to disclose themselves. He does so with class. By Pete Hamill

REPORTING: Writings From The New Yorker. By David Remnick. Alfred A. Knopf, €20

Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language. In 1934, in ABC of Reading, he said, "Literature is news that stays news." In that sense, this collection of articles by David Remnick can stand as literature.

Since 1998, of course, Remnick has served as the editor of the New Yorker, certainly a full-time job. Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding and thinking beyond the obvious. The editor wields the baton for the band; he or she seldom sits in to blow tenor sax. But from the beginning of his editorial duties, Remnick has continued working as a reporter and writer. In the modern era, not many editors make such a choice.

"I was the opposite of a specialist," he writes of his apprenticeship at the Washington Post, starting in 1982. So it is no surprise that these 23 pieces from the New Yorker are the work of a proud generalist, avidly curious about the many enigmas of the world. The articles in Reporting range from patient, careful visits with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (in Vermont exile and again after his return to the new Russia he helped create) to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. Katharine Graham is here and so is Mike Tyson, shrinking into what Remnick calls "a ghetto kid's fatalism". We are shown Al Gore long after he has lost the White House, and we visit with Palestinian exiles and true believers. The earliest article dates from 1994; the latest was reported from Israel and Gaza within days of the Hamas victory in the January 2006 elections. The older articles still make a reader understand better the issues of the present day. For example, the layered, rounded 1998 profile of Benjamin Netanyahu helps explain that complex man's ultimate fall from important power in the Israeli elections in March 2006.

As a writer, Remnick practices a classic journalistic style: concrete nouns, active verbs, graceful sentences, solid paragraphs, subtle transitions. A sly wit often punches up the prose, and he is hip in the original sense of the word, which was "knowing", not "fashionable".

I've been edited by Remnick and interviewed by him, and came away from each experience respecting his intelligence and professionalism. As an editor, he wants to make the writer's work better; as a writer, he treats the reader as an informed, intelligent equal.

The engine of his published work is, of course, reporting. Surely he must have written his share of clunkers over the years, especially during the decade he spent writing for nearly all the sections of the Washington Post, except (thank the journalism gods) the national desk. The clunkers are not in this book. But reporting is a craft; you learn as much from your failures as from the small triumphs. Every reporter inhales scepticism.

The newspaper reporter's daily struggle is against deadlines and column inches, time and space, which is why so many decide to move on – as Remnick did after returning from the Soviet Union in 1992 – to write better about less. He published longer pieces in the New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, Esquire and The New Republic, and in 1992 he was hired at the New Yorker by Tina Brown, his predecessor as editor. At the same time, he was finishing his masterly book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1994. After all this, he still remembers where he came from. In his preface to this collection, Remnick talks affectionately about his apprenticeship in the early 1980s, when he often covered homicides, giving it his all, only to be told by a night editor: "Two graphs. Slug it 'slay'." And yet, he implies, nothing was wasted. The apprentice learns speed and precision, and carries both into the luxury of the long form.

Along the way, Remnick clearly learned another lesson: the best reporting doesn't simply look at the world; it tries to see beyond the obvious surface. The reporter goes places the average reader never visits; the reporter must make that fragment of the world understandable with details. Almost always, Remnick locates the objects of his scrutiny in a specific, personal place: a writer's workroom (Philip Roth, Amos Oz, Don DeLillo) or the welldefended precincts of power (Tony Blair, Vladimir Putin). He has no interest in being a court painter to the powerful and makes certain to note the moral or political warts of even those people he most admires (Natan Sharansky, Vaclav Havel, Oz). He goes places, talks to many people (including the wives of his subjects) and comes back to tell his readers what he has learned. And like any reporter who learns from what he experiences, he knows that the world contains very few saints.

Above all, Remnick wants to see the subject clearly, and if that is not possible, to offer evidence that the person is too elusive for any final word to be written. His duties as a reporter for the Post during the collapse of the Soviet Union taught him many lessons. He is wary of abstractions, and all notions of utopia; utopian visions (secular or religious) usually fill the graveyards and the gulags. Modesty remains a primary virtue of any good reporter. Remnick remembers: "When I ... Volunteered for the paper's Moscow bureau, I was sent abroad with the firm understanding that there had not been more volunteers (it is cold in Russia and the food is heavy) and that I was, in a two-person bureau, the number two."

The bad food and arctic winds soon gave way to one of the great stories of the last decades of the 20th century, and Remnick had a ringside seat. He used every available tool to make sense of what he was seeing, hearing and feeling: histories, novels, contacts among Russians in and out of the crumbling power structure, the criticism of dissidents, a lot of what Murray Kempton, one of his heroes, once called "going around".

It is no accident that six of the pieces in this collection are part of the aftermath of that historic time. Other articles show that Remnick was still learning from his subjects. In a fine essay about the continuing project of retranslating the great Russian writers, he quotes Vladimir Nabokov: "In art as in science there is no delight without the detail. All 'general ideas' (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers shortcuts from one area of ignorance to another."

And in his interview with Oz, the Israeli novelist and journalist, he is told: "I don't like to be described as an author of fiction. Fiction is a lie. James Joyce took the trouble, if I am not mistaken, to measure the precise distance from Bloom's basement entrance to the street above. In Ulysses it is exact, and yet it is called fiction. But when a journalist writes, 'A cloud of uncertainty hovers' – this is called fact!"

The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.p