First Loves
A Memoir
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Solotaroff was one of the notable intellectuals of his generation, the founder of the New American Review, editor and friend of Philip Roth, and editor-in-chief at HarperCollins. Solotaroff reveals himself here as a thinking man with a big heart and gaping wounds of love that are not disconnected from the contributions he has made to American culture throughout his career.
Solotaroff turns back to the earliest pages of his romance with Lynn, remembering his first sighting of her emerging from the water as if from a dream. Yet the image, as he penetrates the intervening layers of sorrow and disappointment, is almost impossibly distant, fragile. First Loves reenacts the blurring of a perfect conception in the mind of a man who would devote his life to precision of thought and word. This opposition, of romantic and intellectual passion, drives the narrative and eventually brings it to crisis.
First Loves could be described as a very private feat of honesty from a public intellectual. Solotaroff’s willingness to admit the failures, personal and professional, alongside the triumphs of his career gives a three-dimensional intensity to the emotions on the page. Working with all of the gritty and romantic elements of his storied life, Solotaroff manages to avoid a tone too heroic or honey-dipped; he manages simply to tell the tale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The loves alluded to in the title of this unflinching but amiable follow-up to the critically lauded Truth Comes in Blows are both romantic and intellectual. Both loves are imperfect, but with Solotaroff who founded American Review as navigator, they are fascinatingly so. The bewitching Marilyn Ringler and Solotaroff met in 1948 when they were working at a Jewish resort on Long Island. "I was nearly twenty, two months out of the navy, and hadn't had much luck with girls whom I didn't pay," Solotaroff declares in a confession that's typical for this public intellectual more bemused than wracked by the recollection of his younger days. There were considerable mistakes and woes early on, although he has crafted another memoir that is admirably shorn of remorse. Solotaroff indulgently embarked on a career as a writer even though the signs were neon-bright that his talent lay in criticism. After Solotaroff and Lynn, as he calls her, married, Lynn began seeing rats and ghosts at night. Moving to New York for the mangy bohemian life he'd fantasized about, Solotaroff became a scrappy laborer as the couple, "so uncannily tuned in to each other" out of the bedroom, were forced to grapple with their sexual incompatibility. They eventually had two children, and Solotaroff settled down to life as a critic. Although he has a tendency to compare nearly everyone in his memoir to major literary figures ("Elizabeth reminded me of Virginia Woolf"; "I was on the way to becoming a younger version of Leopold Bloom"), Solotaroff manages to imbue all of them with full humanity.
