A Writer's Writer

No secret I like to read obituaries, book reviews and stories about authors.

So, when a writer writes about writers, and is themselves I suspect part of that book review team at The New York Times Book Review, you have my attention.

Such is the case of Margalit Fox, an obituary writer for The Times. I happened to meet Margalit when she gave a presentation at the Mid-Manhattan Library on obituary writing during Halloween week last year. It was a lot easier going there than going out to Houdini's grave in Maspeth and breaking a wand over his headstone.

Her presentation moved along and gave credit to some of the noted practitioners in the art of writing obituaries. I got a complete sense of her scholarly approach when she compared Homer's writing techniques with that of an obituary writer. Not many people these days would know who Homer was, other than a John Irving character or a description of a ball hit out of the ballpark.

But Margalit hit her own home run when she explained what was going on in Robert McG. Thomas's obituary of Howard C. Fox, "the Chicago clothier and sometime big-band trumpeter who claimed credit for creating and naming the zoot suit with the reet pleat, the reave sleeve, the ripe stripe, the stuff cuff and the drape shape that was the stage rage during the boogie-woogie rhyme times of the early 1940s." I remember reading that obituary when it appeared and it never dawned on me until Margalit pointed it out that McG was writing his own piece in jazz to reflect the era. I only knew it was good. Margalit explain why it was good.

And being a fan of the obit page I've also noticed what I think is no coincidence. Margalit gets to write about the writers more often than not. And why not? At certain points in the game Mariano gets the ball to do what he does best.

So today, when Margalit writes, "Micheal Cox, a former singer-songwriter turned biographer, then editor, was an authority on the Victorian ghost story who, five years ago, spurred by the threat of blindness, wrote a vast Gothic novel," I knew she was about to let loose her disarming wit that darts out between periods.

She tells us Cox's The Meaning of Night "is set in an 1850s London awash in fog, footfalls and fatality." There is more. "Purple profusion" comes in on the tide. Check it out. Margalit is now writing her own Gothic novel about the Gothic novelist, just as Robert McG. Thomas, Jr. (the man with the "somewhat overloaded name") was writing jazz.

I am a much better read person for having read obituaries.

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