'The Fragility of Happiness'

Christopher Carduff, books editor at the Wall Street Journal, asked me to review a new translation of a Russian novel due for publication in November. The proofs arrived on Thursday and I sent Chris an email letting him know I was already reading the book. The email bounced back with “out of office” on the subject line. I figured he was on vacation. Only on Friday did I learn from a friend that Chris had died last Monday at age sixty-six.

Between us, we had exchanged seven emails (not counting that last one), enough to suggest that this was an editor whose literary judgment I could trust. In my first note I complimented Chris on the two volumes of William Maxwell’s work he edited for the Library of America in 2008. He served as a contributing editor at the LoA from 2006 to 2017, before joining the Journal, whose weekend book section he turned into one of the best in the country. I could also have mentioned The Golden West (2005), Daniel Fuchs’ collection of Hollywood writings edited by Chris for David Godine. Fuchs was author in the 1930s of a wonderful trilogy of Brooklyn novels.  Here is Chris on my favorite among Maxwell’s novels:

“I love the loose-limbed, improvisatory feel of Time Will Darken It. With this book Maxwell was moving beyond personal history and trying to write a kind of social history of the small town he grew up in. It has the largest and most varied cast of any of his books, and it’s painted on a big canvas: it’s like a Midwestern Brueghel, or one of those Chinese scrolls with hundreds of figures, people high and low, young and old, at work and at play.”

In Maxwell’s early work, Chris says, we see him “discovering his signature subject matter—the fragility of happiness, dramatized against the details of small-town Midwestern family life in the early 20th century.”

You’ve got to love a reader/writer/editor who starts by saying he “loves” a book. I wish I had had a chance to work with Chris.