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Getting Started: A Memoir of the 1950s

by William Weintraub

Like the least-known member of a string quartet, William Weintraub’s status as a writer seems destined to remain in the shadows cast by his three more famous friends of the 1950s, Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant, and Brian Moore. Indeed, the main strength of this memoir of “getting started” lies not in Weintraub’s rather thin narrative, but in the highly personal exchanges with his literary cohorts. The adolescent drinking bouts and the hirings and firings at Montreal’s The Gazette, where Weintraub worked, do not make for high drama.

Richler’s private comments on the writing life are the memoir’s chief attraction. He published in Rome “because a friend knew the editor” and concludes: “So much of it is connections, Bill, and it makes me want to puke.” Elsewhere, Moore offers to “push [Weintraub’s] manuscript. I can get you in immediately for a high-level reading.”

Perhaps it’s this ubiquitous nepotism that turned Weintraub away from what Moore called “bookwriting.” Weintraub certainly had the talent to succeed, as his excellent Why Rock the Boat and The Underdogs illustrate. Maybe he was scared off by Richler’s conclusion that “there is no fame big enough or money bribery big enough to compensate for the pain that goes into the making of a novel.” Whatever the reason, Weintraub continuously compares himself to his soon-to-be-illustrious friends and comes up short. His sense of failure, self-loathing, envy, and self-pity mar what could have been an important book.

Getting Started concludes with a nostalgiac “Ah, those were the days.” But for Weintraub, they clearly weren’t.

 

Reviewer: Doug Beardsley

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

DETAILS

Price: $34.99

Page Count: 304 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-7710-8914-7

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 2001-9

Categories: Memoir & Biography