(np) anyone heard of Veronica Geng?

[Michael Bailey]

https://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/features/858/index1.html


(New Yorker writer and editor)

“Like George W.S. Trow and Harold Brodkey, Geng was one of the writers
Shawn hired during the sixties and seventies whose work was extravagantly
intelligent but not always intelligible – “extreme writers,” as his
successor, Robert Gottlieb, so aptly called them, who would require time
and faith to develop a constituency. Shawn’s confidence in them was
tantamount to tenure at a university, allowing, in Geng’s case, a kind of
academic jauntiness to bloom during an era when smart-ass humor otherwise
prevailed. While *National Lampoon*was running boisterous essays on the
virtues of snorting coke while driving, Geng was doing high-concept pieces
about military spending and Chairman Mao. While *Spy* was snacking on
vulgarian overdogs like Donald Trump and Madonna, Geng was holding forth on
staphylococcus germs….

“This week, [May 17, 1999] Mariner Books comes out with *Love Trouble,* a
compilation of Geng’s collected and uncollected work, parts of which will
be read aloud by her friends – including Kincaid, Blount, Ian Frazier, and
Fran Lebowitz – on Thursday, May 13, at Rizzoli on West Broadway. The book
reflects a wide range of Geng’s interests and preoccupations: William
Faulkner. Billy Wilder. The Mets. The mob. The Pentagon. But it also
conceals as much as it reveals. Geng preferred other people’s voices to her
own and crawled into them with merciless precision, exploiting their styles
for the tipsiest conceits: She used the voice of a rock critic to review
tapes from the Nixon White House (“indictably undanceable”) and the voice
of a wine critic to review explosives (“boasting complex overtones of
potassium nitrate”). She reimagined the NBC sitcom *James at 16* as a
series about Henry James as an angst-ridden teenager. In perhaps her most
famous essay, “Love Trouble Is My Business,” she crammed the words “Mr.
Reagan” and “read Proust” into
every single sentence.”