Newsman's novels take shots at business
by Steve Weinberg Posted Sun, Dec 1 2002
Bert Quint served as a CBS News foreign correspondent for three decades. Like a lot of journalists, he yearned to write novels about what he knew best — the pleasures and dangers of foreign correspondents posted to locales far different from their homes.
Retiring to Rhode Island on the East Coast of the United States, Quint accomplished what so many other journalists only talk about. The first novel, Rough Cut From a Bygone War, appeared in the year 2000. The second novel, Transylvania Red, appeared in 2002.
The first is set primarily in Vietnam, a common site for novels about American journalists overseas. The second is set in Romania, an uncommon locale.
Both novels feature Sam Sloane, an aging television journalist having trouble adapting to news as defined by multinational corporations under the control of non-journalists. Both novels also feature Sloane’s cynical combat with cameraman Camden, who does not use his first name.
Reporter Quint is emotional about television cameramen and soundmen, using the “Acknowledgments” section of the first novel to thank all those “whose shoulders I leaned on and whose jokes and personalities I stole for this work of fiction.”
The plots of each novel are convoluted. In the Vietnam novel, Quint has written more of a character study than a plot-driven adventure story. How does an aging news correspondent cope with a future that seems to value style over substance? How does he or she deal with death up close and personal? Will the intense personal bonds forged in free-fire zones strengthen thousands of miles away during peacetime, or will those bonds fray?
The Romania novel is much more plot-heavy. Sloane’s assignment in the post-communist atmosphere seems straightforward — to report a feature about the tourist uptick in the land of Dracula.
Sloane determines that the story transcends tourism, as former communists get greedy when given the opportunity to make money in a strangely jiggered quasi-capitalist economy.
Some readers will probably find the storylines gripping while other readers might find them hard to follow in spots. The storylines, however, aren’t the primary reason for the IPI Global Journalist readers to read these novels.
Rather, Quint’s insights into foreign correspondence, network news and journalism ethics are the main attractions, especially for those interested in the business and idealism of the craft.
In Rough Cut From a Bygone War, Quint establishes the disaffection of aging foreign correspondents as Sloane enters the revolving doors of headquarters. “They called this the home office,” he says. “I would have felt more at home in Baghdad or the Khyber Pass.”
The second paragraph lays it on thicker: “Life-size posters on the marble walls reminded me of the our-peerless-leader pictures I used to see in the old East Bloc. Where I half expected Lenin or Ceaucescu, there was our anchorman. I wondered who those other sleek, jut-jawed men and women were. And there was the answer — ‘The Special Team … They carry the ball of today’s news into the end zones of America.’ Well, kiss my ass and check my ratings. Network football in Givenchy shoulder guards and Armani jockstraps.”
Before Sloane meets with younger executives, he thinks that nothing surprises him about the news business anymore: “It started in the eighties, the switch from information to infotainment, with less info and more ‘tainment all the time.
“My own nosedive from grace probably dates from a celebratory meeting of a select group of foreign correspondents and producers with the top brass from New York in the Sacher Hotel in Vienna. Cronkite had been dumped from his anchor chair and all the networks were developing a philosophy that it isn’t what people need to know but what they want to know that keeps them tuned in.”
Most of the first novel is a flashback, so Quint goes light on the bashing of the news business until the end.
Quint carries off bitterness with a lighter touch in the second novel. Perhaps he unburdened himself more or less fully in Rough Cut From a Bygone War.
Still, Quint gets in his digs, especially through the character of Sidney Kemp, the network’s foreign editor. Quint/Sloane comments that while foreign correspondents are dealing with hardship, their supervisors in New York are “determining how best to fool the American people into thinking they were getting the news and, hopefully, screw their competitors at the other networks.”
Steve Weinberg
Steve Weinberg reviews books regularly for Global Journalist, concentrating on journalistic technique rather than summaries of content.