There’s a cult of the Independent Bookstore, and Three Lives & Company, a small bookstore in the West Village, is one of its temples. Anne Roiphe proselytizes in the New York Times: “Three Lives feels like a personal library. You know that ideas and words matter here, that someone has handled each book and knows its contents; that you, too, a potential customer, can be part of this calm space. You don’t get coffee in this bookstore — it hasn’t the room — and you don’t get decorating books. But you do get to graze among books that grant humanity.”

Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Cunningham, whose book The Hours is on display in the store’s windows, is quoted on ThreeLives.com: “One of the greatest bookstores on the face of the Earth. Every single person who works there is incredibly knowledgeable and well read and full of soul. You can walk in and ask anybody, really, what they’ve read lately and they’ll tell you something – very likely something you’ve never heard of. [But] it’s always going to be something interesting and fabulous. I go there when I’m feeling depressed and discouraged, and I always feel rejuvenated.”

In Springfield, Massachusetts, where I grew up, we didn’t have Independent Bookstores. We had independent bookstores, like Johnson’s on Main St., but whatever it is about Independent Bookstores that that can inspire Roiphe and Cunningham to such levels of rapture (and purple prose), the stores in Springfield didn’t have it. They were poorly stocked, harshly lit, and staffed by uninformed and unfriendly salespeople. When Barnes & Noble finally arrived – with its comfy chairs, massive stock, coffee, newsstand, and anonymity – I was ecstatic, and I have more affection for the Barnes & Noble at the Enfield Mall than I’ll probably ever have for an Independent Bookstore. It’s forgivable then, perhaps, that I approach Three Lives with some skepticism.

My first customer contact is Michael, a publishing executive, who’s looking for the new book by Polish writer Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. He doesn’t find it. Three Lives is a small store, with limited shelf space and a limited budget; the owners can’t stock everything, and have to anticipate their customers’ tastes. Occasionally there are oversights. Gross’s book is one such oversight. A history of the massacre of Jews of Jedwabne by the Poles of Jedwabne, Neighbors is proving controversial, raising issues of Polish complicity in the Holocaust that will be sure to seduce the clientele of Three Lives & Co. (as Lenny Bruce said, everyone in New York is a Jew. “Even if you’re Catholic, if you live in New York you’re Jewish.”).

Michael, who made the fifteen-minute trek up to Three Lives from his office in SoHo, will not walk the few blocks over to Barnes & Noble to find the book. He won’t go home, log on to Amazon.com, and wait the 3-5 days for the U.S. Postal Service to deliver it to his door. Instead, he’ll order it at the counter, or ask about it at the counter, confident that it will appear, sooner or later, either way. He’ll be back, as he’s been back, again and again, for the past fifteen years. “It’s quintessentially New York City,” he says, by way of explanation, “quintessentially the Village, quintessentially progressive.”

Whatever that means, and it does mean something, Three Lives, named after the Gertrude Stein novel, attracts an impressive collection of book-lovers and flaneurs. On the Tuesday evening I stop by, the store is populated by regulars like Michael – impeccably groomed and impeccably English – and Jamie, a twenty-something who also works in publishing and has been coming to the store for about a year, along with passers-by like Daria, a good-looking writer/actor whose play just won a contest sponsored by the Kennedy Center, and John, her equally good-looking writer/actor friend. Also present – briefly – is Julian, a confused German tourist looking for books on Role-Playing Games (e.g. Dungeons & Dragons).

Michael and Jamie, whether they buy today or not, will be back, and they’ll buy then. Daria won’t make a special trip to the store, but if she’s in the neighborhood again, she may stop by and get a book, or maybe she’ll just browse and draw in other customers with her radiance. John only buys used books, and probably won’t be back, but he tips me off to a curbside bookseller over at Astor Place and Lafayette. Julian, however, is out of luck. Three Lives has a good selection of fiction, poetry, and travel books, and scattered non-fiction (books like Neighbors, though not yet Neighbors itself), but no books on role-playing games. They don’t play in the West Village.

Like Julian, and John, but unlike Michael Cunningham, I probably won’t return to Three Lives. I love books, but bookstores have never been a source of rejuvenation for me, they’ve been a place to purchase books. In this, as in many things I’m a consumer first. I look at the much lamented decline of independent bookstores, and I fail to weep. Why, for instance, has Blockbuster, the Barnes & Noble of the video rental market, failed to drive the good independent video stores out of business? Because the good independent video stores offer a wider selection than Blockbuster does.

When I need a video, I go to Kim’s Video in Manhattan, or Best Video in New Haven, or Pleasant St. Video in Northhampton. When I need a book, I go to a superstore, where they’re more likely to have it, and when I want to browse, I hit the used bookshops – they’re cheaper, and shabbier, and I prefer my books, like my women, cheap and shabby. When I want to browse, and am willing to pay full price, I still go to the superstore, because I never know, until I get there, whether I’ll want serious literature or the latest installment in the Boba Fett trilogy, and Boba Fett doesn’t play at Independent Bookstores.

If, 23 years ago, Jenny Feder and Jill Dunbar had located Three Lives & Company in Springfield rather than the Village, or if I’d grown up in the Village rather than Springfield, things would probably be different. Three Lives would probably be for me. Because if you read through the naked advocacy, and put aside the well-meaning exaggeration, and remember that there’s a market for tastes that a philistine from Springfield, Mass never had the chance to develop, Three Lives & Company is all of the things that Roiphe and Cunningham say it is.

It’s beautiful – from the tasteful, golden Bookman Old Style font of the sign outside, to the split-levels of hardwood floors, to the oriental rugs, exposed brick, and green glass lamps lighting the shelves. Music plays softly over the speakers, a mix tape – Curtis Mayfield, Aaron Neville, Liz Story – one of hundreds of tapes made by Feder and Dunbar over the years and stored in a file cabinet behind the counter. The selection, like the music, is excellent but not overwhelming, small enough to make browsing feasible, and pleasurable. The store has good readings – in the past few months, Edmund White, Lillian Ross and Susan Morrison, David Rakoff, and Adriana Trigiani – the salespeople really are knowledgeable, and they really do recognize many of the customers.

This is how it’s been, I imagine, since the beginning (1976), when they set up shop at their original location at 7th Ave. and 10th. Seven years later, in 1983, when they had to re-locate a block away to 10th and Waverly (where they’ve remained), the fusion of whatever it is that makes Three Lives what it is – community, style, taste, courtesy – had already inspired such loyalty that the move was assisted by an elite corps of literati, among them novelist Laurie Colwin and translator Robert Phelps.

Now, another change has come to Three Lives & Company bookstore, a change in ownership. Jill and Jenny finally tired of the bookselling business. Like caring for an infant, the rewards more than compensated for the small profit-margins and the need for constant attention, but 23 years is a long time to care for an infant, and it was time to move on, to trust his care to the outside world. Jill approached a friend, Toby Cox, and asked him if he was interested in buying the store. “When I came in here, a few years ago,” he says, “I thought to myself, ‘this is the kind of place I’d love to own.’” And so when Jill asked, Toby quickly answered. He found some investors, left his job at Random House, and bought the store, taking over for good on February 9th, 2001.

He fits in well. Tall, thirty-ish, trim, balding, with wire-rimmed glasses and quiet clothes, he looks like the singer Moby, if Moby were taller, wore glasses, and had more of a bookseller vibe. Before Random House, Toby worked in Providence, first as a salesman at an independent bookstore, and then as head of promotions at the Brown University Bookstore. Like Joyce (the only other member of his four-person staff whom I met), and the store, he’s nice, unpretentious. There are no disdainful scoffs when someone mis-pronounces an author’s name. There is a manageable quotient of unpronounceable names on the tables and shelves. There’s no literary theory section. They sell books that they like to read (Toby likes travel books, and so he’s expanded the travel book section). “Toby’s Table,” a small display of his favorites, is agreeably eclectic (James Salter, Daniel Duane, Frederick Dillen, Barbara Goudy, Tim O’Brien, Louis Begley, Chris Adrian).

“I don’t see myself as an owner,” he says, “so much as a caretaker.” “This is their store,” he says, indicating the customers. He has no plans to re-decorate, no plans to post his inventory on the web, no plans for radical innovation at all. He owns the place he thought he’d love to own, and he does love it, and he doesn’t see the need to change it. I imagine that if you stop by in a few years, it’ll probably look much the same. You’ll see Toby, maybe a little more bald, you’ll see Michael, still impeccable, you’ll see Neighbors, or its equivalent. If you stop by at the right time, you’ll see a reading by Edmund White, or by his equivalent. You won’t see me, but I’m not much to look at anyway.

**

www.threelives.com

Ann Magnuson begins her new one-woman show, Rave Mom, standing in a hotel room in Las Vegas, high on ecstasy, staring at the radiantly naked form of a young, blonde man with “the body of a surfer.” He reaches out to touch her, and though Magnuson refrains from describing what happens next, peals of another kind of ecstasy follow.

She comes down from her high, her eyes find focus – and contact with the audience – and she’s no longer in Vegas, but on the small stage at P.S. 122, a building on First Ave. converted, in 1979, from an unused New York City public school to the experimental theater it’s been since (the P.S. becoming Performance Space). The young man has disappeared with the imaginative moment. Magnuson retreats to a desk, and riffles through some papers.

“From my lawyer” she says.

The show is autobiographical, and the threat of a defamation suit dangles over the stage like the glittering cloth carrot that, after the desk and its clutter, is the show’s only other prop. Pseudonyms, disappointingly, have been appointed. (“I had met this guy,” she says, “….we’ll call him Moneybags. He was this huge dot-com billionaire…and he was good friends with the biggest movie star in the world…we’ll call him Gus Gossamer”).

Sitting behind the desk, she lays out the basic themes of the show: “the show is about…” the death of her brother Bobby from AIDS; the resulting depression; and the drugs, raves, and relationship with Moneybags that are the manifestations of, and reaction to, her depression.

Rave Mom is a pretty good show. Magnuson is a top-notch performer. Her voice commands attention at all times, even, as in the case of the performance I attended, when the microphone cuts out halfway through the show. She projects through her body equally well and with an impressive economy of motion: simulating a bike ride with a simple up-and-down rhythm of her knees, pulsing to an electronic beat with the controlled intensity of a veteran raver.

An earlier Ann

Her tools are her voice, her body, and the precise direction of David Schweizer, whose subtle lighting design and perfectly calibrated soundtrack compliments Magnuson’s descriptive talents. And “descriptive” is the right word. Her final trip of the evening, a childhood walk through a West Virginia forest with Bobby, is a marvel of descriptive eloquence. A classical guitar plays over her hypnotic, musical voice while a leafy pattern – shading from green to golden yellow – is silhouetted on the back wall of the stage. The scene is so transporting that it’s hard to believe, when it’s over, that it was only Magnuson, standing alone in the middle of a black stage, the whole time. If Magnuson were a novelist, she would write elegant, evocative, atmospheric prose.

Her description of Moneybags’ Oscar party, in fact, brings to life a latter-day West Egg bacchanalia, with celebrities, socialites, and dot-commers (the bootleggers, perhaps, of the late 20th century) mixing in a flapping frenzy that, like Gatsby’s soirees, can’t hide the taint of impending self-destruction. But Fitzgerald created Gatsby to mean something. Gatsby exists for a reason. Moneybags exists because he played a supporting role in Magnuson’s life.

At one point, describing her ecstatic trip with Moneybags down the Pacific Coast Highway, she says that she feels “like a character out of a Joan Didion essay,” which would have been a valid simile had she not then appended “…but a good [character],” making it clear that she was using Didion only for her evocative descriptions of California while ignoring the emptiness and shallowness that Didion always layers beneath the beauty.

Later, with the aid of a Vanity Fair article to which Magnuson makes a passing reference, I discover that Moneybags is the pseudonym for a man named Dana Giacchetto. A high-living, high-profile money manager to the stars, a good friend of Leonardo DiCaprio (“Gus Gossamer”), Giacchetto is a gambler who played a massive check-kiting scheme with his clients’ money, a scheme that depended on, and would wane with, the strength of his smile and his glitter. He is, in other words, a perfect vessel for saying something about America at the end of the twentieth century, a Gatsby-esque figure who burned too brightly, who also “believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us” – though his green light is more Hollywood than East Egg – and whose whole life has been a speculative bubble. And like Gatsby, and the stock market, and the twentieth century, Giacchetto’s time was doomed to end, in his case with a guilty plea to embezzlement charges and a five-year prison sentence.

The analogy isn’t perfect. Gatsby was a meticulous businessman, a schedule-maker, a gambler but also an accountant. Giacchetto’s books were such a mess that it took the Feds months just to de-tangle them and discover whether, in fact, he had stolen money or just lost it through incompetence (a little of both, as it turns out). But it was pretty good – Giacchetto and Gatsby both invented pedigrees for themselves: Giacchetto earning a mythical MBA from Harvard on the basis of two Continuing Ed. Courses, Gatsby becoming “an Oxford Man” from 5 months spent there after the war – and perfect isn’t necessary. The reason that autobiographically based artists give their characters pseudonyms is precisely so that they can tweak them to better fit their narrative or allegorical purposes. Magnuson, in assigning pseudonyms but ignoring the creative space this creates, deprives her work of both aesthetic and salacious value (if she’d used real names, at least we would have gotten some good gossip).

There are other opportunities missed. Icarus, for instance, seems like an obvious metaphorical source for both Moneybags and her brother, each of whom, in their different ways, flew too close to the sun. In the Burning Man segment, Magnuson makes reference to Wagner’s Gotterdämmerung – I believe the music is Wagner as well – and ends by striking the pose of a Valkyrie, but it’s all for purely melodramatic effect. Ignored – in a scene specifically about the death of her brother from AIDS – is the potential value of the Valkyrie, who, according to Brittanica Online, “served the god Odin and [were] sent by him to the battlefields to choose the slain who were worthy of a place in Valhalla.” Magnuson wouldn’t have had to sit through the entire Ring Cycle to figure this out.

Rave Mom, like many a memoir, is difficult to grapple with morally. I find the various phenomena of which the show is representative – postmodernism as excuse for narrative anarchy, self-absorption, referential laziness – disturbing and destructive, but the thing itself is pleasant enough. Like the re-designed Volkswagen Beetle, Rave Mom is well-intentioned and shiny, and like the Beetle it makes all the proper gestures to the past without understanding any of it. The reviews, if there are any, will read like the commercials for the new Beetle. They’ll be upbeat, full of catchy phrases and hip references, and they’ll obscure what is, finally, a bankrupt sensibility.

Because if there’s one thing that memoir has to do, it’s come clean, and Magnuson doesn’t come clean. She tells us that she didn’t know that her brother had AIDS until he was lying on his deathbed, and then moves on as if this doesn’t beg the question: how could she not have known? After dozens of her “close friends” had already died of the disease, how could she not have known? What other questions does this beg? Is it possible that she wasn’t as close to her brother as all the nostalgia would suggest? What kind of lifestyle was he living? Was it self-destructive? Did she try to help him? Where was she in all this, and where, for that matter, was her father?

Real names are not the only things being avoided in Rave Mom. There’s every reason to believe that Magnuson’s grief is real, but by avoiding these questions – questions of her culpability or feelings of culpability – she deprives the show of its moral center. And other questions surface. Why didn’t she mention the fact that the money Giacchetto was using to wine and dine her was embezzled from his clients? She makes a quick reference to a partner of Giacchetto’s – talent agent Jay Moloney – who committed suicide, but doesn’t mention any the following facts: 1.) at one point Giacchetto gave Moloney, who was at a rehab halfway house, $6,000 that everyone knew would be used for drugs; 2.) it took Moloney two years to get clean; 3.) during those two years, Giacchetto lost much of what remained of Moloney’s money; and 4.) after he finally got clean, Moloney was pushed by Giacchetto to assume leadership of a company in which Giacchetto had invested. “Within four weeks,” according to the Vanity Fair article, “Moloney was so far down he couldn’t get out of bed.”

Moloney killed himself later that year, and while depression, and not Giacchetto, was the cause, I’m reminded of some other characters in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald writes: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made….”

For Magnuson, who doesn’t come clean, with herself or us, nobody has made the mess, it just happens, and as she fails to see Giachetto as Gatsby, she fails to see him also as Tom, and maybe to see that part of herself that is Daisy. That’s too harsh; Magnuson isn’t responsible for Giacchetto’s misdeeds, nor her brother’s death. Most of the time, we can’t save people, but we have to try, and when we fail, we have to believe that we didn’t try hard enough. Without that belief – and its consequence, guilt – animating art, and without narrative arc or thematic depth, all that’s left is spectacle, a thumping, serotonin-drenched rave. It’s fun for today, but leaves us feeling empty and hollow tomorrow.

August, 2001

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