Critic Puts Down Sword and Picks Up Pen

With the precision of tiny paper cuts, the words of critic James Wolcott have left smarting wounds on the nation’s thinner-skinned literati during the last two decades. As culture critic for Vanity Fair, the New Republic and the London Review of Books, Wolcott earns a hefty salary dissecting the prose of other writers.

This summer, however, it’s the critic’s turn at the whipping post. A decade in the writing, Wolcott’s first novel, “The Catsitters” (HarperCollins) was published this summer. Reminiscent of “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” it’s a 272-page dialogue-driven story about a B-list New York actor and his hapless dating life. Its breezy optimism has confounded his colleagues. “Fans of Vanity Fair’s famously mordant critic might be puzzled by the rather mild tone of his first novel,” wrote Publishers’ Weekly.

Puzzled, indeed, considering this is the man who wrote that Philip Roth’s novel “Sabbath’s Theater” “rattl(es) along like a boxcar of tainted meat.” The sentences of feminist writer Susan Faludi, he wrote, are “difficult to resist.... They are so awful.” Novelist Joyce Carol Oates is “a trashy lowbrow decked out as a tortured highbrow.” Novelist Jay McInerney has “an obsession with models” that “most men outgrow, unless they’re knuckleheads.” (McInerney, for his part, retaliated by christening Wolcott the “righteous Nerd Avenger.”)

On a recent sunny day at the Chateau Marmont during his book tour, the 48-year-old critic was affable, chatty, even optimistic.

A burly man in a herringbone blazer, khakis and comfortable shoes, he lumbered through the lobby, carrying a tote bag from his favorite Manhattan library. He chose an armchair in a corner and sat on the edge of his seat. As actor Mickey Rourke walked through the lobby with a tiny dog in his arms, the critic turned to catch a glimpse and commented, “I used to joke that I was going to do a piece called ‘What do actors do all day?’ ” (Rourke appeared to be conducting an interview on the hotel doorstep.)

The buzz of celebrity surrounding the hotel on the Sunset Strip seemed to enliven Wolcott. He brightly described his book as ripe for movie optioning.

Not everyone shares his enthusiasm.

A New York Times reviewer likened the novel to “the queasiness of unwelcome intimacy and the tedium of being forced by cramped airline seating conditions to listen to two uninteresting strangers make small talk.”

“Cute as it can be,” wrote the Los Angeles Times reviewer, who added that the book left him “feeling a bit cheated, robbed of the opportunity to see whether Wolcott has always had some sort of paradigmatic novel in mind when blithely skewering the work of others.”

Some of Wolcott’s favorite writers contributed jacket blurbs to “The Catsitters.” Wolcott “writes to the heart of things,” wrote novelist Kaye Gibbons. Gore Vidal wrote that Wolcott “caught so well the heterosexual showbiz New York City male.” Camille Paglia said the critic’s work “has guts and soul.”

On this day, Wolcott is fueled by the excitement of his book tour and unencumbered by reviews. (He doesn’t read them.) “I only get, like, reports,” he said. “It’s almost like there are distant battles, and then people will say, ‘Well, we took this hill,’ or ‘We lost this hill.”’

A Baltimore native from a middle-class Catholic family, Wolcott dropped out of Frostburg State College to pursue writing in New York. He landed his first newspaper job at the Village Voice in 1972, handling subscriber complaints and submitting unsolicited articles. “I look back and think how in the world did I not get chewed up and spit out?” he said. He spent his 20s devouring 1970s pop culture, writing on politics, punk and television. In the mid-1980s, Wolcott landed at Vanity Fair, then followed editor Tina Brown to the New Yorker in 1996. After about four years, he returned to Vanity Fair.

In a recent piece in New York magazine, Brown was quoted as saying that Wolcott returned to Vanity Fair because he felt “outclassed” by the New Yorker’s other esteemed writers, such as Anthony Lane, Adam Gopnik and David Remnick. Wolcott’s response: “I never wanted to be one of those people who hangs on just because that typeface is important to them.”

In the late 1980s, Wolcott said, he’d begun a novel about life in Baltimore’s “instant suburban developments.” He wrote 40 pages, which featured “a feral tribe of cats” and gave up. “I thought John Updike can do this,” he said. “Updike could whip up a parable, a fairy tale about a suburban development. I couldn’t do it.” At the time, he was going through a breakup with a longtime girlfriend, and his girl troubles became the basis for the effort that became “The Catsitters.” (He has since married fellow Vanity Fair writer Laura Jacobs, with whom he shares an Upper West Side home and three cats.)

Wolcott has hinted that the novel’s main characters Johnny Downs and steel magnolia Darlene Rider represent two sides of himself. Rider is the ruthless critic and cynical relationship counselor who hides deep insecurity; Downs is the man Wolcott imagines he might be if he’d followed his high school affections for theater.

Wolcott wrote the novel sporadically, showing his work to no one and fending off naysayers. “I got a fair amount of discouragement,” he said. “You know, ‘Do you really want to bring this out? Do you want to be attacked? All these people are going to be out to get you....”’ His next book, an anthology of criticism called “Personal Attacks,” is due out next year.

He ignored the warnings and instead, followed the advice from Dorothea Brande’s 1934 book “Becoming a Writer.” He kept writing. “She said, ‘The most important thing for a writer is not talent. It’s morale.”’

Still, Wolcott continues to avoid reviews.

“I used to defend the reviewers against the crybaby writers,” he said. Now he knows better. “Even if you try to shrug it off, the phrases lodge in your brain. And they really get at you, because there’s an unfairness. You can’t respond to the reviewer. The reviewer doesn’t care.”