Didion’s Shrewd ‘Fictions’ Picks Up Polk Book Award

The annual George Polk Journalism Awards, whose winners were announced this week in New York, enjoy a particular cachet among working reporters.

Named for a much-admired CBS correspondent killed in 1948 while covering the Greek Civil War, the prizes have what author and journalist David Halberstam calls “good DNA.”

For that reason, he was among many writers who were particularly pleased that this year’s Polk for book-length journalism went to Joan Didion for her shrewd and unconventional collection of political reporting, “Political Fictions.” The volume compiles and amplifies eight lengthy, reported essays written over the past 12 years for the New York Review of Books.

“In the writing life,” Halberstam said this week, “there are awards and then there are awards, and this is an unusually good one. ‘Political Fictions’ is astonishingly original, quite luminous political reporting--something quite apart from the inside-the-engine-room, Teddy White-derived drivel that seems to predominate in that field.

“I think it’s one of the best things she’s ever done as a writer. It’s smart and quite wickedly funny and it’s important to journalism for reputable judges to recognize it as terrific reporting.”

Didion recalls that her “relationship to politics began when, as a Sacramento schoolgirl, I was walked downtown with my class to see the State Legislature in action. It was St. Patrick’s Day, and they all were wearing green hats. That was it for me.”

Didion’s political writing has an unwavering conviction that political ends--which is to say, governance--must never be subordinated to political means--the contest of campaigning. “Politics is supposed to produce government and not just a permanent campaign, which is where we are. We now have a campaign attitude toward running the county.”

Didion says there is “very little conventional reporting, even from conventions” in the book. In fact, she says, “these pieces aren’t really reporting at all. They are more like close textual analysis, which is how I learned to read in the English department at Berkeley.”

The New York Review’s editor, Robert Silvers, who convinced Didion to begin her political project more than a decade ago, said “it had been a dream for some time that we would get her to write more directly about politics, since her fictional work is full of political implications and carefully arrived-at views. The result has been very exciting.”

And now?

“I am very keen that the next thing she will do is something on the Bush administration,” Silvers said.

It is a topic Didion regards as nearly inevitable, if only because “they’re using such a large place in the landscape, you can hardly ignore them,” she says. “I may start by looking at the administration’s relationships with the Christian right. But then, I always start at the wrong place and end up somewhere else.”

Kinsley Would Be Happy With a ‘Cease-Fire’

Since stepping down as founding editor of Slate, Microsoft’s online magazine, earlier this month, Michael Kinsley has been the object of a great deal of speculation. He has repeatedly declared that the Parkinson’s disease with which he was diagnosed eight years ago had nothing to do with his decision. “Throughout my career, I have changed jobs every five or six years,” said Kinsley, who has served twice as editor of the New Republic and as a co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire.”

In a conversation this week, Kinsley said his health has not diminished his appetite for fresh journalistic enterprises. Along with the weekly Slate column he will continue to write, Kinsley said he is in the process of pitching an entirely new kind of political talk show. .

“I have a pretty carefully worked out scheme for a show called ‘Cease-Fire,’” he said. “It would have two guests and a host, who instead of goading the guests into fighting, tries to get them to agree on whatever the issue is.”

If it succeeds, who knows where the trend might end--perhaps in reality shows that reward decency and compassion.

Meanwhile, Kinsley continues to reflect in contrarian ways on the state and future of online magazines. At the moment, neither Slate nor its major competitor, Salon, has turned a profit, though Kinsley says his publication is close. Many of the future’s online magazines, he predicts, “will be subsidized. Their small steady losses will be made up by some rich person, as occurs now with the New Republic or the Weekly Standard. But there also will be profitable publications.”

Ovitz’s New Best Friend:

the Religious Right

Politics always has made strange bedfellows, but nowadays so does publishing. And perhaps the most novel of the couplings now occurring is between talent manager Michael Ovitz’s Artists Management Group and evangelical minister turned bestselling novelist Timothy LaHaye.

Artists Management already represents such blue-chip book-sellers as Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, but LaHaye is a phenomenon of a different magnitude. In less than a decade, the nine apocalyptic thrillers that so far comprise his “Left Behind” series have sold more than 50 million copies to adults and tens of thousands more to juvenile readers. The books’ plots draw on LaHaye’s highly individual interpretation of biblical passages he and like-minded believers conceive as prophecies concerning the end of the world and the second coming of Christ. LaHaye, 75, provides a theological outline for each volume, and a collaborator connects the narrative dots with incidental details, like characters and plots.

Earlier this month, Ovitz’s group reached an agreement with Bantam Dell, a division of Random House, to publish LaHaye’s next four novels for an advance of $45 million, making the group’s new client one of America’s highest paid novelists. LaHaye has severed ties with his longtime collaborator, Jerry B. Jenkins--who nonetheless has four more novels in the series in progress--and is searching for a new partner.

All this is rather like Hollywood-packaging-as-usual. What is novel is the alliance between a leading figure in what most cultural conservatives regard as America’s own evil empire and a founding father of the Christian right.

LaHaye and his wife, Beverly, who heads a group called Concerned Women of America, have long been among the Christian right’s most active lobbyists who oppose abortion, equal rights for gays and lesbians, and feminism in any form.

Among the LaHayes’ more controversial beliefs: 144,000 Jews must convert to their brand of Christianity before the second coming of Christ can occur.

The LaHayes met while both were students at Bob Jones University, an ultra-fundamentalist institution.

Among the school’s other notable alumni is the Rev. Ian Paisley, the Catholic-bashing Ulster politician who currently is trying to wreck the peace process in Northern Ireland.

No word on whether he is shopping a book proposal.