Arts

Outlook at Book Fair: Global and Historical

By J. Anthony Lukas; J. Anthony Lukas is the author of ''Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families,'' which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1985
Published: September 14, 1990

Like ducks and geese winging across the Long Island marshes, writers and editors are flocking back to their winter roosts. But the sure signal that the book industry has resumed after the summer doldrums will come this Sunday when marketing managers and publicity agents get down to the serious job of selling.

That takes place at the 12th annual New York Is Book Country street fair, an event at which publishers traditionally display their wares for the coming season. This year's hoopla is dedicated to the proposition that ''Books Know No Boundaries.''

That is scarcely titillating news. But its emphasis on the global marketplace is appropriate in a year when many Americans have felt like slightly irrelevant spectators at the great dramas of their time. When a dissident playwright becomes the first freely elected president of Czechoslovakia in half a century; when the former president of Nicaragua, the bane of two American Administrations, ensconces himself in a Wall Streeter's town house to receive a parade of editors eager to bring out his memoirs; when a transforming Soviet leadership authorizes the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's ''Gulag Archipelago,'' New York's tight publishing world does well to forswear parochialism.

But national frontiers are not the only boundaries that hedge us in; we are constrained by time as well as by space. As the British novelist L. P. Hartley put it: ''The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.''

So I am pleased to report that while a host of our ablest reporters is harvesting the astonishing news from Central and Eastern Europe, another pack of journalists has quietly been breaching the frontiers of the past.

Consider this partial list: David Halberstam is writing on America in the 50's; Taylor Branch on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement; Tom Powers on German efforts to build a nuclear bomb during World War II; Robert K. Massie on British-German naval competition early in this century; Jean Strouse on J. P. Morgan and his era; David McCullough on the world of Harry S. Truman; Robert A. Caro on Lyndon B. Johnson; Geoffrey Ward on the Civil War; Richard Reeves on the truncated Administration of John F. Kennedy; Gay Talese on Italian immigration to this country, illuminated by his family's own experience.

Mr. Talese is scarcely alone in addressing history in a personal vein. Suddenly it seems memoir is one of our most vital genres. A path brilliantly blazed by Frank Conroy and Geoffrey Wolff has been followed of late by Geoffrey's brother, Tobias Wolff, Lance Morrow, John Gregory Dunne, Joyce Johnson, Russell Baker, Carl Bernstein, Jonathan Yardley, John Edgar Wideman, Annie Dillard and others.

For some reason, my generation of reporters - having earned our spurs in the multiple alarums and excursions of the 60's and 70's - have turned its eyes backward, trying to find out how we all got here.

In part, this is probably a function of our age - most of us are in our 50's now - a time when many people feel impelled to measure their experience against those who have come before.
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