Russell Baker to Michael Halberstam

96 LETTERS Eskimo and Indian days) participated in a good deal of semi-primitive medicine. I like the idea of being occasionally controversial or opinionated, in columns specifically labeled as opinion. I think that what will make the column different from other ones is the fact that I occassionally shoot off my mouth—after all, almost anyone can look up the latest treatment for athlete's foot and write a rather solemn column about it. If you need any additional biographical material, please let me know. I do think, by the way, that the little identifying slug that goes with the column should read something like, "Michael Halberstam, a practicing internist, is also . . ." Yours truly, Michael J. Halberstam, M.D. MJH:mpi:bjc Russeli Baker to Michael Halberstam November 28, 1977 Dear Michael, Mimi and I both read your novel over the weekend and enjoyed it, both. I have sent some incoherent blurb material to Kinney, which of course makes no attempt to do a fine critique. Nor will I try that here. The first thing to be noted is that the book reads damn fast. We both sailed right through it. This as you know is good. Second, Levine is just a very good strong character of the sort political fiction is usually very weak on. This should be a big plus in promoting a movie sale. I trust and hope you have a first-rate agent, or lawyer, as Lippincott in my experience is woefully unaggressive in the commercial arts, and it seems to me you have very good spin-off possibilities from this one. On the captious side: I am a bit confused about your dates. The New Hampshire primary, e.g., is always held in March, deep winter up there. The only thing that gives it any importance is its earliness. Held two weeks later, it would barely make the papers. You have it dated well up in April, as I recall. A small point, to be sure, but one that will make nitpickers say Halberstam doesn't know the first fucking thing about politics. I find the timing odd in other places, particularly at the end when Letters 97 we are in September and the party doesn't seem yet to have chosen between Levine and his opponent for the nomination. Captious Point Two: The opening pages describing America in 1988 are extremely interesting, but they make me feel that some kind of black comedy is about to be unfolded, and of course the story turns out to be something else altogether. I don't know that this is bad. You had me interested from the start. But it was a somewhat jarring switch to expectations when you shift gears and begin showing us Levine in human depth. I think the crux of the matter may be in the abrupt way you dispose of the Inevitable Candidate—the news that he has gone haywire with guns comes and goes like an episode of Joseph Heller. On the negative critical side, I must say that I think it a dreadful loss to the society that yet another doctor appears determined to spend himself on the typewriter. The country has far more books than it needs, and far fewer doctors, yet you sawbones all appear intent on widening the gap even further. An apparently capable doctor has just given us "Coma." At Yale the brilliant Doctor Seltzer fritters good clinical time away over the typewritter. Michael Crichton, if I'm not mistaken, is also a doctor, yet how little time he must have for sawing at gall bladders and palpating the trunk as he toils at his fiction. Surgeon Nolen writes when he should be groping in abdominal cavities. Over in Baltimore Edgar Berman is clacking out funny assaults on his profession and Betty Friedan, disdaining the scalpel forevermore, so far as I can make out. I ask you, Michael, do I abandon my typewriter and go about the office prescribing long vacations, less alcohol and an end to cigarettes for the coronary candidates who run my paper? Does your brother David administer poultices at Bellevue? Even Normal Mailer—God save the mark!—has refused to leave...