When All That Glittered Was Simply . . . Glitter

I've just finished reading a  widely anticipated book that turns out to be a tedious slog. Had I not had a rule to finish any book I started, I probably would have (and most likely should have) tossed it.

Graydon Carter’s When The Going Was Good positions itself as a gilded snapshot of a bygone era of glossy magazine power and celebrity culture. But beneath its highly polished prose and parade of glitterati lies a book that feels increasingly irrelevant, self-indulgent, and disconnected from the world we inhabit today. While Carter (pictured, above) may have once wielded significant cultural influence as the long-time editor of Vanity Fair, this current offering fails to justify one's time or attention. Sadly, it just reminds us that we live amidst a media landscape already overflowing with self-congratulatory memoirs and nostalgic retrospectives. 

A Book Stuck in the Past

The whole first part of the book takes you back to Carter's early years in his native Canada and sets up a pattern of feigned modesty and increasingly unwarranted claims of impecunity that characterize this journey. 

As Carter finds his way to New York, the book sets about romanticizing a media age that is not only over, but arguably deserved to end. He writes wistfully about the heyday of glossy magazines, three-martini lunches, and power cliques in Manhattan’s elite social scene. Yet this nostalgia rarely interrogates the deeper implications of that world—its exclusionary nature, its detachment from everyday realities, its destructive cynicism and its often superficial priorities. In the process, Carter seems increasingly superficial himself as he rarely opens up about his interior self. There is no heart or soul here nor is there any real insight into the shifting sands of media, journalism, or cultural commentary.

Instead of offering a critical lens or new perspective, Carter appears content to relive his own vaulted triumphs. In fact, the book often reads like an ego-saturated  greatest-hits compilation of long-faded influence, where the real message is: Weren’t we fabulous? OK, we grant this may appeal to Carter’s septuagenerian contemporaries or admirers of Vanity Fair’s glory years, but today, this stuff is mostly irrelevant. 

Name-Dropping Over Insight

One of the most frustrating aspects of When The Going Was Good is its incessant name-dropping. Page after page reads like a social register of Hollywood royalty, media moguls and political insiders. So, there’s a breathless recounting of dinners with movie stars, parties with presidents, and gossip about the powerful—but very little of anything else. And it all reeks of pomposity which in itself often masks deep-seated insecurities. Still, Carter seems to feel he had a front-row seat to major moments in American media and culture but honestly, in retrospect, how major and how meaningful were those moments? 

A Vanity Project 

Ultimately, Carter’s book feels like a vanity project concerned primarily with burnishing his own legend. There’s a smugness to the storytelling that borders on self-parody, and an absence of depth that makes the entire endeavor insufferable. The book doesn’t ask hard questions, it doesn’t challenge assumptions, and it doesn’t even try to bridge the gap between then and now. 

And Carter's recommendations on how to live your life are so trivial as to be laughable. Here's one: "Your time is valuable." Here's another: "You never learn from success, only from failure." OMG! Such astounding revelations! 

In short, unless you are a die-hard fan of Carter’s era at Vanity Fair, or have an appetite for superficial media insider chit chat, there’s no compelling reason to spend your time with When The Going Was Good. Because while the going may have been good for Carter and his crowd, the bottom line is -- who cares?