The death of Robert Gottlieb, the magisterial influential editor, provides an occasion to think attentively about the writing and making of good books. It was an art in which he excelled. The occasion of his death happens to be the moment when Carey Newman, Mango Tree: The Artistry and Alchemy of Writing (2023) offers us his mature, energizing exposition of the making of a book. Newman, Senior Editor at Fortress Press, lives in the world of books. He writes, given his scholarly capacity, and he edits them. Then he publishes them, and now he mobilizes his deep learning as instruction and invitation to would-be writers, but also to the great company of readers who assist in the evocation, creation, and formation of books and writers.

Newman writes in an almost gnomic style with abrupt half-sentences, wistful unfinished thoughts, and frequent appeal to “threes” that he finds suggestive. The crux of his elusive work is to report on the way in which good writing must adhere to conventions of plot, structure, and genre; while at the same time exercising bold, defiant freedom in a refusal to conform to conventions that would domesticate. He avers that all good writing has a poetic quality to it, so that the work under way is inescapably elusive, even to the writer. Such elusiveness means that the writer always lives at the “precipice of failure,” though when it is completed the writing has issued into a fresh “metaphysical wonder.” Thus writing is the wondrous process by which something new is called into existence that is only partially under the control of the writer. For good reason Newman terms the outcome of such work a “miracularity,” a wonder beyond any conventional explanation. A remarkable feature of this book is that Newman’s own style of writing is itself generative of the kind of writing about which he writes. We are, in his presence, aware of his own “world making” as he writes.

Such writing constitutes an artistry that requires learning a craft, being aware of the utilization of genre and the development of plot. To some extent good writing is necessarily imitative of writing that has gone before. In the end, however, “originality triumphs over imitation;” beyond artistry there is indeed alchemy, the mysterious generativity of the writing process itself. Newman considers this double-focused exercise through his intense reflection on the paragraph. He observes that we might expect a good paragraph to be monotheist; but it always turns out to be “polytheist,” pushing in fresh directions before it finishes. And thus the work he writes is to add to the paragraph yet another paragraph, and so paragraph-to-paragraph-to paragraph. The outcome is “wine for water, order out of chaos.” In the process, “precision grapples with the poetic, method with artistry, and respectability with singularity.” The writer is always adjudicating between the two, at its best with intellect turned toward the poetic, artistic, and singular.

Newman gives attention to the emergence of “voice” in the writing process, for a writer must have “voice” in order to carry out a plot of surprise. Newman judges that “voice” is hard-won for the writer; it appears “only when all prayers are rightly uttered and all rightly sacrificed.”  No wonder he concludes that “no book exists apart from the sacrifice of the self.” Thus good writing is not a casual enterprise, but an all-demanding investment of self. The self is given up for the sake of the new world birthed by the spilling of ink.

After thirty-one pages of such rich, suggestive wisdom in which one wants at every moment to pause to savor, Newman adds twenty-six pages of closely packed notes in which he draws from his vast learning to support the lighter touch of the body of his work. These pages of notes will be enough to keep us occupied for a very long time, instructed by the accumulated wisdom upon which Newman (and we) rely.

This book is an invitation to writers and to would-be writers to do their work well and knowingly. To do the work well means to do due diligence to considerations of craft. It also means to trust our most daring venturesome images through which newness may appear. To do the work knowingly means that each writer relies upon and joins a great company of those who have preceded and who have created the context for our own present work. I suggest that the book is appropriate for many of our blog readers, because many readers believe and know that they have a book that is waiting to be written. And besides a generative invitation to writers and would-be writers, Newman’s book will evoke better readers, as we learn to notice the artistry and to trust the alchemy of what we read. We may indeed read for substance; but the substance to which we are alert is carried by the form that variously teases, warns, emboldens, and summons.

The two terms of the subtitle invite consideration. “Artistry” is clear enough. Newman has it in abundance in his masterful use of language. It is the capacity to form a word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph that points and suggests and, at the same time, remains elusively invitational. The more difficult term is “alchemy,” whereby Newman acknowledges that there is something hidden and inscrutable about writing that may often surprise and bewilder the writer. Both figure in good writing; the would-be writer is invited and urged by Newman to permit both qualities full freedom in the process of production.

Before he finishes Newman adds a word concerning editors (of whom he is one*) who are endlessly, anxiously alert for the new book manuscript that is surely at hand that will turn the world anew. He characterizes publishers as mighty predators who compete for the next prey upon which they may feast. Newman gifts us with his compelling wisdom, his vast learning, and his practical experience so that the magical world of books comes freshly alive for us. His is a restlessness that matches the restlessness of artistry that lingers in and through the process of creation. The world into which he gives a glimpse is indeed “fresh from the word.” I have no doubt that Gottlieb would readily applaud this persuasive book and urge that we read it attentively. Reading this book has been for me an emotional jolt of purging, receiving, and recognizing what is old “as if for the first time,” and finally ending in wonder, love, and praise for what has been entrusted to us.

*I am glad to acknowledge my own immense debt to Newman for his generous receptivity to my work, and his wisdom in doing the work of an editor in making my writing better than it was before it passed through his magic-making hands.