With Wit and Understatement, a Press Veteran Reflects on His Trade

THE LEDE: Dispatches From a Life in the Press, by Calvin Trillin

“People feel so special, so wise, when somebody they know drops dead,” Ottessa Moshfegh wrote in “Homesick for Another World,” her 2017 story collection. The newly dead might have felt special and wise in advance of their demises if they were friends with Calvin Trillin and could be reasonably sure he would speak at their wakes.

Trillin has long been more in demand as a eulogist, in Manhattan’s interlocking journalism and literary worlds, than probably anyone alive. The reasons are apparent to anyone who has heard or read him. He has a) a fundamental decency, b) a phlegmatic manner and c) a deadpan wit that delivers, like an inoculation, hurt and healing at the same time. I’ve known people to attend the funerals of people they’ve never met because word had spread that Trillin would be speaking, in the manner that an N.B.A. nonfan might attend a Knicks game solely because he’d heard that Chaka Khan would be singing the national anthem.

Trillin’s new book is called “The Lede: Dispatches From a Life in the Press.” It’s an assortment of profiles, essays, columns and a few examples of light verse, all of them about journalism, written originally for The New Yorker, The Nation, Time and other outlets. A few go back as far as the early 1970s. New money for old rope, in other words. But it makes sense to have this material in one place, and this book is buoyant and crunchy from end to end.

“The Lede” contains profiles — of the Miami crime reporter Edna Buchanan, of the New York Times writer and expense-account legend Johnny Apple, and of the pseudonymous Texas drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs — that are acknowledged classics of the form and will be studied until A.I. makes hash out of all of us. Trillin can be counted on to hand the world back clearer than it was before he picked it up.