Towards the End of the Night

Isaac Chotiner has a nice piece at TNR on Michael Frayn’s classic Fleet Street novel, Towards the End of the Morning. Among his observations:

The most astonishing aspect of Frayn’s novel [published in 1967] is that so many of the dilemmas and complaints of the characters are easily recognizable today. “He looked anxiously at the rack of galley proofs behind him. He had only seven ‘The Country Day by Day’ columns in print, and he had sworn never to let the Countries drop below twelve. He had a ‘Meditation’ column for each of the next three days—unless Winters had made a cock-up about immaculate conception, in which case he had only two and a half pieces—but he should have had a running stock of fourteen Meditations…But then what about the crosswords? He counted them up miserably. God Almighty he was down to his last eight crosswords! Day by day the presses hounded him; with failing strength he fed them the hard-won pieces of copy which delayed them so briefly.