"As I write this, The New Yorker is dead." So writes Renata Adler, in irritatingly melodramatic fashion, at the start of yet another over-romanticized book about the days of sainted New Yorker editor William Shawn. At this point, Shawn has become a figure beyond reproach, the be-all and end-all of not only modern intellectual thought and style, but also magazine editing. Maybe Shawn deserves his reputation; maybe not. But Adler, a novelist and frequent writer for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review Of Books, and other esteemed New York-based publications, starts things off on such a hysterically hyperbolic note that it's hard to take anything she writes here seriously. What would you expect from someone who, for all her qualifications, awards, and degrees, willingly allows herself to be categorized as an "intellectual gadfly" in the dust-jacket notes? Adler's book bemoans the apparently terrible fate of The New Yorker, which lost its admired (and legendarily arbitrary) standard of quality after Shawn gave way to the eras of Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, and now David Remnick. But the book is just as much about Adler, and how Adler helped make The New Yorker so successful. Though she's quick to credit others for good stories or editing, she sure knows how to talk trash about writers—Truman Capote, Pauline Kael, Adam Gopnik—who simply rub her the wrong way. Adler also has a matter-of-fact way of name-dropping and mentioning her effortless shuffle amongst the literary and journalistic elite. Rather than cloaking her in casual modesty, the practice just comes off as boastful and arrogant. Adler obviously has her reasons to boast, just as she has her reasons to complain that The New Yorker is not how she remembers it. But Gone is so spiteful and full of toothless outrage that Adler's ire resembles that of an old crone wagging her finger and grumbling about "the kids today." For a memoir meant to make up for the gaps and errors in books by fellow New Yorker alums Lillian Ross and Ved Mehta, Gone is not without its share of clunkers, incorrect dates, redundancies, and observations that the magazine, under Tina Brown, ran "pieces appropriate to The New York Times Magazine, New York, Hustler." Hustler? If there's any hustling going on, it's in Gone, a mean, pointless tirade that loses its way in a haze of self-congratulation and elitist myopia.