This is an easy-going, oblique, abbreviated autobiography—you could call it a casual memoir, but Bernard (Bernie, Bern) Conners does recapitulate the entire range of his life, from his first, pre-grammar-school sex, on through 2014 when at 88 he was an established best-selling novelist, a film producer, a soft-drink magnate, a real estate mogul with a book-publishing branch built into his company, and also the publisher, for two decades, of The Paris Review, which became the most prestigious literary magazine in America. He and the late George Plimpton, one of The Review's founders and its longtime editor, met when they were in the army in Italy and stayed lifelong friends and literary allies.

Bernie is tough on himself in these pages. He talks of his perpetual "butterflies" of anxiety over almost everything he ever did—he labels himself as one of the "nouveau riche" (the subtitle of this book is A Parvenu in Xanadu.). But then there's that check that his mother-in-law wrote for him, doubtlessly influenced by her daughter Katie, Bern's college and most enduringly impressive girlfriend, and whom he credits with all his successes in life, a pretty, savvy woman who by hustling her mother for that check pushed Bernie seriously into the business world where he deftly accumulated a fortune that is right up there with the nest eggs of major movie stars.

There's a relaxed quality to Bernie's attitude toward himself in this book; his prose often sounds like his conversation—I've known him for maybe forty years—but there's also something new to me: his equivocation about life, his "Yes, and then again, no." He talks of his cowardly behavior at certain moments, but then he recounts his Golden Gloves championships, the raves in the press about his quarter-and-half-backing performances in high school and college, which earned him an invitation to try out with the Chicago Bears; and also—during his nine-year career as an FBI agent—his single-handed rescue of a drowning man in a raging sea, and his unarmed (he had only a fellow-agent's empty pistol) capture of a holdup man in a dark alley, drew commendations for his courage, fortitude and valor from J. Edgar Hoover—all these are hardly cowardly achievements.

I've always called him Bernie, sometimes Bern, but in this book his narrator (himself), treats his protagonist (himself) as someone who reeks of formalism, and throughout he has called himself Bernard. But neither Bernie nor Bernard is really serious about being formalistic, for the book is full of jokes that he tells on himself. Bernard quotes a friend of his sister who mocked him for his short stature in high school by greeting him with "Bernard Conners! You get smaller every time I see you."

Bernie recounts Bernard's conflicting behavior and careers throughout the book, and he quotes an appraisal of himself by one of his prep school (Albany Academy) teachers, who suggested that he was "an introvert pretending to be an extrovert" — "this…but then again that." What Bernard doesn't seem to acknowledge, but I believe Bernie knows in his deepest self, is that such equivocation is not unusual, but really par for most writers, who can love their own work, but also flagellate themselves about it, and about much else as well.

What Bernie has produced—while switching between careers as a mogul and a novelist—is a substantial body of work in his chosen idioms: the novel, true crime, the thriller, the non-fiction novel. The books have been well-received, some of them best-sellers, and he's won prizes for his work. Bernard puts it this way: "Although his literary prizes were modest, Bernard courted the favor of more accomplished authors. It was his friendship with George Plimpton that had the most influence on his writing career." And that friendship led to his being the financial salvation for many years of Plimpton's Paris Review, the best literary magazine on the planet. The Review's Writers-at-Work interview series began in 1953 with an E.M. Forster interview. I tuned in when they did Hemingway in 1958 (interviewed by George Plimpton), and it was a magical, invaluable series, singular in its early days. What it gave me, and a lot of other writers, was rare access to the arcane and myriad ways that the great writers wrote fiction. Writing his novels and keeping The Paris Review alive, were notable achievements by Bernard/Bern/Bernie, and not a cause for melancholy. But at book's end here is Bernard on his aging self: "…the later years seem to catch him without warning. Suddenly he found himself an aging author struggling to be heard, a requiem of rustling dead leaves in the wasteland of old age."

I disagree with the perspective "…requiem of dead leaves…in the wasteland." I think somebody should send a message to Bernard that he's too tough on Bernie.

—William Kennedy