In which we have a look at this week's
New York Times Book Review.
We break from practice this weekend to begin with the reviews
that face each other at the center of this weeks' Book Review. New York
is very much the subject here, and, as is so often the case, the truth is
stranger than the fiction. The fiction is Jay McInterney's The Good Life,
reviewed by Paul Gray as unfavorably as one has come to expect. Poor Mr
McInerney! Whether he's trapped in an Eighties Zeitgeist by his own
sensibility or by the critics who won't let him live down is bad-boy party
animal days, he still ought to have foreseen where bringing together his
adulterous couple in a 9/11 soup kitchen at Bowling Green would land him. Here
is the nub of Mr Gray's review.
Corinne and Luke apparently deserve attention because they move
in circles that sometimes intersect with those of the famous, occasionally
even those of the ultra-cool one-name variety. "Salman" cancels at the last
minute from the Calloway dinner party. A director who does show up regales a
"rapt" table with tales of "me and Marty and Peter and the gang" back in
Hollywood in the 1970's. Corinne and Russell attend a book party at "Nan's"
and "Gay's" townhouse. When Sasha McGavock requires a frock for a society
benefit, "Oscar" provides.
Perhaps recognizing that readers able to fill in these last names don't
add up to the sort of numbers that produce best sellers, McInerney gilds
such glitter by throwing in a steady stream of brand names, arcane and
familiar, to attract the demographic of inveterate shoppers.
Attorney Edward Hayes would probably not only be able to "fill in these last
names" but claim to be on retainer from some of them. The celebrity defense
attorney and rough diamond, immortalized by Tom Wolfe (who supplies an introduction) in The
Bonfire of the Vanities, has enlisted Susan Lehman to patch together his
memoirs, in Mouthpiece: A Life in - and Sometimes Just Outside - the Law.
Former Book Review editor Charles McGrath gives Mouthpiece a
jittery review. After summarizing some of Mr Hayes's more provocative opinions
about how the world works, he writes,
Some of this may be slightly put on, to get a rise out of
liberal, middle-class readers, but the disquieting thing about this
otherwise engaging book is that it eventually suggests that the Hayesian
philosophy might be more accurate than many liberal, middle-class readers
would like to believe. That almost anybody can be bought is the apparent
lesson of the book's most interesting section, which describes on of the few
times when Hayes has found himself in over his head.
[That would be when he represented the estate of Andy Warhol.] In addition to
sharing Manhattan topography, both books appear to cover really well-made suits,
and neither review is a heavyweight. Now, back to normal.
Fiction
In addition to The Good Life, six novels are reviewed
this week. Two look interesting. White Ghost Girls, by Alice Greenway, is
a spare novel set in Hong Kong during the Vietnam war that tells of the moral
awakening of the daughter of a Time magazine photographer. Vendela
Vida writes, "Greenway employs brevity and marmoreal prose, trusting the reader
to fill in the relevant facts - something many first-time novelists lack the
courage to do." In Company, Max Barry has written an unsparing novel set
in Seattle. According to Douglas Coupland, it's a spot-on satire of soul-sucking
cubicle life.
OK, we all know that corporate culture and jargon are easy
targets, as are self-improvement programs and management systems. But it
takes an accomplished social anthropologist from the schools of both Dilbert
and Evelyn Waugh to make topics like outsourcing, mission statements and HR
come alive, breathe fire and then vomit all over your in-basket.
The picture of Stephen Wright that is run twice, small- and
medium-sized, in the Book Review shows him wearing a Yankees cap and
three piercings. I understand that this is immaterial to his skill as a writer,
but it's mighty off-putting. I read Meditations in Green years ago but
have read nothing by Mr Wright since. The Amalgamation Polka, his new
novel about a young man named Liberty who enlists on the Union side at the
outbreak of the Civil War. Laura Miller's enthusiastic review celebrates Mr
Wright's powerfully disorienting storytelling but leaves me feeling more than
ever the truth of Susan Sontag's conceit of Manhattan as an ocean liner berthed
at an American dock.
"Is it the climate," a British character asks of Liberty's
countrymen, "some quickening agent in the air, sense you all mooning
helplessly through the woods, scavenging for God in every tree, paradise
behind every rock?" There's something absurd about conceiving of a nation in
terms of a morality so prone to drastic reversals and inversions. For
Wright, America, past and present, is Wonderland, a place of marvels and
horrors from which not even the fortunate escape with their heads.
I am very tired of this sort of writing - of this kind of thinking. In another
historical novel, Steven Heighton's Afterlands, we're taken on an
ill-fated expedition to the North Pole in 1871. Bruce Barcott hails it as
"magnificent."
Heighton extrapolates from historical accounts of the crew's
six-and-a-half-month journey aboard the ice floe to create a sophisticated,
densely-layered fictional exploration of survival, love, betrayal and the
personal cost of history.
Which reminds me that I have got to read Moby-Dick.
Tom Shone reviews Utterly Monkey without mentioning that
author Nick Laird is married to Zadie Smith. That's good. Even better, he faults
Mr Laird for pursuing a high-octane plot (blowing up the Bank of England) when
it is clear that the writer is "more at ease with the threat of violence than
the thing itself." This novel carries a lot of personal warning flags - I try
very hard to read nothing about the Irish Troubles, or about the difficulties
that Northern Irishmen encounter in London. Utterly Monkey appears to be
well-written, however, so perhaps I'll give it a try. What I will not try is
Maile Meloy's A Family Daughter. As Jeff Giles, notes, Ms Meloy's first
novel, Liars and Saints, was accorded gushing praise from the moment it
appeared. You can read what I thought about it
here - on the
understanding that I probably wouldn't be so generous today. Mr Giles writes,
Despite Meloy's drab, if efficient prose - and I'd suggest
there's a difference between good writing an the absence of bad writing -
A Family Daughter veers perilously close to the soap-operatic at times.
Been there, &c.
Nonfiction
The most serious review this week is Leon Wieseltier's critique
of Daniel C Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon;
the piece also raises a serious question about the Book Review's
editorial judgment. Mr Wieseltier's essay is eloquent, and it highlights at least
one interesting weakness in Mr Dennett's deconstruction of the religious impulse; I'm grateful to have been able to
read it. But perhaps the review would have seemed less inappropriate in The
New Republic, where Mr Wieseltier is literary editor. I cannot see any
constructive point in the Times' having assigned a book by an aggressive
atheist to a writer who piously respects religious wisdom even if he does not
quite believe in it. Predictably, Mr Wieseltier has nothing good to say
about Breaking the Spell, and he says it very well.
Here is a passage from Breaking the Spell:
Like other animals, we have built-in desires to reproduce and to
do pretty much whatever it takes to achieve this goal. But we also have
creeds, and the ability to transcend our genetic imperatives. This fact does
make us different. But it is itself a biological fact, visible to natural
science, and something that requires an explanation from natural science.
As Mr Wieseltier observes, it is unreasonable to look to
natural science - the best method that we have so far of analyzing the world we
live in - to explain our transcendence. If our transcendence is explicable in
terms of natural science, it is per se not transcendence. It is clear
that Mr Wieseltier and Mr Dennett do not understand "humanism" to be the same
thing. In the present context, however, the disagreement doesn't mean very much.
It can be meaningful to those who have read Breaking the Spell and
considered its arguments, not as Mr Wieseltier picks them, but as Mr Dennett
lays them out. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, far from serving
the general reader as a helpful reviewer, Mr Wieseltier has been commissioned to
discredit the book in a way that will prevent full consideration of its
propositions. I don't mean that Mr Wieseltier ought to have written otherwise. I
do mean that the Book Review ought not to have published it.
Kevin Baker praises the latest book about Abraham Lincoln.
In Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power, the British
historian Richard Carwardine makes it refreshingly clear from his title on
that he is more interested in Lincoln the politician. It's not that
Lincoln's political abilities have escaped notice. Most recently, Doris
Kearns Goodwin, in Team of Rivals, told the overdue story of how
Lincoln, as president, was able to mold the oversize, contentious
personalities in his cabinet into a remarkably effective unit. But
Carwardine provides a more comprehensive study of how an essentially good
man could gain and wield power, even in scoundrel time.
Mr Baker has no use, however, for Lincoln in The Times: The Life of Abraham
Lincoln as Originally Reported in The New York Times, edited by David
Herbert Donald and Harold Holzer. Mr Baker is amazed that the editors have
contrived to omit the role played by the newspaper's founder, Henry J Raymond,
in the notorious draft riots of 1863. (Raymond "stood down" the mob with Gatling
guns position in the newsroom windows.)
Amanda Mackenzie Stuart's Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The
Story of a Daughter and a Mother in the Gilded Age gets a largely favorable
review from Francine du Plessix Gray. Ms Gray likes the Consuelo parts and
thinks that the Alva parts are too long. It would have been nicer to have a book
focused solely on the daughter, who was married off to the Duke of Marlborough
in 1895 and left him twenty-five years later for the love of her life.
Surmounting most obstacles through her innate intelligence and
self-discipline, abandoning the harsh glitter of her life as a peer's wife
for the pure gold of her happiness with a man she chose to love, Consuelo
Vanderbilt Balsan left an ineffable legacy of style and grace that Stuart
narrates with an elegance equal to her subject's.
Mother Alva, however, is more problematic, and what warrants her inclusion in
the book is the progressive thinking that she instilled in her daughter. That
she could regard marrying her daughter to a rather unprepossessing duke as
"progressive" goes some way to explaining Ms Gray's judgment of her character:
"quick-witted, endlessly self-publicizing and diabolically ambitious."
A far less functional parent-child relationship is the subject
of Bernard Cooper's The Bill From My Father: A Memoir. As reviewer Norah
Vincent suggests, "bill" may have a double meaning. First of all, it refers to
the grotesque bill for two million dollars in payment of parental service
rendered with which lawyer Edward Cooper presented his son. But it may also
refer to the writer's unavoidable struggle to understand such a parent. But Ms
Vincent doubtless unintentionally strikes this book from my list when she
concludes,
The bond, though contentious, is inescapable, and in mapping its
tortuous contours, Cooper has produced a nuanced, pained portrayal of how -
and often how awkwardly - men love.
On the
evidence of Ada Calhoun's review of A Plea for Eros: Essays, Siri
Hustvedt is one of the most insufferable women on the planet. "Unfortunately,
much of this book suggests a similar lack of engagement with the real world."
And Hustvedt's tales about her Norwegian-Lutheran childhood and
New York adulthood have punch lines that don't so much land as waft down in
a billow of gauze. Her clincher, about a drunken bum, has a familiar
premise. He props himself up on his elbow for just one reason: he wants to
tell her that he finds her beautiful.
There
are five reviews in Tara McKelvey's Nonfiction Chronicle.
¶ The Film Snob's Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of
Filmological Knowledge, by David Kamp with Lawrence Levi. Ms McKelvey
primarily notes this treatise's terseness; both writers "have burnished the
28-word and under profile to a sheen." Sounds undernourishing.
¶ Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy, by Anna
Politkovskaya and translated by Arch Tait. The reviewer hails the writer as
"a master at depicting horror and suffering" and concludes, "The more
Westerners know about Putin's Russia, the better. I'm afraid, however, that
dismissing Vladimir Putin as a KGB thug is a dangerous underassessment.
¶ I Hit It Under The Sheets: Growing Up With Radio, by Gerald
Eshkenazi. So much for sportswriting:
Woody Allen (Radio Days) and Stanley Elkin (The
Dick Gibson Show), among others, have mined this material. Yet
Eshkenazi, who writes about sports for The New York Times, isn't
in their league; his writing is flat, the book's structure is disjointed
and he seems to have done surprisingly little research, relying instead
on a static-y memory..."
¶ Confessions
of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption
in the Stock Market, by Dan Reingold with Jennifer Reingold. This
revenge fantasy come true runs out of steam when its villain, Jack Grubman,
resigns in disgrace from Smith Barney.
¶ Time Bites: Views and Reviews, by Doris Lessing. What is this
book doing in a roundup? Lessing is one of the great writers, and her
nonfiction deserves less perfunctory treatment. It is hard to say just what
Ms McKelvey thinks of the collection.
Finally, there
are two sporting books this week. One of these days, I'm going to have to decide
whether to continue covering reviews of books of which I can scarcely understand
the existence. I'm told that some of the best prose in English is sportswriting,
but this is not much different, to my mind, from praising the cinematography of
an adult sex film. For the moment, I'll simply say that boxing historian Bert
Randolph Sugar likes Barney Ross, Douglas Century's biography of a
popular lightweight boxer who emerged from the Chicago ghetto in the late
Twenties and whose career illuminates the diverse ethnic aspect of boxing prior
to Joe Louis's reduction of the matter to black and white. As for John
Feinstein's Last Dance: Behind the Scenes of the Final Four, weren't we
just remarking on Joseph Nocera's rough review of the sportswriter's last book?
Why yes, on 4 December! Jay Jennings doesn't think much of the new one, calling
it "particularly shoddy" and suggesting that this be not only Mr Feinstein's
last "Last" book but his last book period. Sports occupies the final-page
Essay. Keith Gessen's title, "In Search of the Great American Hockey Novel,"
speaks for itself. Apparently, ice hockey is endearing in no small part because
its fans tend toward the shambolic.
