In which we have a look at this week's
New York Times Book Review.
May I just take a second to complain about subtitles in which X
is the making of Y? Such statements usually stretch plausibility beyond the snapping point. Also: one
does not forge pathways.
There are more than a few poor reviews to wade through, this week, but
there are some good ones, too. Just this once, I've made it a snap for you
compare the Book Review's reviews with Janet Maslin's reviews in the
Times proper. In both cases, Ms Maslin does the better job.
Fiction & Poetry??
Joel Brouwer's review of Scar Tissue, Charles Wright's
latest volume of poetry, is almost unintelligibly insidery. "Wright's
paradoxical sentiments come wrapped in gently meandering lines and sentences
that seem not to want to end lest they appear to conclude." I think I know what
that means, but "conclude" seems deliberately arch. I am not sure that Mr
Brouwer recommends the book.
So much for poetry. Eleven novels are reviewed (ouf!). The
first, The Mystery Guest, by Grégoire Bouillier (translated by Lorin
Stein), is billed as a memoir by Erica Wagner, who finds it "endearing." The
book is apparently the novelization of an episode in the writer's life. Noting
that the novel has been "fluently and colloquially translated, Ms Wagner writes,
"This is the theme of this work, the will to find connections, to believe in
something other than random suffering."
A Spot of Bother, Mark Haddon's new novel, gets a
favorable review from David Kamp.
But Haddon is too gifted and too ambitious to write a hacky
second novel. In fact, he's so wondrously articulate, so rigorous in
thinking through his characters' mind-sets, that A Spot of Bother
serves as a fine example of why novels exist.
Anyone who liked The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time but
who "isn't sure" about how well Mr Haddon might follow that hard act will
probably come down for the new book on the basis of Mr Kamp's enthusiasm. Lizzie
Skurkick's baffling review of Pagan Kennedy's Confession of a Memory Eater,
in contrast, kicks up a cloud of dust. Because her sentences make sense
internally but don't really connect with their neighbors, I'd have to type quite
a bit of blather to convey the full opacity of the review. You'll have to take
my word for it.
Terrence Rafferty's review of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman:
Twenty-Four Stories, by Haruki Murakami (translated by Philip Gabriel and
Jay Rubin) is everything that it ought to be, lucidly setting forth the nub of
Mr Murakami's fictional impulse. The stories in this collection, he writes,
seem to speak with one, very seductive, voice. That voice, in
each of these wildly varied excursions into the strange, dim territory of
the self, says that someone named Haruki Murakami is still looking,
quixotically, for something less fragile, less provisional than the usual
accommodations we make do with on the road. These are just 24 of the places
where, one time or another, he thought he might find it.
I only wish that Mr Rafferty had explained away the wry disingenuous that I
taste in every paragraph of Mr Murakami's work. Am I just being paranoid?
Ada Calhoun's ruthlessly dismissive review of Jed Rubenfeld's
The Interpretation of Murder is so devastating - although the book is "a
page turner," it is "both smutty and pretentious" - that I wondered if Janet
Maslin mightn't have been a more sympathetic reviewer of this popular book in
the Da Vinci Code mold. Ms Maslin, however, reviews books for The New
York Times, not for The New York Times Book Review. In fact, she has
reviewed the
book for the newspaper, and, not surprisingly, she's a great deal more
sympathetic, while at the same time just as clear about the book's breezy
qualities - which simply reduce Ms Calhoun to dyspepsia. (Because I think that
it would be instructive to read both reviews, I include a link to the
Book Review.) I am
no more tempted to read The Interpretation of Murder by Ms Maslin's sunny
reception, but it leaves a much nicer taste in my mouth.
You can play the same game with The Meaning of Night: A
Confession, by Michael Cox, only in this case, the Review's piece, by
Susann Cokal, is the favorable one. Her summary of the novel's plot does not
incline one to agree with her praise of it; rather the reverse. For once, I must
quote Ms Maslin:
Instead he is eager to use words like vouchsafe as
liberally as possible, so that “The Meaning of
Night” has the ornate, curlicued linguistic niceties
of a Dickensian period piece. Such affectations have
the potential to be either voluptuously pleasing (as
they were in Michel Faber’s “Crimson Petal and the
White” and Sarah Dunant’s “In the Company of the
Courtesan”) or arduously contrived (Elizabeth
Kostova’s “Historian”). But in Mr. Cox’s version
they are oddly colorless. Images like that of “the
usual metropolitan bustle, the familiar panorama of
unremarkable people doing unremarkable things,” are
captured all too well.
You decide.
Neil Gordon's surprisingly important review of
The Mission
Song, by John le Carré, sets out to debunk the idea that Mr le Carré lost his
footing when the Wall came down.
Read closely, le Carré's brilliant George Smiley novels are much
less about spies than about the fundamental evil of cold-war-era politics.
That these dense, often demanding, unexpectedly radical books have been the
recipients of phenomenal commercial success makes le Carré's career
not only admirable but enviable.
Mr Gordon
goes on to present The Mission Song as a worthy addition to Mr le Carré's
shelf.
Jenny Diski's reviews appear in the London Review of Books,
and I make a point of reading them. It may be that her review of
Kensington
Gardens, by Rodrigo Fresán (translated by Natasha Wimmer), is difficult to
follow because she has been shoehorned into a much smaller space and has too
much to say. "This is one of those novels (think of Lolita, Moby-Dick,
the stories of Borges and Calvino) that really do remind you of the profound
sensual pleasure you had as a child when you discovered reading and began to
swim in that vast ocean of books." Oops. I didn't discover the pleasure of
reading until puberty hit, and while passion was as aspect of my reading from
the start, I was unfamiliar with anything like "profound sensual pleasure" until
the third or fourth time that I read Emma. I was not reassured by this
quote from Mr Freslán's book:
the 60's are a fairy story for adults - for adults who were young
during the 60's and as a result have become the best, most reckless liars in
all of history.
Charles Taylor is quite as negative about Dennis Lehane's
Coronado: Stories as Ada Calhoun is about Jed Rubenfeld. After citing a
passage that he finds trite, Mr Taylor writes,
That's second-rate pulp philosophy, and not redeemed by the
narrative drive that can make you overlook similar guff in a good thriller.
And while Lehane's thrillers ... were sometimes unbelievably violent, they
didn't seem ridiculous.
Tibor Fischer's
review of Touchy Subjects: Stories, by Emma Donoghue, is interesting for
selling Ms Donoghue's collection without making sense of it. And his frame of
reference is almost arcane.
Not as purely gag-led as, say, the stories of Shalom Auslander,
nor matching the oddity of, say, John Dufresne's, Donoghue's stories achieve
an entertaining middle ground.
"Middle" as
between what and what, exactly?
Finally, there's Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone. David
Bowman reviews it quite favorably. I was mystified by one small discrepancy, but
on the whole I got a feel for Mr Woodrell's taut lyricism.
His Old Testament prose and blunt vision have a chilly
timelessness that suggests that this novel will speak to readers as long as
there are readers, and as long as violence is practiced more often
than hope or language.
Nonfiction
On the cover this week, Ian Buruma reviews Frank Rich's
excoriation of the mainstream press in the Age of Shrub,
The Greatest Story
Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina. Mr Buruma is
able to bring a European perspective to the problem of our pusillanimous press.
There may be one other reason for the fumbling: the conventional
methods of American journalism, market by an obsession with access and
quotes. A good reporter for an American paper must get sources who sound
authoritative and quotes that show both sides of a story. His or her own
expertise is almost irrelevant. If the opinions of columnists count for too
much in the American press, the intelligence of reporters is institutionally
underused. The problem is that there are not always two sides to a story.
Someone reporting on the persecution of Jews in Germany in 1938 would not
have added "balance" by quoted Joseph Goebbels. And besides, as Judith
Miller found out, what is the good of quotes if they are based on false
information?
This is a review to clip and tuck into one's copy of The
Greatest Story Ever Told.
Of Helen MacDonald, author of Human Remains: Dissection and
Its Histories, Mary Roach writes that she "is that rare and precious
commodity: a crack historian with a taste for the bizarre."
The topic of women and the iniquities they have borne is a
perennial - though not typically entertaining - topic for historians. But
combine it with MacDonald's sensibilities and a parallel topic of cadavers,
and this is some of the most fascinating scholarly reading since Foucault
tackled sex.
There you have it. Tom
Siegfried aptly reviews two new books that argue against the likelihood that
string theory will ever lead to substantial advances in the science of physics,
Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the
Search for Unity in Physical Law, by Peter Woit and
The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory,
the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, by Lee Smolin.
Smolin's book is worth taking seriously as a plea for minority
viewpoints. But neither he nor Woit really confront the reason ideas in
physics become majority viewpoints. When John Schwarz of Caltech and his few
collaborators worked alone on string theory throughout the 1970's, they
wrote no books complaining about lack of resources. They worked until they
found a striking result that mainstream physicists found worth pursuing.
Physicists vote with their feet, which suggests that there is, after all, a
way to prove string theory wrong - by finding a different theory and proving
it right.
Even I could understand that.
Michael Wolff's review of Daniel Golden's The Price of Admission: How
America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges - and Who Gets Left
Outside the Gates is perhaps this week's most interesting piece.
While Golden mounts a fire-breathing, righteous attack on the
culture of super-privilege, this is also a rather conventionally-minded view
of education. He subscribes to the central assumptions about the Ivy League
in America. The Ivies, he says, pave your way "into leadership positions in
business and government" and "serve as the gateway to affluence and
influence in America." If this is true, it explains why the Ivy League would
turn into a marketplace. How could it not, being of such value and limited
supply? But the obvious solution, to make more colleges more equal, is not
the case he's arguing. Golden wants some people - people like himself - to
have access to elite universities.
In
short, the reviewer might have written the better book.
The premise of Kim Powers's The History of Swimming: A
Memoir, is unlikely enough: a gay man searches for his lost fraternal twin,
also gay. In the background: their mother committed suicide when they were
seven. Reviewer Eve Conant faults Mr Powers's writing ("Powers's writing
background is in television and film, and his fragmented, conversational
sentences often fall flat from overuse.") but becomes too distracted by Mr
Powers's story to express an overall opinion about the book. Maybe if she'd been
given more space... but, no, storytelling is bad at any length.
Reviewers of Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family,
Fatherland and Vichy France, by Carmen Callil, can't seem to resist
storytelling, because the figure at the center of the book, Louis Darquier, is
such an implausible bounder. No, I'm not going to tell you who he was, but you
can find out at Wikipedia. Reviewer Christopher Caldwell makes a few
motions toward refuting Ms Callil's revisionist argument (Darquier was not an
aberration of Vichy France but its exemplar), but for the most part he retails
more or less shocking details from Ms Callil's book.
Tim Weiner gives Sharon Weinberger's
Imaginary Weapons: A
Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld a qualified good
review: he thinks that Ms Weinberger ought to have written a bigger book. "By
focusing on one tiny target, Weinberger has missed the big picture." This seems
obtuse. Focusing on a small target may capture the picture, but in miniature,
and persuade other writers to undertake more comprehensive studies of the
Pentagon's penchant for fantasy physics. I haven't thought up a word yet for
"not wanting the book at hand, no matter how good it is, because you can imagine
another book," but, when I do, you'll be the first to know.
Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions That Forged Modern
Greece and Turkey, by Bruce Clark, covers an important issue, the
folly of equating ethnos with nation in the modern world. According to Belinda
Cooper, Mr Clark has covered it well.
Clark refrains from casting either side as the villain in the
population transfer. He cautiously points out that the exchange achieved its
goals by creating clear boundaries and thus making it possible for the two
countries to live side by side in relative peace. But this quietly nuanced
study, whose lessons transcend the borders of Greece and Turkey, primarily
illustrates the human cost extracted by the bloody project of wrenching
communities apart and forming homogenous nations based on abstract concepts
of belonging.
Do you remember Sarah Chayes from NPR? After the latest
invasion of Afghanistan, she decided to switch jobs, and took a leadership job
with Afghans for Civil Society, a promoter of civic virtue in Kandahar. Her new
book, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan
After the Taliban, reviewed by David Rohde, she denounces the
current US-Pakistani alliance. "If in the end, the American effort in southern
Afghanistan fails, this important and insightful book will explain why.
Joshua Hammer has written a book about the deadly earthquake
that leveled Tokyo and its port, Yokohama, in 1923. An entrepôt along Shanghai
lines, Yokohama depended on foreign relief after the quake - enough to ruffle
the pride of Japanese nationalists, who did not want to be perceived as
dependent upon handouts from abroad. One thing led to another, and you have
Pearl Harbor. In Yokohama Burning: The Deadly 1923
Earthquake and Fire That Helped Forge the Path to World War II,
Mr Hammer makes, according to reviewer Jacob Heilbrunn, "a provocative
and largely persuasive case that [the disaster and its aftermath] marked a
turning point in Japan's embrace of militant nationalism.
This week's silly books are The
Beautiful Fall: Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris,
by Alicia Drake and reviewed by Caroline Weber; and
Nicole Kidman, by David Thomson and
reviewed by Lawrence Levi. Neither review begins to propose a raison d'être.
I've saved for last the funniest review in this week's
Review. Joe Queenan writes up The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The
Screenwriter as God!, by Joe Eszterhas. I am no cinema insider, but I read
the paper, and I know that to speak of Mr Eszterhas as "mild-mannered" and
"diffident, Apollonian" is to be pulling legs. Enough of the truth seeps
through, however, to convey an idea of the book.
True, since the author, now 62, regularly refers to such
once-mythical but now obscure figures as Zsa Zsa Gabor, Yvonne de Carlo,
Elizabeth Berkley and William Faulkner, it is not certain that the intended
reader will understand all the references. Still, the overall message -
everyone in Hollywood is an untrustworthy moron except me and a couple of
directors I might one day work with again - comes through fairly clearly.
Marilyn Stasio, who reviews crime fiction on a generic basis
for the Book Review, takes stock, in her Essay, "There's a New Bad Guy in
Town," of the impact of 9/11 on "hometown mysteries."
