Daily Blague

Hrant Dink may not have died in vain. The assassination of the Armenian-Turkish journalist by a seventeen year-old "nationalist" has prompted massive outpourings of grief, not only in Istanbul, where one might expect it, but elsewhere in Turkey as well. The government is all but patronizing a big-deal funeral. Denial of the Armenian genocide isn't the biggest problem that Turkey faces (Kurdist separatism is), but it is the major obstacle to the final step of Turkey's secularist reformation: union with Europe. I wish I could join the crowds for this particularly sad but generally joyous observance.

Clear up one problem and another will appear in its place, as is shown Times coverage, "Armenian Editor's Death Leads to Conciliation," by Susanne Fowler and Sebnem Arsu. 

Turkey calls the loss of life a consequence of a war in which both sides suffered casualties, and has suggested that a group of envoys from each country analyze the history. Armenia has expressed a willingness to participate but insists that the border must first be reopened to trade.

But many Armenians living abroad hold a much harder line and are lobbying the United States and European governments to deny Turkey entrance into the European Union until Ankara recognizes the killings as genocide.

I know that not all of the Armenian "expats" (many the grandchildren of emigré refugees) live in the United States, but a lot of them do, and they are among the hardest of hard liners. They have plenty of company: Irish-Americans who have supported Sinn Féin, Cubans who have plotted against Castro, and American Jews who have "settled" the West Bank - just to name three groups of powerful quasi-diasporans. The basic idea seems to be that you get thrown out of your homeland for one reason or another and come to America, where you prosper. But you do not forget the Old Country, for vengeance is yours!

The sad fact is that we all live locally, whether we want to or not. People living in California gradually cease to be Armenians, not because they abandon traditions but because actual Armenians, the people who live in Armenia, come to have different experiences, and probably don't see "tradition" in quite the same way as their collateral exiles. The very lack of an overall American "sentiment," or national feeling, makes it possible for newcomers to feel at home within a short space of time, but it also encourages them to hold on to and fetishize the more portable aspects of the culture they have left behind. The rest is money for guns. 

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Last Wednesday, I tootled down to Union Square to attend a book event at Barnes & Noble. A very sophisticated and lighthearted book event: Michael Musto, the Voice columnist, interviewed Rupert Everett, author of Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins: The Autobiography (Warner Books). According to IMDb, Mr Everett will turn forty-eight in May, which makes the writing of an autobiography seem a tad premature, but what's in a name? A book by Rupert Everett would be just as funny by any other. The paragraph that you are reading was massively stalled by a premature opening of the book, which is not what I am here to talk about.

The performance space, so to speak, at the Union Square Barnes & Noble is capacious, but it's also the venue of choice for the most popular events, or so it seems to me. I had no idea what kind of a crowd to expect, so I left the house at ten to six and reached the fourth floor of the branch half an hour later. There were still plenty of seats, but because of my size I am miserable in anything but an aisle seat toward the rear, preferably blocking no one's view. Happily, there was one. Since I was alone, I had to sit in it for forty minutes, which was something of a drag, but I'd brought along The New Yorker and the London Review of Books. A minute passed. And then another minute. By ten to seven, every seat was taken. Very shortly after seven, there was a sort of commotion on the other side of the room as Mr Musto and Mr Everett approached. The latter was all but poleaxed by a gaggle of photographers. I had never seen such a shoot before, and it seemed very silly. It was for that reason that I somewhat priggishly declined to take a snapshot of the event with my cellphone.

I had heard about Mr Musto, but never seen or heard him before; my, what an insolent and impudent piece of work he is! Which is another way of saying that he's a brazen old queen. Mr Everett is a gay guy, not a queen, and a stylistic dissonance was soon humming from the dais. (Mr Musto actually promoted his own forthcoming book, La Dolce Musto, which certainly made me squirm.) There were plenty of laughs, but the mood of the evening relaxed considerably when the discussion was opened to questions from the audience.

Rupert Everett is a past-master at playing blithely irresponsible rakes and cads on screen; in life, he's clever but thoughtful. Asked about his response to 9/11 by someone who apparently knew that he was in Manhattan that morning, Mr Everett remarked on the strange passivity of people in the street, "before the wailing." At first, before the enormity of the incident could hit home, the sight of the towers in flames really just seemed to be another computer-generated image, another special effect. This made him think about the terrible desensitization that has been wrought by "life in a media age," as another questioner put it. "We're all too entertained," Mr Everett said, and, speaking as an entertainer, he wanted to find ways of restoring the vitality of experience. For a moment, he sounded as though he were contemplating another career entirely, but any fears of that were wonderfully dashed by his announcement that "at the end of next year" (next season? 2008?), he's going to play Henry Higgins in a West End production of Pygmalion that, if successful, may come to New York. If I were Michael Musto, I would regale you with the excited response to this news of my plumbing.

The evening was a lot of fun, and it dislodged me from the blue doldrums that had kept me in bed for too much of the morning. I came right home and, knowing that Kathleen would be at the financial printer until close to midnight, I calmly set about making a dish of spaghetti alla carbonara while watching Deceived By Flight. I'm watching all the Inspector Morse episodes, in alphabetical order. It is very much the thing for this time of year.

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Kathleen, whose office is at Wall Street and Broadway in Lower Manhattan, received the following "Media Advisory" in intra-office email:

BEGINNING TOMORROW IN THE VICINITY OF THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE AT 4:00 PM, TUESDAY, JANUARY 23, AND CONTINUING ON WEEKDAYS THROUGH JANUARY, A MOVIE BEING MADE IN THE VICINITY OF THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE WILL EMPLOY FLOOD LIGHTING, ARMY AND COAST GUARD HELICOPTERS, MOCK POLICE AND MILITARY VEHICLES, AND OVER 1,000 EXTRAS FOR AN EVACUATION SCENE.

Can't wait to see the movie.

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For a bookish person, I'm perhaps unusually averse to spending time in or making use of public libraries. It's partly because I find it very difficult to focus on books when I'm in a crowded room (a crowded moving vehicle is something else). But it's also partly because of what Ellen Moody, in her entry about the Library of Congress, calls "institutional bullying." One of the most shameful things about the United States is the unwillingness of so many of its citizens to understand that the staffs of public institutions ought to be among the most highly-compensated workers in the land.

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At the top of all the smartest reading lists this season is Colm Tóibín's Mothers and Sons, a collection of short stories that puts the author in a class with Alice Munro (whose latest book, The View From Castle Rock, is also up there on the lists). As a rule, I give Irish fiction a very wide berth, because so much of it is blighted either by the after-effects of colonial misrule or by the provinciality enforced by the Catholic Church. Mr Tóibín's fiction transcends both limitations without ignoring either. As a very gifted gay man, he gives us an Ireland entirely devoid of Lucky Charms, and he beautifully crumples the impression that I got from driving across Ireland with my father in 1977: "All the smart ones left." Not so. (Although, come to think of it, he did spend an awful lot of time in Barcelona.)

Read about Mothers and Sons at Portico.

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What are your thoughts about amateur cookbooks? I'm talking about the publications of Junior Leagues and Women's Associations. I've gotten rid of most of the ones that I inherited or accumulated; I simply don't have the room to keep them. Even if I did, I wouldn't consult them. I'm not looking for new ways of doing things - not anymore. I'm looking for more classics to do regularly, and the classics are best represented in the professional cookbooks - of which I don't have a great many as it is.

Nevertheless, there are two recipes that I got from the first Noteworthy, a series of cookbooks (perhaps there were only two) put out to benefit Ravinia, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's summer venue. One of them is for dilled green beans, and it's quite refreshing in the summer. The other one is for Herbed Pecans. These nuts are great with cocktails, and they're no trouble to make.

Herbed Pecans

6 tablespoons butter

4 teaspoon rosemary

1/8 teaspoon dried basil

1 tablespoon salt

cayenne to taste

4 cups pecan halves

Preheat oven to 325^o. In a large saucepan, melt the butter. Add the rosemary, the basil, the salt and the cayenne and stir. Remove the saucepan from the heat, and toss in the pecans until well coated. Do not break the nuts. Turn the nuts into a jelly-roll pan and spread them out evenly. Scrape any remaining herb mixture onto the nuts.

Bake the nuts for 15 to 20 minutes, or until well browned, stirring gently two or three times. Drain in a colander and store when cooled.

In my experience, it takes a lot longer than twenty minutes to brown the pecans, and throw in a whole stick of butter.

Do you read cookbooks, leafing through them more for entertainment than for dishes that you would actually prepare? It is probably a very good thing to do, but I can't seem to swing it. I have enough trouble reading the books that are in my piles to have the time to wade into cookbooks. I rarely look at cooking magazines anymore, even the ones that I really like, such as Saveur. It's sign, perhaps, that my skill in the kitchen has outstripped my interest in cooking.

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You wouldn't think that Shawn Levy's Night at the Museum would be a difficult film to appraise, but in fact I'm going to have to see it a few more times before I can tell just how worthy it is of being bracketed with Galaxy Quest (1999). Galaxy Quest appears to be a satire of Star Trek, but its real target is American entertainment in general, and all of its brainy details show up, in one way or another, the brainlessness of mass showbiz. Night at the Museum is not a satire, and its details are not exactly brainy. But it builds on its jokes quite cleverly, and its goofiness is disingenuous. You can tell that (the uncredited) Owen Wilson was involved. Bullshit is hauled offscreen before it can pile up.

The story is simple enough. Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) is an failed entrepreneur whose son, Nick (Jake Cherry), can't bear the disappointment that his Dad has become. Finally without options, Larry swallows his pride and looks for a job. He lands the night watchman slot at the Natural History Museum, a failing institution on Central Park West (only on the outside to be confused with the American Museum of Natural History). During his first night on duty, he discovers that the creatures on display come alive at night. Keeping the mayhem from getting completely out of control is so exhausting that Larry almost quits. On the second night, Larry shows up prepared, but it turns out to be a mistake to give the Neanderthals a cigarette lighter, and in the morning he is almost sacked by the museum's director, Dr McPhee (Ricky Gervais). Given one more chance, Larry decides to share the wonder with Nick, whom he smuggles in at closing time. At the appointed hour, nothing happens, because the three daytime security guards (Dick van Dyke, Mickey Rooney, and Bill Cobbs) have stolen an Egyptian plaque bearing the curse that keeps things lively. I can't for the life of me remember what happens next, but all hell breaks loose. The next morning, the director is appalled by television reports of a T Rex footprint in the snow in Central Park and of the Neanderthals waving torches from the museum's cornice, but changes his mind about firing Larry when he discovers that attendance is way up.

Night at the Museum abounds in stellar cameo performances. Anne Meara (Mr Stiller's mother) is kindling-dry as a skeptical employment agent; Paul Rudd is maddeningly unctuous as Nick's stepfather. Mr Gervais is a sort of British Nathan Lane, with Brylcreem for blood, and he splutters through his part with unsmiling glee. The girls - Carla Gugino as Rebecca, Larry's girlfriend-to-come; and Mizuo Peck as Sacajawea - aren't given very much to work with, but Ms Gugino is savvy and Ms Peck knows how to make her character's grave composure funny. My favorites were Mr Wilson as Jedediah and Steve Coogan as Octavius. This duo is a pair of warring diorama figurines who spend every night trying to break into one another's window. Jedediah belongs to a display about the transcontinental railroad, which is just what you'd expect to see next to the Roman Forum, and his raving macho is beautifully matched by Mr Coogan's visible agony - oh, how he hates his Roman drag, especially the plumed helmet. I have a feeling that some of the ersatz Hunnish lines spoken by Michael Gallagher as Attila are going to creep into those crevices of society  already receptive to Animal House. The character played by Robin Williams almost throws a monkeywrench into the machinery when he confesses that he is really a wax dummy from Poughkeepsie and not Teddy Roosevelt, but by the time Rebecca is getting help on her dissertation from its subject, Sacajawea, most viewers will have forgotten the slip.

There should be no need to state that Ben Stiller has a ball. 

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I stood in front of the painting until I was afraid that I would either weep or get down on my knees. Never has a painting reached out and caressed my heart as this one did. I had always loved the image, but, seen on the canvas, over seven feet square,* John Singer Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882) has the mysterious power exerted by great religious paintings upon pious Christians and venerators of Renaissance painting. It is my Mona Lisa, my top-of-the-heap picture. And I saw it this afternoon for perhaps the last time. When Americans in Paris, the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, closes at the end of the month, it will go back to Boston.

Sargent's composition is extremely eccentric, and the setting extraordinarily spacious. There is a lot of empty room on view. That, oddly, is what gives the picture its vigor. It conveys the sense of walking in on children at play. The third daughter, standing to the left, might very well have been discovered on the right a few minutes ago. The oldest girl, leaning against the great vase, will probably sit down in a moment and try to pretend that she is a grown-up lady. The baby is too young to be expected to stand for guests.

Where are we? Old masters posed their figures against fanciful obscurities that were not intended to represent real-world interiors. Here, we can tell that we are in an actual apartment. The glass over the mantelpiece shows us the windows in the adjoining room. And yet the absence of tables and chairs makes it impossible to say how the space is used by the family when the girls are not playing.  The broad carpet and the imposing porcelains, in conjunction with the fact that there's nowhere to sit, suggest the occasional arrangement of palatial chambers; if chairs are wanted, lackeys will bring them. But for all the backward glancing toward Velásquez, the painting may appeal to us now more than ever because a century of abstraction has made us comfortable with large volumes that lack "pictorial" significance. We're unlikely, for this reason, to be irritated by the warped red screen.

Sargent's way with textiles is always a surprise. From a distance, the brushwork seems orderly enough, but, up close, it becomes riotous and haphazard. (The same thing is true of many of Fragonard's pictures.) Stand near the canvas, and the pinafores are shown to be anything but white. The baby girl's smock breaks down into abstract squiggles, something that beautifully offsets the careful modeling of her face.

And it is her face, I concluded today, that is the center of the picture. It is the part of the painting that draws and holds our attention with strange but pleasurable insistence. Eventually, we may come to feel that Sargent has replaced innocence of a child with something like unearthly wisdom. The older sisters are being polite. They know that they're being looked at, and their expressions are guarded when not simply averted. Only the baby really sees us. It may be mere curiosity; she may simply want to know what we think of her dolly.

Finally, there is what we know about the lives that awaited the daughters of Edward Darley Boit. Just as religious paintings illustrate scenes and events with which the viewer is expected to be familiar, depending for their expressive power upon the viewer's pre-existing associations, so the enchantment that hovers over these girls deepens when we reflect that not one of them would ever marry.

*The painting is a quarter of an inch wider than it is tall.

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Now that the White House and the Pentagon are pushing for a "surge" of additional American troops in Iraq, it may be too late to mastermind a massive redistribution of Edward N Luttwak's "Dead End: Counterinsurgency Warfare as Military Malpractice," which appears in the February issue of Harper's.* Before reading this article, my resistance to the Iraqi misadventure was strong but intuitive. Taking the tack of failing to see any good reason for invading the country spared me the obligation to analyse my conviction that the invasion couldn't succeed - not in the long term. The dots were all there in my head, but I didn't bother to connect them.

Mr Luttwak has connected them for me, however, and now I know why I believe that our military undertaking in Iraq can never succeed - not, that is, so long as we remain a modern Western democracy. Our national commitment to humanitarianism means that we cannot continue to save villages in the only way that we know - by destroying them. We have tied one hand behind our back, and I am fairly certain that any attempt, by the president or anyone else, to untie that hand would rouse very considerable public outrage.

Forty years ago, we were naive enough to think that it might be all right to kill Vietnamese in order to halt the spread of communism. If I have not heard anyone suggest that we are killing Iraqis in order to stop terrorism, that's probably because we're not doing most of the killing. As Mr Luttwak shows, however, we would have to start doing a lot more killing in order to quell the insurgency. We would have to exterminate the inhabitants of entire towns, or shoot randomly chosen children until their elders gave up insurgents. In short, we would have to out-terrorize the terrorists.

That is how the Ottoman Empire could control entire provinces with a few feared janissaries and a squadron or two of cavalry. The Turks were simply too few to hunt down hidden rebels, but they did not have to: they went to the village chiefs and the town notables instead, to demand their surrender, or else. A massacre once in a while remained an effective warning for decades. So it was mostly by social pressure rather than brute force that the Ottomans preserved their rule: it was the leaders of each ethnic or religious group inclined to rebellion that did their best to keep things quiet, and if they failed, they were quite likely to tell the Turks where to find the rebels before more harm was done.

The Turkish blueprint for empire is obviously out of the question for Americans, but the Administration has given parts of it a try, at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Such attempts, however hateful, have been furtive and almost half-hearted. We're not Turks; our digestions are far too delicate. 

After close study of FM 3-24 DRAFT, the "counterinsurgency" manual recently revised under the aegis of, among others, General David H Petraeus, Mr Luttwak finds an unrealistic dependence upon intelligence and counterintelligence. Weapons can't be used until we know where to shoot. Where is this information to come from? As Mr Luttwak knows, ordinary Iraqis have no reason to provide it, and many reasons to withhold it.

These reasons ought to be familiar to anyone who has seen a gangland film, where nobody cooperates with the police if he wants to keep his business and his family intact. The only thing going for the police is gang rivalry: the bad guys kill one another off. There's plenty of savage rivalry in Iraq, too, as the Shiite majority avenges itself on the Sunni minority that, propped up by the Turks, cornered most of the available goodies, giving it the head start that it needed to continue to oppress Shiites after Iraq's severance from the Ottoman Empire. But it would be hard to say that this rivalry is working to our advantage. The civil war that our leaders predicted would begin upon premature troop withdrawal is already under way, erasing the only plausible reason for maintaining any military presence in Iraq.

*Not, as of this writing, the "current" issue. Online, we're still in January.

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This idea of taking stock on Thursdays is all very well, but it's the entry that drives me crazy week after week. Reviewing the Book Review can be like pulling teeth, but at least I know what I'm supposed to be doing. I had absolutely nothing even to work with - no, that's not true, but you don't want to know how desperately unattractive my fallback was - until I passed a few minutes at Sale Bête, where Édouard had just posted a nice new piece and, helpfully for me, some photographs. Dont celle-ci:

 If this is not a Roman Catholic church, I'll be very surprised. It bears the unmistakable stamp of a Catholic church in New England, striving with its pointed Gothic windows and doorways to remind the working-class parishioners of the glories of the True Faith - and to substitute a little pizzaz for the rectangular formality of the Meeting House. The façade is Orvieto in yellow-painted pine. and the squat tower a campanile, not a spire. There is also the fact - fact! and known to Édouard I'm sure - that no pristine Congregational church would be interfered with by so many power lines. There is, finally, the stunning lack of verdure. Well, at this time of year, of sere branches.

Besides, Édouard goes on to tell us that he attended a celebration of the Epiphany here. With clowns. Case closed.

Connecticut and Rhode Island (the church is in Westerly, Rhode Island) are home to arguably the largest population descended from immigrants from Portugal, Italy, and Quebec in the United States. I used to wonder how people from sunny Mediterreanea could survive in dour New England, but then I remembered Homer, and the fact that "sunny" is a recent innovation in those old countries. Life is hard everywhere, and, on balance, not quite so hard here, where there's no class structure.

Or where the class structure is elastic. Because there certainly is a class structure. Looking at this church, I feel once again the terrible shame that I would feel at prep school when I went down to Blairstown for Mass at the pathetic little church at the wrong end end of town and sat through imprecations hurled out by the wild Irish priest who'd have been happier as a Baptist, had he but known that. Or the church that I'd attend (rarely) with my aunt and uncle, in New Hampshire - the church from which my uncle was buried two years ago. What were they thinking, trying to do Gothic with planks of wood? Trying to imitate the glories of the Quattrocento in chromolithograph terms? These churches are temples of hideosity.

I suspect that everybody knows this, and that it doesn't matter.

It didn't, ultimately, matter to me. I never believed. I comb through my earliest memories, and I can remember not a single second in which, say, I hoped that my prayer would reach the Blessed Virgin Mary, or understood that Jesus was the Son of God. I think that, when I was a small child, I expected that I would eventually understand virgin birth and redemption; I'm quite sure that I wasn't a little critical thinker. But I was a born materialist, and revelation never came. There are so many things about life that I don't understand. Religion and sports would be at the top of the list, if I cared very much about either.

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If I'm not mistaken, this item is called a "canterbury." The prototype was designed to make it easier to transport large music scores from the episcopal library to the cathedral. Now canterburies are mostly used to hold magazines. That's certainly what this one is going to be doing. It's a lot bigger than I expected it to be. The side panel comes up to my knee, and the handle reaches about six inches higher than that.

If could sit still in a quiet room - indefinitely, which Pascal assures me I cannot - I could read all the magazines in the canterbury. My brain might liquefy and drip through my nose, but I'd stop feeling guilty about not getting to The Nation every week.

I bought the canterbury from a Levenger sale catalogue, if you're interested.

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In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.

There are two really terrible reviews this week, both of novels. William T Vollmann and Richard Lourie are the perpetrators. Trashing books is loutish and always indefensible; I can guess why the editors of the Book Review publish them, but I can't excuse it. While it may be thrilling to see how far a critic will go to express his disappointment and distaste, it is an uninformative pastime. The book is gored and savaged because the critic doesn't think that it's worth explaining. But surely a book that's unworthy of explanation does not merit a thousand words of comment. Mr Vollmann is particularly guilty of spraying dismissive summaries that we must take or leave on faith. I hope that he runs into the former Marine some night in a dark alley.  

Fiction

Liesl Schillinger nabs this week's cover story, giving House of Meetings, by Martin Amis, a favorable but measured review. Does gender alone explain her two-sentence coverage of Zoya, the wife a gulag prisoner and the obsessive desire of his brother? Male reviewers have been quick to hawk this detail.

Apart from one or two splashes of heat ... this is a fire at which nobody could warm himself. The narrative's true romantic lead is Amis's fact-fed fantasy of slave-camp life, which, as intricately and faithfully as he presents it - plausibly animated in all its cruelty, pain, ordure and boredom - will never been Natalia Rostova in a ball gown.

Bliss Broyard gives Him  Her  Him Again  The End of Him, by Patricia Marx, the review that I wish I'd written. It registers the same complaints but makes the book sound like a lot much more fun.

Even so, Marx's novel made me laugh so hard that I kept trying to read lines aloud to my boyfriend, who - looking up from The Magic Mountain - wasn't persuaded.

That's it exactly. I felt like Ms Broyard while reading the book and like her boyfriend while writing it up. Neil Genzlinger's review of Tim Sandlin's new novel prompted my first act of outsourcing: Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty takes place in an assisted-living community. It also takes place in 2022, which sounded like a long time from now at first but in fact is only fifteen years away. I telephoned my favorite (if only) aunt, the very happy resident of a community in New Hampshire. and asked her to read the book and tell me what she thought. She readily agreed. I hope I haven't done the wrong thing.

Maybe there really are people who have done nothing but debate whether it's "keep on trucking" or "keep on truckin'" since the first Nixon administration. If so, we need to find them and either shut them up or ship them up, to Neptune or thereabouts.

Maggie Galehouse's review of Isabel Allende's historical novel, Inés of My Soul (translated by Margaret Sayers Peden) is what I'd have to call a modified not-rave.

Too often Allende's book reads as if she is assembling a plot around places, dates and historical figures. Slow to start, the narrative acquires an events-driven tunnel vision that can get in the way of character development.

Richard Lourie gives Leslie Epstein's The Eighth Wonder of the World a nasty and unhelpful review.

"This is a cacophonous barn of a restaurant" ran the opening line of a recent review in a London magazine. I blessed the critic and read no further: he had fulfilled the function of filter admirably well, at once killing my interest in the subject of the review and in the review itself. I wish to render the reader of this review a similar time-saving favor.

This is disgraceful but not unuseful: it brazenly exposes the dreariness of reading the Book Review, a chore to be relieved, with luck, by "time-saving favors." Otherwise, the review is wrong on many levels. Even if the consumption of dinner were comparable to the reading of books, reviews of the two have little in common. Restaurant reviews are geared to protecting readers from misspending their money on the dissatisfaction of an indifferent meal. People in search of sustenance will eventually dine somewhere, but book reviews are as far as most of us get in the thick of literary life. And book reviews are literary objects themselves. Not that you would know this from what the Book Review puts out. Adding insult to injury, Mr Lourie attributes Mr Epstein's ability to write well in part to his father's contribution to the screenplay of Casablanca. The review is full of itself and empty of the book that it's supposed to discuss.

Mr Lourie is positively positive, however, in comparison to William T Vollmann, whose review of Anthony Swofford's Exit A makes it very unlikely that I will be picking up one of Mr Vollmann's arch books anytime soon. The piece is so deeply unsympathetic that I'm going to link to it here, so that you can see for yourself what I mean by "unsympathetic" and why I find unsympathetic reviews so useless. Mr Vollmann tells us that he went back and read Mr Swofford's Jarhead and found that the memoir deserved its acclaim. He must be very proud of his diligence. He makes Exit A sound like a terrible book, but he cannot quite squelch the possibility that this first novel might be a work of exploration, and that its prose, which Mr Vollmann says "befits a Harlequin romance novel," might signify a macho man's daring.

I don't mean to defend Exit A or to patch Mr Swofford up after a nasty bruising. I do mean to point out that reviews such as Mr Vollmann's make no attempt to reach readers who might get something out of reading the book that they trash. "Swofford's ability to create character is vastly inferior to his capacity to describe reality as he himself experienced it." That's easy to say, and it certainly sounds critical. But in the end it's beside the point, because Mr Vollmann ought to be describing the novel's characters, not judging their aesthetic persuasiveness. (That's our job.)  He ought to be quoting passages that will allow his readers to judge for themselves whether Mr Swofford's grasp of character is tenuous, and not pre-empting discussion with sweeping remarks. In short, the piece embodies the literary rot of the Review.

Nonfiction

Peter Stevenson's review of About Alice, Calvin Trillin's memoir of his late wife "and muse," is very hard to judge, because its subject is hard to judge.

When About Alice appeared in shorter form in The New Yorker last spring, people couldn't wait to tell their friends to read it. Trillin had written about a marriage in which neither partner seems to have done any grievous or even subtle harm to the other. It was as if he had traveled out beyond a familiar territory and brought back a moon rock, something worthy of preserving.

So, there's that, the book's enormously "special" feeling. Then there's this: 

If the marriage as described seems somewhat formal, that may be because Trillin, now 71, came of age at a time predating the supposition that a man will enter a relationship armed with the daggers and consolations of psychological insight.

This is the sort of review that looks sympathetic but that really isn't feeling much of anything, but just being brightly pious.

Caroline Elkins's review of Rachel Holmes's African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus, a new book about the South African woman who was exhibited to the English upper crust in the last years of the Regency, indulges in a fair amount of storytelling but eventually gets round to the book itself:

At pains to place Baartman's behavior and life in a framework of feminist and psychoanalytic interpretation, Holmes presents a narrative overladen with theory, however deftly disguised. This approach does more to undermine than strengthen the story.

Robert Pinsky is troubled by an aspect of Barbara Ehrenreich's Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. He claims, not without justice, that ecstatic crowds cannot be rigidly distinguished from hysterical crowds. Carnivals and cobblestone-throwing riots differ in degree, not kind, and Mr Pinsky feels that the line that Ms Ehrenreich draws between the two is artificial. In short, she does not, even as a matter of style, sufficiently honor the dark side of Dionysus.

This pop athropology lacks fizz. There's a yearning, wistful gap between Ehrenreich's celebration of inebriated dance and her term-paper prose. In that yearning, she disregards the double, ambiguous nature of Dionysus, the deity she calls "the first rock start." Possibly, her writing indicates a flinching, less than complete apprehension of that shape-shifting Lord of Misrule.

Aside from that he likes the book... Glory in a Line: The Life of Foujita - The Artist Caught Between East and West, by Phyllis Birnbaum, has been getting interesting reviews everywhere, apparently because its subject has been forgotten enough to be exotic. Watch out for the storytelling! Judgment waits at the end.

The details of Foujita's fascinating life left me wishing for more: more on his summer with Modigliani, more on his friendship with Desnos, more on his sojourn in Cuba. "His story will always be a riddle," Birnbaum writes in this brisk and stylishly written book, but she has only begun the process of solving it.

Sara Dickerman calls Danny Meyer's Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business "a memoir-cum-business-manual, and makes her preference for the former over the latter perfectly clear. .

Meyer is more persuasive and interesting, both as a storyteller and as a business adviser, when he sticks to concrete examples from his working life instead of spinning them into catchphrases that might work in a Power-Point presentation. He has built his business not on food or service alone, but on the value of a colorful story - especially the ones that his clients tell to his future clients: the wallet lost in a cab and tracked down by Tabla's manager; the personal call from Meyer before a big anniversary dinner; a superb frozen custard on a sunny day in Madison Square Park. When Meyer slips into generic business-speak, that all-important narrative gets lost.

Is there call for the Book Review to cover books by or about Fox personality Bill O'Reilly? Because I don't happen to think that there is, I have difficulty scolding Jacob Heilbrunn for his very unsympathetic review of The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O'Reilly, by Marvin Kitman, and Mr O'Reilly's Culture Warrior.

Kitman maintains that O'Reilly is a potent (and welcome) antidote to the pap served up for decades by the television industry. What Kitman really ends up revealing, however, is that O'Reilly's struggle isn't about conservative ideas. It's about parading his seething personal resentments in order to become the very thing he purports to despise: a celebrity.

Heist: Superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, His Republican Allies, and the Buying of Washington, by Peter H Stone, gets a goodish review from Norman J Ornstein, who hails the book as "concise and lively" but then regrets that its focus on Mr Abramoff eclipses "the broader context" - the system of which the lobbyist was just a big part. "It will take a major reform effort, and steely resolve, to change a town virtually awash in money."

According Richard B Woodward's review, The Girl With the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market, by Lindsay Pollock, favors the art dealer's relationships with her clients and slights relations with her artists.

I'm not sure how one writes about 20th-century art in New York without once mentioning Picasso. But Pollock has done it.

Mr Woodward goes on to wish that Ms Pollock had spent "another year or two" working on her book.

I was hard put to follow Ligaya Mishan's review of Houshold Gods: The British and Their Possessions, a book about home decoration, I think, in the nineteenth century. It reads like the remnant of a much more comprehensive piece, one, say, in which only every fifth paragraph has survived the blue pencil. 

Henry Alford's totally trivial Essay, "Books on Broadway," begins with a hypothetical lyric from Middlesexy! The Jeffrey Eugenides Musical and stays downhill from there.

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