Daily Blague

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.