In which we have a look at this week's
New York Times Book Review.
This was a tough week. Only one novel made it into Yes, and I've doubts that
it deserved the placement. I used the word "crap" for the first time, because,
Jesus, Erica Wagner really deserves it. With the worldwide democratic electorate
proving itself incompetent on every side, it's no help to read her stupidly
self-indulgent reviews of barely passable books. I would have put Hunk City
among the Maybes (at best), but I needed some good fiction. I have no
idea where the editors found this week's titles. Under a bridge somewhere, I
expect.
Yes
The
following titles appear to deserve coverage in the Book Review. The
reviews may still be inadequate or useless.
Hunk City, by James Wilcox. Mark Sarvas, author of the blog The
Elegant Variation, gives this novel a good review that I can't quite
understand, but I catch its enthusiasm. There's a lot of storytelling, and I
can't tell whether the book is a romp or a memorable novel. Mr Sarvas inclines
me to give it the benefit of the doubt.
As in his prior novels, Wilcox's narrative, which skitters like a
stone thrown expertly across a country pond, delivers a high quotient of
whimsy...
Easter Everywhere: A Memoir, by Darcey Steinke.
I didsn't much care for Stephen Metcalf's exhaling review. I was also unhappy
with the photograph of the author, who bears an elaborate, flaming tatoo on her
right shoulder (I am against tatoos, largely because, yes, indeedy, they're
"cute"). But the review makes it clear that, as a book about the possibility
that adult unhappiness may be attributable more to the lack of reasonable
authorities in life than to childhood dysfunction, Easter Everywhere may
be a pivotal memoir. And yet I did find dysfunction in Ms Steinke's story, even
if she's not exploiting it. The daughter of a lukewarm Lutheran minister more
interested in the poor (and jazz) than in "theodicy," and "a former
provincial beauty queen who attached too early to the local minister's son," Ms
Steinke is clearly the product of a mésalliance. I wish her luck with the
tatoo.
Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, by Atul Gawande.
Paulene Chen (herself also a physician), is enthusiastic about this book, which
might have been given more space. "Gawande, a surgeon, manages to capture
medecine in all of its complex and chaotic glory, and to put it, still squirming
with life, down on the page."
Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women,
and the World, by Liza Mundy. Polly Morrice has her reservations about this
report on the latest in fertility enhancement, but she is clear that the field
needs Federal regulation.
[Mundy] suggests that the government should limit how many
embryos can be transferred - indeed, that it should finally start regulating
the free-for-all fertility industry, which is now so unfettered that
companies producing the sugar-and-protein soup that nurtures human embryos
aren't required to divulge its ingredients. State oversight would also
promote controlled studies of what reproductive science has wrought, perhaps
resolving the question of whether in vitro babies are different in unwelcome
ways from infants created naturally. Such issues certainly deserve our
attention, whether or not they are really the results of a revolution.
Indeed.
The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, by William Dalrymple. Tobin
Harshaw indulges in a great deal of storytelling in his negligently favorable
review of this book about the last non-British ruler of India before 1947. He
does manage to engage with the book for an instant.
Dalrymple excels at bringing grand historical events within
contemporary understanding by documenting the way people went about their
lives amidst the maelstrom [of the Mutiny]. His coup in researching The
Last Mughal was his uncovering, deep in the National Archives of India,
some 20,000 personal personal Persian and Urdu papers written by Delhi
residents who survived the uprising.
The High Road to China: George Bogle, the Panchen Lama, and the First
British Expedition to Tibet, by Kate Teltscher. This book, about
Warren Hasting's attempt to open up the China market via a Tibetan back door,
gets a favorable review from Tristram Stuart. He shows how the author's thinking
has evolved since a 1995 book about India that was heavily influenced by the
anticolonialism of Edward Said. "Even while working for an unjust colonial
machine, many individuals fostered similarly paradoxical relationships that
became the channels for mutual cultural exchange." Fat lot of good it did,
though: China would be "opened" not by diplomacy but by the Opium Wars.
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, by
Bill McKibben. Lance Morrow writes a favorable review of this book even while he
contests its efficacy. Sure, we can all pitch in on the environmental effot. But
To attempt to alter the world by increments of local
improvisation and conservation is to fight against a mighty tide. The world
is flat, all right. It is also a toxic mess. Minds are usually changed on a
mass scale only by some dramatic event - Pearl Harbor, say: Americans,
isolations before Dec 7, 1941, pitched wholeheartedly into the war
thereafter.... Right now, with the tsunami, Katrina, global melting, the
world is cruising along - somewhere around Munich and Czechoslovakia.
Maybe
It is
difficult to tell whether these books are actually as indifferent or pointless as the
reviews suggest.
Way More West: New and Selected Poems, by Edward Dorn. Ordinarily,
poets get a Yes pass from me. But poet August Kleinzahler's review seems
inverted.
But that's Dorn. Throughout his career, he was the least
endearing, domesticated or predictable of poets, always determined to go his
own way, no matter what anyone thought. And if he hadn't been that way,
American poetry would be a lot less vital and interesting.
That's the sort of thing we're always being told about difficult writers, but
Mr Kleinzahler ought to have set out to prove his thesis, instead of ending an
inconclusive review with it.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid. I can't make head nor
tail of Karen Olsson's review. It is almost entirely storytelling - summarizing
the plot of the novel - and wholly lacking in judgment.
The novel begins a few years after 9/11. Changez happens upon the
American in Lahore, invites him to tea and tell him the story of his life
after the attacks. That monologue is the substance of Hamid's elegant and
chilling little novel.
This paragraph, which I have quoted entire, ought to be engraved in the
Enchiridion of Book Reviews: How Not To.
Black & White, by Dani Shapiro. Erica Wagner ought to stick to
writing novels. She makes a complete hash of reviewing Black & White, largely
because she's so taken with her own literary-arity. This is how she begins:
To whom does a novel belong? There is is - an object of a certain
size, shape and weight, its title, its author's name on the cover. So there
can be, you would think, little doubt. Black & White, this one says,
"a novel by Dani Shapiro." So this novel belongs to, is made by, Dani
Shapiro. So far, so good [sic!!!!!]. But when I read Shapiro's words,
she is not with me. I have only her words, black marks on white pages,
thought in this novel her title should be taken to refer, of course, to the
photographic images that have made its protagonist a celebrity, albeit an
unwilling one. But art exists just as much in the mind of its creator.....
Good heavens, woman, whither thou goest? There may be a venue for this sort
of self-celebratory crap, but the Book Review is not it.
The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall. This novel has been the object of
much recent buzz - so much so, in fact, that I now find myself in the middle of
reading it. Misgivings sprouting like mushrooms, I read Tom Shone's review with
inordinate interest. It is very negative.
How all of this will read in 20 years, or even two, is hard to
say, although one suspects that what seemed so vertiginously modern will
ultimately seem like so much cyber-age psychedelia - as depthless and woozy
as paisley-patterned shirts. Hollywood, needless to say, has taken the
bait... But I would advise producers to tread cautiously: we could be in for
a replay of The Beach, by Alex Garland. Novels so in hock to the
movies have a habit of evaporating by the time they get to the screen.
Unfortunately, none of this disposes of Mr Hall's novel.
Coal Black Horse, by Robert Olmstead. Roy Hoffman's column-length
review of what is clearly a complex Civil War novel fails to do justice not so
much to the book as to the job of reviewing. Mr Hoffman is ultimately
dissatisfied with the book, but I'm pretty dissatisfied with his review.
A callow youth, a mystical horse, a Civil War landscape - Robert
Olmstead uses these familiar elements to fashion Coal Black Horse, an
exciting if periodically overwrought coming-of-age novel. They are all
brought together at Gettysburg...
The review goes
downhill from there.
Boomsday, by Christopher Buckley. Jane and Michael Stern, of all
people, have "harrumph!" to say about this book, in which ageing
boomers are offered "incentives" to "transition" (ie commit suicide in
order to spare the health system the expense of caring for them.).
As in so many of the feature length films based on SNL
skits, the caricature that is comical in small doses gets stale fast.
Perhaps you find it amusing that the billionaire's motor boat appears on the
cover of a publication called Vulgar Yacht Quarterly and his sailboat is
named Expensive, but page after page of such cloddish comedy can be
wearying. Then again, maybe we missed the obscure irony in lines like "When
the going gets tough, the touch get blogging," or "In cyberspace, everyone
can hear you scream."
Jane and Michael Stern, our most
literate vernacularists, are improbable reviewers of Mr Buckley's mandarin
humor.
The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman, Edited by Stephen
Pascal. A celebrity book: everyone you've ever heard of went to Leo Lerman's
parties. Is that a reason to read his journals? Certainly not. Liesl
Schillinger, alas, doesn't come up with anything better. Her review is dissociative at
points.
For more than a decade, Pascal deciphered and edited his former
mentor's journals with Foy's help and privy knowledge, and hunted down
hundreds of Lerman's letters. In The Grand Surprise, Pascal
resurrects and imposes order on a dazzling life in the scene-stealing
language of the man who lived it. "How different writing is from thinking,
even from planning what one is to write," Lerman wrote in a morose journal
entry in 1978, after spending the day with Lincoln Kirstein and his wife and
sister in Connecticut. He went on blackly to complain: "I balloon with
words. I grow lardy with words. I am fat - hideously fat - with words."
Pascal has reshaped Lerman's reminiscences into a heroic physique, and given
his subject the posthumous consolation (would that he could have known it)
that a hope he confided to himself late in life, in a notebook he did not
know would be found, was true: "I did do something extra. I lived. I will
live."
If we're supposed to applaud Mr Pascal's transformation of his subject into
Auntie Mame, then please say so.
The Lady Upstairs: Dorothy Schiff and The New York Post, by Marilyn
Nissenson. This ought to have been a Yes, but Jennifer Senior's review is
persistently negative. She applauds the author for thorough research but faults
her for a reluctance to pause and synthesize. In short: a dizzy and dizzying
book. There is naturally a great deal of storytelling in this review of a
biography of Katharine Graham's feistier sister.
Ant Farm: And Other Desperate Situations, by Simon Rich. Henry
Alford's review makes Simon Rich, the son of Times pundit
Frank Rich (whom I admire no end), sound a bit on the idle side, for all his
endearing good humor.
The microscaled, high-concept humor piece seems to be in vogue
with all the cool kids... You'd think that a current Harvard senior and
former president of The Harvard Lampoon might serve up a
hipper-than-thou shivaree of pop culture or highbrow allusions. But aside
from the occasional nod to the Bible or a movie... Some of them could have
been written 50 years ago.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim
Nicholas Taleb. Gregg Easterbrook's review is a textbook example of the
narcissism of small differences. Mr Easterbrook clearly shares Mr Taleb's
interest in the frailty of predictions (the books title refers to the kinds of
unexpected developments that we don't foresee.) Having said that The Black
Swan "has appealing cheek and admirable ambition," Mr Easterbrook proceeds
to pick at it in a niggling sort of way, so that in the end you wonder what Mr
Taleb's publishers were thinking. It would have served everyone better to
suggest why Random House - Mr Taleb's publisher - must have decided that it had
a good title on its hands.
No
These books, if they deserve coverage at all, ought to grace
other sections of The New York Times.
Mergers & Acquisitions, by Dana Vachon. I find that I want to know
more at the same time that I want to know nothing about this book, which appears
to be an enormous moon of nostalgia for a decade that the author spent in his
crib. D T Max is almost savage.
Quinn and his father shop at Brooks Brothers and he and his
friends eat at Smith & Wollensky and Le Bilboquet. They do cocaine in
bathrooms as if the world stopped in 1983. They talk on Motorola Razrs when
the guys selling fake watches on Fifth have them. Socially the '00s may be
the '80s all over again, but even so, no book purporting to bring us
cultural news should be set in an M&A division in 2007.
The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, by Richard Preston.
This is a book about people who love and must conduct their lives atop Sequoia Sempervirens. It is a niche
book if ever there was one. Kate Zernike gallantly tries to give it some general
relevance, but when she writes,
Oddly, in a book of vivid characters, Sillett, the protagonist, is
the least vivid
the game is up.
Positively American: Winning Back the Middle Class Majority One Family at
a Time, by Chuck Schumer, with Daniel Squadron;
...And I Haven't Had a
Bad Day Since: From the Streets of Harlem to the Halls of Congress, by
Charles B Rangel with Leon Wynter. These two Chuck-lheads are important figures
in my part of the world, and, on the whole, I admire their political
achievement. Why on earth I or anyone else would want to read their personal
testaments, however, is beyond me. Eric Alterman praises Mr Rangel's prose and
damns Mr Schumer's, but aside from stylistic differences the books don't seem
that different. These men are actors, not thinkers; it's for others to judge and
analyse their actions.
