13 January 2008
In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.
Curiously, there are two books this week — a novel and a history — that are rooted in Gray's Anatomy.
Sophie Gee's Essay, "Great Adaptations," shows how Beowulf and Paradise Lost have been lately rejiggered into enormously popular filmed entertainments. Ms Gee does make a well-known point that cannot be well-known enough.
That’s how literature works: the best books always need rewriting, and the best writers know they’re rewriters.
Otherwise, the piece would not be out of place in a young person's periodical.
Yes
The following titles belong on your bookshelf.
Freedom For the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment, by Anthony Lewis. Jeffrey Rosen's review is neither unfavorable nor unsympathetic, but it is extremely patronizing. Mr Rosen appears to regard Mr Lewis as a dinosaur, adapted to a legal environment that no longer exists.
Lewis’s faith in judges also presumes that free speech controversies will take the same form in the future as they have in the past — namely, as legal battles between an overreaching government and the institutional press, with the judiciary as a neutral arbiter. But is this really likely?
If it's not, then that's all the more reason to read Freedom For The Thought That We Hate, because, as Mr Rosen himself points out, the author's understanding of First Amendment issues is rooted in his coverage of the Warren Court, which developed the doctrines that prevailed until they faced the dual challenge of conservative judges and new technologies. As such, Mr Lewis's views on the matter make an ideal point of departure.
Okay
These titles appear to deserve coverage in the Book Review. The reviews may still be inadequate or useless.
Sway, by Zachary Lazar. Charles Taylor's excellent favorable review hews so empathically to the novel's dark vision of the Sixties that, for once, storytelling actually conveys the quality of Mr Lazar's fiction.
In contrast to the love-and-peace ethos the decade is remembered for, every early Stones gig here ends with a fight. Crowds seem to pack Midlands blues clubs for the sheer pleasure of trying to beat up the band. In “Sway” the freedom that is often vaunted as the cri de coeur of the ’60s is entirely stripped of its communal ideal. It is, instead, a way for people who have always felt themselves on the outside not to feel they have to fit in.
Remembering the Bones, by Frances Itani. Susann Cokal places this novel, for which Gray's Anatomy is the touchstone, in some very good company indeed.
With this book, Itani joins a group of novelists who have chronicled quiet lives from start to finish, uncovering treasure in their dark corners: Carol Shields with “The Stone Diaries,” Marilynne Robinson with “Gilead.” As in these earlier novels, great events of history are less important, and less revelatory, than moments of private pain. Some of Georgie’s own major events, like the sudden death of an infant son, are barely described; they seem too heartbreaking to recall fully, even though traces of them keep resurfacing. In contrast, some apparently small moments assume lyrical dimensions and significance, and here is where Itani’s true gift lies.
Homecoming, by Bernhard Schlink; and Night Train to Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier. The subheader of Liesl Schillinger's mixed review — she likes the Schlink; the Mercier, not so much — reads "Two German novels wrestle with the repercussions of a previous generation's tyrannical regime." That's a veritable formula for swamping literature with political history.
Two German novels recently translated into English — one sensitive and disturbing, by Bernhard Schlink, author of the understatedly eloquent novel “The Reader”; the other fantastical, long-winded and dull, by the Swiss-born philosopher Peter Bieri (who writes his novels under the pen name Pascal Mercier) — wrap these questions in the cloak of fiction.
If these novels are indeed the philosophical reflections cloaked in fiction that Ms Schillinger suggests that they are, then her storytelling is superfluous.
The Senator's Wife, by Sue Miller. Judith Warner's review is a classic example of the sympathetic unfavorable review. Not that Ms Warner is actually sympathetic: she doesn't like Sue Miller's novels, period. But she understands that they have their fans, and she has an idea of what it is that their fans are looking for, at least to the extent of being able to tell them that they'll like this book while warning the rest of us to stay away.
I won’t reveal how the final betrayal occurs, but will just say that in this particular moment Miller plays her hand in a masterly fashion. Shock, deceit, desire and despair come together at once in a way that feels simply like fate. In that remarkable bit of novelistic choreography, I saw in Miller what her fans have always seen: a clever storyteller with a penchant for the unexpected and a talent for depicting the bizarre borderline acts, the unfortunate boundary crossings and the regrettable instances of excessive self-indulgence that can destroy a world in a blink.
Excellent!
Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination, by Lynda Roscoe Hartigan. Leah Hager Cohen judiciously suggests that readers who persevere with the scholarly text of this lavishly-illustrated book will not be wasting their time.
This book stands out, too, for being utterly unfey, devoid of the poetic eruptions Cornell induces. This is not to say Hartigan’s prose is a breath of fresh air, exactly. Her text seems intended not for the Cornell fancier but for the Cornell scholar, and it reads at times like a sendup of driest academia. (“With a multidisciplinary compendium dominated by science, this construction clearly complements the art-driven yet similarly multivalent contents of the book object in progress since 1933.”) Some readers will tire quickly of such stuff and flip ahead to the art.
But those who linger may be rewarded, for it turns out Hartigan has done something lovely. She, too, has modeled a response to Cornell’s work on his own methods, assembling and inventorying a pastiche of the ideas, innovations, people, philosophies and experiences that most likely influenced the artist. She doesn’t navigate his imagination so much as map the explicit tributaries that fed it. And is her map ever detailed.
They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, by Jacob Heilbrunn. Timothy Noah's dutiful review is a little longer than the standard. Storytelling takes up most of the piece. What we have is an uneasy resolution of Mr Noah's lack of sympathy for this book and the editors' desire to help out one of their regular contributors.
His front-row seat gives him an easy familiarity with his subject, but in this case that seems less help than hindrance, because the author’s disillusioned perspective feels a tad insular, and occasionally shades into snideness...
Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger. Matthew Yglesias is more interested in placing the authors of this book in the context of current environmentalist debates than he is in reviewing their book. At the end, however, he does buckle down and deliver.
Break Through is more convincing in its case for a change in rhetoric. Conventional environmentalist policy is perfectly compatible with an optimistic vision of a landscape dotted with windmills and solar panels, of high-speed trains and energy-efficient office towers. But to win, Nordhaus and Shellenberger persuasively argue, environmentalists must stop congratulating themselves for their own willingness to confront inconvenient truths and must focus on building a politics of shared hope rather than relying on a politics of fear.
Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile's Hunger for Home, by Eduardo Machado and Michael Domitrovich. Reviewer Gary Kamiya wraps up his storytelling account of this memoir by holding it up to a phantom standard.
Tastes Like Cuba doesn’t dig quite deep enough to succeed entirely. It’s a little too self-indulgent and informally written to offer a really nuanced self-portrait, and some of its life lessons feel pat. But despite this, Machado emerges as an odd and endearing character, one whose emotional vulnerability masks toughness and humor. His memoir is less filling than it could have been, but it tastes good.
Not very helpful.
Maybe
It is difficult to tell whether these books are actually as indifferent or pointless as the reviews suggest.
Darkmans, by Nicola Barker. Sylvia Brownrigg calls this novel "dzzling, complex," but her review is devoid of inklings thereof. That it might be "pretentious, boring" is suggested by the following:
If Barker didn’t care so deeply about her characters, one might feel overwhelmed by their number, and by the wealth of information they share with one another. She has a Pynchonesque range of intellectual interests: a typical swath of “Darkmans” includes a brief discourse on the etymology of the word “mogul,” a conversation about the contrasting virtues of a Mercedes C220 and a Russian Lada customized in Jamaica, a discourse on the primitive Celts’ reverence for geese, and various discussions of medieval arts and systems of belief.
Gods Behaving Badly, by Marie Phillips. Alexandra Jacobs's favorable review is larded with witty storytelling, but it never presents this novel about the Greek Gods making do in contemporary London as more than clever entertainment.
As it traces Neil and Alice’s sweet and predictable little love plot, Phillips’s novel sometimes threatens to descend as well, into something like bathos. But for the most part her nonchalant transposition of the ancients into post-postmodern life is seamless, amusing and blessedly unpretentious. It may not be ambrosia, but it’s some pretty good trail mix.
The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray's Anatomy, by Bill Hayes. D T Max's review may be (rather ghoulishly) sympathetic —
It’s this gentle, inquiring approach that finally binds Hayes’s somewhat disjointed Anatomy together. I wanted to hear a bit about, say, the “resurrection men” whose job it was to supply doctors up until Gray’s era with fresh corpses often stolen from graveyards. But that is not Hayes’s style. When we turn green, he is there to remind us to calm down. Traditionally, anatomy professors have left their mortal remains to the lab. One suspects that when his time comes, Hayes will join their ranks and this engaging book will not be his only tribute to the profession.
— but it never manages to clear this book of "curiosity" status.
Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up, by John Allen Paulos. Jim Holt can barely conceal his impatience with Mr Paulos, who, in his view, fails to explore the foundations of his argument.
Clearly, Paulos is innocent of theology, which he dismisses as a “verbal magic show.” Like other neo-atheist authors, his tone tends to the sophomoric, with references to flatulent dogs and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Ann Coulter crops up in the index, but one looks in vain for the name of a great religious thinker like Karl Barth, who saw theology as an effort to understand what faith has given, not a quest for logical proof.
If this book merits coverage in the Book Review, Mr Holt is the wrong reviewer.
Entering Hades: The Double Life of a Serial Killer, by John Leake. Robert Macfarlane seems to be very taken with this grisly book about a deadly charmer who so wowed the Austrian chattering classes (including Elfriede Jelinek, who perhaps thought it would be amusing to unleash a psychopath on her countrymen) that he Got Out Of Jail Free and was thus able to murder a few more prostitutes. Why are we reading about this in the Book Review? It's the sort of story for which Vanity Fair exists to provide a cordon sanitaire. (VF have better visuals, too.)
John Leake has written the definitive book — dispassionate, superbly detailed — on Jack Unterweger. Of its subject, no more now needs saying, beyond the words with which Leake ends his story, citing the wife of the Vienna detective who spent years unraveling the case: “Thank God, he’s dead.”
Whenever someone is said to have had the "last word" about a subject, I come to believe that the subject can't have been very worthwhile.
Copernicus' Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began, by Jack Repcheck. Owen Gingerich writes that this book "brings the astronomer to life in a way that past efforts have not quite achieved." Unfortunately for Mr Repcheck (if fortunately for us), he goes on to say that, while the story of Copernicus and the Protestants to which the author devotes his attention is vivid, it is perhaps slightly beside the point.
These are not, however, the central questions of the intellectual history of the astronomical revolution. Instead, we want to know where, when and why Copernicus’s insight into a heliocentric cosmology took place. Was he significantly influenced by Islamic astronomy? How important were direct observations in formulating the new picture? Was Copernicus simply building a model, or did he believe in the physical reality of the heliocentric arrangement? Did he hesitate at all over the possible theological reaction to his removing the Earth from the center of the cosmos? Repcheck has little to say about these questions or about more technical astronomical issues. He never makes it clear whether Copernicus’s “secret” is his mistress or his book. Still, no other biography of which I am aware treats the life of this scientific giant more vividly than this one.
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