Reviewing the Book Review

Of Crime and the River

17 February 2008

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

To compare Francine Prose's review of A Person of Interest with her explications de texte in Reading Like a Writer is to see how dismally short of its objective the Book Review falls. It would almost seem that the editors require dreadful clots of storytelling.

This week's installment of literary gossip, Rachel Donadio's Essay, "The Paranoiac and The Paris Review," is about Doc Humes, a literary "character" and enthusiastic conspiracy theorist who was once part of the Paris Review crowd. The three people left on earth who might be shocked to learn that the CIA bankrolled writers and publishers will be agog. The rest of us may conclude that the Agency was hardly better organized than Humes himself.

Yes

The following titles belong on your bookshelf.

A Person of Interest, by Susan Choi. This book garners a rare Yes rating thanks to its reviewer, Francine Prose, whose favorable endorsement is not only clear and convincing but bonded, as it were, by the extraordinary grasp of fiction writing that Ms Prose exhibits in Reading Like a Writer.

And yet the story’s resolution also makes us realize that the plot was never what kept us reading this novel so intently. The question of who did it is ultimately less compelling than the character who clearly didn’t. We read “A Person of Interest” for one of the best reasons to read any fiction: to transcend the limitations of our own lives, to find out what it’s like to be someone else, to recognize unmistakable aspects of ourselves staring back at us from the portrait of a stranger.

Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, by Mark Harris. According to Jim Shepard's review, this is a well-written, solidly-researched exposition of the making of the five nominees for Best Picture in 1968. As such, it lays out one of the country's cardinal institutions at a turning point not only in the film industry but in American culture as well.

Though Harris offers plenty of support for the standard take on the period, he also complicates the picture by showing how many forward thinkers were already in place and greenlighting movies like Arthur Penn’s “Mickey One.” He’s shrewd as well on the manner in which structural changes in the business were paving the way for transformation: how, for example, “from the beginning of the 1950s to the end, even as the overall number of Hollywood films declined sharply, so-called independent production at the majors quadrupled.”

Okay

These titles appear to deserve coverage in the Book Review. The reviews may still be inadequate or useless.

The Principles of Uncertainty, by Maira Kalman. Ariel Levy writes that, with this book, "based on her illustrated blog for The New York Times, Kalman has explicitly concocted what her critics have always accused her of secretly wanting to create: a children's book for adults." An accompanying illustration will refresh the reader's recollection (if needed) of Ms Kalman's faux-naif style.

Modern Life, by Matthea Harvey. Not a proper book review but given a whole page, David Orr's review promises a remarkable book.

But what makes “Modern Life” more than just another neatly accomplished collection from a neatly accomplished poet are two long, strange, nervous sequences: “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future.” These are among the most arresting poems yet written about the current American political atmosphere, and they’re all the more surprising coming from a writer whose sensibility seems so resistant to our usual ideas about “political poetry.” But then, our usual ideas are often not our best ones

The Reserve, by Russell Banks. Luc Sante's review is anything but enthusiastic; Mr Sante all but dismisses the novel as a glamorous sellout.

But then even the Hemingway component has a way of suggesting the prose of the J. Peterman catalogs: “The pilot was a large man, in his early 40s, tall and broad, with big, square hands, and moved with the grace of a man who liked the feel and appearance of his own body, although he did not seem to be vain.” All of this is surprising coming from Banks, author of “Affliction” and “The Sweet Hereafter” and “Cloudsplitter,” an author whose work tends to be unsparing and even harsh in its lyrical honesty. In “The Reserve” he has penned a ripping yarn, which seems equally suited to Hollywood, the book clubs and the talk shows. Given his past work, it is hard to begrudge him a bountiful payday.

It's regrettable that Mr Sante, a writer of great discernment, was apparently unable to dodge this assignment.

Detective Story, by Imre Kertesz (translated by Tim Wilkinson). Nathaniel Rich does not care for the way this book is written (even in translation), but his conclusion acknowledges genuine merit. \

When put alongside the book’s larger concerns, such complaints may appear trivial. Yet that’s exactly why all of Kertesz’s venturing and shrugging distracts so painfully from the difficult, haunting truth of what he has to say.

The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird, by Bruce Barcott. Elizabeth Royte's review is mostly storytelling, but she does award the book some genuine critical praise.

Barcott deftly unsnarls his story’s many strands and keeps them taut. He explains complicated deals clearly, dramatizes legal proceedings and leads readers on delightful (to this reviewer, at least) excursions into how one makes, stores and moves energy from water; the environmental downside of dams; and how and why animals go extinct. With a deep understanding of so many environmental issues and their larger context, Barcott presents evidence and then states strongly — but never shrilly — what other writers might hedge on. Mammoth concrete dams “kill rivers.” Programs to mitigate a dam’s biological damage “usually disappear once the dam goes up.” Habitat destruction in remote areas, like Belize’s Macal River valley, “happens because too many people are willing to serve up half-truths, erase fault lines and rig studies in order to get paid. It happens because too few people have the courage or capacity to stand against powerful institutions on behalf of powerless creatures like red seed-eating birds.”

An Uncertain Inheritance: Writers on Caring for Family, edited by Nell Casey. Joyce Johnson argues that the topic of caring for ailing elders in a world of nuclear families is one that we as a nation had better confront more frankly and realistically. Her one complaint is perhaps structurally inevitable:

Nell Casey, the editor of “An Uncertain Inheritance,” also includes essays by Andrew Solomon, Amanda Fortini and Julia Glass that deal with the psychic difficulties of becoming the one who needs the care — “the helplessness of surrendering to another, the paradox of both wanting attention and not.” Despite the remarkably wide spectrum of experiences covered in this book, however, there is no one who speaks for those who have no one to depend on when they most need help and have to endure it all on their own — a situation increasing numbers of unmarried and childless people are apt to find themselves in these days. That is an even more neglected subject than caregiving, and it deserves to be explored.

Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, by Samantha Power. What is Francis Fukuyama doing reviewing this book? That he devotes so much of the allotted space to trashing the UN is no surprise, but his having been assigned the book at all is nakedly tendentious. Even so, the review does not bury the book.

In the end, the book does not make a persuasive case that the United Nations will ever be able to evolve into an organization that can deploy adequate amounts of hard power or take sides in contentious political disputes. Its weaknesses as a bureaucracy and its political constraints make it very unlikely that the United States and other powerful countries will ever delegate to it direct control over their soldiers or trust it with large sums of money. But surely the life and death of Sergio Vieira de Mello is a good place to begin a serious debate about the proper way to manage world order in the future.

The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, by Ned Sublette. Jason Berry's review is almost uninterrupted storytelling, but he does pause long enough to call the book "an absorbing study of the transition from colony to American city" and to praise its "ringing coda."

Maybe

It is difficult to tell whether these books are actually as indifferent or pointless as the reviews suggest.

The Seven Days of Peter Crumb, by Jonny Glynn. This book about a remorseless serial killer would seem to be a No, but reviewer Danielle Trussoni's review suggests unexpected artistry.

The result is an elegant contrapuntal stream of consciousness so brutally spiky and internal that the reader (like Crumb's victims) wants to plead for reprieve.

Shame on Ms Trussoni if her use of "elegant" and "contrapuntal" are not really merited.

Winter in Madrid, by C J Sansom. Noting that this book is a best seller in Britain, Alan Riding praises its clever structure but regrets the lack of "rich language." The review's wallpaper of storytelling makes it impossible to judge the merits of this complaint.

These books, if they deserve coverage at all, ought to grace other sections of The New York Times.

The Spare Wife, by Alex Witchel. Elinor Lipman's review only notionally pretends that this book is not a fairly interesting escapist beach read, with a mean heart withal.

There’s no question that Witchel is satirizing rather than celebrating the values and raw ambition of “the viperous crew that composed social New York,” but her efforts are often undercut by observations that seem both generic and familiar.

Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography, by Andrew Morton. What this book is doing in these pages is beyond me.

Nor is Cruise impotent, Morton suggests, describing two miscarriages suffered by Nicole Kidman. Per his M.O., Morton repeats and then denies the rumor that Cruise’s daughter Suri was in fact fathered by L. Ron Hubbard’s frozen sperm. He then cruelly suggests that Katie Holmes still might have wondered if she were carrying the Devil’s spawn, à la “Rosemary’s Baby.” At such moments, “Tom Cruise” feels about as reliable as the tabloids and yet, astonishingly, somehow meaner.

The book seems bad enough, but the review itself is a lapse of taste and intelligence.

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