Reviewing the Book Review
The Illusionist
24 February 2008
In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.
Two things mark this issue of the Book Review apart: more fiction than nonfiction titles are covered, and yet none of the nonfiction seems entirely worthwhile. How curious this can be measured by the fact that one of the authors is George Steiner!
As if guided by foreknowledge of the Academy Awards, Anthony Arthur's Essay, "Blood and Oil!" discusses differences between Upton Sinclair's novel and There Will Be Blood. Mr Arthur regrets that Daniel Plainview, the hero of the film, isn't "more than the destructive and ultimately unexplained villain and victim" of Paul Thomas Anderson's film.
Yes
The following titles belong on your bookshelf.
Selected Poems, 1945-2005, by Robert Creeley (edited by Benjamin Friedlander). August Kleinzahler's enthusiastic review is perhaps too short for so prominent a figure in American poetry; there is not a lot of room for quotation. The work is well-summarized, however.
In Creeley’s poetry the bleakness often finds its expression in a tortured self-regard, an almost panicked need for engaging experience, usually interior experience, by enacting it in language, syllable by syllable, line by line. One often feels while reading his work that if there is any misstep, any syllable or stress put wrong, not only the poem but its maker will either go up in flames or disappear down a black crevasse. This is the drama of Creeley’s defining work, and that drama never feels calculated or inauthentic.
Beginner's Greek, by James Collins. Happy as I am that this excellent novel has received James Kaplan warmly favorable response in the Book Review, I'm a bit squirmy about Mr Kaplan's judgment.
Part comedy of manners, part chick lit in male drag, James Collins’s “Beginner’s Greek” is a great big sunny lemon chiffon pie of a novel, set, for good measure and our sociological titillation, among the WASP ruling classes, people who work at white-shoe investment firms and own villas in southwestern France and can instantly tell the difference between fine Bordeaux and plonk.
The days when people who could distinguish Bordeaux from plonk were probably rich are long gone. Mr Kaplan atones for the "chick lit" crack as follows: "One of the great pleasures of this novel — and what sets it quite apart from chick lit — is the sheer felicity of its prose."
Nazi Literature in the Americas, by Roberto Bolaño. This "counterfactual" proposal of what sort of literature the Nazis of the Western Hemisphere would have turned out had their side won World War II doesn't seem to belong with the other fiction titles in the Book Review, even if the late Roberto Bolaño made it all up.
As if he were Borges’s wisecracking, sardonic son, Bolaño has meticulously created a tightly woven network of far-right littérateurs and purveyors of belles lettres for whom Hitler was beauty, truth and great lost hope. Cross-referenced, complete with bibliography and a biographical list of secondary figures, Nazi Literature is composed of a series of sketches, the compressed life stories of writers in North and South America who never existed, but all too easily could have. Goose-stepping caricatures à la The Producers they are not; instead, they are frighteningly subtle, poignant and plausible.
This sort of dead-earnest playfulness is a Latin American specialty — tant pis pour eux — and Bolaño writes it with past-mastery.
Okay
These titles appear to deserve coverage in the Book Review. The reviews may still be inadequate or useless.
Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories, by Steven Millhauser. D T Max fails to convey to me the reasons for his evident enthusiasm for this book, which in his hands sounds both quirky and scolding. This is not the sort of favorable review that I would hope for.
Millhauser began his unusual voyage in 1972 with the parody biography “Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954,” supposedly written by Mullhouse’s precocious contemporary Jeffrey Cartwright. All the themes Millhauser would work in later years can be found in that first book: the unstable self, the knife’s-edge difference between reality and dreams, the power of hysterical young people. The way Millhauser conveyed a suburban world where the quiet slippage of the self was a greater threat than violence hardly fit that era. His characters didn’t turn on or tune in. They lived under the indifferent Connecticut sky, moored to reality by their thoughts and their books. Since then, although the heightened visual awareness that has always been his trademark has grown even more extraordinary and its possessor has achieved some fame, little has changed for Millhauser. Not so for us: more than 30 years later, with lived life everywhere giving way to the Internet and “reality” TV, Millhauser’s chronicles of our semi-inhabited landscape seem not just brilliant but prescient.
Dark Roots, by Cate Kennedy. Although her review is too short, and the storytelling is not always comprehensible, Maud Newton manages to convey a clear-enough idea of what this collection of stories might be like.
The stories in “Dark Roots,” the Australian writer Cate Kennedy’s first collection, are melancholy but deliberate and coolly exact. They depict characters in crisis, often so mired in what Walker Percy called the malaise of everydayness that the horror of their condition is invisible to them. Some of the stories culminate in epiphanies; others hinge on a jolt — a violent act or loss. “I love the manipulation of readers’ emotions,” Kennedy has said. “It’s like pantomime: readers want to call out to a character, ‘Don’t go in there.’”
The Age of Shiva, by Manil Suri. Caryn James's favorable review would be improved by less storytelling and more background about India and Pakistan, but its judgment seems to be sound.
The Age of Shiva is more literary than Gone With the Wind, yet less graceful than The Death of Vishnu. The intersections of Meera’s life with larger events are sometimes handled clumsily, and as narrator she tends to spell out her feelings. But the novel’s strengths far outweigh these problems. Suri, who was born in Bombay and moved to the United States when he was 20, is fearless in imagining a passionate, confused and not always admirable woman. That striking creation, and his refusal to give in to any hint of the didactic or the predictable, affirms his position as a writer worth serious attention.
Bass Cathedral, by Nathanel Mackey. David Hajdu takes this book seriously, and does a good job of communicating his reasons for doing so.
Bass Cathedral and its three companion books have their own kind of poetry that is kinetic and also contemplative, elegiac and mercurial, sometimes volatile. Mackey’s prose is essentially writing about writing — that is, about language and the act of using it. As a maker of such writing, he descends from a long line traceable from Whitman and Melville to the modernists and Mackey’s idol, Baraka, to the metafictionists John Barth and William Gass. Mackey has described himself as “post-bebop,” and his musical preference is for the freewheeling, overtly artful, contrarian jazz of the late ’50s and early ’60s. His prose is its postmodern counterpart.
The Commoner, by John Burnham Schwartz. A not-very-secret roman à clef about the Empress of Japan, The Commoner gets a guardedly favorable review from Lesley Downer.
Schwartz has clearly done extensive research into the lives of the empress and the crown princess and seems, as well, to have had extraordinary access to the Imperial Household Agency, whose members are the strictly traditional guardians of Japan’s royal family and its elaborate court life. He vividly evokes the secrets and ceremonies of the imperial palace, including the wedding of Haruko and the crown prince and the ritual called the Daijosai, which takes place on the occasion of the new emperor’s coronation and is performed by him alone and unseen. It’s magical to have the curtain imaginatively lifted on these mysteries.
Maybe
It is difficult to tell whether these books are actually as indifferent or pointless as the reviews suggest.
A Father's Law, by Richard Wright. Ron Powers plainly regrets that this project, left unfinished — according to Mr Powers, very unfinished — at Wright's death in 1960, now makes its appearance in print. The moral that he draws at the end is particularly sad:
Perhaps its very flaws will prove the most instructive elements in the publication of “A Father’s Law”: evidence that even for the best writers, it is often necessary to write poorly before writing well. Especially when they think no one is looking.
I dare say that a more positive review might have revealed the defects of A Father's Law somewhat more clearly.
Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution, by Jerome Charyn. Meaning, I believe, to be complimentary, Stacy Schiff writes,
The good news is that what “Johnny One-Eye” lacks in narrative momentum it handily supplies in antics and atmosphere. Here are the founding fathers out on a lark; here is the Revolution waged at the gaming table and in the bedroom. If “Johnny One-Eye” occasionally comes across as “Johnny One-Note,” it’s a small price to pay for an uncommonly unbuttoned George Washington.
Aha, the "Laughing Christ" school of literature. "Unbuttoned George Washington," indeed!
David Mamet: A Life in the Threatre, by Ira Nadel. Jeremy McCarter's review makes one wonder what Mr Nadel was thinking, when he set out to write this book without great cooperation from his subject. "Shorn of the biggest advantage of writing about a living subject, Nadel’s book falls back on recapping the events of Mamet’s life while trying to find an artful way of mentioning all the plays and books and other things." Worse:
For all Nadel’s research, his book captures little of his subject’s unruly brilliance. He offers a useful insight, as when he ties Mamet’s impatience with emotionally manipulative acting to the way he was manipulated at home in his youth, then reverts to clumsy banality.
Or perhaps what one wonders is this: Can Palgrave Macmillan, Mr Nadel's publisher, be as indifferent to quality as Mr McCarter's review implies?
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, by David Shields. From the Department of Faint Praise: "There is plenty not to like about this book, but here is what I did like: It is almost impossible to define." It is evidently very difficult to describe, because no coherent impression emerges from Alex Beam's review. If all he did was quote this father-son imbroglio, however, I'm afraid that I'd have to put it with the Noes.
Here is how Shields defines his genre: “An autobiography of my body, a biography of my father’s body, an anatomy of our bodies together — especially my dad’s, his body, his relentless body.” The 51-year-old author doesn’t mask his mixed feelings for his 97-year-old father, whom he calls “cussedly, maddeningly alive and interesting.” “I seem to have an Oedipal urge to bury him in a shower of death data,” Shields continues. “He’s strong and he’s weak and I love him and I hate him and I want him to live forever and I want him to die tomorrow.”
In Search of the Blues, by Marybeth Hamilton. Dave Marsh is scathing about the thinking behind this book.
In Search of the Blues is at best frustrating and sometimes infuriating. It may seem to come out of left field, but it’s actually one of the clearest examples of the revival of interest in writing about folk music spurred by the “Old, Weird America” chapter in Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic. Marcus told the story of the collector Harry Smith in a book mostly concerned with music. Smith got all the attention. His Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) has now been succeeded, in various forms, by what amounts to a continuing Harry Smith Project. “In Search of the Blues” brings the process to its culmination by making the music invisible and all but irrelevant.
My Unwritten Books, by George Steiner. Judging from the half-page into which Ben Marcus's unenthusiastic review has been poured, one must conclude that Mr Steiner, one of the great modern intellectuals, has turned out a shamelessly self-indulgent prospectus manqué. The reviewer's lack of sympathy makes the writer's claim that "I have been privileged to speak and make love in four languages" smell like old fish.
Mr and Mrs Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and Into Legend, by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, with Anthony Gerzina. David Waldstreicher's review does little to counter the impression that a very small amount of original material has been overstretched to book length.
No
These books, if they deserve coverage at all, ought to grace other sections of The New York Times.
Beautiful Boy, by David Sheff; and Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines, by Nic Sheff. Polly Morrice's review begins with a caution: "Addiction is repetitious." Nothing that follows suggests that this pair of books, remarkable if only for being written by father and son, respectively, have anything new to add to what we already dismally know. Of the parental onlooker's book, Ms Morrice makes this slightly strange observation:
Crisis by crisis, the book maps Sheff’s emotions, which veer from agonized self-examination to increasingly harsh judgment of a culture that makes addiction possible.
And of the addict's:
For readers who can stick with it, “Tweak” should work as an effective anti-drug tract. Nothing here, not even the frank accounts of meth-triggered marathon sex, makes substance abuse seem remotely attractive.
These books belong elsewhere in the Times.
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