Reviewing the Book Review
The End of Jihad
2 March 2008
In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.
Not one but two of this week's Yeses bears the unforgivable How X Transformed Y formula in their subtitles. I suppose that we should be grateful that James Campbell does not argue that Stephen King Transformed Literature.
Colson Whitehead's Essay, "I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It.", comes down to earth not in the City of Churches but on Writer's Block, where scrivener's spend a great time alone in rooms that could be anywhere. That they aren't — that so many writers' rooms are in Brooklyn — appears to be a fact that Mr Whitehead, perhaps with a view to finding a larger apartment, tends to downplay.
Yes
The following titles belong on your bookshelf.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, by David W Anthony. Among the most important shifts in modern historiography is the move away from credulous faith in myths of racial migration to more concrete tracings of cultural portability. Just as English is the language of success today (even if it is imperfectly understood almost everywhere), so Proto-Indo-European was five or six thousand years ago. Christine Kenneally's favorable review of Mr Anthony's account is compelling.
Where Proto-Indo-European came from and who originally spoke it has been a mystery ever since Sir William Jones, a British judge and scholar in India, posited its existence in the late 18th century. As a result, Anthony writes, the question of its origins was “politicized almost from the beginning.” Numerous groups, ranging from the Nazis to adherents of the “goddess movement” (who saw the Indo-Europeans as bellicose invaders who upended a feminine utopia), have made self-interested claims about the Indo-European past. Anthony, an archaeologist at Hartwick College who has extensive field experience, makes the persuasive case that it originated in the steppes of what is now southern Ukraine and Russia, a landscape consisting mainly of endless grasslands and “huge, dramatic” sky. Anthony is not the first scholar to make the case that Proto-Indo-European came from this region, but given the immense array of evidence he presents, he may be the last one who has to.
The Bush Tragedy, by Jacob Weisberg. I was tempted to put this book among the Noes, because who needs another &c. But the closer I looked at Alan Brinkley's review, the better I understood that his objection to the book's title amounts to important praise. The biggest mistake that voters can make this year is assuming that, however disastrous for the nation, the Bush Administrations have been unhappy for the incumbent.
Is the story of George W. Bush in fact a tragedy? Many Americans, of course, believe that his presidency has been a tragedy for the nation and for the world. But Weisberg provides few reasons to think it has been a tragedy for Bush himself. He portrays Bush as a willfully careless figure, only glancingly interested in his legacy or even his popularity. “To challenge a thoughtful, moderate and pragmatic father,” Weisberg argues, “he trained himself to be hasty, extreme and unbending. He learned to overcome all forms of doubt through the exercise of will.” Tragedy, in the Shakespearean form that Weisberg seems to cite (although there is nothing tragic about Henry V either), requires self-awareness and at least some level of greatness squandered. The Bush whom Weisberg skillfully and largely convincingly portrays is a man who has rarely reflected, who has almost never looked back, and who has constructed a self-image of strength, courage and boldness that has little basis in the reality of his life. He is driven less by bold vision than by a desire to get elected (and settle scores), less by real strength than by unfocused ambition, and less by courage than by an almost passive acquiescence in disastrous plans that the people he empowered pursued in his name.
Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World, by Peter Chapman. Daniel Kurtz-Phelan's enthusiasm for this book is not unqualified —
In its final pages, Chapman’s witty, energetic narrative veers off into polemic, straining to flaunt some direct contemporary relevance. Today’s supporters of multinational corporations, Chapman declares, “would have us all as banana republics.” But his heart is more in the storytelling than in the lecturing, and he never does much with these sweeping proclamations.
— but the importance of Mr Chapman's subject emerges indisputably from his review.
Okay
These titles appear to deserve coverage in the Book Review. The reviews may still be inadequate or useless.
Song Yet Sung, by James McBride. Madison Smartt Bell's enthusiastic review contains a surfeit of storytelling, but it winds up with a comparison that's the opposite of odious:
Edward P. Jones, who may be the first black American to have written about slavery without rancor, has said that his measured portrayal of the slave masters of Virginia in “The Known World” was like writing about Hitler from Hitler’s mother’s point of view. In “Song Yet Sung,” McBride has captured a version of Jones’s dispassionate tone, which can deliver the cauterizing power of anger without the corrosive effects of bitterness. That’s a radically new way of telling this old story, and it just might turn out to be balm for a wound that has so far stubbornly refused to heal.
Gardens of Water, by Alan Drew. Jason Goodwin concludes his storytelling review with a clear judgment.
Drew is an American who spent three years as a teacher in Istanbul, where he witnessed the earthquake he describes so well. Making deft use of this background, he has constructed a novel in which disastrous aftershocks rumble all the way through to a tragic denouement. Sensitive and thought-provoking, “Gardens of Water” is set in a perfectly realized Istanbul, a city where traditionalism and modernity grind together like the fragments of a collapsing building.
Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East, by Robin Wright. Patrick Cockburn feels that Ms Wright's evidence undercuts her optimistic analysis of the Middle East, but he admires the book overall.
Wright has long been one of the best-informed American journalists covering the Middle East, and her reputation is borne out here. She is refreshingly skeptical of conventional wisdom about what is happening in the region, and her book will be essential reading for anybody who wants to know where it is heading.
She is particularly good on the moribund nature of the regimes that now hold power and know they are too unpopular to allow any open expression of popular will (though some innovations, like satellite television and the Internet, have prized open their control of information). Both the Algerian election in 1992 and the Palestinian poll in 2006 showed that the West will not accept an election won by its enemies. But since the invasion of Iraq it is difficult to imagine a fair poll having any other result.
Reagan's Disciple: George W Bush's Troubled Quest for a Presidential Legacy, by Lou Cannon and Carl M Cannon. Jacob Heilbrunn appears to share the authors' sympathies for Reagan and against the President.
As president, Bush reverentially invoked Reagan’s name on behalf of the war on terror and became, the Cannons write, “a de facto neocon.” Where Reagan had wisely kept his own counsel, “Bush had surrounded himself with dreamers telling him what they hoped would happen.”
The Cannons have little that is really fresh to add about Iraq. Nevertheless, as Bush’s presidency lurches to its desultory conclusion, even familiar stories offer potent reminders of why the Iraq venture went wrong. Paul Wolfowitz, for example, makes a cameo appearance here, once more to inform Congress that when Gen. Eric Shinseki estimated several hundred thousand occupation troops would be needed after the invasion, he was “wildly off the mark.”
The Good Rat: A True Story, by Jimmy Breslin. Notwithstanding a certain padded quality, this book delights Marc Weingarten.
Breslin chronicles the cops’ sordid tales with a mixture of awe, repugnance and perfect diabolical detail. He remains a master of transforming crookery into opera.
Mr Weingarten then does a bit of storytelling about the "murder and burial of a jeweler named Israel Greenwald in a Brooklyn parking garage."
Rock On, by Dan Kennedy. Michael Azerrad writes, "Kennedy doesn't expound on the music industry's decline; instead, he simply lays out reams of damning evidence.
Or maybe the industry has lost touch with its product. Rock ’n’ roll is “sadly missing in this newly merged, trimmed, refinanced, restructured, freshly scrubbed, wide-eyed, suited and tied record company.” In a bravura passage, Kennedy finds real rock at a concert featuring Iggy Pop, who climbs a wall and harasses the flabby grandees in the V.I.P. section. By contrast, in one of the many McSweeney’s-esque lists that punctuate the book, “Rock On” offers choreography advice to singers in aspiring bands: “Moves should be odd combination of sexual advances and a temper tantrum, punctuated with moments of apparent hypoglycemia.”
What the Gospels Meant, by Garry Wills. David Gibson's excellent review gets to the nub of Mr Wills's third book of popular foundational exegesis.
The adage that “Jesus began as biography and ended as creed” is an article of faith to those who believe that the truth of what really happened 2,000 years ago has been buried under layers of dogma and deception. Wills shows that the reverse is true: Jesus’ disciples followed him to the cross because they believed he was the Messiah, and then spread his message as they — like generations after them — came to believe that he had been raised from the dead in fulfillment of the Scriptures. Creed came first, then the Gospel truth. Or truths.
Maybe
It is difficult to tell whether these books are actually as indifferent or pointless as the reviews suggest.
The Boys in the Trees, by Mary Swan. Susann Cokal's enthusiastic storytelling review fails to offer more than a few crumbs of ambivalent judgment about the quality of this book. We're told what Ms Swan "does" in her novel, but not how well she does it.
The Soul Thief, by Charles Baxter. As if infected by the review on the facing page (see Song Yet Sung, above), Liesl Schillinger's review is also an enthusiastic exercise in storytelling. Do reviewers really believe that novels will appeal to more readers if "what they're about" is presented appealingly? The risk is always that such appeals will fall, as they do here, at least upon these ears, flat. I came away with no idea what this novel is "about."
Yalo, by Elias Khoury (translated by Peter Theroux). It is impossible to tell very much about this book from Adam LeBor's too-short, storytelling review.
Resistance, by Owen Sheers. Jess Row's favorable review of this counterfactual novel places it in line with Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, and argues that
it demonstrates fiction’s unique power — we might call it the power of the hypothesis — to stand outside of recorded history and remind us how complicated and compromising an actual act of resistance might be.
The Konkans, by Tony D'Souza. Reviewer Geoff Nicholson finds this novel about the Christianized Indians of Goa (transplanted to Chicago) "a humane book, sometimes easier on its characters than they deserve."
Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front, by Todd DePastino. David Michaelis's lengthy review barely bothers to judge this book apart from its subject, and when it does, it is not encouraging.
As this life of high achievement and half-concealed self-destruction unfolds, the truth of intimate experience is too often sacrificed to literal accounting. Mauldin’s story has much to say about the development of an artist, but in this telling it seems almost as if a censoring hand has cut out pieces of what might have been a classic narrative of art’s paradoxically redemptive and imprisoning power.
About My Life and the Kept Woman: A Memoir, by John Rechy. David Leavitt complains that some of Mr Rechy's "scenes are redolent of narcissism mingled with self-hatred."
About My Life and the Kept Woman has all the ingredients for a good memoir. Unfortunately, it is undone by its own writing. Describing the English teacher who introduced him to the works of great writers, he admits that he punctuated his “literary explorations by reading, and enormously enjoying, famous best sellers: Kings Row, Gone With the Wind, The Strange Woman, Leave Her to Heaven, The Foxes of Harrow — those books, with their splashes of Technicolor prose, also influenced me.”
No
These books, if they deserve coverage at all, ought to grace other sections of The New York Times.
Duma Key, by Stephen King. James Campbell's full-page review utterly fails to suggest compensations for this novel's grave literary shortcomings.
The plotting of Duma Key is labyrinthine, if overextended, with psychically connected deaths and the appearance of zombies in the living room, but the characterization is flimsy.
High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed, by Michael Kodas; and Mountain Madness: Scott Fischer, Mount Everest and a Life Lived on High, by Robert Birkby. Real mountaineers, one is tempted to argue, don't write books. Bruce Barcott perhaps inadvertently snips whatever literary pretensions these books might have with a shrewd observations: Climbing Everest, he writes,
has become such a powerful cultural metaphor that some climbers arrive seeking little more than career makeovers. They go up as schoolteachers; they come down as motivational speakers.
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