Reviewing the Book Review
Their Vilest Hour
23 March 2008
In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.
Polly Morrice's Essay, "Descended From Salinger," reads like a souvenir from the days when Seymour Glass was the ne plus ultra of black-edged brilliance. Whether Ms Morrice is meditating a book on America and its fictions or merely seeking an occasion to remark that "updated versions of Salinger's off-kilter, quasi-saintly children do continue to crop up," this page is not the right frame.
Yes
The following titles belong on your bookshelf.
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, by Nicholson Baker. Colm Toíbín gives Mr Baker's somewhat incendiary revisionist account of the origins of World War II a guardedly favorable review.
Baker is adept at managing the reader’s emotion. His vignettes about the treatment of the Jewish population, the deportations and the planned mass murders, are just as carefully chosen, with the same amount of barely contained anger in them as his pieces about what was done to the civilians of Germany and to the civilians of Britain by bombers. It seems that he wishes to stir up an argument as much as settle one. In his afterword he says of the pacifists: “They failed, but they were right.” It is an aspect of the subtlety of his book that the reader is entitled to wonder if it’s true.
Okay
These titles appear to deserve coverage in the Book Review. The reviews may still be inadequate or useless.
The Painter From Shanghai, by Jennifer Cody Epstein. Sarah Towers's extremely favorable review raises only one question. Why is a review that begins like this —
In this age of memoir and thinly veiled autobiographical fiction, writers who take high dives into deeply imagined waters have become increasingly rare — and valuable. What a pleasure, then, to discover that Jennifer Cody Epstein, whose luminous first novel, “The Painter From Shanghai,” is based on the actual life of Pan Yuliang, a former child prostitute turned celebrated painter, also happens to be one such writer.
— and that continues in much the same vein given so very little space?
Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality, by Martha C Nussbaum. Emily Bazelon likes everything about this book (except Prof Nussbaum's defense of Mormon polygamy), and hails it as an important explanation of the "equality tradition" in American jurisprudence, which is woefully under attack within the Supreme Court today.
Nussbaum draws a straight line from Williams’s fusion of respect and fair play for religious groups to John Rawls’s vision of people choosing the basis of their common governance without knowing where they will be situated in the society that results. Williams and Rawls also agree that the state has a moral foundation that is religious for some people and nonreligious for others. Nussbaum finds this construct of “overlapping consensus” to be “a much more helpful idea to think with than the bare idea of ‘separation’” between church and state. She lauds Madison for seeing tax support for religion as an inevitable source of hierarchy and favoritism. But she does not read the establishment clause as erecting a wall that discounts the contributions of religion; this she sees as another “type of unfairness.”
Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877, by Walter A McDougall. Michael Kazin's review appears to trip on a reasonable obstacle: the dissonance between this book's thesis and that of its predecessor, the first of three volumes of American history by Prof McDougall.
Yet the conception of the work is a good deal less satisfying than its parts. “Throes of Democracy” is the second installment in a projected multivolume history of America from its colonial birth pangs to the present. McDougall began the first volume, “Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828,” with the arresting statement that the United States was “the central historical event of the past 400 years.” It is, he declared, “the mightiest, richest, most creative civilization on earth — a civilization that perturbs the trajectories of all other civilizations just by existing. Not only was the United States born of revolution; it is one.” But to interpret the Civil War era as a history of self-deception on a grand scale ends up making that civilization look rather small.
This is the sort of review that Nicholson Baker might quite reasonably have expected for Human Smoke, but didn't get. Perhaps the editors of the Book Review would have been wise to assign this book to a foreign observer as well.
Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks From the Wild Web, edited by Sarah Boxer. David Kamp finds this gleaning of the Blogosphere uneven at best, and he faults the editor for not having gone even further back in time than she does.
One more quibble: Nearly all the blog entries that appear in “Ultimate Blogs” were originally posted between 2005 and 2007, the period in which Boxer was researching the book. While this time limitation is helpful in providing a snapshot of blogging at a particular moment in its evolution, “Ultimate Blogs” would have been more fun if it had reached back further, to when blog writing first took flight at the turn of the 21st century. There’s an amazing program run by the Internet Archive project called the Wayback Machine (www.archive.org/web/web.php) that lets you travel back in Web time and see certain sites and blogs, even defunct ones, exactly as they appeared in years past. This could have yielded wonderful results for Boxer’s purposes.
Strictly as a public service, I provide herewith a link to the preface to Ms Boxer's book, which first appeared as a piece in The New York Review of Books.
Maybe
It is difficult to tell whether these books are actually as indifferent or pointless as the reviews suggest.
The Ghost War, by Alex Berenson. This work of unadorned genre fiction belongs among the Noes, and not in the Book Review, but reviewer Robert D Kaplan's favorable review suggests an extraneous warrant for recommending this thriller about war with China.
Like many novels of this genre, “The Ghost War” is too mechanical in its plot and lacks the baroque character development for which John le Carré is famous. The protagonist, a Central Intelligence Agency officer named John Wells, is a two-dimensional variation of derring-do types common to other spy books. (Much more successful is Berenson’s study of the American mole, Keith Robinson, whose family tragedy leads him in stages to betray his country.) Moreover, the lavish descriptions of military technicalities can sometimes be distracting from the plot and the characters themselves. But Berenson is not trying to be le Carré. Rather, he displays a reporter’s fine awareness of headlines over the horizon.
The Philosopher's Apprentice, by James Morrow. Siddhartha Deb gives this "novel of ideas" a sympathetically semi-favorable review.
Morrow’s inventiveness is beguiling, as are his delight in Western philosophy and his concern for the sorry state of the world. Yet there’s also something comic-bookish about his novel, with its rapid succession of climactic moments, its abundant references to pop culture, its reliance on the strikingly visual and its first-person narration, which has the inflections not of a failed graduate student but of a Los Angeles gumshoe:
Shortly after breakfast, a Jeep pulled up outside Charnock’s A-frame, driven by a raffish, safari-jacketed Latino with a drooping black mustache and olive skin, a by-God Ramar of the Jungle pith helmet shadowing his face. He introduced himself as Javier Cotrino, Dr. Sabacthani’s personal assistant, dispatched to chauffeur me to her mansion. For the next 20 minutes, Javier and I lurched and bounced along an unpaved road, descending into a verdant valley flush with hibiscus and bougainvillea, until at last we came to a high chain-link fence surmounted by spirals of barbed wire. We drove beneath a raised crossing gate, angled like a satyr’s intractable erection, then continued past acacia groves and cypress stands toward the rising sun.
This overblown style works well in showcasing Morrow’s imaginative flair. Yet it also makes everything that happens in the novel seem like a game.
The generous quotation, especially in a half-length review, is especially commendable.
Knockemstiff, by Donald Ray Pollock. Jonathan Miles's sympathetic and guardedly favorable review identifies Chuck Palahniuk as the godfather of this collection of linked short stories, notwithstanding a superficial resemblance to Winesburg, Ohio.
Aside from their geographical proximity and formalistic architecture, the two books share something else: a concentrated focus on the lonely, the depraved, the neglected — the “twisted apples,” in Anderson’s phrase, or the toadstools “stuck to a rotten log,” in Pollock’s — that prompted Anderson to originally title his work “The Book of the Grotesque.” But whereas Anderson tucked the grotesque beneath the staid and steady public lives of his characters, doctors and other professional types among them, Pollock’s characters — addicts, runaways, squatters, rapists, aspiring molesters, many of them one signature away from internment in “the group home” — wear their grotesqueness high up on their sleeves. If Winesburg’s social constructs held the unutterable hungers of its citizenry in check, however loosely, in “Knockemstiff” there are no such constructs. Rome has fallen, and it’s a Dark Ages free-for-all. Nothing to do now but huff some Bactine and head to the Crispie Creme at 3 a.m. to watch the cross-eyed waitress doze behind the display case of day-old doughnuts.
The Invention of Everything Else, by Samantha Hunt. Louisa Thomas appears to intend to give this novel a favorable review, but between heavy helpings of misguided storytelling — the almost radioactively inventive Nikola Tesla, a central character here, slips through Ms Thomas's hands like a greased fish — and a muddy appraisal of the novelist's talents, the results are decidedly inconclusive.
The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, by David Hajdu. I'm tempted to deposit this review among the Noes simply because of its subtitle. If there's one thing that comic books have yet to do, it is to change the world. The general reader may be excused from taking an epidemiological view of fantasies aimed at pre-teen boys; and assuredly those fantasies have no other importance. In spite of which, cultural history continues to march on, dressed in anything it can get its hands on.
A frustrating obstacle to full readerly engagement in “The Ten-Cent Plague” is Hajdu’s otherwise touching affection for the men and women who wrote and drew the comic books. He seeks to memorialize them — all thousand-odd of them, individually, it sometimes seems, by emptying his notebook of their names, sound-bite quotations and thumbnail descriptions: their pencil mustaches, cigars, derby hats, pageboy cuts and pet monkeys. This is kind, but it clogs the narrative and diffuses the attention owed the giants like Eisner; Jerry Iger; M. C. Gaines and his son, Bill; and the ill-starred co-creators of “Superman,” Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who prematurely sold their copyright on the greatest comic character of them all. That said, “The Ten-Cent Plague” is a worthy addition to the canon of comic-book literature: a super effort, if not a superduper one.
Worlds At War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West, by Anthony Pagden. Amy Chua's not unsympathetic review stops short of the frankly favorable.
In the end, however, “Worlds at War” is another book about the clash between the Enlightenment and religion, and its central target is Islam, which, Pagden argues, is incompatible with the Western principle of separation between church and state. The “fundamental theological difference between Islam and Christianity,” he tells us, lies in “the association between religion and the law.” Unlike Christianity, Islam supports “the complete identification of the secular realm with the sacred and the corresponding elevation of the ruler.” Christianity recognizes both the Kingdom of Heaven and the governments of earth. In Islam, by contrast, “there can be only one law”: the Shariah, which is God’s law and thus “eternal” and “unchanging.” According to Pagden, the history of Islam is unified “by a continuous and still unfulfilled narrative, the story of the struggle against the ‘Infidel’ for the ultimate Muslim conquest of the entire world."
...
Such passages are bound to infuriate many, including those Muslims who see themselves as reaffirming a well-rooted Islamic tradition of diversity in opinion against a rising trend of rigid fanaticism. Pagden tends to treat Islam as a monolith; at one point he describes Islam as intellectually “simple.” Given Islam’s long and variegated history, not to mention its abstruse jurisprudence, many will disagree.
Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, by Matthew Connelly. Nicholas D Kristof, a Times columnist and something of an expert on the subject of oppressed women, makes the tendentiousness of this volume abundantly clear.
Fatal Misconception” is to population policy what William Easterly’s “White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good” (2006) was to foreign aid: a useful, important but ultimately unbalanced corrective to smug self-satisfaction among humanitarians. Connelly scrupulously displays a hundred years of family planners’ dirty laundry, but without adequately emphasizing that we are far better off for their efforts. One could write a withering history of medicine, focusing on doctors’ infecting patients when they weren’t bleeding them, but doctors are pretty handy people to have around today. And so are family planners.
Somebody Scream!: Rap Music's Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power, by Marcus Reeves. Baz Dreisinger's minimally favorable review makes a case for the importance of books about hip-hop music that is the only thing keeping this review out of the Noes.
Perhaps that’s because writing about hip-hop affords critics and scholars an opportunity to cast a wide net; this self-consciously capitalist genre is American culture writ large — a brasher, bolder, ruder edition of the Horatio Alger myth. Reading it as part and parcel of American social and political history is a way of legitimizing a culture long derided, and the bar for this brand of analysis was set high by Jeff Chang’s “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop” (2005), a definitive history of the hip-hop generation. Close on Chang’s heels (and treading many of his paths) comes the journalist Marcus Reeves with a sweeping, painstakingly thorough, not especially original history of hip-hop, told through the stories of a dozen celebrated acts and their sociopolitical contexts.
Permalink | Portico | About this feature
Copyright (c) 2008 Pourover Press