Reviewing the Book Review
American Children
6 April 2008
In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.
All too often, the people who write for the Book Review appear to be confused about the identity of the intended reader. This is especially true where poetry is concerned. Is the review aimed at the general reader? The general reader of the Book Review? Or some segment of the community of people who take a special interest in poetry? The confusion is symptomatic of a cultural doubt about just what poetry is for. The Book Review ought to be engaging with that doubt, not shrugging it off.
Well, gee, anyhoo, this week's Review was a pleasure to cover. I throw myself upon the mercy of my readers. Is it just me? A matter of mood swings?
Yes
The following titles belong on your bookshelf.
Please Don't Remain Calm: Provocations and Commentaries, by Michael Kinsley. Jonathan Freedland presents this book as a kind of treat, but it's clear from his review that Mr Kinsley has produced that rarest of all collections: the souvenir that refreshes our recollections of recent history and even inspires us to reconsider them. We're given enough of Mr Kinsley's well-tempered prose to quiet any fear that his book works like the Stations of the Cross that it might well have been.
Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West, by Benazir Bhutto. Fareed Zakaria's brilliantly favorable review deserves some sort of prize — why not the Keefe Prize? — for doing justice to an important book while acknowledging (and sweeping aside) its would-be drawbacks. "The other, larger part of the book is stirring and important — and takes up most of the first three chapters. If the reader loses interest by the time he gets to Pakistan, that's just fine."
If that sounds like very faint praise indeed, I apologise.
With the publication of “Reconciliation,” Bhutto has — alas, posthumously — closed that gap. Written while she was preparing to re-enter political life, it is a book of enormous intelligence, courage and clarity. It contains the best-written and most persuasive modern interpretation of Islam I have read. Part of what makes it compelling, of course, is the identity of its author. People have often asked when respected Muslim leaders would denounce Islamic extremism and articulate a forward-looking and tolerant view of their religion. Well, Bhutto has done it in full measure. And as the most popular political figure in the world of Islam — for three decades she led the largest political party in the second largest Muslim country — she had much greater standing than the collection of reactionary mullahs, second-rate academics and unelected monarchs who opine on these topics routinely, and are accorded far too much attention in the West. In fact, Washington should arrange to have the portions of the book about Islam republished as a separate volume and translated into several languages. It would do more to win the battle of ideas within Islam than anything an American president could ever say.
My favorite part:
Throughout, Bhutto is responding to the argument of Samuel P. Huntington’s Foreign Affairs essay “The Clash of Civilizations?” that the Islamic and Western worlds are unalterably opposed to each other. She is extremely attentive to Huntington, marshals evidence against him and cites almost all the best critiques. In fact she has devoted her book in large part to dissuading Muslims from seeing the world as one in which a clash of civilizations is necessary or inevitable.
The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett. On the basis of Lewis Hyde's review, this may be the most important book of 2008; it may well, in historical perspective, turn out to be the most important book of the decade. "Moreover, it is through his insistence that thought arises in relation to craft that Sennett comes to one of his more intriguing interventions, a reimagining of the Enlightenment in terms not of ideas but of how craftsmen learned to work." Further, extensive quotation:
Using craftsmen as symbols of the Enlightenment turns out to be part of an argument that Sennett is conducting with one of his teachers, Hannah Arendt. In her own portrait of the human condition, Arendt distinguished between the world of animal needs and a “higher” world of art, politics and philosophy. This division is, for Sennett, a serious philosophical mistake with serious ethical and political consequences. It isn’t only that it demeans those who labor with their hands, but that it fails to recognize one of the foundations of good citizenship and cannot then imagine the kind of democracy in which governance is widely diffused, not given over to expert elites.
For it is Sennett’s contention that “nearly anyone can become a good craftsman” and that “learning to work well enables people to govern themselves and so become good citizens.” This line of thought depends, among other things, upon the Enlightenment assumption that craft abilities are innate and widely distributed, and that, when rightly stimulated and trained, they allow craftsmen to become knowledgeable public persons.
And what is it that such persons know? They know how to negotiate between autonomy and authority (as one must in any workshop); how to work not against resistant forces but with them (as did the engineers who first drilled tunnels beneath the Thames); how to complete their tasks using “minimum force” (as do all chefs who must chop vegetables); how to meet people and things with sympathetic imagination (as does the glassblower whose “corporeal anticipation” lets her stay one step ahead of the molten glass); and above all they know how to play, for it is in play that we find “the origin of the dialogue the craftsman conducts with materials like clay and glass.”
Okay
These titles appear to deserve coverage in the Book Review. The reviews may still be inadequate or useless.
Fidelity, by Grace Paley. Mary Jo Salter's kindly but not quite sympathetic review is shot through with suggestions that Paley, who died last year, was not really a poet, but rather a gifted writer who wrote the odd memorable scrap of verse.
Most of the poems in Fidelity aren't as successful as the ones quoted here. Yet they consistently appeal in their wry but heartfelt voices, their dramatization of the human condition.
Sea Change: Poems, by Jorie Graham. James Longenbach's unhelpful review is politely dissatisfied with this book. After discussing the poet's ecological anxieties, and harping on what he claims is a chronic imprecision, Mr Longenbach throws up his hands:
Rather than answering such questions, Graham asks them, leaving herself vulnerable; what is intended as open-endedness may also feel, again, like portentousness. But the fact that some aspects of Graham’s work are more fully realized than others seems, while not uninteresting, oddly beside the point. What matters, as with Ashbery and Glück, other poets who perpetually challenge the terms of their own achievement, is the shape of the career — not only what she has done but what she will inevitably do next. There will be “a time again in which to make,” Graham writes, “the imagined human / paradise.”
Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri. Liesl Schillinger gives the noted Bengali-American writer's first fiction collection a warmly enthusiastic review. It's interesting to note what she does not remark upon:
The eight stories in this splendid volume expand upon Lahiri’s epigraph, a metaphysical passage from “The Custom-House,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which suggests that transplanting people into new soil makes them hardier and more flourishing. Human fortunes may be improved, Hawthorne argues, if men and women “strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.” It’s an apt, rich metaphor for the transformations Lahiri oversees in these pages, in which two generations of Bengali immigrants to America — the newcomers and their hyphenated children — struggle to build normal, secure lives. But Lahiri does not so much accept Hawthorne’s notion as test it. Is it true that transplanting strengthens the plant? Or can such experiments produce mixed outcomes?
There is nothing in the review about the quality of Ms Lahiri's writing, which is at least clear enough not to require comment.
Blood Kin, by Ceridwen Dovey. Dave Itzkoff, the Book Review's go-to guy for science fiction, gives this ambitious book — not only a novel but a master's thesis as well — a ringing accolade that may presage a herd-like run on Ms Dovey's exquisite dystopian autopsy. "The tale she wants to tell is more ambitious and more immediate than a fable, a story about how the slightest taste of power so easily stimulates our limitless appetite for sadism." My appetite? Surely you're thinking of my boss. The review makes this sound like a book that could take Manhattan by plague of locusts.
Last Last Chance, by Fiona Maazel. Joshua Henkin's sympathetic review closes in nicely on the writing that makes this novel about addiction &c different from the pack:
But “Last Last Chance” isn’t your average novel, thanks in no small part to Maazel’s funny, lacerating prose. The book fits squarely in the tradition of novels about the wealthy and dissolute, but ultimately it’s less John Cheever than Denis Johnson — the Denis Johnson of “Jesus’ Son,” with its drug-addled narrators — though Maazel’s voice is more caffeinated, more fueled by attitude (“I don’t even know whether they do the Eucharist at a memorial. Do the Eucharist? Is that like do the hustle?”) and more prone to hectoring. “There’s nothing worse than a drug addict with opinions,” Lucy observes.
The Sorrows of An American, by Siri Hustvedt. Sylvia Brownrigg clearly likes this book, but her review presents it is yet another bleak novel about Midwesterners whose emotional minimalism threatens to slip into something more clinical. "In one late scene, as Erik continues to struggle with depression onb the anniversary of his father's death, his own elderly psychoanalyst reminds him of a quotation from Hans Loewald: 'The work of psychoanalysis can turn ghosts into ancestors'."
The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, by Pico Iyer. Holly Morris's enthusiastic review very nearly makes this book sound like essential reading. Her initial summing-up of Mr Iyer's book is helpfulness itself.
Iyer has set out to examine Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, as a part of a larger set of ideas and thinkers — a towering example of the cross-cultural interconnectedness that has been the author’s particular subject. Iyer has long wondered “how globalism could acquire depths, an inwardness that would sustain it more than mere goods or data could.” And “if our new way of living were to offer any real sustenance,” he posits, “it would have to be invisible, in the realm of what underlies acceleration and multinationals.”
Maybe
It is difficult to tell whether these books are actually as indifferent or pointless as the reviews suggest.
Monster, 1959, by David Maine. Josh Emmon's guardedly favorable review nonetheless fails to suggest why a novel that "self-consciously borrows the themes, tropes and settings of classics like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms," and that appears to include a Christ-like Passion, was taken seriously enough by the editors to merit coverage.
Parenting, Inc: How We Are Sold on $800 Strollers, Fetal Education, Baby Sign Language, Sleeping Coaches, Toddler Couture, and Diaper Wipe Warmers — And What It Means for Our Children, by Pamela Paul. Kate Zernike never quite says so, but she makes this book sound like a blown-up magazine article. Long on "research" and ridicule, Parenting, Incdoesn't, Ms Zernike notes, tell us why "we are rendered unable to recall the advice Dr Spock issued our parents: Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do." Indeed:
Paul says she talked to parents, but I would have liked to hear more of their voices and less from the news stories and experts she quotes extensively. My guess is that most parents would share my panic in the face of Buy Buy Baby and then discover, as I did, that even the product that friends insist you must have is actually an encumbrance (and that all your lovingly selected toys pale when the kid discovers he can pull the saucepans out of the cupboard).
Bravo! I'm reminded of a wonderful afternoon in the country on which a neighbor's little boy — he'll be heading off to college any day now — made that very discovery in my kitchen. What a heavenly racket!
Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance, by Dean Wareham. Liz Phair (who ought to know) argues convincingly that this "memoir is fast-paced and memorable, peopled with characters you could find only in the music industry." And not just a joyride, either:
But not all the subplots in “Black Postcards” are so happy-go-lucky. One particularly unforgettable story involves the rags-to-riches-to-rags-again tale of a high-flying A & R executive at Elektra named Terry Tolkin, whose musical discernment never translated into the other areas of his life. Riding around in limousines, showing up late to work, throwing outrageous parties for artists and charging it all to the label, the surprisingly likable Terry finds himself on shaky ground as a corporate realignment threatens to squeeze him out of a job: “If he had signed just one platinum act, all would have been forgiven. Instead he gave them Luna, Stereolab and the Afghan Whigs.” Things go from bad to worse, until “Terry had lost his wife, which he pretended not to care about. Now he had lost his job. ... Six months later he was working at a gas station in New Jersey, changing oil and brake liners by day, snorting heroin by night.”
No
These books, if they deserve coverage at all, ought to grace other sections of The New York Times.
But Didn't We Have Fun?: An Informal History of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843-1870, by Peter Morris, reviewed by Buster Olney; and Arnie & Jack: Palmer, Nicklaus, and Golf's Greatest Rivalry, by Ian O'Connor, reviewed by Charles McGrath. On the evidence of the reviews, neither of these books makes the kind of larger cultural claim that warrants the coverage of hobbies and pastimes in the Book Review. For what it's worth, Mr Olney describes Mr Morris's book as "fascinating but mechanical," while Mr McGrath remarks that Mr O'Connor, "unlike some of the journalists golf has been blessed with, he's not someone you read for the gracefulness of his prose."
Permalink | Portico | About this feature
Copyright (c) 2008 Pourover Press