Reviewing the Book Review

The Catastrophist

27 April 2008

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

Rachel Donadio's Essay, "You're an Author? Me Too!", is all about self-publication, and the increasingly lopsided ratio of writers to readers. She notes the alarming increase of graduate writing programs — up from 13 in 1967 to 465 today — without pointing out that the only genuine school of writing is reading, reading, and more reading.

Yes

The following titles belong on your bookshelf.

The Man Who Pushed America To War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi, by Aram Roston. Having given this book top marks for content, Leslie H Gelb devotes his final paragraph to doing the same for relevance.

The problem is not that Chalabi was so smart, but that we were so careless and so vulnerable to manipulation. As Roston thoroughly demonstrates, Chalabi understood us better than we understood ourselves.

Okay

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

Complete Minimal Poems, by Aram Saroyan. Richard Hell writes sympathetically of this souvenir of the Sixties, when the young Mr Saroyan was somewhat famous for his "concrete" poetry. In Mr Hell's view, the poems weren't as gimmicky as they might sound.

Saroyan is more literary, though, than the label “concrete poet” might suggest. His ear is as sensitive and pleasure-hungry as his eye, as can be heard in that “This red hood holds the mood, keeps my eye happy,” which is practically pornographic. His sensuality isn’t obscene, though. It’s clean and open and cheerful. His literary forebears were the rugged, unpretentious and openhearted Black Mountain poets and the Beats of the ’50s, specifically Robert Creeley and Jack Kerouac. And as Saroyan has often described, he was a child of the ’60s, with those values of community and peace and love. He’s written, in fact, that the disillusionments of 1968 — Vietnam, the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy — had a lot to do with why he stopped writing for the subsequent five years, and why he permanently dropped his minimal mode, which he associated with the innocent spirit of pre-’68. (He’s also written that he’d simply exhausted that aesthetic for himself). The minimal poems are not just whimsical ’60s trippiness. They’re much more than novelties. This beautifully designed collection contains a poetry that shivers with itself, like something just born. Anyone interested in art made from words should have it.

The Odyssey: A Dramatic Retelling of Homer's Epic, by Simon Armitage. James Parker hails this adaptation of The Odyssey as a radio play. His one reservation, that Mr Armitage seems to take more interest in mortals than in divinities, is duly noted.

The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom, by Martin Amis. Alas, Leon Wieseltier's byline in the Book Review has become a byword for tendentiousness. His unsympathetic review of Mr Amis's performance is not as negative as it might have been, but that is the one and only unexpected aspect of the piece. Here is what, if I may risk sounding French with English words, the characteristic devastation:

You get the feeling, reading these pages, that for his side Amis will say almost anything, because being noticed is as important to him as being right. The complication is that there is considerable justice on Amis’s side. He is correct in insisting upon the moral and historical primacy of the battle against theocracy and terror. He is correct that the West possesses the moral advantage in this battle, and that the defense of Western conceptions of freedom and equality is not an exercise in ethnocentrism. He is correct that the skeptical discussion of religious ideas and practices must not be abrogated by the skinlessness of multiculturalism, or by its cunning. He is correct that opinions that seem not only spectacularly false, but also lethally false, do not have to be intellectually respected even if they have to be politically tolerated. He is correct that in Islamism the many doctrines of antimodernism, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are one doctrine. I have never before assented to so many of the principles of a book and found it so awful. But the vacant intensity that has characterized so much of Amis’s work flourishes here too.

That it comes at the end of a string of inverted grievances, echoing the Declaration of Independence, cannot be unintended.

Shakespeare's Wife, by Germaine Greer. Katie Roiphe unaccountably waits until her last paragraph to tell us that this book answers a prayer offered by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own:

In A Room of One’s Own, with its famous riff on Shakespeare’s sister, Virginia Woolf wrote that when one tries to picture the life of an Elizabethan woman, “one is held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. History scarcely mentions her. ... What one wants, I thought — and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it? — is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; ... did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect and make a book of it. It would be ambitious beyond my daring.” And now the book written by a brilliant student from Newnham, dreamed of by Virginia Woolf in the last century, exists: lively, rigorous, fiercely imagined.

Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors, by Lisa Appignanesi. Although Kathryn Harrison can't resist a certain amount of ghoulish storytelling, she hails this history of diagnostic fashions.

One of the consistently fascinating and disturbing aspects of “Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors” is Lisa Appignanesi’s assiduous tracking of the modishness of what might be mistaken for a sui generis discipline. Of course, as anyone who has visited a psychiatric hospital — or ridden the subway — can attest, crazy is what we call people who refuse to conform to accepted norms of behavior. And the definition of nonconformity must change in step with styles of conforming.

Ms Harrison may go a bit overboard in talking of anorexia as if it were a kind of hemline, but this hardly dampens her enthusiasm.

Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation, by Sheila Weller. Stephanie Zacharek is irresistibly chock full of storytelling, but she kicks off her review very usefully:

How you feel about Sheila Weller’s “Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation” may depend on how you respond to Weller’s dedication, which reads: “To the women of the 1960s generation. (Were we not the best?)” If that’s the sort of thing that gets you all hepped up to pour a glass of chardonnay and order some gauzy embroidered tunics and Clarks sandals from the Soft Surroundings catalog, then you go, girl!

The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East, by Olivier Roy (translated by Ros Schwartz. Although Dexter Filkins faults this book for failing to come up with suggestions for the future, he praises it as "a concise and penetrating summation of the current scene; it’s a fine primer for anyone trying to get a sense of just how chaotic the Middle East is."

White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America, by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh. If this book is as good as Joyce Hor-Chung Lau's too- short review says it is — "White Cargo is meticulously sourced and footnoted — which is wise, given its contentious material — but it is never dry or academic." — then it deserves far more extensive treatment. Ms Lau's last sentence, observing that "probably tens of millions" of Americans today are descended from what the books used to call "indentured servants," reminds us that what made the later and notorious form of American slavery so toxic was the ineradicable badge of skin color.

Maybe

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

Fanon, by John Edgar Wideman. Lee Siegel is so excited by this novel, which he presents as an experimental work, that he infects it with incoherence.

Brilliantly, “Fanon” retains the stunning specifity of its details — a love affair in Paris, a torturer’s morally bewildering testimony, the head-banging intractability of time passed and lost forever — while spiraling up through different phases of experience to something like a vision of strife-ridden interconnectedness. As Rob, Wideman’s imprisoned brother, puts it: “You got this one human person trying to make a life for itself on the planet.” Or, as the narrator expresses his sense of interwoven destinies, in a different key and a different tone: “A city, after all, isn’t it. Fabricated of eye exchanges.”

Shadow Country: A New Rendering of the Watson Legend, by Peter Matthiessen. Tom LeClair says nothing to inspire fans of the earlier, longer version of Mr Mattheisen's Florida saga to try this abridged version: "It offers a quicker and easier passage through the swamp, but fewer shades and shadows."

Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, by Gary Marcus. Annie Murphy Paul rather likes this book about the duct-taped nature of the human brain — but not as a book.

Marcus, it seems, has a problem: an appealing and intriguing idea that isn’t quite as big as he claims. To solve it, he reaches for that rhetorical kluge, the straw man, setting up and then sweeping aside the notion that the human mind is infallible. “Are human beings ‘noble in reason’ and ‘infinite in faculty’ as William Shakespeare famously wrote?” Marcus asks ingenuously. “Perfect, ‘in God’s image,’ as some biblical scholars have asserted?” Hamlet might well complain that his remarks are being quoted out of context — after all, he goes on in the same soliloquy to call man the “quintessence of dust.” And biblical scholars have devoted at least equal time to the flaws and sins of humanity (serpent, apple, etc.). Even Marcus’s own readers’ imputed beliefs become so many flimsy figures for him to knock down. He writes of “our everyday acceptance of the idiosyncrasies of the human mind,” suggesting later on that “many of us just don’t want human cognition to turn out to be less than perfect.”

Actually, most of us are only too aware of our mental malfunctions, greeting them with consternation (and maybe a profanity or two). But in skewering these supposedly universal assumptions, Marcus has taken a slight premise and leveraged it into a book. It’s not the most elegant solution to his problem, but hey, it works.

The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr, by Jonathan Rieder. John McWhorter likes this linguistic analysis of Dr King's oratorical style, but he seems to think that it is not designed for the general reader.

In the introductory chapter, Rieder worries that the subversive intent of the “I Have a Dream” speech has been forgotten, that those words are now replayed as “a sappy version of Rodney King bleating, ‘Can we all get along?’ ” There’s something to that, and Rieder makes good use of analytical tools when he reminds us of that speech’s original intent. This leaves one wishing that, for the benefit of general readers, he had done so more often in his rigorous but only fitfully engaging book.

The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, by Noah Feldman. Having praised Olivier Roy's book in the longer half of his review, Dexter Filkins finds that Mr Feldman's contribution to the discussion "runs out of steam."

How could it not? As Roy points out, modern attempts to impose Shariah have failed wherever they have been tried — whether in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia or Iran. Failed, that is, in Roy’s words, at “instigating effective and legitimate political institutions and social justice, and guaranteeing economic development.” Feldman is correct in pointing out that Islamist ideas will play an increasingly prominent role in the Middle East, but he avoids the critical questions. What about women? What about Muslims who leave the faith? Of these, Feldman says almost nothing.

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

Sneaker Wars: The Enemy Brothers Who Founded Adidas and Puma and the Family Feud That Forever Changed the Business of Sports, by Barbara Smith. I'd stop at "Business of Sports," but it's worse than that, as, according to Joe Nocera's review, this book embarrassingly skimps on mention of the current giant in the field, Nike.

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