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Reviewing the Book Review

Words in Air

2 November 2008

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

FACT

¶ If Gary Rosen had cut off his favorable review at the start, hailing Russell Shorto's Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason as "a smart, elegantly written contribution to this genre," the overall effect might have been more positive. But as the review goes on, the book seems more and more gimmicky.

Shorto overreaches at times in the interest of advancing a strong thesis and weaving an engaging tale. Descartes’s influence was immense, to be sure, but it is a stretch to credit him, as Shorto does, with laying the ground for modern ideas of equality, individual rights and self-government. On the scientific side of the ledger, Shorto’s eagerness to set apart Descartes as a system-builder leads to his unfortunate assertion that the celebrated experimenters and empiricists of early modern science — Galileo, Bacon, Harvey, Kepler — initially sowed “more confusion than clarity.” Melodrama also occasionally intrudes into Shorto’s account, particularly in his sleuthing about Descartes’s skull and his speculation about the philosopher’s feelings for his working-class mistress and their illegitimate daughter.

¶ Max Boot is wowed by David Hackett Fischer's study — both more and less than a biography — of the man who gave his name to the "Fifth Great Lake," Champlain's Dream. Mr Boot pauses from the storytelling (interesting stuff!) to give Mr Fischer's skills a useful appraisal.

Fischer is not a prose stylist to rival the great popular historians — the Barbara Tuchmans, Shelby Footes and David McCulloughs. Arguably he is not a popular historian at all but simply an academic who has reached a wide audience. Yet even when he writes books of doorstop heft, as he invariably does, his plain, unadorned style is never dry or boring, in part because he so often sprinkles intriguing ideas into the narrative.

Schindler's List, cont'd: Ruth Franklin reviews two new books about the preservation of Jewish lives under very odd circumstances, in a factory outside of Warsaw, during World War II. The first, The Road to Rescue: The Untold Story of Schindler’s List, by Mietek Pemper with Viktoria Hertling (assisted by Marie Elisabeth Müller). Translated by David Dollenmayer is a memoir by another survivor — that is, not Poldek Pfefferberg, the ultimate source of Steven Spielberg's screenplay. Ms Franklin calls it "a deepening of the story, which Spielberg’s movie inevitably oversimplified."

Pemper argues that the “crucial accomplishment” was not the list itself but “the multifarious acts of resistance that, like tiny stones being placed into a mosaic one by one, had made the whole process possible.”

The other, Thomas Kenneally's Searching For Schindler: A Memoir, sounds as if it ought to be called The Making of My Famous Book. I would describe Ms Franklin's tone as "politely withering."

Keneally’s memoir is not particularly insightful on the deeper questions that have arisen around “Schindler’s List” — why the book was categorized as a novel, or whether the movie, among many serious criticisms, went too far in aestheticizing the Holocaust — but it abounds in amusing and poignant anecdotes. (During the filming, Ralph Fiennes was so effective as Göth that the other actors were afraid to approach him, even out of character.) And it, too, serves as a useful caution against the natural preference for tidy stories with well-defined heroes. Much as the rescue could not have occurred without many small contributions along the way, the credits for the blockbuster “Schindler’s List” should begin not with a successful novelist or a powerful Hollywood director but with the immigrant proprietor of a luggage store.

¶ Christian Lehmann-Haupt reviews a clutch of books about the Giants with a spate of breathless storytelling. Here are the titles:

From my position of complete and utter lack of interest, the books sound equally zippy and at the same time nostalgic for simpler, less mammothly remunerated times: it was the Colts' victory over the Giants in sudden-death overtime that mesmerized television audiences to an extent that network executives were not slow to appreciate.

¶ Josef Joffe's review of  From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776, by George C. Herring, takes a little while to take its gloves off. Having praised the book's length (ahem!) and "the author's Herculean power of synthesis," Mr Joffe goes on to fault the work for lacking an overall theme and for taking revisionist views of American engagement in World War II and the Cold War. He even lists a few important books that Mr Herring appears not to have read. The review is, all too unfortunately, persuasive. A favorable review would not have conveyed the sense of error-addled tome that I suspect this book does not deserve. 

¶ Rob Walker writes an entertaining review of Stephen Baker's The Numerati, which is one of approaching what seems to be a vastly inflated in-flight magazine article about the still relatively nascent art of data-mining.

Both chapters — all the chapters, really — involve a lot of speculation (many sentences begin “Let’s say . . .” or “Imagine . . .”). By and large, Baker seems to accept much of what the new “counting elite” say they can do now or will be able to do someday, but sometimes their claims and Baker’s credulity are all the reader has to go on. At one point, a data cruncher who is devising ways to improve office-worker efficiency says the underlying stochastic calculus isn’t too hard to understand, starts to explain a formula . . . and then he stops, and Baker lets it drop. Presumably he was simply more interested in keeping up his short book’s crisp pace, but The Numerati could have used a few more specific and nonhypothetical examples...

LETTERS

¶ The unusual length of William Logan's lovely review, as favorable as it is sympathetic, of The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton, might seem less unwonted if rather more verse were quoted.

If Lowell and Bishop often seem to love no poems more than each other’s, as critics perhaps they were right. A hundred years from now, they may prove the 20th century’s Whitman and Dickinson, an odd couple whose poems look quizzically at each other, half in understanding, half in consternation, each poet the counter-psyche of the other. Their poems are as different as gravy from groundhogs, their letters so alike — so delightfully in concord — the reader at times can’t guess the author without glancing at the salutation.

Stinting on verse is one of the Book Review's more flagrant, and less comprehensible failings.

FICTION

¶ Leah Hager Cohen fills her review of John Berger's From A To X: A Story in Letters with storytelling, in spite of the attention that she calls to the difficulties of Mr Berger's style, which leads one to look for extensive quotation. Instead of which, we're given impressionistic snippets.

Even the most rudimentary details beg contemplation. The setting, for example, is not simply ambiguous; it’s drunkenly peripatetic, seeming to lurch around the globe heedless of divisions in time and space. A’ida makes reference to ancient Assyria, Spain, Carthage and Romania, while Xavier, in notes scribbled on the backs of her letters, cites Venezuela, Bolivia, Paris, Moscow and Myanmar. The identities of the lovers are similarly hazy. A’ida uses Spanish and Arabic endearments (“Mi Guapo,” “Ya Nour”), transcribes lines by a Turkish poet and cooks molokhiyya, an Egyptian dish. Xavier quotes the Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano, Frantz Fanon, Hugo Chávez and Subcomandante Marcos, not to mention Cassandra Wilson and Johnny Cash. When A’ida addresses Xavier by a pet name that, she writes, translates in Greek as “chameleon,” we might well wonder whether this is an encrypted message from one insurgent to another, or Berger’s way of winking at us.

This makes From A to X sound arty and pretentious, surely not the reviewer's intention.

¶ Liesl Schillinger seems to like Louis de Bernières's new novel, A Partisan's Daughter, and if her review is long on storytelling and short on appraisal, it nevertheless conveys a likely idea of this story about a depressed, middle-aged Londoner and a prostitute who holds his attention with tales of her appalling past in Yugoslavia.

The novel’s tension arises from another quarter: the question of whether Chris, mired in restraint and self-recrimination, will muster the verve to make Roza a dishonest woman. Their story is told in he says/she says chapters, in unadorned, confessional language that has a certain coarse pathos but less beauty than de Bernières’s usual writing. While Chris (and we) wait for a resolution, Roza beguiles him with stories.

¶ Susann Cokal gives Fault Lines, a rather odd-sounding novel, narrated (with improbably articulateness) by six year-olds by Nancy Huston, a favorable review that will nonetheless caution gimmick-averse readers against giving this book a try. I can't imagine that the following bit of storytelling will entice many readers of the Book Review:

We begin with Sol, a child of the contemporary American culture of megalo­maniac self-esteem. His parents clap for him at meals, give him easily accomplished tasks and never spank, so he’s able to maintain a positive self-image. The result is a monster: “Six years old and a genius, first thought every morning when I wake up.” He calls himself “Son of Google, Son of God, Eternal Omnipotent Son of the World Wide Web” and takes a precocious sexual pleasure in watching Internet footage from snuff films and images of tortured Iraqi soldiers. Like his father, grandmother and great-­grandmother, he bears a special birthmark, and when his mother has this mole — his “one defect” — removed, an infection threatens to kill him.

¶ Tom de Haven gives Miriam Toews's novel, The Flying Troutmans, the kind of bad review that's a lot of fun to read, and in the process casts doubt on its own reliability. If the following statement is actually arguable —

The vernacular narrative, which had spark, specificity and rueful wit throughout the novel’s opening chapters, becomes sloppy and gabbling, like a blog hastily banged out.

— then the book doesn't merit coverage in the Book Review.

¶ Coming from Judith Warner, the very favorable review of Stéphane Audeguy's The Only Son (translated by John Cullen) makes me sit up and pay attention. The ostensible memoir of the elder brother whom Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentions only to dismiss at the start of his Confessions, this book, Ms Warner writes, is

quite an achievement, this picaresque adventure, which reads without any false notes of anachronism and in John Cullen’s translation harmonizes beautifully with the cadence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s style. True to his brother’s self-­exhortation at the start of the “Confessions” to present himself “in all the integrity of nature,” François sugarcoats nothing. There is no nicening-up of the world of the 18th-century libertine; for whatever titillation is on offer, Audeguy exacts payment, forcing readers to bear witness to sadism, the torture of animals and the sexual abuse of children.

It is this refusal to allow François any shallow triumphs — beyond the structural triumph of his text’s survival, hidden in the final resting place his brother desired on the peaceful island in Ermenonville — that makes this book something much more than a clever literary exercise. François may end his confessions with the adage “He laughs best who laughs last,” but in the end it is the moralist Jean-Jacques who has the last word.

¶ Julia Scheeres's unsympathetic review of When the White House Was Ours, a new novel by Porter Shreve, extends to the decade in which it is set, the Seventies:

As in his two previous novels — “The Obituary Writer” and “Drives Like a Dream” — Shreve uses “When the White House Was Ours” to deconstruct family relationships, examining the way fathers inspire both pride and resentment in their offspring.He writes in the acknowledgments that this latest work was inspired by his own family’s attempts to run an alternative school, also called Our House, and he manifests an entertaining knowledge of ’70s particulars like kangaroo socks and Marshmallow Fluff.

The atmosphere of the fictional Our House mirrors that of the Carter presidency — inaugurated with high hopes, only to slide inexorably downward. The strange combination of hippy permissiveness and teenage belligerence is the school’s undoing. Ultimately, “democratic education” proves to be bunk. “All that jive talkin’,” as the Bee Gees put it, “just gets in your eye.”

Not very helpful.

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