Reviewing the Book Review

Stranger Than Paradise

1 March 2009

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

There's something drolly appropriate about the conjunction, among this week's books, of a first life of Flannery O'Connor and a small raft of fiction in translation. O'Connor's fiction is as strangely contoured as any in English, and I'm sure that many readers have found themselves wondering, as the shock of such tales as "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" subsides, what they mean.

FACT

¶ Flannery O'Connor is the subject of this week's cover story, and Jay Williams's review of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, by Brad Gooch, promises very interesting reading. Mr Williams errs, I think, in addressing readers already familiar with O'Connor's work; delightful as it is to pass along a handful of a favorite writer's creakier secrets, it would have been more helpful to make a case for her work's importance and to aim it at younger readers. Like Donald Barthelme (a writer with whose prose O'Connor's shares only an honorable scrupulousness), O'Connor has had a wider impact on current writing than one might guess, and yet she belongs to a generation older than her own.

I did not count the number of paragraphs that Mr Williams begins with an apostrophe, but I certainly noticed that he writes as though he's being buttonholed for his opinion at a cocktail party.

Flannery. When asked why she wrote, she replied, “Because I’m good at it.” She found sickness “more instructive than a long trip to Europe.” She was buried the day after she died. Robert Giroux sent a copy of Wise Blood to Evelyn Waugh hoping for a blurb, and Waugh replied, “The best I can say is: ‘If this really is the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.’ ” One should pretty much ignore her own pronouncements on her art, though in her last years she increasingly endeavored to explain her intentions. She was an anagogical writer, of that there is no doubt. The civil rights movement interested her not at all. When she received a request to stage one of her stories, she wrote, “The only thing I would positively object to would be somebody turning one of my colored idiots into a hero.” Her kinship, she believed, was with Hawthorne. She also described herself as being “13th-century.” She is reported to have had beautiful blue eyes.

¶ Jim Holt gets a page and a half for his discussion of The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War, by Alexander Waugh — doubtless because the quality of the gossip is very high. He is unhappy with Mr Waugh's dismissal of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy as "incomprehensible," but wisely doesn't take it too seriously; Ludwig, after all, was only one of nine children, and his brother, Paul, who after World War I was the world's premier left-handed pianist, makes for more dashing reading. I came away thinking that this must be a very good book about Vienna at its brilliant twilight, before the city slipped back into the provinciality from which it had emerged only slightly more than two centuries earlier.

The author brings another advantage to his subject: he is a music critic (and sometime composer), and the Wittgensteins were the musical family par excellence. Their palatial residence in Vienna contained seven grand pianos, including two Bösendorfer Imperials. Among the guests at their home concerts, which took place in a special Musiksaal adorned with a marble statue of the nude Beethoven squatting and glowering atop a high plinth, were Brahms, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg and Mahler. All the Wittgensteins, parents and children alike, were prodigiously talented musicians. They “pursued music with an enthusiasm that, at times, bordered on the pathological,” Waugh writes. Concertizing together seems to have been for them a wordless medium of communication, affording a respite from the usual family tension and bickering.

Echt Wien.

¶ Armond White's review of Frankly, My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited, Molly Haskell's semi-scholarly reconsideration of one of the most famous motion pictures ever made, is very serious, but it feels torn in different directions, toward both an academic film analysis that is rather out of place at the Times and a discussion of the significance of pop culture generally.

She is most comfortable examining the male-female sexual dynamics. Leigh’s Scarlett and Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler (who provides a climax to their tumultuous saga by uttering the memorable exit line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”) have become archetypes of American heterosexual romance — its allure and its collapse. Haskell dissects their images, provocatively hinting at the film’s true basis in screwball comedy. She also contemplates hidden notions of gender identity, Southern mores, Civil War history and early-20th-century sexual fantasy.

¶ Rich Cohen appears to like The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, David Grann's dual account of a late-Victorian explorer, Percy Fawcett, and of his own distinctly less stouthearted attempt to follow Fawcett's footsteps.

The book is screwball, in other words, a hybrid in which the weak, fear-wracked reporter from the present age confronts the crazed iron men of yore, citizens of a country as grand and gone as the kingdom of the Incas. The result is a powerful narrative, stiff lipped and Victorian at the center, trippy at the edges, as if one of those stern men of Conrad had found himself trapped in a novel by García Márquez. Along the way, Grann examines dozens of subjects that seem more and more mythical, suggesting a kind of magical nonfiction — the myth of the white Indian, for example, the fate of explorers who vanished searching for Fawcett, the habits of carnivorous fish, some which latch on to and live off the holiest, most tender of human organs. But in the end, the book is mostly about the jungle itself, the real and shrinking wilderness that can be traversed on Google maps, but also the wilderness as a metaphor that can be glimpsed but never charted — the world as it really is, where everything wants to infect you and even flowers want you dead. Which is why Fawcett, in his relentless drive into the bush, supposedly in pursuit of a goal but really going because going is the same as being alive, is a stand-in for all those who keep feeding themselves to the beast. This is what Grann means when he writes of his own magazine stories: “They typically have one common thread: obsession. They are about ordinary people driven to do extraordinary things — things that most of us would never dare — who get some germ of an idea in their heads that metastasizes until it consumes them.”

If this could be said of a travel classic, it could also, unfortunately, be said of a self-important stunt. Mr Cohen shies from nailing the book beneath either rubric.

¶ It is perhaps only fitting that one nonfiction title should also suffer from too-short treatment this week. Gaiutra Bahadur clearly likes Azadeh Moaveni's Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran, but her storytelling approach risks casting the book into a chick-lit bin.

But while Azadeh Moaveni does indeed deliver details of her romance with the son of an Iranian textile tycoon, there’s another, more intriguing relationship at the core of this memoir.

It’s embodied by a certain Mr. X, the intelligence agent the Islamic Republic has assigned to shadow Moaveni’s movements as a reporter for Time magazine. . .

FICTION

¶ Marlon James's The Book of Night Women gets one of those strange NYTBR reviews in which great claims are made for a novel whose reviewer, in this case Kaiama L Glover, doesn't have much room to work in. Here is the review's first sentence, followed by its final paragraph. The space in between is devoted entirely to storytelling.

Marlon James’s second novel is both beautifully written and devastating.

Significant parts of The Book of Night Women are, understandably, very difficult to read. Rape, torture, murder and other dehumanizing acts propel the narrative, never failing to shock in both their depravity and their humanness. It is this complex intertwining that makes James’s book so disturbing and so eloquent. Writing in the spirit of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker but in a style all his own, James has conducted an experiment in how to write the unspeakable — even the unthinkable. And the results of that experiment are an undeniable success.

You wouldn't find reviews of books by Toni Morrison or Alice Walker crammed into half-pages or less.

¶ In another too-short review, Dennis Overbye calls Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor, (a novel with a plot reminiscent of the film Memento) "deceptively elegant, but evidence of this is lacking in the underbrush of his storytelling. (Stephen Snyder translates.)

¶ Liesl Schillinger's review of Every Man Dies Alone, a curious German novel dating from 1947 is the sort of piece that places her at the top of the class of writers who toil in the vineyard of the Book Review. She packs in a world of information about Rudolf Ditzen, a disturbed man who borrowed the names "Hans" and "Fallada" from the Brothers Grimm and who died shortly before the appearance of this, his last book (translated by Michael Hofmann). But the background never upstages the book under review, which is based on a harrowing but courageous real-life story of wartime Berlin.

But what can be made of the author himself? An enigmatic, complicated figure, Fallada has been the subject of a handful of biographies in German. The fascinating scholarly afterwords contributed to Little Man — What Now? by Philip Brady and to The Drinker by John Willet retrace the author’s life and work, and weigh his contribution. They acknowledge that the critics of Fallada’s own era praised him for his “authenticity” and well-drawn characters but questioned his imaginative powers, often dismissing his writing as unpolished or workmanlike — as, in short, an overly literal interpretation of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) that overtook German arts and letters in the 1920s and ’30s in revolt against abstraction and expressionism. But at the remove of more than half a century, Fallada’s reanimation of the actions, motivations and private terrors of Berliners who are long since dead — leaving a full record of wickedness and, sometimes, goodness — is infused with something else. Call it Alte Sachlichkeit: the reality of another age, restored.

¶ The problem with brilliant page-and-a-half reviews is the half-page left over. For the third time this week, an impressive-sounding book of fiction (this time, there's nonfiction as well) is crammed into the tail of Ms Schillinger's essay. Floyd Skloot tells us something about the difficult Portuguese author, António Lobo Antunes, in this review of The Fat Man and Infinity: And Other Writings.

In the second section, Lobo Antunes reflects on traffic lights and gas cylinders, book signings and photo sessions, and suggests that how we think about such mundane matters reveals the creative mind at work. He includes a contradictory account of how he started writing. This time, he was riding a streetcar at the age of 12 and heard “the call, the vocation, the certainty of a fate entirely unconnected with my plans.” This led him to decide he was a writer, to compose poetry no one liked (or paid for). “Between the ages of 12 and 13 I cooked up a dozen or so works of various types, all of them remarkable: novels, odes, plays.” Later, in a third version, he “never made a conscious decision to be a writer.”

The fact that Margaret Jull Costa translated this book into English is a more reliable guide to its quality than anything that Mr Skloot has to say about it.

¶ Mike Peed's review of Elie Wiesel's A Mad Desire to Dance is almost brutally unsympathetic, as though to scold the author for taking up space deserved by more conventional novelists. If the editors share Mr Peed's estimation of the book, then they had no business assigning it for review, to anyone. At the end, the reviewer suggests that he may have misunderstood the book.

Such facile insights add little to Elie Wiesel’s legacy. But perhaps they’re beside the point. In One Generation After, a collection of essays and stories published in 1970, Wiesel declared that he attaches “more importance to questions than to answers. For only the questions can be shared.” When there are no answers, the writing must go on.

¶ Clare Clark's review of Doghead (translated by Tiina Nunnally), a novel by Morten Ramsland that was very well-received in the writer's Denmark, hangs on comparisons that European critics have made to the work of John Irving and T C Boyle, and seems intent on telling those critics that, no, their boy has not mastered the licks of an edgy kind of American fiction.

For all their eccentric habits and physical peculiarities, Irving’s characters are essentially realistic, capable of making a profound emotional connection with the reader. Ramsland’s are larger-than-life creations who go by a roll call of nicknames, among them Jug Ears, the Bath Plug and the Little Bitch. In the world of the Erikssons, life is shocking and childhood brutal. No one is to be trusted, family least of all. Rambunctious, often imaginative, invariably cruel, the stories rattle through a catalog of adultery, duplicity and casual violence. A father sells his son’s precious coin collection to buy booze. A mother hides the letters sent to her son by his distant love. A brother tapes his sister making out with her boyfriend in the room next door and shares the cassettes with his friends. None of these characters learn from their mistakes. Instead they run away from them. And those who stay make more.

I don't see what purpose this review serves.

Charles Bock calls John Wray's novel, Lowboy, "uncompromising, often gripping and generally excellent." He then proceeds to write a review that makes that praise look like understatement.

This is a meticulously constructed novel, immensely satisfying in the perfect, precise beat of its plot. Wray, however, has larger goals than a thrill ride. The book’s core is a nexus of tragedy . . .

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