Reviewing the Book Review

Crimes of Innocence

8 March 2009

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

There's a Chinese connection to this week's issue that goes beyond the cover story. The quartet of titles — two novels, two books of reportage; two lingering on the Cultural Revolution, two observing China's emergence from Maoist thrall — ought to provide readers who haven't quite tuned in to modern China with apt beginnings.

FACT

¶ In the first of the nonfiction China reviews, Joshua Hammer makes an unsympathetic audience of one for Xinran's China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation (various translators). Although he admires some of the interviews, he seems to disdain the style of the book overall — and to forget that it has been translated from a language in which people talk quite differently about commonplaces.

¶ Jonathan Spence, dean of Chinese history in this country, praises James Fallows's Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports From China for its broad views of today's China — up to a point, the point where the journalistic nature of Mr Fallows's accounts shows through.

The difficulty with such ambitious and highly topical reporting is that however carefully the observer tries to catch something permanent that might underlie the fleeting moment, the world is always changing before his readers’ eyes. It’s unavoidable that Fallows’s book, germane to the needs of the moment though the original essays were, is doomed by chronology and structure to be unpredictably behind the times: post-earthquake but pre-Olympic, post-Internet-firewall yet pre-Obama.

Nothing in “Postcards From Tomorrow Square” could have seemed more logical than the list of the greatest and most confident players in the global gambling game in Macao as described by Fallows in September 2007: “So which side will prevail in the battle for Macao? The shady system that has been the backbone of its economy, and that local companies still rely on? Or the international standards that the Nevada Gaming Commission and the shareholders of the world are forcing on the likes of Wynn, Adelson, and MGM Mirage?” From the vantage point of 2007, compiling a list of the effective long-range and international guarantors of honesty and prosperity at those same Macao casinos would have seemed a no-brainer: the big combines that came to mind ranged from “Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch to Deutsche Bank and Citibank.” Now such a list has other echoes.

Surely today's readers are viscerally aware that almost anything appearing in book form is bound to contain a measure of superseded material. That's hardly an argument against the solid reporting of a writer such as Mr Fallows, our dean of Asia-beat journalists.

¶ Katie Roiphe pouts a bit about Elaine Showalter's inclusion of second-tier writers in A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, and she complains about a few of the author's contemporary choices. That Ms Showalter is writing a feminist account of American literature rather than a literary one might have been dealt with in one sentence.

Still, this comprehensive record of American women’s attempts at literary achievement holds its own fascination; the small, vivid portraits of women’s lives are extremely readable and enlightening. Writing about times when women’s stories were too often ignored, Showalter offers a series of vignettes about what their struggles consisted of and how difficult it was for a woman to forge a professional identity as a writer. She is concerned with the drama of women writing; the lives she describes are filled with abortions, divorces, affairs, unhappy marriages, postpartum depressions and suicides. Her short, incisive biographies offer a glimpse into the exotic travails of the past and the eternal concerns of female experience; and, of course, from a purely biographical standpoint the literary mediocrities can be as interesting as the successes.

That's better.

¶ William Julius Wilson's More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City gets a sympathetic review from Richard Thompson. Mr Thompson sees Mr Wilson as carrying on the bitterly-attacked sociological analysis of black families authored decades ago by Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

The urban poor need remedies that judges cannot order: public and private investment to create jobs that pay a living wage, training to help them learn new skills and understand the job market, and most of all a chance to move into racially and economically integrated neighborhoods where there are better opportunities and healthier cultural norms. Wilson’s levelheaded, thorough and unemotional analysis should help such badly needed policies prevail in the court of public opinion.

¶ Baz Dreisinger is impressed by Martha Sandweiss's Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, but confesses his dislike of the deceiver in this love story, a man who claimed to be black in order, it would seem, to live with an attractive black woman. He does not share Ms Sandweiss's belief that the man loved his wife.

With every page of “Passing Strange” — as King runs off yet again to the frontier, or to Cuba or the Bahamas, leaving his pregnant wife, Sandweiss imagines, “exhausted and grateful for her husband’s visits, however short or infrequent they might be” — I liked King less. Details denote an unflattering portrait: his sport of “slumming” in places like Manhattan’s Tenderloin district — as a precursor to Norman Mailer’s “white Negroes” — and his passion for “primitive” women, ogled on trips to Tahiti and Hawaii. Ultimately, a lacuna lies at the heart of Sandweiss’s book: she tells us that “King loved Ada, and she loved him back,” but do we really know that? Even his letters to his wife — relating “the daily comfort of remembering that far away in the East there is a dear brown woman who loves me” — struck me as disingenuous.

Somehow, though, the man's good nature seems somewhat beside the point of Ms Sandweiss's story.

¶ Of a book about uranium, Drake Bennett notes wryly that it is not necessary to vaunt a claim that the substance "shaped the world"; we know all to well that it did. Having noted that Tim Zoellner is better at description than analysis, Mr Bennett is happy to recommend Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World as a useful book.

Today, concern about climate change and desire for “energy independence” have driven former skeptics to take another look at nuclear power. Some even talk of a “nuclear renaissance.” At the same time, experts in and out of government worry that the small club of nuclear weapons states is soon likely to grow, as North Korea’s nuclear arsenal or Iran’s potential arsenal incites a regional arms race. In preparation, it probably wouldn’t hurt to get to know the rock at the root of it.

FICTION

¶ Pico Iyer's intense review of Yiyun Li's The Vagrants suggests a book of great power — the power of long-cooked cabbage.

If The Vagrants sounds like a grim and lightless book, though heart-rending at every turn, it is. Steadily collecting atrocities and amassing paragraphs with the solidity of bricks, it replaces the tender ease and range of some of Li’s earlier stories with a much more focused, imprisoned rage. It can seem, in fact, less like a novel — since movement and plot are fairly sparing — than a counter-document of sorts, a private, unsanctioned portrait of those interiors (in every sense) that are always left out of the grand official picture. It is an individual’s response to a collectivist madness, and since that individual is a novelist, it goes into precisely those places, psychological and emotional, that five-year plans try to deny or idealize out of existence.

If this novel does indeed present a challenge to the reader's intestinal fortitude, then Mr Iyer ought to have located a compensating appeal.

¶ Jess Row regrets that Anglophone readers, unfamiliar with such classics as The Dream of the Red Chamber, will find Yu Hua's Brothers (translated by Eileen Cheng-yin Chow and Carlos Rojas) to be an indigestible stew of incompatible literary styles.

Does this mean Brothers is untranslatable? Perhaps it’s better to say that the strangeness of this English version demonstrates just how wide the chasm of common reference and understanding between China and the West still is. It’s not so much a matter of how many books are translated as which books are taught and promoted and viewed as essential. I’d like to think that in another generation the heroine of The Dream of the Red Chamber, Lin Daiyu, could be as recognizable to English-speaking readers as Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, but I’m not wildly optimistic. Until then, I’m afraid, Brothers will fall on ears that, while not entirely deaf, are somewhat hard of hearing.

What the novel clearly needs, then, is a reviewer capable of encouraging inexperienced readers, not one who throws up his hands at the difficulties facing them.

¶ David Gates tackles the most controversial novel of the hour, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones (translated by Charlotte Mandell), and concludes that the author has miscalculated in his attempt to present an extremely twisted protagonist as a common-man, banality-of-evil witness to the Holocaust.

Given all that’s happening outside this narrator’s head, who cares? In some other novel, Aue might be a magnificently dark, Beckettian spirit. “My pineal eye, gaping vagina in the middle of my forehead, projected a crude, gloomy, implacable light on this world, and allowed me to read each drop of sweat, each pimple, each poorly shaven hair on the garish faces that assailed me as an emotion, the infinite cry of anguish of the child forever prisoner in the atrocious body of a clumsy adult incapable, even by killing, of avenging himself for the fact of living.” But in this book, his exquisitely mistuned consciousness seems a form of dandyism — a moral and spiritual luxury item in a world of devastation.

¶ Zoë Heller's new novel, The Believers, gets a rather tired review from Jill Abramson. We're tossed a great chunk of a quotation, to do with as we will; the reviewer's prefatory comment signally fails to distinguish between a maddening character and a character maddeningly presented.

The most maddening character is rude, profane Audrey, whose grating demands that Joel be kept alive at any cost drive his doctors and also her family nuts. The author seems to have little patience or empathy for her, either. “Like an old lady who persists in wearing the Jungle Red lipstick of her glory days, she had gone on for a long time, fondly believing that the stratagems of her youth were just as appealing as they had ever been. By the time she woke up and discovered that people had taken to making faces at her behind her back — that she was no longer a sexy young woman with a charmingly short fuse but a middle-aged termagant — it was too late. Her anger had become a part of her. It was a knotted thicket in her gut, too dense to be cut down and too deeply entrenched in the loamy soil of her disappointments to be uprooted.”

¶ Laura Miller neatly derives the likely audience for Eric Kraft's collection of three novellas, Flying.

If I could offer you a Venn diagram — which is just the sort of thing that’s liable to turn up in a Kraft novel — it would show the extremely slender overlap between the set of readers who like the ineffable, high-concept fiction of, say, Jorge Luis Borges or David Foster Wallace, and the set of readers who favor fondly comic portraits of small-town life in mid-20th-century America after the fashion of Garrison Keillor or Jean Shepherd, whose own autobiographical writings inspired the movie A Christmas Story. Each of these genres has a devoted audience, but not many people read both.

¶ In another review than warns us of difficult material, Rebecca Barry seems content, in her review of Patrick deWitt's Ablutions: Notes for a Novel, to argue that, since addiction is brutal, a novel about addiction will be brutal, too.

His character descriptions are brilliant, and he is well versed in the gritty truths of a hard drinker’s life — the way a seasoned drunk learns to vomit silently into a toilet, the way he drinks beer instead of whiskey to “give aid” to his liver, the way he and his wife fight more over whether he takes aspirin or Advil for his hangover than they do over the fact that he has hepatitis and is guzzling whiskey. And it is to deWitt’s credit that he has written a book the way an addict might — as a series of picaresque moments that are sometimes poetic, sometimes terrible, sometimes funny, often all three at once.

What's needed her is an explanation of why "it is to deWitt's credit" that he captures an addict's voice, if only as a gesture to whom the proposition might be lacking self-evidence.

¶ Natasha Wimmer rather likes César Aira's Ghosts, and she calls its author a "light-footed experimentalist." Storytelling is therefore a very poor way of conveying enthusiasm for this short novel, for summarized experiments have a way of sounding dreadfully twee.

At one point earlier in the book, we learn that Patri could have earned a blue belt in karate but never took the exam, “for various reasons, including her innate distaste for perfection.” That distaste is shared by Aira, and it is one of the keys to an appreciation of his novels. Any time an image, thought or scene is about to settle harmoniously, he jerks the floor out from underfoot. These exhilarating effects and the novel’s aesthetic delights are captured with delicate precision by the translator Chris Andrews.

¶ Marlena Watrous's too-short review of Sara Houghteling's Pictures at an Exhibition provides another instance of ill-advised storytelling. There simply isn't enough space in which to judge the peculiar qualities of a novel while attempting, as storytellers always must, to make the material conform to readily-intelligible outlines. The result is inevitably gassy.

Aiding him is the lovely Rose, whose passion for art preservation is matched only by Max’s passion for her. (Houghteling based her character on the real-life Rose Valland, who worked at the Louvre and secretly kept track of looted art in meticulous records that allowed for some of its repossession.) Max pines after Rose from start to finish, in a lengthy unrequited love story. Her cause is noble, but her character is static; her nunlike devotion to art makes his fixation frustrating. The more interesting, dynamic relationship here is between Max and his father. Houghteling shows how we hurt the people we love the most, often when we seek to protect them from the truth.

Permalink | Portico | About this feature

Write to me