Reviewing the Book Review

Crimes of Innocence

15 March 2009

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

This week's issue is notable for inadequate half-page reviews. The one useful half-page review proves that the brief allotment is not necessarily to blame, but it does appear that few reviewers are capable of the necessary concision. That said, Nicholas Thompson is heroically concise reviewing Afghanistan book.

FACT

¶ Although Geoffrey Wolff wishes that Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life were a tad shorter, he admires the book overall, and specifically praises Bailey's literary judgment, a quality all too infrequently discerned among recent literary biographers.

Readers of literary biographies should long ago have disabused themselves of the illusion that writers learn or wish to learn from their works how to live their lives. But in Cheever the distress between “seemed” and “was” became so flagrant that Bailey has had to take extraordinary pains to account for it. It’s a paradox of the best literary biography (and this book is even more eloquent and resourceful than Bailey’s celebrated biography of Richard Yates, A Tragic Honesty) that it manages to unscramble the omelet. Provoked by Cheever’s art — and why else trouble his rest? — it disassembles such a synthetic achievement as The Wapshot Chronicles and reveals that novel’s constituent parts in the writer’s personal history. Whether this process is wholesome or perverse is for others to judge, but it requires a bomb-disarmer’s nerve and tact.

¶ Alexandra Jacobs is surprised that an anthology about various experiences of menarche, My Little Red Book, edited by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, can be so interesting, even though the accounts of actual physical experiences "grow mundane upon repetition."

Indeed, “My Little Red Book” is as much a referendum on mothering styles as a mass chronicle of menstruation, whose details, frankly, grow mundane upon repetition: the widening surprise splotch, the cramps, the sense of life’s great unfairness. Customarily told the news first, some moms laugh, others cry, others distribute supplies without visible emotion. They humiliate (by telling everyone in sight); or intimidate (issuing dire warnings about teen pregnancy); or celebrate, with florid gifts and arcane ritual.

¶ James Traub's review of Rashid Khalidi's Sowing Crisis: The cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East treats it more as a card in an ongoing ideological debate about the Middle East than as a study in its own right — as polemic rather than as history.

But is it true, as Khalidi alleges, that President Truman favored Israel, and ultimately agreed to recognize the country, because he had more pro-Jewish than Arab voters to answer to? Only by checking a footnote does the reader learn that this comment, which Khalidi quotes twice, comes from an American diplomat who may not have been in the room when Truman is said to have uttered it.

Surely this complaint is disproportionate. Whether or not Truman made the remark is a negligible detail in the already well-documented history of American involvement in the Middle East that Mr Khalidi seeks to interpret.

¶ Steve Coates succeeds at making Mary Beard's The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found sound not only like a lot of fun but also a very important read.

Beard, a classics professor at Cambridge University,takes cheeky, undisguised delight in puncturing the many fantasies and misconceptions that have grown up around Pompeii — sown over the years by archaeologists and classicists no less than Victorian novelists and makers of “sword and sandal” film extravaganzas. While many scholars build careers through increasingly elaborate reconstructions of the ancient world, Beard consistently stresses the limits of our knowledge, the precariousness of our constructs and the ambiguity or contradiction inherent in many of our sources. “There is hardly a shred of evidence for any of it” serves as her battle cry, and it’s a noble one.

¶ Gary J Bass's review of Mike Rapport's 1848: Year of Revolution is a study in storytelling. Having disturbingly claimed that the uprisings of 1848 "are not well known in the United States," Mr Bass proceeds to tell us about them instead of appraising Mr Bass's book — until the last paragraph, anyway.

It’s hard to read this book without feeling a deepening reverence for successful postrevolutionaries like Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel, who first made revolution and then made the unheroic compromises that are the lifeblood of actual democratic government. People will always thrill to utopian demands for perfection, from Mazzini to Che. But it’s what comes next that counts: the daily humdrum of effective governance.

¶ In his review of Bill Barich's Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub, James Oliver Cury never says why such a book is worth reviewing. If he began with his closing paragraph, who would keep reading?

By the end of his travelogue, Barich admits that “there’s a good deal of hand-wringing . . . over what it actually means to be Irish” and that plenty of Irish men and women don’t actually mind the disappearance of old pubs. And while he finds a few worthy spots, he never deeply contemplates the paradox that makes them worthy. He has, after all, based his notion of authenticity on a few plays and poems and an American movie — on a romanticized stereotype.

¶ Nicholas Thompson gives Gregory Feifer's The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan an excellent review, keen enough to fire up the reader's enthusiasm for reading yet more about Central Asia's black hole of impolity.

The book’s structure and style mean that Feifer adds little specifically to the question that will draw many readers: What can the United States learn for its own wars today? Feifer flicks at the topic, but the grim answers he offers have already been absorbed: don’t shoot up wedding parties, never underestimate fanatics who know the terrain, and remember that all politics in Afghanistan are messy. Remember, too: Fighting these guys is hard. According to Feifer, the mujahedeen were canny enough to smuggle heroin into Soviet barracks to get their adversaries hooked.

Even if Feifer fails to offer what his publisher calls “striking lessons for the 21st century,” he succeeds in his main goal: presenting a new side of a long, sorry war that would leave an estimated 1.3 million Afghans dead and the Taliban surging through the ravaged countryside toward Kabul. It’s “a tragic human story,” Feifer writes — and one that he recounts with skill.

¶ Dahlia Lithwick is disappointed that Jeff Benedict's Little Pink House: A True Story of Defiance and Courage isn't more an account of the law in the Kelo-New London case and less an Erin Brockovitch-type exemplary tale (which most readers would clearly prefer). Perhaps the book deserves an essay on popular taste more than it does a review.

Pitting an all-too-human Susette Kelo against the heartless “five strangers in black robes” is a convenient frame for the narrative. It’s also a dangerous one, as Kelo herself learned when, in the swirl of publicity surrounding the decision, she began getting calls from militia groups offering to help protect her home with guns.

¶ Ammon Shea likes John McWhorter's book about the mongrel background of the English language, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English but leaves one wondering if it is the professional look at syntax that he suggests it is, or merely another word maven's book. Again, the review is too short: if Bastard Tongue is serious, it ought to garner more space; if not —

FICTION

¶ I'm not quite sure, but Marilyn Stasio seems to be disappointed that Olen Steinhauer's The Tourist isn't more of a spy thriller than a character study. Quote.

Even if he didn’t look like George Clooney, Milo would be the kind of principled hero we long to believe still exists in fiction, if not in life. The only drawback to this warm close-up of the protagonist is that it skews the novel, rendering it more of a character study than a full-bodied espionage novel. There’s plenty of plot, but it’s messy rather than complex; and while the cast is thickly populated with career spooks from France, Russia, China, Sudan and components of the former Yugoslavia, few of them develop into worthy adversaries, and their agendas are so murky that we’re not particularly anxious to get back to them.

It appears that the editors have viewed this book through the wrong prism.

¶ Dean Bakopoulos is impressed by Patrick Somerville's brief but packed novel, The Cradle.

Even if he didn’t look like George Clooney, Milo would be the kind of principled hero we long to believe still exists in fiction, if not in life. The only drawback to this warm close-up of the protagonist is that it skews the novel, rendering it more of a character study than a full-bodied espionage novel. There’s plenty of plot, but it’s messy rather than complex; and while the cast is thickly populated with career spooks from France, Russia, China, Sudan and components of the former Yugoslavia, few of them develop into worthy adversaries, and their agendas are so murky that we’re not particularly anxious to get back to them.

More generous quotation would have helped to convey the "lean" quality of the novel.

¶ Are half-page reviews ever justifiable? On page 16 of this week's issue, Wendy Lesser writes enthusiastically about Chloe Aridjis's Book of Clouds.

From the massive, anonymous housing blocks of the former East Berlin, to the late-night and often literally underground “parties” held in abandoned buildings, to the centrally located Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (which she experiences as eerily disorienting on a shadowy, moonlit night), Tatiana’s Berlin is exactly the one you will find if you go there. In some ways her alienation makes her an even more accurate observer than a “normal” person would be, because she focuses excessively on the ghosts who are not present as well as the strangers who are — and that, too, is part of the real Berlin.

But, as often happens with these short reviews, the novel sounds merely odd. Adam Haslett, in contrast, dislikes Helen Humphreys's Coventry; when he's not storytelling, he's complaining about Ms Humphreys's artistic decisions; as a review, his contribution is worse than useless.

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