Reviewing the Book Review

I'll Go On

5 April 2009

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

¶ Joseph O'Neill quotes generously from the The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume I: 1929-1940, edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More. If he's a fan, he's got a reason: one of Beckett's late letters (not covered in this volume) was written to him.

The kicker, here and elsewhere, is Beckett’s uncanny multilingualism. (Remember, this is the man they entrusted with the translation of portions of “Work in Progress,” a k a “Finnegans Wake,” into French.) Italian phrases and poems judiciously and joyfully pepper these letters, and never gratuitously: Beckett seems practically incapable of an unconscientious utterance. Among the most affecting streams of correspondence is the one he conducts with his teenage cousin in Dublin, a promising student of modern languages. Lucky, lucky fellow, because from Beckett he receives long letters in French and German that are masterpieces of mentorship: learned, utterly uncondescending, self-revealing, personal. (The editors, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, throughout provide translations — executed by George Craig, Dan Gunn and Viola Westbrook — of all foreign-language letters.) It is to the youngster that Beckett makes the crucial admission (in German) that “no sooner do I take up my pen to compose something in English than I get the feeling of being ‘de-personified.’ ”

¶ Robin Romm lets us know right off that Kevin Wilson's Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories is long on imagination but perhaps a bit short on observation.

One of the most striking absences in this lively, inventive book is the sensory. Wilson offers fabulous twists and somersaults of the imagination, but not the details to make them wholly visceral. It’s an approach that can work in fables, but in Wilson’s highly particular world the lack of concrete experience makes some stories feel unfinished. This is not to say that the book isn’t daring and often exquisitely tender. But as Wilson continues to dig into the texture and mystery of the world, his fiction should grow, like his best characters, in strange and remarkable ways. Assuming, of course, he doesn’t blow up first.

¶ Susan Dominus reviews two books on the history of smut in Gotham, and wishes that both were a little racier. Of Kat Long's The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex and Sin in New York City, she writes,

In part because Long keeps the pace moving quickly, there isn’t always time for some of the detail the reader might crave, even for non-prurient reasons. Beyond the bump and grind, what exactly did the fans of burlesque see in some of the many shows that so outraged censors? And who were its stars? Why not lavish a little less space on the nitty-gritty of legal maneuverings and a little more on the actual witty, bawdy lyrics that shocked audiences in Harlem clubs in the ’20s?

Nothing is said about Donna Dennis's Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York to suggest that, period aside, it is any different. Ms Dominus helpfully notes that Ms Dennis's book ends roughly where Ms Long's begins — with the dreadful Anthony Comstock.

¶ Christopher Benfey advises us that, in Dear Husband, her new collection of stories, Joyce Carol Oates applies her trademark Gothic sensibility to what looks like Cheever country.

The smug addresses in Oates’s stories have a certain doomed poignancy, as though luxurious seclusion will summon the very demons it seeks to banish — “a large white Colonial on a hill in Baskings Grove Estates, near Quarton Road”; a “sprawling French Normandy house on a large, partly wooded and professionally landscaped lot in the Village of Fair Hills”; a house with “floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows” on “rural-suburban Edgehill Lane three miles north of the village of Tarkington.” While the nightmare possibilities of cloning turn up in that Norman manor, Oates suggests that an equally insidious kind of replication is taking place in the homogenized lives of the right addresses, the right prep schools (“It’s heartbreaking to see the exit sign for Groton,” one mother sighs, “and not be going there to see my son”) as well as the right universities and the right careers.

¶ Writing about Under Their Thumb: How a Nice Boy From Brooklyn Got Mixed Up With the Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell About It), Peter German's memoir of writing a long-running Rolling Stone's fanzine, "Beggar's Banquet," reviewer Alan Light offers no appraisal of Mr German's prose, either in his newsletter or in his book. The adventure of annotating the band's career seems to have been achievement enough.

Despite such anecdotes, though, this book isn’t really about the Rolling Stones — it’s about being a fan. “Under Their Thumb” is a story of retaining faith, of keeping a flame burning through bad records and band squabbles and even through discovering that your heroes aren’t Golden Gods, but actual people. It also documents a bygone age, before celebrity Web sites, when a kid could spot Mick Jagger at a club, write a description, type it up in a home-stapled newsletter, mail it out a few weeks later and still break news. Now, such sightings are instantly posted on Gawker — and the alluring quality of mystery that defined rock stars has become almost impossible to retain.

¶ Adam Kirsch's moderately favorable assessment of Susan Gubar's Judas: A Biography rests on the following judgment:

Gubar borrows the idea of a biography from Jack Miles, who treated the deity himself in similar terms in God: A Biography (1995). Yet the conceit does not work nearly as well for Judas, and it creates more problems for Gubar than it helps to solve... To do full justice to it would require a team of scholars — in particular, historians of theology and art.

Gubar is neither of these, but a pioneering feminist literary and cultural critic. What she brings to the Judas story, then, is her talent for interpretation...

Unfortunately, Mr Kirsch has nothing to say about Ms Gubar's writing.

¶ Terrence Rafferty's enthusiasm for The Glister, by John Burnside, is almost breathless.

The reason the novel isn’t the downer it might have been is that Burnside’s writing conveys an almost palpable thrill of discovery, a delight in the play of his imagination over this bleak terrain, an irrepressible joy in cultivating metaphor after metaphor and seeing them all, improbably, bloom. Though the town is dying, Burnside has populated it densely, with characters whose different doomed strategies for staying alive give color and variety to the book’s vision of social decline. And plenty happens, at a speedy pace. The narrative has the quick urgency of a threatened creature: it moves like a cockroach streaking from light to the safer dark.

¶ Claire Tomalin writes lucidly about John Guy's dual biography, A Daughter's Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg, that, more gently than the pro-Reformation line of English historians who, like Froude, see More as a "merciless bigot," nonetheless sees the man's medieval limitations, through the silent chafing of his brilliant daughter, Margaret.

She became fluent in Latin and Greek, an excellent letter writer and translator; and his pride in her was great. But although he believed that boys and girls were entitled to equal education, More thought it wrong for women to publish books or to make any show of their learning. So when Margaret, brought up to excel and encouraged by a good tutor, expressed a hope that she might one day publish something, her father warned her off. She must avoid pride, remain modest and accept that men might show off, but not women. “Renown for learning,” he advised, “if you take away moral probity, brings nothing else but notorious and noteworthy infamy, especially in a woman.” Suddenly he sounds more like a medieval churchman than a Renaissance man.

¶ Jeffrey Gettleman pauses in his storytelling account of Gérard Prunier's Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe to pass cautious judgment on the book itself.

Prunier has a reputation as a maverick historian. A research professor at the University of Paris and the director of the French Center for Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa, he has written not only about Rwanda but about Darfur, too. Probably the best way to read him is to assume that most of what he has to say is solidly researched, but that some of it is not. In “Africa’s World War,” for example, Prunier says the Rwandan Army invaded Congo using rubber boats provided by an American aid organization. He cites unnamed eyewitnesses as his sources and presents this as possible evidence of wider American involvement.

¶ Suzanne Daley's review of Mark Gevisser's book about the recently ousted president of South Africa, A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Figure of the South African Dream, is distracted by storytelling from offering a clear and distinct appraisal. Her complaints seem very minute.

He notes that while this is not an authorized biography, Mbeki did cooperate, agreeing to be interviewed seven times, for a total of about 20 hours. During that time, Mbeki never asked Gevisser a question, resisted all small talk and did not touch any food. He kept his hands busy with his pipe, which Gevisser sees as “more than just a way of focusing the mind: it created a scrim between him and his interlocutor, allowing him to work with ideas, unhindered by the mess of human interaction”

¶ Rachel Kushner's unsympathetic review of Achy Obejas's Ruins contrasts lots of interesting-sounding storytelling with harsh judgment. The result is utterly unhelpful.

¶ Sharing the page is Malena Watrous's equally unbeguiled review Tim Gatreaux's novel, The Missing.

Gautreaux has a mythic sense of plot, a keen ear for dialect and vivid powers of description, but subtle he ain’t. Sam analyzes his drive to recover the missing child with an ease that suggests years in therapy: “What propelled him, he wanted to believe, was the awful diminished feeling he suffered whenever he thought of his dead child or of his taken family. If he could make another family whole, maybe that would help.”

¶ Emma Brockes goes out of her way, at the end of a warm review of Arthur Laurents's memoir, Mainly On Directing: Gypsy, West Side Story, and Other Musicals, to call attention to the book's "glimpses of Laurents's 52-year relationship with his partner, Tom Hatcher... to whom the book is a tribute." This puts a nice finish on what is otherwise a catalogue of zingers.

Dismay at the current state of Broadway is, of course, the tradition and privilege of its elder statesmen, but Laurents is saved from sounding too pompous by his wit and a tone more cheeky than plaintive. In the fawning world of show business, how refreshing to hear a director refer to an actor — in this case a minor player called Henry Lascoe, who, in rehearsals for the 1964 musical “Anyone Can Whistle,” caused Laurents and his leading lady no end of trouble — as having “rescued both of us by dropping dead.” Ethel Merman, he writes, couldn’t act; Jerome Robbins cared more for his own “position” than for the show he was putting on. With the exception of those aimed at Mendes, the criticisms are mostly affectionate, and the author’s accounts of tussles with his leads are elevated from gossip to a lesson in why some shows work and others don’t. Not even Rodgers and Hammerstein escape censure. During an out-of-town tryout of “Gypsy,” they gave Laurents a piece of directing advice he has never forgotten for its uselessness.

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