Reviewing the Book Review

Always on My Mind

12 April 2009

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

¶ Kate Christensen hails The Song Is You as Arthur Phillips's breakthrough novel, as "brainiacal" as its predecessors but more "tenderer and more visceral."

A less rigorous writer might have turned this story into a sentimental, overwritten swamp. But thanks to Phillips’s thwarting of our (and his characters’) expectations, and to his objective, amused intelligence about the deep ways music affects us, he dances like Fred Astaire over any alligators and mangrove roots lurking in turgid waters.

¶ Charles Morris's largely favorable review of American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile diligently lays out the terms of the debate between the book's late author, Richard John Neuhaus, and his philosophical adversary, Richard Rorty. Mr Morris makes his reservations clear:

Good as it is, Neuhaus’s book could have been better. He does not accept that in the turmoil that followed Roe v. Wade,the country actually did engage in a debate about political morality, and that it has been resolved, as a 2008 South Dakota referendum suggests, in favor of rule-based access to abortion. Many religious denominations from the same traditions as Neuhaus’s have endorsed that position. He also sometimes lapses into too-narrowly “Catholic” modes of analysis, which will limit his audience. A section on the relations between Christians and Jews is the kind of theological inside baseball that few believers other than those professionally engaged in such matters would care much about. Finally, he interprets a short article written by Rorty shortly before his death as a kind of recantation, and does so, I’m sorry to say, smugly. I can find nothing in it to support Neuhaus’s interpretation.

¶ Jack Miles writes about James Carroll's Practicing Catholic with respect but less than wholehearted sympathy.

“The Catholic people have already changed,” Carroll writes, “and this book” — autobiography though it may seem — “is that story. Catholics came to understand that they themselves — not their priests, bishops and pope — are the church.”

So Carroll believes. I believe otherwise. In the wake of the clerical pedophilia scandal, I thought it just barely possible that lay Catholic reform groups like Voice of the Faithful might either force more democratic, more effectively self-correcting governance on the Roman Catholic Church as a whole or introduce it into the American Catholic Church in spite of the Vatican. But such groups never became a working majority, and now the moment has passed. The “new kind of Catholic identity” that Carroll names as the very subject of his book I see as a faded hope rather than, with him, an accomplished fact. It remains a brave hope, however, for all that, and no centurion of the pen is worthier than he to keep it alive and burning.

¶ Storytelling does not prevent Steven Heighton from assessing the literary quality of Paulette Jiles's The Color of Lightning.

Historical novels are by nature elegies. This is especially true of novels of the Old West, and never more so than in the form Cormac McCarthy has refined — call it the Poet’s Western. Paulette Jiles, an acclaimed poet as well as a novelist, lodges The Color of Lightning deep within this genre, packing her prose with inventive metaphor, luxuriant detail and flights of fierce, austere poetry, as well as hymns to the Texas landscape. This is a place where wind-whipped grasses “all bent in various yielding flows, with the wild buckwheat standing in islands, stiff with its heads of grain and red branching stems,” and where dawn can conjure up “morning in paradise,” with “fading stars like night watchmen walking the periphery of darkness and calling out that all is well.”

¶ Liesl Schillinger feels that Joanna Smith Rakoff's diligence in using Mary McCarthy's The Group as a template for a contemporary novel, A Fortunate Age, gets in the way of her characters' development.

Rakoff’s book is an intentional good-faith homage to “The Group,” but the pity in this overliteral observance is that Rakoff’s writing is strongest when she describes characters who belong more emphatically to our time. McCarthy wrote about strait-laced Protestant virgins; Rakoff writes of free-spirited Jews — men and women — who have the typical sexual experience of their demographic. With one significant exception: unlike McCarthy’s Vassar group, which includes a discreet lesbian alumna, not one member of the core Oberlin posse of actors, musicians, writers and teachers is gay. Why impose the mores of Vassar ’33 on the Oberlin class of ’94?

¶ Miranda Seymour claims, in her review of Andrea Wulf's Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the birth of an Obsession, that horticulture as an obsession of English men and women dates from the Eighteenth Century. That seems off to me by at least a century, but I'm no expert. Ms Seymour certainly made me eager to read Ms Wulf's book, and find out for myself.

Throughout The Brother Gardeners, Wulf’s flair for storytelling is combined with scholarship, brio and a charmingly airy style. (It’s hard to resist her comparison of the soft needles and dangling cones of an Eastern hemlock to “feather boas carelessly slung around a woman’s neck.”) She has written a delightful book — and you don’t need to be a gardener to enjoy it.

¶ Michael Beschloss doesn't come out and say so, but his review of Leslie Gelb's Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy suggests at more than one point that this is just another old man's ventilation. Here, for example.

The author wishes to reclaim the middle ground in the debates over American foreign policy between the two parties, toward both of which he feels “a bit surly.” At the start of his extended analysis of world power, he complains that “the core meaning of power has been lost, or even worse, hijacked by various liberals and conservatives,” who “repeatedly corner our leaders into making commitments they cannot fulfill,” as well as groups like “America’s premature grave diggers” and “the world-is-flat globalization crowd,” presumably led by Gelb’s successor on the Times Op-Ed page, Thomas L. Friedman.

Or here.

Gelb may also underestimate both the value and the importance of mass citizen involvement in American foreign policy. For example, had Johnson trusted his exquisite political instincts and consulted a few more Americans outside the Eastern professional diplomatic establishment, he might have realized how unsustainable his war in Vietnam would turn out to be if he failed to win it cheaply and quickly. Gelb’s chapter about domestic political influences on top foreign-policy makers is excellent on think tanks, cable TV and lobbies but does not discuss the mass influence of the Internet. (The chapter takes no serious note of blogs, except to mention that some think-tank analysts write them and to praise some bloggers for reading government documents.) In fact, future historians may well conclude that one of the most formidable forces in mobilizing opposition to George W. Bush’s adventure in Iraq was the widely read liberal blog Daily Kos.

¶ David Kirby is astonishingly coy about stating that, in Slamming Open the Door, Kathleen Sheeder Bonnano tells about her daughter's murder in a series of poems. Surely room ought to have been made for one substantial excerpt.

Readers will have to step outside of a familiar, comforting tradition of poetic grief while reading this book. Here are not the solemn measures of Shelley and Tennyson. Whereas another writer might have turned this hellish trip into stylized, polished work, Bonanno is still in the heart of the journey. Theodor Adorno warned against making art out of the Holocaust, saying that to strip the ordeal of its horror was to deny what the victims experienced. As I read, I wished Bonanno had developed her material in a way that would have spared me, and then I felt as thoughtless as the mourners in “What Not to Say.”

We ought to have been enabled to form our own judgment on this point.

¶ Walter Isaacson does a fine job of helping Richard Beeman's new history of the Constitutional Convention, Plain Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution, stand out from the pack, and on the important issue of compromise.

Beeman’s judiciousness, however, usually serves him well. He is able to avoid the overemphasis some historians place on the economic interests of the framers while still showing when they were motivated by parochial and personal concerns. For example, the Virginians shared with other Southerners the desire to protect slavery, but they were more willing to stop the importation of new slaves (thereby increasing the value of the ones they already owned) than were delegates from Georgia and South Carolina, where rice and indigo farming created a greater demand for them.

¶ John Leland is not an entirely sympathetic reviewer of The Beats: A Graphic History, by Harvey Pekar and Ed Piskor, largely, it seems, because, for a change, a book about faux Outsiders (the well-educated Beats) has been written by genuine Outsiders.

But the medium provides a new angle on a familiar story, in a voice more directly empathetic than those of many prose histories. It gives the hipsters back their body language. In a book that is largely about license and the enlightened rebel, it is easy to find reflections of both in the graphic form. The panels, which are flat and often horrific, capture the dullness and insanity not only of the lives the Beats sought to escape but of the ones they made in their place. The Beats here inhabit a world that looks a lot like Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland. No wonder they had to go go go and not stop till they got there.

Maybe it's Mr Pekar who's the real deal.

¶ Jack Pendarvis is unhappy that Torsten Krol's Callisto is written by an "orher" (author): "But either Krol writes too well or Deefus [the book's narrator] doesn’t write badly enough" I'm not sure what Deefus is supposed to be up to, but Mr Pendarvis is not unhappy about it.

By the time Deefus is spirited away to an undisclosed location under suspicion of terrorism, the punch lines have deepened and the bitterness shines. “I was not tortured, I was closely questioned. Thank you,” Deefus says. “Thank you thank you thank you.” And finally he’s in our heads.

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