Reviewing the Book Review
American Quilt
19 April 2009
In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.
¶ Leah Hager Cogen's review of Joanna Scott's Follow Me was almost impossible for me to follow, at least until I reached the following passage.
Such interjections remind us that the narrative is not really in the hands of young Sally at all, derailing our suspension of disbelief. But the effect, though disconcerting, is not clumsy. Certainly, it’s not unintended. At best, it produces a weird thrill. Whether readers find these voices annoying or tantalizing is likely to correspond to their appetite for indeterminacy, since we never learn to whom they belong. Scott drops a hint in the novel’s early pages, where she describes legendary beings called Tuskawali, whom the “natives” believed were “the sacred incarnations of fate.” These water-dwellers, we are informed, “have the faces and hair of humans and the spotted bodies of tadpoles.” They turn out not to figure much in the plot, appearing — or rather, half-appearing — only a handful of times: once, while crossing a creek, Sally feels “a cold, wet wormy thing” on the back of her leg and flicks it off; a decade later, miles downriver, she glimpses “some kind of water snake or maybe a salamander or a newt,” its “long-fingered hands clinging to the curve of a rock.” These brief encounters function to communicate Sally’s belief in “a magical being,” but how, or whether, such a belief informs her actions remains less certain.
This at least gave me some idea why the review wasn't making any sense. What the book is doing on the cover remains a mystery.
¶ Pico Iyer writes warmly about Geoff Dyer's Geoff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.
To bring Mann and Ginsberg into the same sentence, to summon and advance European high culture with a slacker casualness, to mix a with-it, slangy, trans-Atlantic prose with the concerns of classic fiction (about self and morality and God): such are the novel fusions that Geoff Dyer has made defiantly his own. ... But the joy of his writing at its best lies in not knowing what’s coming next, and in the fluent way it throws irreverence and transport together with a confessional ease that reflects the spirit of the age. His new book, which is Dyer at his very best, allows Jeff Atman to turn himself inside out and remind us that “it’s possible to be a hundred percent sincere and a hundred percent ironic at the same time.”
¶ Jennifer Senior's review of Columbine treats Dave Cullen's book as
an excellent work of media criticism, showing how legends become truths through continual citation; a sensitive guide to the patterns of public grief, foreshadowing many of the same reactions to Sept. 11 (lawsuits, arguments about the memorial, voyeuristic bus tours); and, at the end of the day, a fine example of old-fashioned journalism.
In short, we're assured that this is not just another true-crime package.
¶ Allison McCulloch's review indicates that Chloe Hooper's account of the killing of an Aboriginal man in a jail cell, Tall Man: The Death of Doomadgee, is nothing less than a book about Australia itself
About 2,500 people live on Palm Island, many of them, like Doomadgee, descendants of those banished from the mainland. Doomadgee’s stepfather was sent to Palm in leg irons in the mid-1950s “after knocking out all the teeth of a missionary who’d flogged his uncle to near death.” Officially a mission, this “tropical gulag” was one of around 20 set up in Queensland to “protect the natives from the violence of the frontier” and bring “light to the darkness” of their lives. Now, the missionaries are gone and the communities they left behind have become “impoverished ghettos of alcoholism, petrol sniffing, brutality, arrests and early deaths.”
¶ Joshua Hammer's review of Jonathan Rabb's historical thriller, set in Berlin in the Twenties, Shadow and Light, not only fails to make a case for distinguishing this book from the run of crime novels but suggests that it isn't very successful by genre standards.
But the biggest problem with Shadow and Light is the plot. Despite a brisk beginning, the narrative soon becomes bogged down by co-conspirators, sinister corporate entities, technical details and extraneous subplots. You know you’re in trouble when one key development hinges on what someone describes as a “glow lamp light modulator for variable density sound.” It’s never quite clear why Thyssen was murdered or what the Hollywood agent’s real mission was or why Thyssen’s mistress disappeared.
What's not clear is what this book is doing in the main pages of the Book Review.
¶ Ross Douthat's review of Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South does a good job of capturing the equivocations of the evangelist's career, particularly on the subject of civil rights, but he is not clear about the stance of the book's author, Steven P Miller.
In Miller’s account, one of 20th-century America’s most important religious leaders emerges as a representative political actor as well, whose example is worth pondering less because he was courageous than because he often wasn’t.
¶ James Longenbach achieves the dual objectives of arguing that the poetry of Constantine Cavafy (Collected Poems, The Unfinished Poems) is important and that he is well-served by translator Daniel Mendelsohn.
Today, Cavafy is well known for writing what might initially seem like two kinds of poems. Beginning in 1911, he wrote poems depicting homosexual desire with an unsensational directness: “They were slow getting dressed, they were sorry to cover / the beauty of their supple nudity / which harmonized so well with the comeliness of their faces.” At the same time, he wrote poems about Greek history — not the well-known glories of the classical era but the long decline that finally concluded with the collapse of the Byzantine Empire: “He wasn’t completely wrong, poor old Gemistus / (let Lord Andronicus and the patriarch suspect him if they like), / in wanting us, telling us to become pagan once again.”
But as Mendelsohn argues in his elegant introduction to the poems, any division between the erotic and historical poems is facile. Whether Cavafy is describing an ancient political intrigue or an erotic encounter that occurred last week, his topic is the passage of time. The lines I’ve just quoted are in fact from the same unfinished poem, “After the Swim”: the naked youths, dressing on the beach, are revealed to be students of Gemistus, a Byzantine Neoplatonist who was condemned by authorities of the Orthodox Church for proclaiming that Zeus was the supreme god.
¶ Michael Agger is fairly sure that Julia Angwin's Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America would have been a better book (aside from the dating issues evident in the title) if the author had had greater access to the men behind the site.
The other missed opportunity was the chance to discuss MySpace as a demographic phenomenon. Angwin does quote a famous paper by the researcher Danah Boyd comparing the Facebook audience — “They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after-school activities” — with that of MySpace: “still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, ‘burnouts,’ ‘alternative kids,’ . . . punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids.” But she doesn’t follow up with any reporting. The story of MySpace as a meeting ground for outsiders is not fully here — Angwin needed Anderson and DeWolfe for their “present at the creation” perspective. It’s our loss that they all didn’t figure out a way to friend one another.
¶ Jonathan Freedland spends a while telling us that Dispatches From the War Room: In the Trenches With Five Extraordinary Leaders, by campaign consultant Stanley Greenberg night have been a great book, before settling down to assure us that it isn't.
Unfortunately, delights of this kind are few and far between. To reach them, you have to wade through a text that is at least 200 pages too long, and through writing that is not only repetitive but also often sloppy. The book’s editor failed in a basic duty: he did not command Greenberg to focus on the forest rather than the trees. The result is that Greenberg insists on giving us what reads like an account of every day of every campaign — the phone call at 7 a.m., the meeting at 9:30, the follow-up phone call, the ordering of room service, the fax to Washington and on and on until even the most curious reader finds his stamina flagging. The Barak chapter opens with a lengthy paragraph on the Greenberg travel arrangements to Israel: “I flew overnight on Philippines Airways, 16 hours from Manila to Frankfurt. Blessedly, it was first class, so I slept O.K. . . . Just five hours later, I was on a long flight to Brussels. Sabena lost my luggage.” There’s more, but I’ll spare you.
It would appear that this is an utterly misbegotten book, the contents of which ought to have appeared in other formats.
¶ Sallie Tisdale has just about no use for Wetlands, which effectively handicaps her ability to make sense of Charlotte Roche's European best-seller.
I wondered at times if Roche was attempting a female version of “American Psycho,” substituting sex and fluid-play for the violence. Perhaps “Wetlands” is intended as a parody of narcissism and arrested development. After three days, having not managed to get her parents in the same room together, Helen deliberately tears her surgical wound open to stay in the hospital longer, in the process injuring herself seriously. Perhaps Roche means to connect this act with Helen’s obsession with eggs. She has sacrificed her fertility already; are we meant to believe that she wants to be their child again so much she will destroy the most specific emblem of adulthood, her sexual organs?
But I suspect such depths did not occur to Roche, who insists that “Wetlands” is a celebration of the female body.
A classically useless review.
¶ The book that ought to be on this week's cover is Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, by Robert Shiller and George Akerlof. Certainly Louis Uchitelle's review leaves no doubt that this is the most significant title in the issue.
Akerlof, a Nobel laureate, and Shiller, a good bet to become one, are prominent mainstream economists. They don’t deviate easily from orthodox theory, with its allegiance to the proposition that people are essentially rational, well informed and unemotional in the numerous transactions that shape the economy. But in “Animal Spirits,” they have deviated — and they have done so just as mainstream theory self-destructs.
There was nothing rational, well informed or unemotional about the behavior that has all but collapsed the economy. That leaves most of America’s economists without a believable framework for explaining how we got into this mess. Akerlof and Shiller are the first to try to rework economic theory for our times. The effort itself makes their book a milestone.
¶ David Gessner is impish with Robert Sullivan's The Thoreau You Don't Know: What the Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant:
Which raises the question of just whom this book is for. The author admits that the answer isn’t “scholars,” and if you already know Thoreau, you already know the Thoreau You Don’t Know.
Perhaps the book is meant for the many readers who were force-fed Thoreau in sophomore English and came away bored or irritated with the preachy teetotaler, who find that Thoreau the nature saint has precisely zero to do with their lives — other than to make them feel a little bad. Sullivan asks those readers to consider what this more complicated, full-bodied and often funny writer has to say to them now, things they perhaps weren’t ready to hear back in high school.
Whether the book is indeed meant for those "many readers," Mr Gessner's review certainly is.
¶ Sandeep Jauhar (a cardiologist on the side) is not very impressed by Sherwin Nuland's ostensibly Chaucerian The Soul of Medicine: Tales From the Bedside.
Nuland writes that these stories are “the lessons of humanity itself, with all its wondrous gifts and its failings.” But this collection suffers from the lack of an overarching theme or idea. If you’re going to write a book of stories with this conceit, the reader has the right to expect more: engaging narrative, insight, reflection. Nuland does provide commentaries to some of the tales, which bring out some historical tidbits, but they have a sort of ad hoc, cobbled-together quality. It would have been better to integrate the commentaries into the tales themselves, and Nuland doesn’t help the situation with gushing encomiums to some of his narrators, physicians he has encountered in the course of his career.
The review itself is a tale of smoking agenda.
¶ And, finally, Paul Greenberg is even less taken with Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life, by Neill Strauss.
After informing us that his book is a distillation of eight years spent learning to “extract drinkable fluids from the ocean, deliver a baby, fly a plane, pick locks, hot-wire cars, build homes, set traps, evade bounty hunters” and so forth, he promises that when it all hits the fan, “you’re going to want to find me. And you’ll want to be doing whatever I’m doing.” Alas, at the risk of having him refuse to deliver my baby, I must report that finding Strauss in his present form is not so much fun.
The problems begin with the subtitle, “This Book Will Save Your Life,” a claim the author modifies slightly in the preface by changing “will” to “may.” If all the skills Strauss touches on were spelled out in a duplicable way, you might actually want to shove the book into your BOB (that’s survivalist for “bug-out bag”) just before the eotwawki (End of the World as We Know It). Instead, Strauss uses the manual conceit as a way to explore survivalist culture and track his own transformation from skill-less writer into Capable Real Man. This would not be an unworthy thing to do, and some may enjoy the author’s frenetic voice as the chapters whiz by. But for this reader, Strauss’s tone and recurrent whiny asides about his hang-ups are tiresome. Do I need to know that his girlfriend is a “quick-witted, high-spirited Russian-American heartbreaker with two-tone black-and-blond hair and a penchant for midriff tops, tight blue jeans and push-up bras”? Or that his teacher Mrs. Kaufman “had the most tremendous breasts any of us sixth graders had ever seen on a teacher”?
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