Reviewing the Book Review

Rake's Progress

26 April 2009

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

¶ Sam Tanenhaus's very favorable review of Jay McInerney's How It Ended: New and Collected Stories includes a warm and invigorating appraisal of the writer's oeuvre.

“How It Ended” reminds us how impressively broad McInerney’s scope has been and how confidently he has ranged across wide swaths of our national experience. It reminds us too that for all the many literary influences he has absorbed, McInerney’s contribution — and it is a major one — is to have revitalized the Irish Catholic expiatory tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara, with its emphasis not only on guilt but also on shame: on sins committed and never quite expunged, always in open view of the sorrowing punitive clan. Even the most alienated characters in McInerney’s universe remain tethered, or chained, to others. He is preoccupied with the many varieties of the strangling embrace, whether felt by star-struck political hirelings reduced to pimping for a philandering senator (“My Public Service”), Irish-American brothers locked in competitive mother-love (“The Madonna of Turkey Season”) or a Bible Belt couple whose sexual dysfunction degrades them into sick rituals of voyeurism (“Invisible Fences”).

¶ James McManus writes about Joe Queenan's memoir of a childhood marinated in contempt, Closing Time, with what can only be called compassion.

There’s no denying that Queenan’s prose can be scabrously entertaining, though he is usually funnier at the length of the essay, where the mockery has less time to congeal into bile or mere shtick. Yet “Closing Time” doesn’t need to be especially funny to work. The author is struggling to defuse an unexploded bomb in his psyche. We don’t need to laugh while we watch.

¶ Mark Ford's assessment of William Logan's poetry take-down, Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue, leaves no doubt that this might be a respectably dull book.

The most obvious advantage of Logan’s Diogenes-like approach to much of the contemporary poetry he writes about is that it transforms the normally rather stultifying genre of the poetry review into something more akin to a blood sport. Logan’s hounding and slashing, parodying and chastising, make for what editors call good copy. Occasionally he exempts a passage, or a complete particular poem, from his mocking strictures, but in general one learns to expect — and even, in a slightly shameful way, like a member of the crowd at a Roman circus, to demand — the final turning of the emperor’s thumb down, and the consigning of another poet to oblivion. Logan works as hard, in these reviews, as any stand-up comic or 18th-century satirist to unite critic and audience in a shared bond of ridicule. And yet, funny as many of his put-downs are, it is I think worth remembering that poets have always been easy game to their detractors, from Plato onward, and even good, original ones can be made to look silly by a well-briefed, cocksure, eloquent prosecutor, which Logan undoubtedly is.

¶ Roger Cohen's review of The Myth of American Exceptionalism, by Godfrey Hodgson, is flawed by Mr Cohen's insistence that America is special.

Some dubious assertions are offered in support of this excoriation, not least that Cuban health care is “as good as, or better than, the average in America.” Everything from the fate of Native Americans to the paucity of United States foreign aid is invoked in the jeremiad’s cause. But I don’t want to cavil; this is a moment of painful American nemesis and it’s captured well by Hodgson. Where I think he’s wrong is in his apparent conviction that a sobered United States can and should become simply a nation among nations.

America was born as an idea, and so it has to carry that idea forward. It is in many ways the last ideological country on earth. We all know that India and China are rising, but we’d be hard pressed to say what they stand for. An American revival without its universalist embodiment of liberty, democracy, the rule of law and free enterprise seems to me impossible; the trick is in how that’s done in an interconnected world where problems require joint action. Bombast is not the way. Careful listening is.

Argumentative book reviews are rarely helpful, and Mr Cohen's is no exception.

¶ Victoria Redel's review of Matt Haig's The Possession of Mr Cave illustrates the drawbacks of storytelling: a rather unappealing-sounding narrative is summarized without much regard for the manner of its presentation. My point is not that stories are somehow vulgar and beneath the critic's attention. It's rather that readers of literary fiction will take almost any story in stride so long as it is interestingly told. That's what reviewers ought to evaluate — and in way that facilitates the reader's disagreement.

Possession, as Haig’s title announces, is a central theme in this novel. The simplest and most direct form it takes is Terence’s obsession with protecting Bryony from the amorous clutches of a local boy. But Terence is also possessed — as in overtaken — by the spirit of his dead son, Reuben. This is after all a novel about twins, and Haig skillfully weaves the twinning of the living and the dead, the good and the bad, the known and the unknown throughout. Terence increasingly seems invaded and controlled by his dead son’s memories and dark wishes, goaded into actions ever more dangerous and morally questionable.

There is very little useful information in this paragraph.

¶ In another, somewhat milder argumentative review, Hanna Rosin politely disagrees with John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, the authors of God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World (and also editors at The Economist):

Despite the dark side, the authors ultimately conclude that “God is back, for better.” By this they mean that religion is now a matter of choice for most people, and not a forced or inherited identity. But if that choice can lead you to either buy a sweatshirt or blow up a building, the conclusion itself seems a little forced. The reality is that God is back, for better or worse.

¶ Mark Oppenheimer's review of Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace is so preoccupied by re-telling the tortuous story of William Lobdell's journey through faith that I had no idea why I was being asked to consider this book.

I left the daily religion beat (for The Hartford Courant) in 2001, just as journalists from Boston to Los Angeles were about to expose a horrendous pattern of thousands of American priests’ molesting young children, and their superiors’ covering it up, over many decades. I have often wondered how I would have slept if I’d had to do what Lobdell did from 2001 to 2004: talk to traumatized survivors; watch indifferent bishops try to brush the abuse under the rug; and, perhaps worst of all, see the victims pilloried as bad Catholics, and the priests defended in the face of all evidence. “I’ve watched Catholics yell at and even spit on victims who picketed outside a parish,” Lobdell writes. “I’ve seen congregants offer molesting priests jobs and even raise their bail.” Lobdell’s faith had already been tested by other articles he’d written, about charlatan faith healers and adulterous televangelists; but those people could be dismissed as rare malefactors. By contrast, thousands of Catholic clergymen were tainted by this evil. Many were direct perpetrators, many more were cowardly and silent.

It seems awfully unserious (or unregenerately adolescent) to reject Christianity because a misguided institution created opportunities for predatory priests.

¶ Pankaj Mishra's review of Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History is so fascinating that I can't wait to read the book. You'll pardon me while my objectivity is temporarily out of order; but a reviewer who kindles a passion to read the book under discussion is doing his job.

As Wendy Doniger, a scholar of Indian religions at the University of Chicago, explains in her staggeringly comprehensive book, the British Indologists who sought to tame India’s chaotic polytheisms had a “Protestant bias in favor of scripture.” In “privileging” Sanskrit over local languages, she writes, they created what has proved to be an enduring impression of a “unified Hinduism.” And they found keen collaborators among upper-caste Indian scholars and translators. This British-Brahmin version of Hinduism — one of the many invented traditions born around the world in the 18th and 19th centuries — has continued to find many takers among semi-Westernized Hindus suffering from an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the apparently more successful and organized religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

The Hindu nationalists of today, who long for India to become a muscular international power, stand in a direct line of 19th-century Indian reform movements devoted to purifying and reviving a Hinduism perceived as having grown too fragmented and weak. These mostly upper-caste and middle-class nationalists have accelerated the modernization and homogenization of “Hinduism.”

One can only wonder if Prof Doniger wished to subtitle her book, more accurately, "A Critical History.

¶ Aside from offering up some sadly amusing gossip, Dana Stevens's review merely raises doubts that Emanuel Levy's Vincente Minelli: Hollywood's Dark Dreamer merits coverage in the Book Review.

In fact, the degree to which the author’s language gains in liveliness when he criticizes his subject’s work raises the question: Why does Levy believe that Minnelli’s career merits this, the director’s first full-length biography? Of course, no artist need produce an unblemished string of masterpieces to deserve critical attention, but Levy seems hard pressed to find a Minnelli film he actually likes. “Kismet” is “heavy-handed, grim and listless.” “Brigadoon”is “curiously flat and rambling, lacking in warmth or charm.” “The Long, Long Trailer” is “vulgar” and “banal.” After half a dozen such assessments, it’s puzzling to hear on Page 308 that “Gigi” counts as “one of Minnelli’s few movies that occasionally feels like an overly studied work.”

¶ The same question arises from Louise Richardson's review of Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, by Michael Burleigh.

To appreciate the virtues of this book (it is, in its way, an exceptional synthesis), one has to make a conscious and concerted effort to ignore the condescending tone, the incessant sneering, the unsupported assertions and the gross generalizations. Few escape Burleigh’s ire. He describes Sartre as a “loathsome academic” at one point and an “aged useful idiot” at another. Foucault is a “silly Western intellectual.” Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel, “What Is to Be Done?,” is “execrable,” and liberal artists are idiots. He complains of “the sanctimonious ethos” of The New York Times and describes students at the London School of Economics as “Eurotrash and Americans doing ‘Let’s See Europe.’ ” There is certainly a lot of rage here, but quite what it has to do with terrorism is often hard to tell.

¶ A book for weeping: If only the Bushies had listened to David Kilcullen, whose new book, The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One, outlines, according to Joanne di Giovanni, a commonsense approach to counterinsurgency that would have saved a lot of lives in Iraq and elsewhere. Maybe by the time we're called in to Pakistan, Defense Secretary Gates will have paid attention.

Kilcullen believes that to succeed, the West needs to remain agile, and to protect the people who support the government, what he calls “population-centric security.” “Effective counterinsurgency,” he writes, “provides human security to the population, where they live, 24 hours a day. This, not destroying the enemy, is the central task.”

So the work of the international community, or NATO (which Kilcullen also advises) or America comes down to basics: securing villages, valleys, roads and population centers. But still, Kilcullen warns, it is essential to reassure the native peoples that you are not there to occupy them. The military must also protect.

¶ By focusing on the quality of Paul Yoon's writing, Joan Silber makes his new collection, Once the Shore: Stories, sound immensely appealing. Or not.

Yet the beauty of these stories is precisely in their reserve: they are mild and stark at the same time. By mild I do not mean cozy. Harshness is always close at hand here, and no one is surprised by betrayals, thefts, brutal mistakes of war. Nor do the stories entirely lack acts of will. A couple whose son has probably been killed in a bombing test resolutely set off at sea to search for him. A child whose family farm has been sold tells the buyer’s wife to go home. But even these resolves feel not altogether voluntary. Most of the collection’s characters move through events with a resignation or forbearance rare in contemporary fiction. “Once the Shore” is the work of a large and quiet talent.

¶ Reading Joe Conason's favorable review of Sam Roberts's new book about one of New York's unsung great men, A Kind of Genius: Herb Sturz and Society's Toughest Problems, I was startled by the reflection that many of today's New Yorkers were children (if they were alive at all) when Ed Koch was mayor.

When he started out 50 years ago, Sturz had nothing more than a college degree, an encouraging note from a favorite author, John Steinbeck, and a vague commitment to improve the lives of society’s downtrodden. Unlike most young people with worthy aspirations, he actually managed to change things. Perhaps, as President Obama suggested recently, the critical factor in creating change is persistence. Keeping faith for half a century is a kind of genius, too.

¶ Gina Bellafante is so not a sympathetic reviewer of Jennifer Scanlon's Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown. Her real fight, of course, is with the former editor of Cosmo.

Scanlon’s chief lament is the questionable notion that her subject’s progressive influence has gone entirely unrecognized, perhaps a moot point given the extent to which Brown’s brand of sex-positive, everyone-in-a-miniskirt feminism has triumphed in the popular consciousness over the comparatively drearier, and arguably nobler, goals of the Second Wave. The culture of chick lit persists, and yet today, bringing up the Equal Rights Amendment seems to have the effect of angling for a new national dialogue on Prohibition. Brown appears to have won even without having been honored with a postage stamp during Women’s History Month. Her best-selling advice guide “Sex and the Single Girl” was reissued with a cover line that hardly obscures her legacy: “Before there was ‘Sex and the City,’ there was . . . ‘Sex and the Single Girl.’ ”

This is all very entertaining, and not without a certain clarifying quality. But Ms Bellafante seems indisposed to consider the possibility that Ms Brown's contribution to the feminist cause, if not exactly constructive, was mightily destructive. With Sex and the Single Girl, Ms Brown razed the last remnants of feminine respectability, clearing the field for women to live seriously new lives without having to face the obloquy that their independence would have invited before.

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