Reviewing the Book Review
Hush, Memory
10 May 2009
In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.
¶ Liesl Schillinger has lots of good things to say about When I Forgot, by Finnish writer Elina Hirvonen (translated by Douglas Robinson), and she quotes extensively from the novel. But the net effect of her obviously impressed storytelling is to imbue Ms Hirvonen's work with more than a whiff of archness.
Anna has come to the cafe to read Michael Cunningham’s novel “The Hours,” seeking refuge from her thoughts in this other “world I am allowed to enter,” with its account of one day in the lives of three different women in three different eras, inspired by Virginia Woolf and her character Mrs. Dalloway. But as hard as she tries, Anna can’t concentrate on the story. While she broods about Joona, frets over a deadline and fields worried calls from her boyfriend and her mother, she tries to look like the “kind of woman who sits in a cafe in the afternoon eating salad and losing myself in a good book” — in other words, tries to “imagine I’m someone else.”
When I Forgot comes off sounding like an Adrian Tomine story that would work a lot better in graphic form.
¶ When Susan Dominus, reviewing Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace, writes, "What really makes Waldman's book interesting...", she proceeds to make it sound like Exhibit A in a nut case.
What really makes Waldman’s book interesting, as voices on motherhood go, is Waldman herself — the intensity of her positions and the way she thinks. In an essay on teaching her kids to feel good about sex, she writes about her decision to put a colorful bag of condoms on one of the top shelves in the kids’ bathroom, just so they get used to the idea for when the time comes (her youngest is now 5). Objecting to her kids’ playing dodgeball, she calls the gym teacher to quote, chapter and verse, the official opposing position of the National Association for Sports and Physical Education. (You might think this was in an essay on the perils of overparenting; it’s actually one in which she realizes that she can’t foist her own childhood anxieties onto her own socially adroit children.)
And that's the good part.
¶ David Means's review of Denis Johnson's Nobody Move is clotted with storytelling, but one (slightly long) paragraph could stand as an estimable review all by itself.
Johnson is one of the last of the hard-core American realist writers, working — in his own way — along a line that might be charted from Melville and Stephen Crane, with a detour through Flannery O’Connor and Don DeLillo. He routinely explores the nature of crime — all his novels have it in one form or another — in relation to the nature of grace (yes, grace) and the wider historical and cosmic order. So how does “Nobody Move” fit into his oeuvre? As Susan Sontag might say, it seems to operate as a flight from interpretation, settling into the genre for a ride, looking away from the wider implications of the world to enjoy itself by unfolding action within a neatly closed universe. But something more is at hand, because Johnson is a great writer, and even a casual entertainment, written well, has meaning. If “Tree of Smoke” — intricately plotted, embracing the entire Vietnam era and bringing it up alongside the war in Iraq — was a huge piece of work, a “Guernica” of sorts, then “Nobody Move” is a Warhol soup can, a flinty, bright piece of pop art meant to be instantly understood and enjoyed. It opens with the line “Jimmy Luntz had never been to war,” and it closes with two characters near a river. All of its symbols — if you want to take a shot at finding deeper meaning — are in your face and seem to be saying, at least to me, that for the most part, most of us live within the status quo, one way or another, just trying to locate the next move.
¶ Bryan Burrough likes Jeff Guinn's Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde — although he's not keen about "Untold." As for Paul Schneider's Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend —
And now, in time for the 75th anniversary of the pair’s deaths on a Louisiana road, come 11 and 12. The one to pick up is Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, by Jeff Guinn, which is easily readable and includes much of the last two decades’ new scholarship. The one to avoid is Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend, by Paul Schneider, a book whose idiosyncrasies include the author’s devotion to such italicized gun sounds as, on Page 8 alone, Pop! Pop! and Blam! and Rata rata rat. On Page 277 an automatic rifle is quoted as saying, Rata rata rata rata rata bang pow rata blam. Two pages later it remarks, Blam pow bangbangbang pow. At any moment one half-expects thought bubbles, or maybe Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, to leap from the text.
¶ Ben Macintyre's favorable review of Iliya Troyanov's The Collector of Worlds, a novel about the Victorian explorer and man of parts, Richard Burton (translated by William Hobson) is engaging and astute.
Troyanov grew up speaking Bulgarian and English, and writes in German (the novel was originally published as Der Weltensammler). Like Burton, he seems to have transcended the notion that each of us is wedded to a single native language. In this translation by William Hobson, Troyanov paints Burton in broad strokes. Large swaths of his protagonist’s life are simply omitted. Many conversations, events, thoughts and people are wholly imaginary; others are factual. Troyanov offers no clues as to where history ends and invention begins. Some will find this form of fictional biography frustrating, but for these readers there are already numerous biographies of Burton.
Troyanov succeeds at a different level, recreating that hunger for knowledge, hardship and space that was Burton’s distinctive cast of mind, depicting a man at once hard to like and impossible not to admire. In some ways he was representative of his time, race and class, while resolutely nonconformist and solitary. Burton, as his African guide observes, is “like an old elephant who has withdrawn from the herd and always drinks alone at the watering hole.”
¶ Martin Fuller, himself a writer on architecture, storytells his way through Barbara Isenberg's Conversations with Frank Gehry, noting that while there are more rigorous books in the same format — he names two — he finds a place for this one.
Isenberg, a Los Angeles-based writer on the arts, exhibits neither Forster’s intellectual sheen nor Friedman’s comprehensive expertise, but nonetheless offers worthwhile new information for architecture devotees and an engaging introduction for general readers.
As always, I'd have preferred a review by a book critic.
¶ David Hajdu hails David Robertson, author of W C Handy: The Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues, as "a biographer of admirable restraint," and makes a strong case for adding this book to the American music shelf:
Handy’s complicated legacy involves both the preservation and the adulteration of that weirdness. He was a classically oriented musician working in the sheet-music era. While notating the blues and disseminating it through published scores may seem unexceptional today, these acts were nearly radical at the time for their implicit argument that blues, in its mere worthiness for notation, had parity not only with Tin Pan Alley tunes but also with Western concert music. Of course, musical notation is not merely documentation; it is a kind of translation, and the tonal elasticity and rhythmic volatility of the blues are simply impossible to get across with the tempered scale and metric limitations of conventional notation. Handy relished the blues but considered it “primitive,” and he clearly saw the “polishing” he did to the music as correction or improvement. Indeed, his readiness to clean up the blues so that it could be played by musicians geared to the Western tradition has long made him seem like an accommodationist.
¶ A peculiar politeness seems to prevent Azadeh Moaveni from coming out and calling Con Coughlin's Khomeini's Ghost: The Iranian Revolution and the Rise of Militant Islam as the patently worthless screed that his review exposes.
This unworkable, dual sovereignty of the divinely appointed and the popularly elected lies at the heart of Iran’s problems and is the cause of its debilitating factional strife. Coughlin has little feel for the role Iran’s warring factions play in its foreign policy, and often relates only half the story. He paints a picture of Iran as a state in cahoots with Al Qaeda, writing that Tehran masterminded the escape of operatives fleeing from Afghanistan, including Osama bin Laden’s son Saad, and provided them safe haven. He states that “the presence of such prominent Al Qaeda militants in Iran . . . was yet another issue that would undermine Khatami’s attempts to improve relations with the West.”
This is a misleading presentation of the facts. It is true that Iranian hardliners played a cat-and-mouse game with the moderate government of Mohammad Khatami, concealing Qaeda fugitives who had fled to Iran. But the Khatami government dispatched agents to hunt down at least 200 fugitives, and put them on planes back to their home countries.
¶ David Sanger's generally favorable review of Juan Cole's Engaging the Muslim World provides an illustration of the drawbacks of specialist book reviews. A Timesman and the author of a book about the diplomatic challenges facing the United States today, Mr Sanger does not have the general reader's interests at heart.
But in seeking to explain such sentiments to Americans, Cole sometimes reaches for the wrong analogy. He compares the 9/11 hijackers to Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who read white supremacist works before bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. To Cole, the two men “bear a number of striking similarities to members of such radical Egyptian groups as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Grouping of the Blind Sheikh.” They all railed against “Jewish control of the U.S. government” and attacked tall buildings that were symbols of power. They all belonged to “fringe, if significant, movements.”
Did they? George W. Bush may have overinflated the power of Islamofascism, but certainly the radical Muslim movement, in all its incarnations, has a membership that is bigger and better financed than the American fringe groups, and with a presence in more countries than those home-grown extremists who threaten domestic terrorism.
This is insidery and unhelpful.
¶ Aside from a brief pause, to describe T J Stiles's The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt as a "perceptive and fluently written biography," Michael Kazin storytells his way through the steam and smoke. The review is neither favorable nor its opposite, not out of caginess, I suspect, but because the need to make a recommendation seems not to have occurred to Mr Kazin.
¶ Dorothy Gallagher's too-short review of Susan Jacoby's Alger Hiss and the Battle For History is almost incoherent, so rich is the subject and so profuse are the reviewer's quibbles with the author's scholarship.
But Jacoby is incensed at the way current scholars have continued old ideological battles on the back of the Hiss case. She is not always an equal opportunity critic. When, in an essay on conservatism, Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, challenges a paper presenting evidence for Hiss, it is a “screed,” whereas Jeff Kisseloff, whose Web site about Hiss is sponsored by the Nation Institute, replies to Tanenhaus with an “equally impassioned counterblast.” And it is a little disconcerting to find Ann Coulter thrown into the mix of respectable scholars, just to make Jacoby’s point. I wish also that Jacoby had made a bow in the direction of disinterested scholarship. After all, not even some of the work she herself cites has been done with a political agenda in mind; some scholars believe that historical truth has its own claims.
¶ In 1911, the Mona Lisa disappeared from the Louvre. It reappeared in Florence two years later. To this day, nobody knows who "masterminded" the theft, as Mary Jo Murphy helpfully points out, but without suggesting why, in that case, we should want to read R A Scotti's Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa.
Scotti’s Sherlock, the foremost French criminologist of his day, Alphonse Bertillon, never did sniff the man out. But it is in padding the criminologist’s role that Scotti is at her most strained: “Bertillon seemed as out of place at most crime scenes as the Virgin Mary at the Folies-Bergère.” “Bertillon approached the empty frames as cautiously as a lion trainer who understands the imperfect line between the tame and the feral.” One wishes for the vanished simile. Or at least that the blank wall that drew record crowds to the Louvre in the aftermath of the theft really was a reflection of the perfect Modernist crime.
That last bit sounds clever, but I don't think that I get it.
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