24 May 2009
In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.
¶ David Brooks's review of Simon Schama's The American Future: A History, although more than a little snarky, features an interesting analysis of a type of book that is popular among European writers on the United States, while also being representative of Mr Schama's oeuvre: strong on history, not so strong on contemporary reporting.
Once safely in history and liberated from the insufferable demands of the Brilliant Book genre, Schama is of course quite good. His specialty is finding interesting midlevel characters from the buried mounds of history and telling their stories. In the first great chunk of the book, he tells the stories of the Meigses, a fascinating military family that has passed down the twin ideals of service and civilization from generation to generation.
¶ Walter Kirn's memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever, gets a largely favorable review from Laura Miller, who nevertheless is careful to plant warnings for readers who might well hate this book. (I myself can't wait to read it.)
In one respect, Kirn lucked out: his college years coincided with the ascendancy of “theory” in American academia. Since hardly anybody understood the deconstructionists to begin with, it was that much easier for Kirn to bluff his way through, powered by bravado alone. Better yet, theory was intent on proving the illegitimacy of all those great books he’d never read. “We skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism,” he writes of his cohort, “deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.”
¶ In a review of two books bearing the stamp of Israeli writer Amos Oz, Liesl Schillinger is mildly dismissive of the novella, Rhyming Life and Death (translated by Nicholas de Lange) as stocked with "fertile but unsown ruminations," but hails the strength of Mr Oz's focus on imagining the other as it relates to the problem of aggression, as put on view in The Amos Oz Reader (selected and edited by Nitza Ben-Dov; translated by Nicholas de Lange and others).
It is the understanding of “the other,” those upon whom we project emotions and characteristics we think are different from our own — whoever “we” are, whoever “they” are. In Oz’s first story collection, Where the Jackals Howl, published in 1965 and set in the world of the kibbutz, the other could have a familiar face — like the kibbutznik in the title story whose ugliness and lack of fervency made him an outsider in his own community; or the rejected son in the story “The Way of the Wind,” from the same collection, a “dark, gentle youth” who joins the paratroopers to impress his hard-line father. Or it could be a kibbutz motormouth spared from ostracism by his gift for truck repair in the novel “A Perfect Peace.” But Oz’s others can also have more exotic faces
¶ Chris Hedges warmly reviews the graphic treatment of a perilous journey, The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan With Doctors Without Borders, by Emmanuel Guibert (illustrator), the late Didier Lefèvre (photographer and narrator), and Frédéric Lemercier (designer) (translated by Alexis Siegel)
The disparity between what we are told or what we believe about war and war itself is so vast that those who come back, like Lefèvre, are often rendered speechless. What do you say to those who advocate war as an instrument to liberate the women of Afghanistan or bring democracy to Iraq? How do you tell them what war is like? How do you explain that the very proposition of war as an instrument of virtue is absurd? How do you cope with memories of children bleeding to death with bits of iron fragments peppered throughout their small bodies? How do you speak of war without tears?
The book concludes with contact sheets showing Lefèvre walking with his mother on the beach in Blonville with Bienchen, her small dog. A postscript notes that she did not learn the details of her son’s travels until the publication of this story, two decades after his first trip.
The power of The Photographer is that it bridges this silence. There is no fighting in this book. No great warriors are exalted. The story is about those who live on the fringes of war and care for its human detritus. By the end of the book the image or picture of a weapon is distasteful. And if you can achieve this, you have gone a long way to imparting the truth about warfare.
¶ I knew at the beginning of the second paragraph of Jess Row's warmly favorable review of Anne Michaels's The Winter Vault that this is not a book for me. The extract below begins with the end of the first paragraph.
Or, in Anne Michaels’s case, begin a novel with an image that stops time all by itself: “Perhaps we painted on our own skin, with ochre and charcoal, long before we painted on stone.”
That sentence — an arresting thought, specific in detail but universal in application, meditating on the past but resolutely of the present — is a model of Michaels’s novelistic aesthetic, which she shares with her contemporary and fellow Torontonian Michael Ondaatje.
¶ Robert Sullivan's review of what he characterizes as "more art book than typical natural history tome," Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, by Eric Sanderson, is an entertaining read.
The fact-intense charts, maps and tables offered in abundance here are fascinating, and even kind of sexy. And at the very middle of the book, the two-page spread of Mannahatta in all its primeval glory — the visual denouement of a decade’s research — feels a little like a centerfold. Sanderson quotes “The Great Gatsby”: “Gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world.” Upon closing this remarkable book, you feel revved up, at the very least, and are likely to see a way to build a future that is more aligned with what once was than with what can no longer be.
¶ Scott Bradfield begins his review of two books by J Robert Lennon — Castle and Pieces for the Left Hand: 100 Anecdotes, with an arresting observation the intrigue of which is sustained throughout the piece. quote the first sentence.
Over the last decade, J. Robert Lennon’s literary imagination has grown increasingly morbid, convoluted and peculiar — just as his books have grown commensurately more surprising, rigorous and fun. He has often written affectionately about overbearing fathers, clinically depressed mothers and failure-bound children who can’t break free from the past long enough to ruin families of their own. But while the earlier books relied on amusing, eccentric romances and chance epiphanies to redeem their shut-down characters, Lennon’s latest books don’t find redemption so easy to come by. Their monstrous protagonists don’t really achieve anything that resembles salvation; instead, they just become more successful at being monsters.
¶ It's hard to be serious about usage books, which tend to be written in a jocular style; as though learning proper syntax were best approached comically. Roy Blount Jr's review of Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language, by Patricia O'Connor and Stewart Kellerman, bogs down in a protracted argument about the phrase "to beg the question" (the meaning of which I, for one, have never grasped), before turning to an altogether unrelated book by Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language.
¶ Benny Morris's One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict gets a mixed review from Jeffrey Goldberg, but the book, clearly a tract consisting of necessarily transitory political and social analysis, does not belong among books appropriate for coverage in the Book Review.
¶ Jack Pendarvis produces that rarest of items, the too-short review that, by relying almost exclusively upon storytelling, actually conveys the tone of a novel — in this case, Frederick Barthelme's Waveland.
The central puzzle of the book is how a family is made. Barthelme’s queasy optimism is exemplified by a bit player, a very short cashier who, in her brief time on the page, exults that she is “filled with the pleasures” of her life at home with an old man and a hamster named Teeny-Weeny.
¶ Natural Elements, a novel by Richard Mason, gets an unsympathetic review from Louisa Thomas that is skewed toward unhelpful ambiguity by a misguided attempt to sketch different characters who are evidently presented in different tonalities by Mr Mason. It would have been more helpful to appraise the book overall.
But the parts of Natural Elements that layer the past atop the present are some of its weakest, however urgently they may be felt. At times, they seem like lessons, more imposed than understood. The connections — both spontaneous and longstanding — between people in the 21st century are where Mason’s characters ultimately find value. Often beautifully rendered, these connections extend that value to the novel itself.
¶ Boris Fishman's distanced review of The Spy Game, by Georgina Harding, suggests that he has not responded well to Ms Harding's way with a story.
Harding’s own storytelling — full of melodramatic marveling, but also maintaining an odd clinical distance — is circumspect. It strains for thematic convergence (“Cold, waking me up. A Monday in January during the cold war”), but a little too much remains in the shadows, clever device though this is for a spy novel. For instance, if Anna is old enough to suspect her mother of being a spy, isn’t she old enough to miss her just a little?
¶ Maggie Scarf gives Wendy Moore's Wedlock: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore, a breathless and horrified account of one of the Queen's ancestress' dreadful second marriage, but provides no sense whatever of the book's tone.
¶ According to Sophie Gee's review, the problem with Mary McGarry Morris's The Last Secret is that it is too smart for its own story.
Despite the intense, urgent feelings that pulse through its pages, this novel of emotional realism is based on an emotional fantasy — as becomes obvious when Morris is forced to conclude it with an unconvincing denouement. An over-complicated attempted abduction from a suburban garage, a conveniently stored garden shovel used as a weapon, improbable resolutions to the characters’ difficulties and a bizarre and out-of-place wedding all leave the book’s key question unanswered: how could someone like Nora have gotten herself into this situation in the first place?
¶ According to Michael Shapiro's warm review, Michael D'Antonio's Forever Blue: The True Story of Walter O'Malley, Baseball's Most Controversial Owner, and the Dodgers of Brooklyn and Los Angeles is not a sports book but a biography that powerfully evokes a bygone era. This following smidgeon of information is bound to be recopied countless times throughout the Internet.
O’Malley, D’Antonio reminds us, never wanted to leave the borough; he badly wanted to build a ballpark with his own money in downtown Brooklyn. But to buy the land he would need it condemned, and for that he needed the approval of Robert Moses, the lord of all that fell and rose in New York.
Moses refused; O’Malley could not sway him. Los Angeles promised the moon; New York offered a rental property in Flushing Meadows. So he left. And in his new home in Chavez Ravine, O’Malley grew ever more wealthy and influential — in time becoming the dominant owner, and power, in the game.
Unless, as often happens, I'm the last to know.
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