Reviewing the Book Review

Summer Reading

31 May 2009

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

¶ What's a "Dumbledore"? Someone out of Harry Potter, I expect. Elizabeth Royte applies the term to Bernd Heinrich in her warmly favorable review of his new book, A Summer World: A Season of Bounty.

While Heinrich considers insects “magical” for doing so much with a pinpoint-size brain, the entomologist himself is a Dumbledore of the forest — magical himself for his ability to conjure a riot of life from what others less attuned might consider your standard Northern woodlot. Those rolled up aspen leaves on the ground? Look inside and behold a moth caterpillar hiding in a tube made of its own fecal pellets. Those bite marks on fresh leaves? They indicate the biter was unpalatable to birds. That barely audible patter in the woods at night? It’s the rain of caterpillar poop on leaves. Heinrich’s business is exploring and explaining the astonishing adaptations of his woodland neighbors (among them wood frogs, mud daubers, Cecropia moths, longhorn beetles, hummingbirds and various annoying flies) and their struggle to procreate while they’ve got the chance.

¶ Without breaking the skin, so to speak, Adam Begley makes Rachel Cusk's The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy sound like a study in fatuity.

I was puzzled by the cruelty of her descriptions of characters who appear only briefly and incidentally — and then it occurred to me that perhaps she resented the cameo intrusion of these bit players who interrupted her pursuit of truth and beauty, and caricatured them by way of revenge. She certainly resents her fellow tourists. Her snobbery in this respect is impressively flexible: in Sansepolcro she sees tourists “of a superior kind” — although they’re art lovers, like herself, she mocks their bourgeois rectitude. In Florence the “herds” repulse her. In Assisi she’s “outraged” by the pilgrims who wait in line to pay reverence to the relics of St. Francis but ignore the frescoes of Giotto. At least she has the courage of her convictions: she makes no attempt to conceal her disdain.

This is not the kind of bad publicity that is better than no publicity, but merely unhelpful publicity — unhelpful to reader and writer alike.

¶ Robert Pinksy's terrific review of the latest Elmore Leonard, Road Dogs, zeroes in on Mr Leonard's language, and quotes plenty of it.

Having characters think about fine details of speech before engaging in sex or violence isn’t merely a prank or indulgence. In a story about trust and betrayal, the hyper-intense attention to nuances of dialogue not only fits: it’s a matter of survival. The weird alertness of characters and narrators also includes a director’s eye for facial expressions. A Leonard character thinks like this: “But she didn’t work her eyes on him as he thanked her.” Another sentence about communication without words, always involving some element of trust or its opposite: “He looked at Foley, who gave his buddy a tired smile.” When Dawn ends a speech with the words “I trust you, Jack,” his response is “You make it sound easy.”

¶ David Byrne — a committed cyclist himself — enthuses moderately about Jeff Mapes's Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities, and takes pains to present the book as urbane, not just urban:

As Mapes points out, when more women begin riding, that will signal a big change in attitude, which will prompt further changes in the direction of safety and elegance. I can ride till my legs are sore and it won’t make riding any cooler, but when attractive women are seen sitting upright going about their city business on bikes day and night, the crowds will surely follow. A recent article in a British newspaper showed the pop singer Duffy on a pink bike. The model Agyness Deyn claims never to be without hers, and Courteney Cox reportedly presented Jennifer Aniston with a Chanel bike last year. Tabloid fodder does not a revolution make, but it’s a start.

¶ Scarlett Thomas's guardedly favorable review of Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger trips over — of all things — the reviewer's fondness for Ms Waters's characters.

Throughout the novel, Dr. Faraday claims to be giving us the objective facts about what he sees in front of him, and making “sensible deductions,” because “that’s what doctors do.” That he does not quite do this, and that the Ayreses come to such sticky ends, will no doubt be a source of great delight to some. After all, Sarah Waters is an excellent, evocative writer, and this is an incredibly gripping and readable novel. But to some extent her skill works against her. The Ayreses are such lovingly depicted and realistic characters that it becomes hard to accept their gothic fates. Jonathan Coe, in The Winshaw Legacy, memorably kills off some of the English upper class and you cheer along, because in narrative terms (and probably beyond), his particular characters — gothic from the start — really deserve it. But things are not so simple here.

¶ Christine Muhlke's review of three "foodoirs" — A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes From My Kitchen Table, by Molly Wizenberg; I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti: A Memoir, by Giulia Melucci; and The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World's Most Glorious — and Perplexing — City, by David Lebovitz — two of them excerpted from Web logs, drips with snarky condescension for books that the reviewer clearly finds lacking in interest. What is the point of this exercise?

¶ Dawn Drzal's review of Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows, by Kathleen Collins, makes it hard to tell why this book merits coverage in the Book Review.

Despite its pile of data and array of provocative theories, “Watching What We Eat” stops short of resolving the “persistent paradox” it raises: Why are we transfixed by the sight of someone cooking on television when we might not love to do it ourselves — or might not do it at all? Collins’s failure to synthesize the information she has collected makes her book ultimately unsatisfying.

This sort of book, that is.

¶ Caroline Weber's review of Jill Jonnes's Eiffel's Tower: And the World's Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count sound as promising as its subtitle, and the appended, two-paragraph mention of James McGregor's Paris From the Ground Up reads like an embarrassed afterthought.

It would be misleading, however, to suggest that such broad-based international-affairs issues dominate “Eiffel’s Tower,” which instead recounts a series of smaller, more personal stories that took the 1889 exposition as their backdrop. As her subtitle reveals, Jonnes, the author of Conquering Gotham and Empires of Light, takes a remarkable cast of characters and documents their respective experiences at the fair. Buffalo Bill, for instance, brought his crowd-pleasing Wild West revue to Paris for the occasion, while Thomas Edison traveled there to unveil his new and improved phonograph; both men were overnight sensations — as was Bill’s star performer, Annie Oakley, whom the polygamous king of Senegal attempted to buy for 100,000 francs. The artists who displayed their work at the exposition included James McNeill Whistler, whose portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell won a gold medal, and Gauguin, who didn’t sell a single painting but who did manage to pocket an exotic sculpture fragment that he found at the fair’s Khmer temple. Each of these characters — in different ways and to varying degrees — used the fair as a forum for an idea or a worldview that was to have lasting implications for French culture. (Though this statement may sound dubious in regard to Buffalo Bill, Jonnes credits him with inspiring the abiding “French love affair” with the Wild West. Which, moreover, had some surprising early adopters: “After attending the Wild West show, Paul Gauguin bought a Stetson to wear.”)

This certainly sounds miscellaneous rather than engaging.

¶ Radikha Jones suspects that Matthew Pearl miscalculated when he put Charles Dickens as a character in his new book, The Last Dickens.

But when the spotlight leaves Osgood, the story fares less well. Pearl juggles too many narrative strands for a compact novel (compact relative to Our Mutual Friend, at any rate); weaving them together forces him to resort to exposition at inopportune moments, throwing off the pace. The subplot set in India and centered on Dickens’s son Frank, a supervisor in the Bengal Mounted Police with his own interest in the opium trade, is a promising gesture but never pays off. Pearl knows his Dickens, undoubtedly better than many of his readers do, and his focus on the author’s dark late period is in perfect step with the current vogue in Dickens-related material, from Dan Simmons’s recent novel Drood (where the opium dens are also front and center) to the BBC’s brilliant production of Little Dorrit. The problem is that by putting “the Chief” in his book (which he does through a series of flashbacks to the author’s final, backbreaking American tour), Pearl introduces a writer with whom he can’t compete, on grounds of suspense, style or addictive sentimentality. To be fair, few writers could.

A sympathetic review would have been more informative.

¶ Jonathan Eig's review doesn't begin to make a case for Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball From Itself, Michael Shapiro's book about the phantom "Continental League."

The real trouble with this book is that the Continental League, in the end, amounted to little more than a bluff. By threatening to create a new league, Rickey and his backers forced the baseball owners to agree to expansion. Between 1961 and 1969, eight new teams would join the majors.

¶ And now, for something completely the same: a book about the Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent. Of all the books covered this week, this one has the least claim to space. That it is not given very much is no mitigation.

¶ Doubtless without intending to do so, Holly Morris makes David Kinney's The Big One: An Island, an Obsession and the Furious Pursuit of a Great Fish sound as though it would have made a far better novel.

The net effect points to an old truth: men, apparently, like to go out and fish and drink. They can’t always say why, exactly, but like its less hurly-burly kin (think of A River Runs Through It), The Big One articulates a sense that fishing is an acceptable shared intimacy. And, of course, there is the catch. “For anglers and addicts,” Kinney tells us, “it’s all about the next hit.”

Kinney captures these characters, but less so their passion. Absent are supple descriptions of the zip of serotonin that comes when a line sings toward the horizon, or the ineffable magic that drives anglers the world over. This is a derby book, after all, and Kinney won his Pulitzer for journalism, not poetry.

¶ Neil Genzlinger suggests that a good way "to solve the global warming problem" would be to "take away P. J. O’Rourke’s car keys." On the basis of his review of Mr O'Rourke's scrapbook of pieces about automotion, Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-Bending, Celebrating America the Way It's Supposed to Be — With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank Mowing Our Lawn. I say: take his computer (and any stray typewriters) while you're at it.

Yes, this book is a monument to slash-and-burn living, glorifying old cars whose miles-per-gallon ratings read like shoe sizes and indulgent off-road races conducted in fragile terrain. The thing is, you’ll hardly hear the cries of the rare lizards and cactuses being ground to extinction under O’Rourke’s tires because you’ll be laughing too hard. Sure, he’s personally responsible for the impending death of our race and planet, but at his best, as he is for about two-thirds of this volume, the guy’s hilarious.

I remember a distant time when P J O'Rourke was funny. But I've grown up since then.

¶ I wish that Penelope Green had spent less time storytelling and more time choosing quotations, but she does make Elinor Lipman's The Family Man sound like a must-read.

The Family Man is Lipman’s ninth novel, and by now she has her method down pat: a screwball plot with a tone and in a territory that veers from Paul Rudnick to Nora Ephron, driven by copious rapid-fire dialogue and quickly sketched scene-setting details: the coffee section of Zabar’s, the escalator at Whole Foods, the No. 7 train to Long Island City. She has a penchant for slapstick, or even slapshtick, but so did Preston Sturges, and so you forgive her. What redeems the mayhem of the sitcom story line of “Family Man” and the unlikely behavior of its voluble, careering characters is the author’s abundant good will.

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