Reviewing the Book Review

Telling the Tale

7 June 2009

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

¶ As perhaps befits the review of a biography of "the world's most popular serious novelist," Paul Berman's review of Gerald Martin's Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life is an ambitious piece. But it is more an appraisal of the Nobelist's career than an assessment of what Mr Martin has written about it. The air of argumentativeness is so thick, in fact, that one looks about for the ghost of Norman Mailer.

And yet, the biography’s account of the friendship will make readers pause thoughtfully over that word, “lackey.” Martin tells us that, on an occasion when Castro visited Colombia, García Márquez volunteered to be one of his bodyguards. The world’s most popular serious novelist does seem to be a flunky of the world’s longest-lasting monomaniacal dictator. Why García Márquez has chosen to strike up such a friendship is something I cannot explain — except to point out that, as Martin shows, the great novelist has never veered from the epiphany that came to him at his grandfather’s house in 1950, and he has always been fascinated by the grotesque, the pathetic and the improbable.

¶ Bill Bradley's warm and favorable review of Bill Russell's Red and Me: My Coach, My Lifelong Friend makes the book sound thoughtful and wise on the subject of basketball, but it makes no suggestion that the review ought not to have appeared in the newspaper's Sports section.

¶ T Coraghessan Boyle gives John Updike's posthumous collection, My Father's Tears: And Other Stories a measured favorable review, quoting the felicities of Updike's prose without much in the way of analysis. Here is his one complaint:

And here lies both the triumph and the limitation of these stories: the obsessive recollection of detail for its own sake. In the foreword to The Early Stories, 1953-1975, published six years ago, Updike describes his younger self sitting in his office above a restaurant in Ipswich, where “my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me — and to give the mundane its beautiful due.” That is his triumph. Among all the writers of our time, he was the most gifted in illuminating the phenomenological world. But in these stories, like David Kern at his reunion, he presents details in a testimonial way, as a feat of recollection, and sometimes — as in “Kinderszenen” and “The Guardians,” which both present a young child’s perspective on Updike’s familiar world — the details tend to overwhelm the artistry of the stories themselves.

This is worth looking into. The relation between Updike's sensuous but lucid details and the stories that he tells about people has not been explored in the mainstream press.

¶ Douglas Wolk's enthusiastic review of "You'll Never Know": Book I: A Good and Decent Man, written and illustrated by C Tyler, takes a break from storytelling the war memories of the author's father long enough to tell us something worth knowing about the book itself:

Tyler has been drawing comics on and off since the 1980s; her 2005 collection of short pieces is aptly titled Late Bloomer. She was a painter before she was a cartoonist, though, and she’s adapted some painterly techniques to comics, even beyond her magisterial sense of color (she drew this project with 53 custom-mixed inks). Every panel is lush with visual and psychological detail. Her swooping ink lines have the fluidity and force of paint, and she treats the borders of her pages and images as frames, sometimes solid and unassuming but more often decorative or permeable or even broken. In one sequence, a despondent Tyler falls through the base of a panel and onto the bottom of the page, only to be scolded by her father in his easy chair (“Whaddya think you’re layin’ on!! Get up!!!”) and an imaginary elf that we’ve earlier seen telling him to “keep your feelings secret!”

¶ Aside from a few words of reservation about one of the three stories that form Josh Weil's The New Valley: Novellas, Anthony Doerr has nothing but praise:

Read back to back to back, these novellas form a triptych — detailed works in their own right, they offer more than the sum of their parts when taken together. Weil meticulously imagines people and their histories, and presents them as a product of their places. This is perhaps the hardest thing for a fiction writer of any age, working in any form, to accomplish.

Near the end of Sarverville Remains, Geoffrey Sarver tells his rival: “But there is always been things I don’t understand. This is where you estimate me too small. I have grown used to it. I know how to work around it. I will think on it and I will think on it and I will think on it, and you watch.”

Keep writing novellas, Josh Weil, because you write very good ones. You think on it, and we’ll watch.

¶ I must confess that I have no idea of what John Buchan is up to in his review of Iain Pears's Stone's Fall.

The problem with Elizabeth is not that she wears out men but that she wears out male narrators. As we move back in history, she sees off both Matthew and a British banker-cum-spymaster named Henry Cort. In the last third, Pears finds himself somewhat in the situation of the clumsy home improver who, deciding to decorate his front room, finds he has painted himself into a corner. To possess a conventional erotic value in 1909, Elizabeth cannot be alive in the 1860s. Pears has landed himself in 1867 without the character who has entertained both author and reader for 423 pages.

Fortunately, we are in Venice, in the company of all manner of good literary guides from Casanova to Daphne du Maurier. There is a superb scene of a torpedo test in the lagoon. Alas, the plot is now a monster and cannot be resolved without the supernatural, sexual deviancy, the precision engineering of high explosives, narcotics and incest. I have nothing against those amenities in literature, but if you use them you have to use them with conviction, not as the bent nails, stripped screws and dried-up wood glue in the bottom layer of the literary toolbox.

Why don't you have a go at it?

¶ Francis Fukuyama gives Matthew Crawford's Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work a winningly favorable review, agreeing with point after point before concluding,

Crawford argues that the ideologists of the knowledge economy have posited a false dichotomy between knowing and doing. The fact of the matter is that most forms of real knowledge, including self-knowledge, come from the effort to struggle with and master the brute reality of material objects — loosening a bolt without stripping its threads, or backing a semi rig into a loading dock. All these activities, if done well, require knowledge both about the world as it is and about yourself, and your own limitations. They can’t be learned simply by following rules, as a computer does; they require intuitive knowledge that comes from long experience and repeated encounters with difficulty and failure. In this world, self-esteem cannot be faked: if you can’t get the valve cover off the engine, the customer won’t pay you.

¶ Max Boot praises Andrew Roberts's Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945, noting that it

succeeds in deepening our understanding of the complex interactions between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt (the “masters” of the title) and their senior military advisers (or “commanders”), Field Marshal Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Gen. George C. Marshall, the United States Army chief of staff who was primus inter pares on the Joint Chiefs.

Mr Boot ends with Mr Roberts's observation that the power of senior officers on both sides of the Atlantic to challenge their heads of state gave the Allies a crucial advantage over the Nazi war machine, which was unable to protect itself from Hitler's whims.

¶ In too short a space, Lori Gottlieb manages to make Malina Saval's The Secret Life of Boys: Inside the Raw Emotional World of Male Teens sound genuinely enlightening.

But as different as these boys seem, what unites them, Saval says, is the very quality boys reputedly lack — a desire for connection: “The boys told me straight out that they were not just looking for someone to talk to, but someone to talk with.”

¶ One has to wonder why Dagmar Harzog gets half a page for her favorable review of The Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler, by Anne Nelson. The review is a success in spite of that. Here is its conclusion:

A journalism professor at Columbia, Nelson is the author of the moving post-9/11 play The Guys. More pertinent to the strengths of this book are her experiences as a reporter who lived and worked under military dictatorships in Central and South America as well as in post-totalitarian Romania and Cambodia. No doubt those experiences inform the deep sympathy and unsentimental compassion of Red Orchestra, with its story of a tiny band that somehow managed to summon the wild courage to take a stand against a barbarous status quo.

¶ The further Chelsea Cain's review of Alice Hoffman's The Story Sisters progresses, the more the book sounds intended for precocious, teenaged girls.

But The Story Sisters itself is not a fairy tale. The characters in fairy tales are all good or all bad, and Hoffman’s characters are always moving back and forth, challenging our perceptions, daring us to judge them. Her sentences tremble with allegory; nothing in this novel is ever as it appears — or is it? As Elv becomes more troubled, she retreats farther into the world of Arnelle, and farther away from her sisters. Even the girls’ last name, Story, is whimsical, lending heft to Elv’s theory that they were renamed by mortal kidnappers — we mortals being so maddeningly literal.

The last act grows a bit histrionic and narrative strands are over-tangled, then too neatly tied up, but Hoffman’s writing is so lovely and her female characters so appealing that it almost doesn’t matter. In the end, The Story Sisters, for all its magic realism, is about a family navigating through motherhood, sisterhood, daughterhood. It’s Little Women on mushrooms. (Bookish sisters beware.) I can’t wait to read it in Arnish.

¶ Tayt Harlin contrives to kindle our interest in Damon Galgut's The Imposter, a novel set in the interior of South Africa.

Then he runs into a man named Kenneth Canning, who claims to be an old classmate, though Adam can’t recall him. Canning lives at the base of a mountain on a vast estate called Gondwana: “Like a tropical island that has been towed in from somewhere else and moored incongruously here.” The estate, an inheritance from Canning’s cruel father, is destined to become a golf resort. “I go to sleep happy at night when I think of how I’ll dismantle his dream,” Canning says. “Bit by bit, piece by piece. I’m going to savor every second of it.” Adam is horrified: “The emptiness, the spiritual vapidity, are hard to express; the word that comes to him is desecration.”

¶ When Gaiutra Bahadur tells us that Laila Lalami

has said she chooses to write in English partly because she wants to speak directly to Americans, who read few translated books but urgently need authentic maps to those parts of the world where inequality has electroshocked the terrorist id into being

we can almost bet that the review of Ms Lalami's novel, Secret Son, is going to wind up like this:

But something has been lost in her attempt to bypass translation: perhaps it’s the cadences of the inner courtyards of her upbringing. Her English prose, although clean and closely observed, lacks music, and her similes can be predictable, as when Youssef’s half sister, returning from California to Casablanca, feels “like a fish that had been taken out of water and put back.” And some scenes — notably Youssef discovering that his father isn’t dead, as his mother had told him — unfold too quickly, in the tempo of a reporter telling what has happened rather than a novelist lingeringly narrating. Still, “Secret Son” is a nuanced depiction of the roots of Islamic terrorism, written by someone who intimately knows one of the stratified societies where it grows.

¶ Anand Giridharadas's review of Shanthi Sekaran's The Prayer Room is rather too unsympathetic to be useful.

Yet we slowly realize that the book is little more than the sum of its beautiful details. Sekaran’s sentences may be loose gems, but she hasn’t strung them together to make jewelry. While she treats us to descriptions of a “possibly malnourished” lizard and a “small bikini that dripped gray puddles onto the linoleum,” she never convincingly tells us what it’s like for Viji to bear the children of a man who doesn’t love her, or how she reaches the decision to leave George, or what her impressions of America are. Nor does Sekaran compensate for this lack of interior life with a corresponding exterior gaze — we don’t learn who is president at the time, what is happening in the society, what George’s academic interests are.

¶ Polly Morrice does not help me to understand what a review of Boy Alone: A Brother's Memoir, by Karl Taro Greenfield, is doing in the Book Review. It appears that the book is a survivor's tale, and that what the writer survived was parental neglect (his brother, severely autistic, got all the attention.) This is a book for Science and Health.

¶ Florence Williams thinks that Joshua Blu Buhs "overdoes it," in Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, by considering the "ginormous, nonexistent ape" "through a class lens."

Everybody loves a good monster tale. To the extent that Bigfoot transcended race, gender and geography, we have the human brain to thank. We evolved with predators, and there’s something in our primitive core that cannot forget the fear of the hunted. Where predators don’t exist, we invent them, and we always have, from Grendel to Godzilla.

It's hard to tell from Ms Williams's review whether Mr Buhs's book is social history or social club chatter.

Permalink | Portico | About this feature

Write to me