Reviewing the Book Review
No Smiting
28 June 2009
In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.
¶ Paul Bloom gives Robert Wright's The Evolution of God a warmly favorable review, but he also sees the need to argue.
I don’t doubt that the explanation for consciousness will arise from the mercilessly scientific account of psychology and neuroscience, but, still, isn’t it neat that the universe is such that it gave rise to conscious beings like you and me? And that these minds — which evolved in a world of plants and birds and rocks and things — have the capacity to transcend this everyday world and generate philosophy, theology, art and science?
So I share Wright’s wonder at how nicely everything has turned out. But I don’t see how this constitutes an argument for a divine being. After all, even if we could somehow establish definitively that moral progress exists because the universe was jump-started by a God of Love, this just pushes the problem up one level. We are now stuck with the puzzle of why there exists such a caring God in the first place.
This space would be put to better use with quotations from the book, to give us an idea of Mr Wright's style.
¶ David Gates finds Alexander Hemon's new collection of stories, Love and Obstacles, to be a bit too artful. He also notes that Mr Hemon's characters do not connect.
The best Hemon’s characters can hope for is an occasional random intersection of private fictions. His readers may have no better hope in their real lives, but in Hemon’s stories they can observe the strange, lonely artistry of the individual imagination from a distance that seems like no distance at all.
A review less at odds with Mr Hemon's objectives would be preferable.
¶ Alain de Botton has a new book out, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and Caleb Crain not only doesn't like it but manages to write about it in a manner so opaque and mystifying that one would never guess that the author has published a slew of highly entertaining (if somewhat lightweight) books that wryly ponder the human condition. And by the time that Mr Crain claims that the book "succeeds as entertainment," we're not inclined to believe him.
In the book’s most promising passage, a career counselor invites de Botton into his home office in South London to observe sessions with a client, a 37-year-old tax lawyer. He listens as the lawyer sobs in despair, and later as the counselor asks about what she likes and whom she envies in an attempt to cipher out what might make her happy. But just as revelation seems under way, de Botton’s narrative drifts, and he frets for pages about self-esteem-boosting bromides that he hears the career counselor dispense at a seminar, worrying that in feeling superior to them he may be depriving himself of a psychological advantage. In the end, anxiety about social status undermines the chapter completely. The counselor’s office, de Botton has noticed, smells “powerfully of freshly boiled cabbage or swede,” one of several signs that the enterprise doesn’t securely rank as upper-middle class, and he comes to feel it’s “strange and regrettable that in our society something as prospectively life-altering as the determination of a person’s vocation had for the most part been abandoned to marginalized therapists practicing their trade from garden extensions.”
This is a superficial judgment, as de Botton himself all but admits. Moreover, it’s an abdication of journalistic responsibility. If a disinterested writer won’t try to distinguish the efficacy of an endeavor from its trappings, who will?
The most curious aspect of the review is its air of withholding the real reasons for Mr Crain's animus.
¶ Liesl Schilinger makes Robert Boswell's The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards: Stories sound like a must-read, despite the less than appealing characters and their stories.
Reading these tales of bluff, brusque people who wrestle clumsily with emotions, you get the impression that self-analysis may be less popular in some parts of the country than it is on the coasts. Boswell, a man of the Southwest (he and his wife, the writer Antonya Nelson, met in Arizona and now teach creative writing in Texas), likes to outsource his characters’ introspection. A priest, a parent, a landscaper, a policeman creep up to his benighted protagonists, coaxing reflection; but their interference is usually rebuffed. In “Supreme Beings,” a young loner who squanders his paychecks on a fortune-teller’s muzzy readings ditches a priest who drops by to check on him. While the priest waits for a whiskey, the loner slips out the back door. “He thought of himself as an outlaw but acted like any other person whose passions were shaped largely by television,” Boswell writes. “His desire for the fortune-teller had become the first exceptional event in a life so tawdry and yet so ordinary as to have no texture whatsoever.”
¶ William Boyd clearly likes Richard Flanagan's new novel about Tasmania, Dickens, and the omniscience of the Victorian novelists, Wanting. But he makes the book sound like an exercise in both senses, displaying the writer's cleverness while imposing no small tedium on the reader.
“Wanting” is, in its way, as interesting a fictional exercise as Flanagan’s celebrated and unclassifiable third novel, Gould’s Book of Fish (2001). Flanagan takes a literary form — in Gould’s, metafiction and unreliable narration; in Wanting, Victorian-style omniscience — and bends it forcefully to the essential themes that his fiction subsists on: the secret “silences” of Tasmania, as he terms them, and the essential needs that inform all human lives across history and culture and race.
¶ Geoffrey Wheatcroft is implacable with Richard Haass's War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars; he wants the author to produce a better reason than he can for staying on in the Bush Administration despite his serious misgivings about our Iraqi misadventure.
Altogether Haass emerges as an intelligent and honest man, but a little rarefied and maybe indecisive. He gives too many people the benefit of the doubt and has few really bad words for anyone, although there’s one nice line when he almost bares his fangs: “I should add that Dick Cheney and I always got on well, or at least I thought so until I learned that his staff was reading accounts of my conversations abroad supplied by U.S. intelligence agencies.”
Despite what others have claimed, Haass says that there was no decision to go to war by the summer of 2002, but rather that “the president had reached the conclusion that it was both necessary and desirable that Saddam should be ousted,” and that “this would almost certainly require the use of military force.” Isn’t that what’s called a distinction without a difference?
He also proposes a psychiatric explanation. Although more justifiable, the operation in Afghanistan didn’t “scratch the itch,” and Bush the Younger wanted to do something bolder. Invading Iraq would above all serve his need “to distance himself from his father.” Oedipus, schmoedipus, so that’s why we went to war.
¶ In a not very helpful review, Jeremy McCarter faults Christopher Bigsby for concentrating his life of Arthur Miller on the playwright's most productive years. (Arthur Miller: 1915-1962).
Yet valuable as Bigsby’s access and insights are, his conception of the book proves wanting. It affords immense space to Miller’s experience of the 1950s, both his marriage to Monroe and the way he was pursued by conservatives for his pro-Soviet stands. (Though never a member of the Communist Party, he considered himself a Marxist until 1950, Bigsby reports.) But about the last 40 years of his life, the book says very little. Bigsby explains the choice this way: “This book primarily concerns itself with the first half of his life for that was when he was being shaped, when he began his conversations with America, when, no matter his later doubts, he did, indeed, change the world and continues to do so.”
It’s certainly true Miller had nothing like the sway on the culture after 1960 that he did before it. Though he would win acclaim as the president of International PEN, the quality of his plays dropped off, so much so that by 1984, “The Oxford Companion to American Theatre” was referring to him in the past tense. This would make uncomfortable writing for someone favorably disposed to Miller, as Bigsby plainly is. But it is also the part of his life that is most in need of study. Both Miller’s memoir, Timebends, and Martin Gottfried’s 2003 biography draw to a rapid close. We still don’t have the full picture of Miller’s outsize life.
Books that are actually notable for what they exclude probably don't merit coverage in the Book Review. As a rule, the Book Review is no place for Mr McCarter's scruples.
¶ Cristina Nehring has, as you might imagine, a field day with Thomas Maier's Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love. Having storytold a nasty picture of the sex-therapists' lives together and apart, she lights into the author.
Maier, the author of an earlier biography of Benjamin Spock, thinks the world of his subjects’ attainments. He passes lightly over the gaffes of their career, like their dubious research on “gay conversion.” He plays down their personal dishonesty, self-mythologizing and myriad contradictions. His pen is not probing but platitudinous: Couples “lose their innocence” when they make love, and on the night a teenage Virginia has sex for the first time, he tells us it feels “pleasant enough for her, though far from familiar.” It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that he makes little of Masters and Johnson’s own awkward and incomprehensible prose style.
Perhaps the lives of Masters and Johnson, and not their research, are the true revelation. At the end of their marital charade and their medical circus, Masters left Johnson the way he had left his first wife (and Johnson her previous husbands): in cold blood. A four-word announcement, and he was off.
¶ Terrence Rafferty writes with barely-cloaked condescension about Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Angel's Game (translated by Lucia Graves).
But seriousness and high moral purpose don’t come easily to writers like Ruiz Zafón. He’s essentially a voluptuary whose temperament runs to big emotions and the purplish prose that heightens them. (The superb translation, by Lucia Graves, captures the strangely serene excessiveness of his style.) Ruiz Zafón toys with ambiguity without, it seems, really believing in it. When he places the action in mist and shadows, as he often does, it’s because he loves the murk and mystery of them. The contrast between the light and the dark is always sharp, like a black-and-white image from a German Expressionist film of the silent era. Like good and evil.
The pleasures of “The Angel’s Game” are guilty ones. As he did in “The Shadow of the Wind,” Ruiz Zafón provides, along with sex and death, a nice slide show of old Barcelona, a handful of affectionate riffs on favorite books (among them that other, very different mysterious-benefactor tale “Great Expectations”) and a pervasive sense of the childish joy of credulity — of surrendering to a story and letting it take you where it will, whatever the consequences.
¶ Sylvia Brownrigg seems to want it both ways. She begins her review of Eva Hoffman's Appassionata warmly:
eloquent new novel poses these and related questions, while also presenting a nuanced portrait of a musician deeply engaged in the complexities of her art.
but, later, she throws in a rather bathtub-sized qualification:
But if the debate between Isabel and Anzor slowly loses interest, it is less because of its familiarity and more because the reader comes to wonder why Isabel is so tolerant of her lover’s scornful rages. She isn’t fully able to counter her friends’ impression that her attraction to Anzor lies in both his charm and his threat. (“The thing about fanatics,” Isabel’s ex-husband, Peter, a rational law professor, notes, “is that they have charisma.”) Hoffman’s decision not to ground the novel in specific dates or historical events also diffuses the novel’s political argument.
Eloquent but boring? Hmmm...
¶ Gaiutra Bahadur tells us up front that Ana Menéndez's new novel, The Last War, is a roman à clef. Between that and the ain't-war-grand discussion that mesmerizes the reviewer, there isn't a lot of space for the book itself.
The scene also hints at the broken psyches that pull certain people to spectacles of violence — including a few who have risked their lives to report on the conflict in Iraq. “We were the war junkies,” Flash says, “endlessly drawn to the ragged margins where other people hated and died. It was as if we believed constant movement would deliver us finally from the disappointments of an ordinary life.” The Last War shows how that instinct can lead to dispatches about the bedroom, as well as those from the war zone.
¶ Amy Finnerty serves up a few helpings of the tittle-tattle that apparently fill Michael Gross's breathless account of snobbery at the Museum, Rogues Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I intend to read this book between brown paper wrappers. It does not merit coverage in the pages of the Book Review.
¶ Alexander Nazaryan's review of Christopher Beha's The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else makes it fairly clear that this book is not yet another report of a high-minded lark, like reading the OED.
A product of Manhattan private schools and Princeton, Beha seems an unlikely candidate for such earnest self-improvement. But like the working masses who were Eliot’s intended audience, he was desperately seeking a retreat from the mundane. At 27 he was the picture of aimless youth: a struggling writer, marginally employed and grievously in debt. Searching for salvation, or at least something to do, he pledged on a lonely New Year’s Eve to spend the next 12 months reading the Harvard Classics, which had long been gathering dust in his parents’ library.
A wealthy young man shacked up with Plato and Goethe sounds like a gimmick, and a tired one at that. But life intruded rudely on Beha’s sabbatical, and he rose to the occasion by writing an unexpected narrative that deftly reconciles lofty thoughts with earthly pain. In doing so, he makes an elegant case for literature as an everyday companion no less valuable than the iPod.
¶ Stephen Mihm's review strongly suggests that Gavin Weightman's The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World 1776-1914 is one of those survey-scrapbooks that trace the history of something without leaving a trace.
Less successful is Weightman’s attempt to draw broad lessons from the history he relates. Toward the end, he briefly summarizes some grand theories about why certain countries more readily embrace industrial innovation than others. This seems like an awkward afterthought, and falls flat, as does his attempt to explain Britain’s industrial decline (he blames the shortsighted embrace of free trade). Yet for the most part, Weightman expertly marshals his cast of characters across continents and centuries, forging a genuinely global history that brings the collaborative, if competitive, business of industrial innovation to life.
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