Reviewing the Book Review

Irrational Behavior

12 July 2009

¶ Curtis Sittenfeld's warm review of Maile Meloy's new collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, begins with a remarkable observation. "Almost all her characters are flawed." This prepared me for the revelation that the Earth is the third planet from the Sun, but Ms Sittenfeld never got round to that chestnut. There are plenty of other indications, however, that Ms Sittenfeld is new to the book reviewing biz.

Thanks to Meloy’s spare, subdued style, the death and infidelity running through these tales don’t take on as grim a tone as you’d expect. Only one story, about the murdered daughter, really makes you want to slit your wrists; and, indeed, a wry humor appears regularly. An Argentine aristocrat observes that another man “was a bore; not even failure could make him interesting.” Or, as one wife tells another, “the whole soul mates idea . . . is really most useful when you’re stealing someone’s husband. It’s not so good when someone might be stealing yours.”

I hope that Ms Meloy is pleased; I can see no other possible consequence of this mash note.

¶ Thomas Mallon begins his review of two new books about America and the Moon — Craig Nelson's Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon and Voices from the Moon: Apollo Astronauts Describe Their Lunar Experiences, by Andrew Chaikin with Victoria Kohl — with a comparison that strikes me as so wrong-headed that I am not going to judge the rest of his piece.

Since 1972, no human has traveled beyond low-Earth orbit, a situation that makes one imagine what things might be like if, after Lindbergh’s flight, the species had contentedly gone back to making do with boats and trains.

Where to begin? How about this: the comparison would work only if the 1969 voyage began on the Moon itself, planned by colonists long resident at that location.

¶ Susann Cokal asks why Gaynor Arnold, author of Girl in a Blue Dress: A Novel Inspired by the Life and Marriage of Charles Dickens, invented a stand-in for her literary hero instead of just calling him "Dickens." When you figure out what her answer means, let me know.

Given the clear commonalities in the stories, and the “inspired by” line on the cover, why not simply write about the Dickenses? Perhaps this explains it: The relatively scant liberties Arnold takes with history allow her to gesture toward a feminist ending, although the feminism is appropriately limited and relies on a deus ex machina that might work in one of Gibson’s/Dickens’s stories but doesn’t seem quite suited to Dorothea’s more prosaic view of the world. Perhaps she has a bit of the gothic in her after all.

¶ Howard Blum, whose disappointed review of Richard Rayner's A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and LA's Scandalous Coming of Age is full of ideas to make it a better book, may well have written that book: his own American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century. Why the times chose a competitor to review this book is beyond me; the conflict of interest invalidates Mr Blum's opinions.

¶ Christopher Benfey's round-up of four biographical novels with literary subjects — The Boswell Brothers, by Philip Baruth; Vanessa and Virginia, by Susan Sellers; The Bellini Madonna, by Elizabeth Lowry; and A Monster's Notes, by Laurie Sheck —is almost beneath notice; on closer look, the novels turn out to have little essential in common, beyond the fact that Mr Benfey doesn't seem to like them.

That echo chamber is the locale of all four books. Despite differences in form and style, certain motifs recur — childhood trauma, sibling rivalry, family madness and suicide, buried manuscripts, gender ambiguity, artistic creation — that seem the contagious conventions of a still-developing genre. If these books are any indication, the biographical fever in current fiction has yet to run its course.

¶ I rather hoped that Virginia Postrel's review of Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price would be somewhat more interesting and insightful than it is. But she seems to be playing a game of ping-pong with the author, addressing points that, conceivably, they've discussed in person, while letting us watch. That's the feel of the review, anyway. It ends on Delphic note.

Business strategy, however, seeks not only to create but to capture value. Free is about a phenomenon in which almost all the new value goes to consumers, not producers. It is false to assume that no price means no value. But it is equally false to argue that value implies profitability.

¶ Jonah Lehrer's generally positive review of Colin Ellard's You Are Here: Why We Can find Our Way to the Moon But Get Lost in the Mall is more descriptive than analytical — which is a nice way of saying that it regurgitates in chitchat-ready nuggets a number of Mr Ellard's findings about spatial orientation. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to be interested in the author's attempts to draw wisdom from the material.

Sometimes, Ellard’s wide-ranging interests lead him astray. At the end of the book, he attempts to connect our spatial brain to the destruction of the environment. Unfortunately, his prescriptions often feel generic, such as when he advises parents to restrict television watching, so that the child will instead develop a connection to “the maple trees waiting at the end of the block.” Perhaps. But I couldn’t help wondering if the kid wouldn’t have more fun — and develop a stronger relationship with nature — if he knew more about the ants on the kitchen counter, and the strange ways in which they find their way home.

Looking at this paragraph, I don't see any real connection between the first two sentences.

¶ There is nothing in Jennifer Schuessler's review of Arianne Cohen's The Tall Book: A Celebration of Life From on High to argue against moving her piece straight to the newspaper's Science section. I say this as a tall person. Just because it's a good book doesn't mean that it warrants coverage in the Book Review. I can't tell from the review if it is a good book, but, as I say, that question is moot.

¶ Ditto, mutatis mutandis, for Joe Scarborough's The Last Best Hope: Restoring Conservatism and America's Promise, of which reviewer Nick Gillespie writes,

Yet “The Last Best Hope” is less a serious manifesto (the book quotes the conservative saint Russell Kirk and the mawkish singer Sarah McLachlan) than a breezy bull session.

¶ Peter Keepnews writes persuasively about the thought-provoking effect of reading Elijah Walds' How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music. Mr Keepnews appears never to have heard much (of) Paul Whiteman.

And he finds parallels between Whiteman — who commissioned “Rhapsody in Blue” and whose quasi-symphonic approach was said, in the unfortunate terminology of the time, to have made an honest woman out of jazz — and the Beatles. Whiteman, he explains, took a music that had been seen as rough and uncouth and made it respectable to a wide audience; the Beatles did the same thing with the string-quartet elegance of “Yesterday” and the operatic grandiosity of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

Wald admits that the analogy is far from perfect, which saves me the trouble of saying so myself. But it works well enough to allow him to ask an uncomfortable question: Why is it that the Beatles and others who “built on the work of black precursors but took the music in new directions” in the 1960s have been routinely praised for accomplishing this feat, while Whiteman has been roundly condemned for doing essentially the same thing 40 years earlier?

¶ As a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, Joshua Kurlantzick is perhaps not the man to introduce Nicholas Schmidle's To Live Or To Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan to the general reader.

At times, Schmidle’s work, a collection of chapter-length anecdotes, coheres little better than Pakistani politics. Parts read like stand-alone articles, and Schmidle diverges into topics, like politics in Bangladesh, that stray from the narrative thrust about the long-term survival of Pakistan.

But what anecdotes.

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