Lit-Crit
Reviewing the Review: August 17 2008
by Levi Asher on Sunday, August 17, 2008 12:20 amOne of the best things critics can do is complete the thoughts we struggle to formulate ourselves when we read new books. I balked at buying James Wood's literary study How Fiction Works recently after reading several pages in a bookstore, sensing that I might find the air too rarefied. After reading Walter Kirn's consideration of the book on the cover of this week's New York Times Book Review, I feel better about this tough decision.
Kirn appears to be both impressed and offended by Wood's unimpeachable knowledge and authority, not to mention his increasing fame and "Anton Ego"-like (*) critical aura. Kirn mocks Wood gently at first, then more openly later:
... he flashes the Burberry lining of his jacket whenever he rises from his armchair to fetch another Harvard Classic.
By the article's last line, Kirn finally dismisses Wood's book completely:
there is one thing this volume answers dismissively: Why Readers Nap.
Despite the jabs, this is a respectful review of what is clearly an important book, and that's why I think the NYTBR made a good choice in asking the skeptical Walter Kirn to take it on.
The Wood review provides this NYTBR's biggest splash. Bill Keller, a NY Times big-shot who resembles Donald Rumsfeld worries me when he paraphrases Garibaldi in the very first paragraph of his review of John Carlin's Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation. Fortunately, though, Keller turns out to have a good political story to tell (as a former Johannesburg bureau chief for the Times, he must know South African sports from all the angles). He makes a strong case for the relevance of this book, which I think I'll be checking out.
Beyond those two pieces, I can only report the typical ennui of several more notices of new books that feel hard to tell apart. Sophie Gee says "the bloggers" have been enthusiastic about The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson. Not any bloggers I've read lately, but okay. Stacey D'Erasmo does some good work with a "Tempest" theme in reviewing A Blessed Child by cinematic daughter Linn Ullmann, but I still know I'll never get around to reading this book. Liesl Schillinger doesn't really breathe life into a novel about hip young American expatriates in Germany, This Must Be the Place by Anna Winger, and I wish Schillinger had pointed out something I've said a few times before: if you can't come up with a better title for your novel than a Talking Heads or Elvis Costello song, you really shouldn't get to publish a novel at all. (Although I guess we'll give Carol Alt a free pass).
Kirn appears to be both impressed and offended by Wood's unimpeachable knowledge and authority, not to mention his increasing fame and "Anton Ego"-like (*) critical aura. Kirn mocks Wood gently at first, then more openly later:
... he flashes the Burberry lining of his jacket whenever he rises from his armchair to fetch another Harvard Classic.
By the article's last line, Kirn finally dismisses Wood's book completely:
there is one thing this volume answers dismissively: Why Readers Nap.
Despite the jabs, this is a respectful review of what is clearly an important book, and that's why I think the NYTBR made a good choice in asking the skeptical Walter Kirn to take it on.
The Wood review provides this NYTBR's biggest splash. Bill Keller, a NY Times big-shot who resembles Donald Rumsfeld worries me when he paraphrases Garibaldi in the very first paragraph of his review of John Carlin's Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation. Fortunately, though, Keller turns out to have a good political story to tell (as a former Johannesburg bureau chief for the Times, he must know South African sports from all the angles). He makes a strong case for the relevance of this book, which I think I'll be checking out.
Beyond those two pieces, I can only report the typical ennui of several more notices of new books that feel hard to tell apart. Sophie Gee says "the bloggers" have been enthusiastic about The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson. Not any bloggers I've read lately, but okay. Stacey D'Erasmo does some good work with a "Tempest" theme in reviewing A Blessed Child by cinematic daughter Linn Ullmann, but I still know I'll never get around to reading this book. Liesl Schillinger doesn't really breathe life into a novel about hip young American expatriates in Germany, This Must Be the Place by Anna Winger, and I wish Schillinger had pointed out something I've said a few times before: if you can't come up with a better title for your novel than a Talking Heads or Elvis Costello song, you really shouldn't get to publish a novel at all. (Although I guess we'll give Carol Alt a free pass).
Sick, Sick, Sick
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 12:13 pm
1. We don't hear enough about cartoonist Jules Feiffer these days, so this interview is a nice refresher. (Via Slut).
2. Hamlet, who was also sick, sick, sick, will never go out of style. However, the Hamlet currently running at New York City's Shakespeare in the Park got a terrible New York Times review. My favorite recent Hamlet was right here.
3. Richard Hell, who is not sick, sick, sick but is often mistaken as such, has collaborated with Christopher Wool on a new poetry project called Perpenilsis. They'll be at the Strand in New York City on Wednesday, June 25.
4. Latter-day Beat writer Charles Plymell, who is also not sick, sick, sick, is interviewed at a blog titled Even for the Hipsters, Hustlers and Highjivers. Damn straight.
5. Check out the good people -- Samantha Hunt, Joyce Carol Oates, Tommy Chong, a tribute to Jason Shinder -- who'll be reading at Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan.
6. The Loss of Hope and Love blog offers "daily cut-up poetry".
7. The irascible Roger Kimball on criticismism:
The first thing to notice about the vogue for “critical thinking” is that it tends to foster not criticism but what one wit called “criticismism”: the “ism” or ideology of being critical, which, like most isms, turns out to be a parody or betrayal of the very thing it claims to champion.
The above does appear, however, to be the best sentence in the article.
8. Frank Wilson asks: will bloggers care that the Associated Press is announcing strict rules about online quotation? I can answer that very quickly. No.
9. I agree with Chad Post about the "New Classics". It's gotta get better than this.
10. Sign and Sight has discovered a new explanation for Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot -- but you have to read French to understand the explanation (via Scott McLemee).
Sick, sick, sick.
John Carey on Elitism and the Literary Intelligentsia
by Jennifer Cuddy on Friday, June 20, 2008 12:26 am
Why is literary fiction inevitably a poor seller? This question is at the core of John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses, Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939.John Carey asserts that the English literary intelligentsia of this era made a conscious effort to segregate literary fiction from the newly literate (or semi-literate) mass culture produced by the late nineteenth century educational reforms to which many of the intelligentsia opposed. The Education Act of 1871 introduced universal elementary education in England. When a newspaper called the Daily Mail emerged in 1896 it carried the slogan 'The Busy Man's Paper' and announced its intention to 'give the public what it wants' This was in direct conflict to the belief that the public should be given what the intellectuals say they should be given. T.S. Eliot wrote in an essay:
There is no doubt that our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards...destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.
The 1879 novel Immaturity by George Bernard Shaw was turned down by nearly every London publisher, and he concluded that the reason for its rejection was the newly adopted Education Act, which he proclaimed 'was producing readers who have never before bought books.'
Publishers of the time also did not want the 'excessively literary' George Eliot, but preferred the adventure stories of Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde).
As populist newspapers like the Daily Mail prospered, European intellectual hostility to newspapers grew. In The Criterion in 1938, T.S Eliot declared that the effect of the daily newspapers on their readers was to 'affirm them as a complacent, prejudiced and unthinking mass'. Extensive campaigns against newspapers were abound. Critic F.R. Leavis wrote in Scrutiny of the mass media 'arousing the cheapest emotional responses,' declaring that 'Films, newspapers, publicity in all forms, commercially-catered fiction -- all offer satisfaction at the lowest level.' Evelyn Waugh satirised the new trend in popular culture in his novels Scoop and Vile Bodies.
To the highbrows of the time, it seemed that the masses were not fully alive. Many of the predominate literary icons of this period expressed clear hostility towards the explosive over-population of the third-world; and the triumph of hyperdemocracy and social power created by this newly created state. Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun's anti-democratic views are epitomized by his character Ivar Kareno, hero of the Kareno trilogy:
I believe in the born leader, the natural despot, the master, not the man who is chosen but the man who elects himself to be the ruler over the masses. I believe in and hope for one thing, and that is the return of the great terrorist, the living essence of human power, the Caesar.
Thomas Hardy wrote in 1887:
You may regard a throng of people as containing a certain small minority who have sensitive souls; these, and the aspects of these, being what is worth observing. So you divide them into the mentally unquickened, mechanical soulless; and the living, throbbing, suffering, vital, in other words into souls and machines, ether and clay.
D.H. Lawrence argues that only the elite truly live, while the proletariat merely survives:
Life is more vivid in the dandelion than in the green fern, or
than in the palm tree,
Life is more vivid in the snake than in the butterfly.
Life is more vivid in the wren than in the alligator...
Life is more vivid in me, than in the Mexican who drives the wagon for me.
Ezra Pound's complex Cantos are a good illustration of the fashion for obscurity in literature, a style that itself expressed contempt for the common man. In Pound's Cantos the multitudes and democratically elected leaders were a torrent of human excrement. The illustration of 'the great arse-hole' Pound contends, was a portrait of contemporary England.
A body of esoteric doctrine "defended from the herd" was adopted by a group of intellectuals who created a secret society called 'The Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn' in 1890. This secret society fed the craving for power and distinction to soar the intellectual above the masses.
The contempt for the masses expressed by the literary icons of this period not only opposed universal education, but many also supported the ever-growing concept of eugenics as a means to control the overpopulation of inferior beings. Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection inadvertently led a new ethics most expressed in H. G. Wells' New Republic. Wells writes:
The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility, not a sort of night refuge for base spirits out of the void; and the alternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully and efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalor dishonor, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through the sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence.
The entirety of John Carey's study is overwhelming, enlightening and extremely disturbing, especially as literary elitist tendencies may be an inevitable part of many intellectual communities, even today.
Rebranding the Review: June 8 2008
by Levi Asher on Sunday, June 8, 2008 04:30 pmAn ecology activist climbed the New York Times building in midtown Manhattan this week, but the best part is that a few hours later another guy heard about it and rushed over to do the same thing. Which just goes to prove: you can't scrounge a minute of fame in this city without somebody else jumping into the spotlight. Same as it's always been.
Have you noticed that the New York Times Book Review has been bursting out more and more into its own (successful) brand? A new 15-minute weekly radio show on WQXR-FM is no small potatoes, especially since it reflects the NYTBR's decision to define itself outside the shrinking newspaper category and become a multimedia brand. These are hard times in the newspaper business, but the Book Review has an identity and industry presence beyond that of its parent paper. Who remembers that New York Magazine was once the Sunday magazine supplement for the dying New York Herald Tribune? The New York Times is hardly dying, but still the NYTBR is doing the smart thing by positioning itself on its own terms and promoting the Book Review brand directly to the world.
I'm thinking not only of radio here, but of internet publishing. It's a surprising fact, and possibly a discouraging one to independent bloggers like me, that Paper Cuts, the New York Times Book Review blog, has a higher Technorati ranking than any other literary blog. It also often maintains a higher Technorati ranking than any other New York Times blog. We like to make fun of the stodgy NYTBR here in the 'sphere, but who's laughing last?
NYTBR's directors may be more savvy than they look, especially since the publication trades heavily on its "traditional" image in contrast to all that crazy internet stuff out there. But behind the "gray lady" aura and the retro ink-on-the-fingers chic, it's entirely possible that these executives are more focused than they want readers to know on playing both sides of this equation. The online edition of the NY Times competes for online ad dollars with Google and Yahoo, and does so from some position of strength. Like I said, more savvy than they look.
And maybe this is one reason why, in case anyone is wondering, I still keep my eye on the New York Times Book Review every week, even when I have to fight off waves of ennui to remain interested. Some LitKicks readers have suggested to me that this old media brand isn't worth the attention, but I'm not falling for that easy answer. They're on the radio, their blog's Technorati ranking kicks my ass ... no, the NYTBR isn't losing its relevance anytime soon.
Quality-wise, it remains a mixed bag. The best article in today's issue, David Gates' explanation of why he just can't endure another self-satisfied Salman Rushdie historical fantasia, rings completely true with me:
I'm probably not Rushdie's target audience: in literature, at least, I find the marvelous tedious, and the tedious -- as rendered by a Beckett or a Raymond Carver or even a Kafka -- marvelous.
I also like Robert Pinksy's flights of pathos in connecting Kathryn Harrison's true-crime story While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family to Oedipus Rex, Dante's Inferno and the book of Genesis. Joanna Hershon's The German Bride, which is on my to-read pile, wins the approval of Deborah Weisgall, and Elinor Lipman's clear writing almost persuades me (as if I had time to read more novels!) to add Sylvia Brownrigg's Morality Tale, the study of a marriage in crisis, to the pile as well.
There's no awful writing in today's issue, but there are some deeply flawed critical stances. Bryan Burrough completely dismisses a modest biography of a Wyoming kid who dies in an oil-field accident, The Legend of Colton T. Bryant by Alexandra Fuller, for imagining scenes and dialogue in a non-fiction book.
Call me a strict constructionist, but I wanted to yell, No, no, no, you can't do that! Not if you want to call a book nonfiction. That's not artistic license. It's cheating. Not cheating in the sense that plagiarism is cheating. I don't belive Fuller has committed a major literary felony here, but it's clearly a misdemeanor, even if she comes out and admits it.
Burrough seems to lack confidence in his own emphatic position here, and he well should, because Fuller's book is written the same way good nonfiction has been written since, probably, the days of hieroglyphics. Nonfiction books almost always invent dialogue and imagine scenic details beyond the realm of what the author can authenticate. There is absolutely no reason to single out this book, especially since the book does not market itself (I went to a bookstore and checked) on its veracity but on the quality of its storytelling. Nowhere on the book's cover does it proclaim "A True Story!". The words "nonfiction" and "biography" appear only in the finest print on the title page. Alexandra has not committed a misdemeanor or a felony; she has attempted to write a book the way books have always been written. The sins of James Frey should not condemn the world's eager readers to a new publishing standard whereby nonfiction books are drained of all their imaginative blood and broadly vetted by lawyers. I can hardly imagine a worse fate for the important field of nonfiction publishing.
Chuck Pahlaniuk's Snuff is likewise dismissed wholesale by Lucy Ellmann, who refers to Pahlaniuk as a "shock jock" and clearly can't stand his scummy, nasty book. What her review doesn't tell us is whether Pahlaniuk has written a good scummy, nasty book or a bad scummy, nasty book. And that's exactly what Pahlaniuk's readers will want to know.
Have you noticed that the New York Times Book Review has been bursting out more and more into its own (successful) brand? A new 15-minute weekly radio show on WQXR-FM is no small potatoes, especially since it reflects the NYTBR's decision to define itself outside the shrinking newspaper category and become a multimedia brand. These are hard times in the newspaper business, but the Book Review has an identity and industry presence beyond that of its parent paper. Who remembers that New York Magazine was once the Sunday magazine supplement for the dying New York Herald Tribune? The New York Times is hardly dying, but still the NYTBR is doing the smart thing by positioning itself on its own terms and promoting the Book Review brand directly to the world.
I'm thinking not only of radio here, but of internet publishing. It's a surprising fact, and possibly a discouraging one to independent bloggers like me, that Paper Cuts, the New York Times Book Review blog, has a higher Technorati ranking than any other literary blog. It also often maintains a higher Technorati ranking than any other New York Times blog. We like to make fun of the stodgy NYTBR here in the 'sphere, but who's laughing last?
NYTBR's directors may be more savvy than they look, especially since the publication trades heavily on its "traditional" image in contrast to all that crazy internet stuff out there. But behind the "gray lady" aura and the retro ink-on-the-fingers chic, it's entirely possible that these executives are more focused than they want readers to know on playing both sides of this equation. The online edition of the NY Times competes for online ad dollars with Google and Yahoo, and does so from some position of strength. Like I said, more savvy than they look.
And maybe this is one reason why, in case anyone is wondering, I still keep my eye on the New York Times Book Review every week, even when I have to fight off waves of ennui to remain interested. Some LitKicks readers have suggested to me that this old media brand isn't worth the attention, but I'm not falling for that easy answer. They're on the radio, their blog's Technorati ranking kicks my ass ... no, the NYTBR isn't losing its relevance anytime soon.
Quality-wise, it remains a mixed bag. The best article in today's issue, David Gates' explanation of why he just can't endure another self-satisfied Salman Rushdie historical fantasia, rings completely true with me:
I'm probably not Rushdie's target audience: in literature, at least, I find the marvelous tedious, and the tedious -- as rendered by a Beckett or a Raymond Carver or even a Kafka -- marvelous.
I also like Robert Pinksy's flights of pathos in connecting Kathryn Harrison's true-crime story While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family to Oedipus Rex, Dante's Inferno and the book of Genesis. Joanna Hershon's The German Bride, which is on my to-read pile, wins the approval of Deborah Weisgall, and Elinor Lipman's clear writing almost persuades me (as if I had time to read more novels!) to add Sylvia Brownrigg's Morality Tale, the study of a marriage in crisis, to the pile as well.
There's no awful writing in today's issue, but there are some deeply flawed critical stances. Bryan Burrough completely dismisses a modest biography of a Wyoming kid who dies in an oil-field accident, The Legend of Colton T. Bryant by Alexandra Fuller, for imagining scenes and dialogue in a non-fiction book.
Call me a strict constructionist, but I wanted to yell, No, no, no, you can't do that! Not if you want to call a book nonfiction. That's not artistic license. It's cheating. Not cheating in the sense that plagiarism is cheating. I don't belive Fuller has committed a major literary felony here, but it's clearly a misdemeanor, even if she comes out and admits it.
Burrough seems to lack confidence in his own emphatic position here, and he well should, because Fuller's book is written the same way good nonfiction has been written since, probably, the days of hieroglyphics. Nonfiction books almost always invent dialogue and imagine scenic details beyond the realm of what the author can authenticate. There is absolutely no reason to single out this book, especially since the book does not market itself (I went to a bookstore and checked) on its veracity but on the quality of its storytelling. Nowhere on the book's cover does it proclaim "A True Story!". The words "nonfiction" and "biography" appear only in the finest print on the title page. Alexandra has not committed a misdemeanor or a felony; she has attempted to write a book the way books have always been written. The sins of James Frey should not condemn the world's eager readers to a new publishing standard whereby nonfiction books are drained of all their imaginative blood and broadly vetted by lawyers. I can hardly imagine a worse fate for the important field of nonfiction publishing.
Chuck Pahlaniuk's Snuff is likewise dismissed wholesale by Lucy Ellmann, who refers to Pahlaniuk as a "shock jock" and clearly can't stand his scummy, nasty book. What her review doesn't tell us is whether Pahlaniuk has written a good scummy, nasty book or a bad scummy, nasty book. And that's exactly what Pahlaniuk's readers will want to know.
Blinding Me With Science
by Levi Asher on Monday, May 12, 2008 04:49 pm1. Jonathan Gottschall, a professor and classicist, says literary critics should adopt scientific methods. This article is alternately silly and smart. It starts off silly:
But over the last decade or so, more and more literary scholars have agreed that the field has become moribund, aimless, and increasingly irrelevant to the concerns not only of the "outside world," but also to the world inside the ivory tower. Class enrollments and funding are down, morale is sagging, huge numbers of PhDs can't find jobs, and books languish unpublished or unpurchased because almost no one, not even other literary scholars, wants to read them.
When was the time in our glorified past when morale wasn't sagging, when huge numbers of liberal arts PhDs easily found gainful employment, when books didn't languish unpublished or unpurchased? Gottschall, author of a book about Homer, should know that golden ages tend to be highly overrated. To the extent that this article posits an urgent current literary crisis that a paradigm shift towards scientific exactness will solve, it's a highly unconvincing piece.
Flawed framing aside, though, there are good ideas here:
Homo sapiens is a bizarre literary ape -- one that, outside of working and sleeping, may well spend most of its remaining hours lost in landscapes of make-believe. Across the breadth of human history, across the wide mosaic of world cultures, there has never been a society in which people don't devote great gobs of time to seeing, creating, and hearing fictions -- from folktales to film, from theater to television. Stories represent our biggest and most preciously varied repository of information about human nature. Without a robust study of literature there can be no adequate reckoning of the human condition -- no full understanding of art, culture, psychology, or even of biology. As Binghamton University biologist David Sloan Wilson says, "the natural history of our species" is written in love poems, adventure stories, fables, myths, tales, and novels.
Amen. This is why, as a reader fairly obsessed with global history and politics, I turn so often to fiction and poetry and drama to help me understand societies of the past. Now, let's see an example of Gottschall's "scientific method" in practice:
In some cases, it's possible to use scientific methods to question cherished tenets of modern literary theory. Consider the question of the "beauty myth": Most literary scholars believe that the huge emphasis our culture places on women's beauty is driven by a beauty myth, a suite of attitudes that maximizes female anxiety about appearance in order, ultimately, to maintain male dominance. It's easy to find evidence for this idea in our culture's poems, plays, and fairy tales: As one scholar after another has documented, Western literature is rife with sexist-seeming beauty imagery.
Scholars tend to take this evidence as proof that Western culture is unusually sexist. But is this really the case? In a study to be published in the next issue of the journal Human Nature, my colleagues and I addressed this question by collecting and analyzing descriptions of physical attractiveness in thousands of folktales from all around the globe. What we found was that female characters in folktales were about six times more likely than their male counterparts to be described with a reference to their attractiveness. That six-to-one ratio held up in Western literature and also across scores of traditional societies. So literary scholars have been absolutely right about the intense stress on women's beauty in Western literature, but quite wrong to conclude that this beauty myth says something unique about Western culture. Its ultimate roots apparently lie not in the properties of any specific culture, but in something deeper in human nature.
Nicely done. If this is what Gottschall means by scientific method, I'll bite. What it really amounts to is the adoption of empirical testing for commonly held presumptions about literature, and I bet there are many insights to be gained by an approach like this. I would not want to go too far with it, though. In the age of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and William James, psychological investigations involved more imagination and speculation than observation and proof. But the field of psychology is now completely dominated by empirical testing and observation -- the "scientific method" -- and while much may have been gained by this paradigm shift, it should not escape our notice that there have been few great or visionary psychologists on the scale of Freud or Jung or James since. Empirical testing should complement the work of the imagination; it cannot replace the work of the imagination.
I'd like to follow the work of Jonathan Gottschall further. I see that he has also written a book called The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of the Narrative (co-edited by David Sloan Wilson, the same source Gottschall quotes in the first passage above, which indicates that the field of scientific literary criticism may be an uncomfortably small world). I am disturbed, though, to see that this volume is priced at a ridiculous $79.95. Empirical evidence tells me that books priced at $79.95 deserve the tiny readership they get. Gottschall may want to descend a few steps from his ivory tower, and then perhaps his interesting ideas may actually find an eager audience.
2. Even though I already know every word in this book, an appealing cover design compelled me to glance at a new paperback Kafka collection published by Penguin, Metamorphosis and Other Stories, which was prominently displayed in a store. I then almost fell over in shock and knocked over the "New Paperbacks" display when I read the biographical note on the very first page and learned that Franz Kafka was born in 1833.
Yes, 1833. Empirical evidence tells me that this is highly unlikely, since he would have been 82 years old when he wrote Metamorphosis and 93 when he wrote my favorite of his novels, The Castle. In fact Franz Kafka was born in 1883. So, seriously, doesn't Penguin have a responsibility to recall this new "Deluxe Edition"? It's funny to read about this mistake on a blog, but it's not going to be funny when generations of readers and students are misinformed and confused by the error. I say Penguin is obligated to recall, and to eat the cost. What do you say?
I showed the mistake to my friend Dan Levy, who quipped "Sure, Penguin, what do they know about classic literature?" Exactly.
3. Here's the Best of the Booker Prize shortlist. LitKicks says J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace is the masterpiece of the bunch. Though Booksquare is correct to ask: "does it really help literature if the establishment keeps finding new ways to give awards to the same group of authors over and over again?"
But over the last decade or so, more and more literary scholars have agreed that the field has become moribund, aimless, and increasingly irrelevant to the concerns not only of the "outside world," but also to the world inside the ivory tower. Class enrollments and funding are down, morale is sagging, huge numbers of PhDs can't find jobs, and books languish unpublished or unpurchased because almost no one, not even other literary scholars, wants to read them.
When was the time in our glorified past when morale wasn't sagging, when huge numbers of liberal arts PhDs easily found gainful employment, when books didn't languish unpublished or unpurchased? Gottschall, author of a book about Homer, should know that golden ages tend to be highly overrated. To the extent that this article posits an urgent current literary crisis that a paradigm shift towards scientific exactness will solve, it's a highly unconvincing piece.
Flawed framing aside, though, there are good ideas here:
Homo sapiens is a bizarre literary ape -- one that, outside of working and sleeping, may well spend most of its remaining hours lost in landscapes of make-believe. Across the breadth of human history, across the wide mosaic of world cultures, there has never been a society in which people don't devote great gobs of time to seeing, creating, and hearing fictions -- from folktales to film, from theater to television. Stories represent our biggest and most preciously varied repository of information about human nature. Without a robust study of literature there can be no adequate reckoning of the human condition -- no full understanding of art, culture, psychology, or even of biology. As Binghamton University biologist David Sloan Wilson says, "the natural history of our species" is written in love poems, adventure stories, fables, myths, tales, and novels.
Amen. This is why, as a reader fairly obsessed with global history and politics, I turn so often to fiction and poetry and drama to help me understand societies of the past. Now, let's see an example of Gottschall's "scientific method" in practice:
In some cases, it's possible to use scientific methods to question cherished tenets of modern literary theory. Consider the question of the "beauty myth": Most literary scholars believe that the huge emphasis our culture places on women's beauty is driven by a beauty myth, a suite of attitudes that maximizes female anxiety about appearance in order, ultimately, to maintain male dominance. It's easy to find evidence for this idea in our culture's poems, plays, and fairy tales: As one scholar after another has documented, Western literature is rife with sexist-seeming beauty imagery.
Scholars tend to take this evidence as proof that Western culture is unusually sexist. But is this really the case? In a study to be published in the next issue of the journal Human Nature, my colleagues and I addressed this question by collecting and analyzing descriptions of physical attractiveness in thousands of folktales from all around the globe. What we found was that female characters in folktales were about six times more likely than their male counterparts to be described with a reference to their attractiveness. That six-to-one ratio held up in Western literature and also across scores of traditional societies. So literary scholars have been absolutely right about the intense stress on women's beauty in Western literature, but quite wrong to conclude that this beauty myth says something unique about Western culture. Its ultimate roots apparently lie not in the properties of any specific culture, but in something deeper in human nature.
Nicely done. If this is what Gottschall means by scientific method, I'll bite. What it really amounts to is the adoption of empirical testing for commonly held presumptions about literature, and I bet there are many insights to be gained by an approach like this. I would not want to go too far with it, though. In the age of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and William James, psychological investigations involved more imagination and speculation than observation and proof. But the field of psychology is now completely dominated by empirical testing and observation -- the "scientific method" -- and while much may have been gained by this paradigm shift, it should not escape our notice that there have been few great or visionary psychologists on the scale of Freud or Jung or James since. Empirical testing should complement the work of the imagination; it cannot replace the work of the imagination.
I'd like to follow the work of Jonathan Gottschall further. I see that he has also written a book called The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of the Narrative (co-edited by David Sloan Wilson, the same source Gottschall quotes in the first passage above, which indicates that the field of scientific literary criticism may be an uncomfortably small world). I am disturbed, though, to see that this volume is priced at a ridiculous $79.95. Empirical evidence tells me that books priced at $79.95 deserve the tiny readership they get. Gottschall may want to descend a few steps from his ivory tower, and then perhaps his interesting ideas may actually find an eager audience.
2. Even though I already know every word in this book, an appealing cover design compelled me to glance at a new paperback Kafka collection published by Penguin, Metamorphosis and Other Stories, which was prominently displayed in a store. I then almost fell over in shock and knocked over the "New Paperbacks" display when I read the biographical note on the very first page and learned that Franz Kafka was born in 1833.
Yes, 1833. Empirical evidence tells me that this is highly unlikely, since he would have been 82 years old when he wrote Metamorphosis and 93 when he wrote my favorite of his novels, The Castle. In fact Franz Kafka was born in 1883. So, seriously, doesn't Penguin have a responsibility to recall this new "Deluxe Edition"? It's funny to read about this mistake on a blog, but it's not going to be funny when generations of readers and students are misinformed and confused by the error. I say Penguin is obligated to recall, and to eat the cost. What do you say?
I showed the mistake to my friend Dan Levy, who quipped "Sure, Penguin, what do they know about classic literature?" Exactly.
3. Here's the Best of the Booker Prize shortlist. LitKicks says J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace is the masterpiece of the bunch. Though Booksquare is correct to ask: "does it really help literature if the establishment keeps finding new ways to give awards to the same group of authors over and over again?"
Reviewing the Review: April 20 2008
by Levi Asher on Sunday, April 20, 2008 07:21 pmMichael Orthofer has been bemoaning the English-only literary focus of the New York Times Book Review for a long time, and he reaches a brilliant sarcastic pitch with a recent blog post titled 29 Words. It's more important that you read this than that you read anything I will say here this weekend.
Of course, the Book Review editors might feel singled-out by this type of analysis, since they are effectively a pillar of the USA commercial publishing/bookselling industry, and it's the entire USA commercial publishing/bookselling industry, not just the New York Times Book Review, that persists in a hot-dog-and-apple-pie America-only scope of vision, refusing to realize that many readers considers themselves citizens of the world and would welcome the chance to read more excellent books from around the world. The NYTBR does seem to be in a position to improve this lame situation, though, and Orthofer is definitely speaking for many loyal New York Times readers when he pleads for more coverage of translated books.
Another harsh critique of the NYTBR was published this week in Bitch Magazine, which says "At the New York Times Book Review, all the misogyny is fit to print".
It's been a tough week for the crew up at Eighth Avenue and 40th Street, but I have no solace to offer, because I don't even like this week's issue very much.
I appreciate the types of systematic studies of NYTBR editorial practices produced by writers like Michael Orthofer and Sarah Seltzer above. I tend to react more viscerally to individual articles, and one thing I know I'll react to negatively is the feeling that a critic is puffing up a book (they usually do this, I suspect, not out of any good will towards the book's author or publisher, but simply because it's the easiest review to write). I hate intellectually lazy and self-satisfied critics, and I hate a book review that reads like a blurb.
There are no prime offenders this week, but there are a few minor examples. Terrence Rafferty's cover piece on The Journey Home, a novel about disaffected young Dubliners by Dermot Bolger, is a rave, but I feel an undercurrent of yawns throughout. The book's big conflict is that the young suburban characters "can't get a grip on what it means to be Irish anymore". Okay, but that's hardly a riveting plot, and in fact somebody already made a halfway decent movie about something like that called The Commitments. Dermot Bolger's novel sounds fine, maybe even a book I'd try to read, but Terrence Rafferty completely fails to convince me here that the book is seminal or unique enough to deserve an NYTBR rave cover review.
I'm similarly underwhelmed by Langdon Hammer's slightly wheezy appreciation of John Ashbery's selected later poems, Notes From The Air. "No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery," Hammer begins, instantly turning me and many other readers off. First of all, this opening sentence is a highly well-trod road. It should be avoided. Second, the claim reeks of cultural elitism, since the average smart person on the street probably has an opinion (possibly even a favorable one) about Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath, but not about John Ashbery. So how exactly does Hammer justify "No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery"? Who's looming who?
There's some good stuff here. Christopher Benfey turns in a highly engaging examination of Cynthia Ozick's Dictation: A Quartet. Floyd Norris places a history book by Steve Fraser called Wall Street: America's Dream Palace in context with a more topical book, The Trillian Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash by Charles R. Morris. I'm intrigued by Paul Devlin's summary of Negro With A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey by Colin Grant, and there's a strange, fascinating endpaper by Paul Greenberg about two eco-millenarian novels I've never heard of (I've also never heard the word "eco-millenarian" before, and I bet you haven't either).
Joyce Carol Oates seems to have written a very strange new book, Wild Nights!, containing far-reaching fantasias about the elderly lives of writers like Mark Twain, Henry James and Emily Dickinson. Brenda Wineapple's discussion of the book is strong. All in all, there are probably more good pieces than bad ones in today's New York Times Book Review.
Still, it adds up to a disappointing whole, perhaps due to a sense of weak conviction that hangs over many of the pieces.
Oh, and, big surprise -- no translated books are reviewed.
Of course, the Book Review editors might feel singled-out by this type of analysis, since they are effectively a pillar of the USA commercial publishing/bookselling industry, and it's the entire USA commercial publishing/bookselling industry, not just the New York Times Book Review, that persists in a hot-dog-and-apple-pie America-only scope of vision, refusing to realize that many readers considers themselves citizens of the world and would welcome the chance to read more excellent books from around the world. The NYTBR does seem to be in a position to improve this lame situation, though, and Orthofer is definitely speaking for many loyal New York Times readers when he pleads for more coverage of translated books.
Another harsh critique of the NYTBR was published this week in Bitch Magazine, which says "At the New York Times Book Review, all the misogyny is fit to print".
It's been a tough week for the crew up at Eighth Avenue and 40th Street, but I have no solace to offer, because I don't even like this week's issue very much.
I appreciate the types of systematic studies of NYTBR editorial practices produced by writers like Michael Orthofer and Sarah Seltzer above. I tend to react more viscerally to individual articles, and one thing I know I'll react to negatively is the feeling that a critic is puffing up a book (they usually do this, I suspect, not out of any good will towards the book's author or publisher, but simply because it's the easiest review to write). I hate intellectually lazy and self-satisfied critics, and I hate a book review that reads like a blurb.
There are no prime offenders this week, but there are a few minor examples. Terrence Rafferty's cover piece on The Journey Home, a novel about disaffected young Dubliners by Dermot Bolger, is a rave, but I feel an undercurrent of yawns throughout. The book's big conflict is that the young suburban characters "can't get a grip on what it means to be Irish anymore". Okay, but that's hardly a riveting plot, and in fact somebody already made a halfway decent movie about something like that called The Commitments. Dermot Bolger's novel sounds fine, maybe even a book I'd try to read, but Terrence Rafferty completely fails to convince me here that the book is seminal or unique enough to deserve an NYTBR rave cover review.
I'm similarly underwhelmed by Langdon Hammer's slightly wheezy appreciation of John Ashbery's selected later poems, Notes From The Air. "No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery," Hammer begins, instantly turning me and many other readers off. First of all, this opening sentence is a highly well-trod road. It should be avoided. Second, the claim reeks of cultural elitism, since the average smart person on the street probably has an opinion (possibly even a favorable one) about Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath, but not about John Ashbery. So how exactly does Hammer justify "No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery"? Who's looming who?
There's some good stuff here. Christopher Benfey turns in a highly engaging examination of Cynthia Ozick's Dictation: A Quartet. Floyd Norris places a history book by Steve Fraser called Wall Street: America's Dream Palace in context with a more topical book, The Trillian Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash by Charles R. Morris. I'm intrigued by Paul Devlin's summary of Negro With A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey by Colin Grant, and there's a strange, fascinating endpaper by Paul Greenberg about two eco-millenarian novels I've never heard of (I've also never heard the word "eco-millenarian" before, and I bet you haven't either).
Joyce Carol Oates seems to have written a very strange new book, Wild Nights!, containing far-reaching fantasias about the elderly lives of writers like Mark Twain, Henry James and Emily Dickinson. Brenda Wineapple's discussion of the book is strong. All in all, there are probably more good pieces than bad ones in today's New York Times Book Review.
Still, it adds up to a disappointing whole, perhaps due to a sense of weak conviction that hangs over many of the pieces.
Oh, and, big surprise -- no translated books are reviewed.
Reviewing the Review: February 17 2008
by Levi Asher on Sunday, February 17, 2008 02:02 amAhh, the ethics of book reviewing. I wish I understood them myself.
Ed Champion calls New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus a "literary lapdancer" for allowing a kissy review of NYT Executive Editor (and recent hatchet man) Bill Keller's new children's book, Tree Shaker: The Story of Nelson Mandela to run in this weekend's issue. I'm half-and-half on this one. On one hand, the reviewer clearly states Bill Keller's job title, and a full disclosure is all that is required here. On the other hand, as Ed suggests, an editorial offense does not have to be an ethical violation to be an editorial offense; Ruth Conniff's review ("Keller's biography of Mandela vibrates with the feeling of history comes alive") is awfully friendly, and this can be an offense against taste.
On the other hand, Tanenhaus could not have known what Ruth Conniff would write. Also on the other hand, a book about Nelson Mandela sounds a hell of a lot better than some of the other junk found in this week's "Children's Books" section, like the unbearably cutesy Maira Kalman's The Principles of Uncertainty ("All this whimsy rings a bit Hallmark-ian at times", says reviewer Ariel Levy, and I can only imagine). In fact, I'm impressed that the Executive Editor of the New York Times witnessed the fall of apartheid as the Times bureau chief in Johannesburg in 1992 and has chosen to write a book about it. The truth is, I know nothing at all about Bill Keller save the fact that he is Sam Tanenhaus's boss and that he bears a chilling physical resemblance to Donald Rumsfeld (which isn't going to make anybody like him), so I think I'll check out his book before I say any more about this.
Friendly reviews sure are a grey area at the Grey Lady, though, and Ruth Conniff isn't the only one laying it on for a book by a Times power player today. It seems pretty clear that Elinor Lipman can't stand Alex Wichtel's Manhattan business/society satire The Spare Wife, which she says "isn't a book with heart", contains "too many inelegant lines" and only succeeds "in spots". But I can practically feel the pain Lipman feels at having to hurt the novelist's and Times columnist's feelings, especially in moments like this:
But wait. Halfway through the book, when the setup is complete and the main story finally kicks in, the choreography and the emotional unveilings are clever and most welcome.
Oh, stop sniveling and admit you hate the book. Yeah, the emotional unveilings are clever and most welcome, that's what I always say when I love a book. If we're going to slam the NYTBR editors for not filtering out Ruth Conniff's valentine to Bill Keller, we should slam them for not filtering out this display either.
Elsewhere this week, Joyce Johnson's workmanlike writing fails to enliven An Uncertain Inheritance: Writers on Caring for Family. Francine Prose is much more inspired on the subject of Susan Choi's A Person of Interest, which fictionalizes a "Unabomber"-type campus-bombing scenario as Choi's earlier American Woman fictionalized Patty Hearst. Jason Berry persuades me that I ought to read Ned Sublette's historical survey The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square.
I expected to like Jim Shepard's review of Mark Harris book about 1967 Hollywood, Pictures at a Revolution. But Shepard tangles himself up inexplicably every time he mentions one of the movies featured in Harris's book, the classic Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy interracial marriage comedy Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. He calls its racial theme "outdated", stating that:
'The Graduate' was seemingly designed to demolish the values on display in 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner'
Huh? Actually, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was designed to demolish the values on display in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. It's a little something called satire, and I can't imagine why Shepard doesn't see this. His idea that the film's racial intermarriage theme is "outdated" in 1967 is especially strange since Shepard also writes:
"... the pilot for the sitcom 'Bewitched' languished for more than a year because of complaints by ABC's Southern stations that its adman-loves-witch premise was 'a thinly veiled argument for racial intermarriage'".
Such a tangled web we sometimes weave. Elsewhere, Rachel Donadio provides a worthwhile endpaper on Harold L. "Doc" Humes, a once-promising "literary star" who co-founded the Paris Review before sinking into paranoid incomprehensibility, though the article caroms strangely into the separate and thematically unrelated subject of Peter Matthiessen's involvement with the CIA before returning to its own subject.
Elizabeth Royte's cover piece on a nature book about a complex ecological conflict in Belize, The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw by Bruce Barcott, is superb:
You may think you've heard this tale before: the tree/bird/fish huggers against the land-raping multinationals. But few parts of Barcott's story are what they appear: what's local is global, insiders are outsiders (are vice versa) and scientists transform themselves, with the signing of nondisclosure agreements, into "biostitutes" for hire.
Francis Fukuyama's informative piece on Samantha Power's Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World is also good, and in fact either of these articles would have helped a lot in last week's anemic politics issue.
The best article this week is David Orr's introduction to a poet I've never heard of, Matthea Harvey, who does playful things with form and even manages, in a verse fragment quoted here, to make the abecedarian form feel fresh. Like the Bruce Barcott review and the Samantha Power review, this article fulfills a book review's most important function: calling attention to a writer or a book we might otherwise never read.
Ed Champion calls New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus a "literary lapdancer" for allowing a kissy review of NYT Executive Editor (and recent hatchet man) Bill Keller's new children's book, Tree Shaker: The Story of Nelson Mandela to run in this weekend's issue. I'm half-and-half on this one. On one hand, the reviewer clearly states Bill Keller's job title, and a full disclosure is all that is required here. On the other hand, as Ed suggests, an editorial offense does not have to be an ethical violation to be an editorial offense; Ruth Conniff's review ("Keller's biography of Mandela vibrates with the feeling of history comes alive") is awfully friendly, and this can be an offense against taste.
On the other hand, Tanenhaus could not have known what Ruth Conniff would write. Also on the other hand, a book about Nelson Mandela sounds a hell of a lot better than some of the other junk found in this week's "Children's Books" section, like the unbearably cutesy Maira Kalman's The Principles of Uncertainty ("All this whimsy rings a bit Hallmark-ian at times", says reviewer Ariel Levy, and I can only imagine). In fact, I'm impressed that the Executive Editor of the New York Times witnessed the fall of apartheid as the Times bureau chief in Johannesburg in 1992 and has chosen to write a book about it. The truth is, I know nothing at all about Bill Keller save the fact that he is Sam Tanenhaus's boss and that he bears a chilling physical resemblance to Donald Rumsfeld (which isn't going to make anybody like him), so I think I'll check out his book before I say any more about this.
Friendly reviews sure are a grey area at the Grey Lady, though, and Ruth Conniff isn't the only one laying it on for a book by a Times power player today. It seems pretty clear that Elinor Lipman can't stand Alex Wichtel's Manhattan business/society satire The Spare Wife, which she says "isn't a book with heart", contains "too many inelegant lines" and only succeeds "in spots". But I can practically feel the pain Lipman feels at having to hurt the novelist's and Times columnist's feelings, especially in moments like this:
But wait. Halfway through the book, when the setup is complete and the main story finally kicks in, the choreography and the emotional unveilings are clever and most welcome.
Oh, stop sniveling and admit you hate the book. Yeah, the emotional unveilings are clever and most welcome, that's what I always say when I love a book. If we're going to slam the NYTBR editors for not filtering out Ruth Conniff's valentine to Bill Keller, we should slam them for not filtering out this display either.
Elsewhere this week, Joyce Johnson's workmanlike writing fails to enliven An Uncertain Inheritance: Writers on Caring for Family. Francine Prose is much more inspired on the subject of Susan Choi's A Person of Interest, which fictionalizes a "Unabomber"-type campus-bombing scenario as Choi's earlier American Woman fictionalized Patty Hearst. Jason Berry persuades me that I ought to read Ned Sublette's historical survey The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square.
I expected to like Jim Shepard's review of Mark Harris book about 1967 Hollywood, Pictures at a Revolution. But Shepard tangles himself up inexplicably every time he mentions one of the movies featured in Harris's book, the classic Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy interracial marriage comedy Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. He calls its racial theme "outdated", stating that:
'The Graduate' was seemingly designed to demolish the values on display in 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner'
Huh? Actually, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was designed to demolish the values on display in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. It's a little something called satire, and I can't imagine why Shepard doesn't see this. His idea that the film's racial intermarriage theme is "outdated" in 1967 is especially strange since Shepard also writes:
"... the pilot for the sitcom 'Bewitched' languished for more than a year because of complaints by ABC's Southern stations that its adman-loves-witch premise was 'a thinly veiled argument for racial intermarriage'".
Such a tangled web we sometimes weave. Elsewhere, Rachel Donadio provides a worthwhile endpaper on Harold L. "Doc" Humes, a once-promising "literary star" who co-founded the Paris Review before sinking into paranoid incomprehensibility, though the article caroms strangely into the separate and thematically unrelated subject of Peter Matthiessen's involvement with the CIA before returning to its own subject.
Elizabeth Royte's cover piece on a nature book about a complex ecological conflict in Belize, The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw by Bruce Barcott, is superb:
You may think you've heard this tale before: the tree/bird/fish huggers against the land-raping multinationals. But few parts of Barcott's story are what they appear: what's local is global, insiders are outsiders (are vice versa) and scientists transform themselves, with the signing of nondisclosure agreements, into "biostitutes" for hire.
Francis Fukuyama's informative piece on Samantha Power's Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World is also good, and in fact either of these articles would have helped a lot in last week's anemic politics issue.
The best article this week is David Orr's introduction to a poet I've never heard of, Matthea Harvey, who does playful things with form and even manages, in a verse fragment quoted here, to make the abecedarian form feel fresh. Like the Bruce Barcott review and the Samantha Power review, this article fulfills a book review's most important function: calling attention to a writer or a book we might otherwise never read.
Pulling Levers
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, February 5, 2008 12:40 pm1. I'm proud to see my piece on "How To Avoid Author Scandals" running today at the Guardian's Books Blog.
2. If you want more of me, I can be found at NewCritics.com answering the question "what has inspired you in the past year?" Naturally, my answer involves gangsta rap.
3. Frank Wilson's tenure as Books editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer is coming to an end. I'm sure many newspaper readers will recall many different highlights of his career. For me, I mainly appreciate his willingness to give a few bloggers like me their first delicious shot of black ink.
4. Words Without Borders is running its second graphic fiction issue!
5. This is just great. Apparently the Boston Globe really wanted to have their book about the New England Patriots' perfect season out on Amazon.com the moment the Gatorade spilled over Bill Belichick's head. And then the Patriots lost. Ahh, these moments just feel so good.
For the record, I am not a New York Giants fan (Jets, people, Jets!). But I have to admit that was one beautiful, amazing Super Bowl victory, and Eli Manning is now my favorite QB.
6. I pulled this lever about an hour ago:
I'm fond of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, so this wasn't an easy choice. I decided to vote for the candidate with a better chance at breaking through partisan barriers and uniting our divided nation behind shared ideals. Yeah, well, they can't stop me from hoping.
2. If you want more of me, I can be found at NewCritics.com answering the question "what has inspired you in the past year?" Naturally, my answer involves gangsta rap.
3. Frank Wilson's tenure as Books editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer is coming to an end. I'm sure many newspaper readers will recall many different highlights of his career. For me, I mainly appreciate his willingness to give a few bloggers like me their first delicious shot of black ink.
4. Words Without Borders is running its second graphic fiction issue!
5. This is just great. Apparently the Boston Globe really wanted to have their book about the New England Patriots' perfect season out on Amazon.com the moment the Gatorade spilled over Bill Belichick's head. And then the Patriots lost. Ahh, these moments just feel so good.
For the record, I am not a New York Giants fan (Jets, people, Jets!). But I have to admit that was one beautiful, amazing Super Bowl victory, and Eli Manning is now my favorite QB.
6. I pulled this lever about an hour ago:
I'm fond of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, so this wasn't an easy choice. I decided to vote for the candidate with a better chance at breaking through partisan barriers and uniting our divided nation behind shared ideals. Yeah, well, they can't stop me from hoping.
I Hit The Newspapers
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, January 1, 2008 04:46 pm2008 is off to a good start for me: my review of Steve Martin's new autobiography Born Standing Up (and my first-ever newspaper book review) is running in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.
While I am clearly comfortable critiquing other newspaper book critics, I'd never imagined until recently that I'd ever see my own byline in print. I met editor Frank Wilson at a panel on book reviewing in 2006, and it's due to his generosity (as well as the encouragement of some blogging colleagues) that I was given this chance. I was nervous writing the review, and I sure was nervous as hell this morning reading it back. But I guess I sound like I know what I'm talking about, and I see I managed to name-check Wittgenstein and Descartes in an article about comedy, so it must be me.
LitKicks is still on hiatus (until Thursday or so) as I try to get our new poetry software to work. Happy New Year, people!
While I am clearly comfortable critiquing other newspaper book critics, I'd never imagined until recently that I'd ever see my own byline in print. I met editor Frank Wilson at a panel on book reviewing in 2006, and it's due to his generosity (as well as the encouragement of some blogging colleagues) that I was given this chance. I was nervous writing the review, and I sure was nervous as hell this morning reading it back. But I guess I sound like I know what I'm talking about, and I see I managed to name-check Wittgenstein and Descartes in an article about comedy, so it must be me.
LitKicks is still on hiatus (until Thursday or so) as I try to get our new poetry software to work. Happy New Year, people!
Reviewing the Review: September 30 2007
by Levi Asher on Sunday, September 30, 2007 07:21 pmWhen we read a review of a book, we simultaneously react to two texts: the article about the book, and the book the article is about. A good reviewer must be aware of this fact.
I am pleased to find a review of Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal on the cover of the latest New York Times Book Review, but I quickly find myself repelled by reviewer Paul Theroux's mushy, overcooked treatment. Theroux certainly can write better than this, and he knows the subject matter well, so I can only guess that this review assignment caught him uninspired. He calls Jeal's book "magnificent" and tells us that this biography "has many echoes for our own time" (as a book about a 19th Century African explorer certainly should), but that's as far as Theroux goes in terms of social relevance, and most of the review features limp psychoanalytic summaries like this:
In Livingstone, the fatherless Stanley found a powerful (and idealized) father figure, whose stated mission to explore Africa could be his own. Importantly (and this is one of the many modern dimensions of Jeal's book) he found a continent where he could transform himself. Africa gave a man who had experimented with multiple identities a name, a face, a notoriety, a mission, problems to solve, and it confirmed his greatness as an explorer.
Echoes for our time? Exactly, because Paul Theroux makes this book sound like a James Frey memoir. We hear nothing at all in this review about the actual confrontation between Euro-American and Central African culture that Stanley spearheaded (no pun intended). But we hear that "Nobody knew who [Stanley] was, and he didn't want anyone to know" and that he was "shy" and "diffident when pursuing a woman". I can just imagine Barbara Walters doing the follow-up interview:
"Tell me ... what scares Henry Morton Stanley?"
In contrast, let's look at Pico Iyer's similarly speculative review of Orhan Pamuk's new Other Colors: Essays and a Story. Like Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer doesn't hesitate to guess about his subject's mental state. But Iyer's subject is a coy, metaphysical novelist, not a bold African explorer, and Iyer's multi-layered psychological treatment seems not only appropriate but essential for a consideration of Pamuk's work. I like this review very much, and I agree with points like this:
His books are, really, celebrations of multiplicity ("My Name is Red" is told in the voice of 19 narrators) which makes them celebrations of unfinishedness; the mysteries they set up are always more delicious than any attempt to solve them.
and this:
What "Other Colors" makes most clear is how seriously committed to playfulness Orhan Pamuk is.
I'm excited to read this book. Getting back to the main point, please note that one of the two reviews discussed above is an ugly mess, while the other is a good brisk read. The difference is in the critic's ability to find a voice and approach for the review that corresponds to or harmonizes with the voice and approach of the book being reviewed. A soft, kittenish critical voice is just right for Orhan Pamuk, but completely wrong for explorer Henry Morton Stanley. These two examples show this as well as any two ever will.
Like last Sunday's issue, today's Book Review is packed with good stuff and I fear I can't do it all justice. Liesl Schillinger writes elegantly about Anne Enright's The Gathering (though, based on her description, this review is as close to the book as I'll ever get). A. O. Scott increases my eagerness to read Junot Diaz's The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, especially now that I've learned the "Oscar Wao" of the title refers to Oscar Wilde. Jeremy McCarter's brief review of Alan Bennett's royal fantasia The Uncommon Reader makes me eager to read this book as well.
I was slightly bored with Leah Hager Cohen's review of Ann Patchett's Run when it started off like a worshipful puff piece, and then I almost got whiplash when Cohen started pointing out what she doesn't like about the book, which turns out to be a lot. Finally, I'm not completely down with Stephanie Zacharek's extended "pants" metaphor in reviewing Irvine Welsh's new If You Liked School, You'll Love Work, but when she's not talking about pants she does a fine job of expressing the excitement a new Irvine Welsh book always seems to bring.
The endpaper space is well-used to reprint Stephen King's provocative introduction to the newly-released Best American Short Stories of 2007, in which he speaks of the indignity of our current literary scene as represented by wan stacks of literary magazines invariably tucked into the bottom shelves of bookstore racks. He points out that:
What's not so good is that writers write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and the New Yorker, of course, the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there.
Stephen King speaks the truth.
* * * * *
Okay, yeah, the Mets choked, Palahniuk-style, but you're crazy if you think that makes me like them any less. The enjoyment they gave me and Caryn and the kids at Shea Stadium this year is all the reason I need. Jose Reyes remains my favorite player for his optimistic spirit, although I do feel compelled to point out that the nickname "Mr. September" would not be a good choice for him. But I seriously hope he will hold his head high, because he had a great season and made New York happy this summer. The same goes for other lovable goats Oliver Perez, Tom Glavine, Carlos Delgado, Shawn Green, Dave Wright, Luis Castillo, Willie Randolph, all of whom will be taking some heat from the critics and amateur humorists in the next few days.
I see some Phillies fans are poking their heads out of the dirt. I wish them well in the playoffs. Though I won't be reading the sports sections, so it makes no difference to me.
I am pleased to find a review of Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal on the cover of the latest New York Times Book Review, but I quickly find myself repelled by reviewer Paul Theroux's mushy, overcooked treatment. Theroux certainly can write better than this, and he knows the subject matter well, so I can only guess that this review assignment caught him uninspired. He calls Jeal's book "magnificent" and tells us that this biography "has many echoes for our own time" (as a book about a 19th Century African explorer certainly should), but that's as far as Theroux goes in terms of social relevance, and most of the review features limp psychoanalytic summaries like this:
In Livingstone, the fatherless Stanley found a powerful (and idealized) father figure, whose stated mission to explore Africa could be his own. Importantly (and this is one of the many modern dimensions of Jeal's book) he found a continent where he could transform himself. Africa gave a man who had experimented with multiple identities a name, a face, a notoriety, a mission, problems to solve, and it confirmed his greatness as an explorer.
Echoes for our time? Exactly, because Paul Theroux makes this book sound like a James Frey memoir. We hear nothing at all in this review about the actual confrontation between Euro-American and Central African culture that Stanley spearheaded (no pun intended). But we hear that "Nobody knew who [Stanley] was, and he didn't want anyone to know" and that he was "shy" and "diffident when pursuing a woman". I can just imagine Barbara Walters doing the follow-up interview:
"Tell me ... what scares Henry Morton Stanley?"
In contrast, let's look at Pico Iyer's similarly speculative review of Orhan Pamuk's new Other Colors: Essays and a Story. Like Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer doesn't hesitate to guess about his subject's mental state. But Iyer's subject is a coy, metaphysical novelist, not a bold African explorer, and Iyer's multi-layered psychological treatment seems not only appropriate but essential for a consideration of Pamuk's work. I like this review very much, and I agree with points like this:
His books are, really, celebrations of multiplicity ("My Name is Red" is told in the voice of 19 narrators) which makes them celebrations of unfinishedness; the mysteries they set up are always more delicious than any attempt to solve them.
and this:
What "Other Colors" makes most clear is how seriously committed to playfulness Orhan Pamuk is.
I'm excited to read this book. Getting back to the main point, please note that one of the two reviews discussed above is an ugly mess, while the other is a good brisk read. The difference is in the critic's ability to find a voice and approach for the review that corresponds to or harmonizes with the voice and approach of the book being reviewed. A soft, kittenish critical voice is just right for Orhan Pamuk, but completely wrong for explorer Henry Morton Stanley. These two examples show this as well as any two ever will.
Like last Sunday's issue, today's Book Review is packed with good stuff and I fear I can't do it all justice. Liesl Schillinger writes elegantly about Anne Enright's The Gathering (though, based on her description, this review is as close to the book as I'll ever get). A. O. Scott increases my eagerness to read Junot Diaz's The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, especially now that I've learned the "Oscar Wao" of the title refers to Oscar Wilde. Jeremy McCarter's brief review of Alan Bennett's royal fantasia The Uncommon Reader makes me eager to read this book as well.
I was slightly bored with Leah Hager Cohen's review of Ann Patchett's Run when it started off like a worshipful puff piece, and then I almost got whiplash when Cohen started pointing out what she doesn't like about the book, which turns out to be a lot. Finally, I'm not completely down with Stephanie Zacharek's extended "pants" metaphor in reviewing Irvine Welsh's new If You Liked School, You'll Love Work, but when she's not talking about pants she does a fine job of expressing the excitement a new Irvine Welsh book always seems to bring.
The endpaper space is well-used to reprint Stephen King's provocative introduction to the newly-released Best American Short Stories of 2007, in which he speaks of the indignity of our current literary scene as represented by wan stacks of literary magazines invariably tucked into the bottom shelves of bookstore racks. He points out that:
What's not so good is that writers write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and the New Yorker, of course, the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there.
Stephen King speaks the truth.
Okay, yeah, the Mets choked, Palahniuk-style, but you're crazy if you think that makes me like them any less. The enjoyment they gave me and Caryn and the kids at Shea Stadium this year is all the reason I need. Jose Reyes remains my favorite player for his optimistic spirit, although I do feel compelled to point out that the nickname "Mr. September" would not be a good choice for him. But I seriously hope he will hold his head high, because he had a great season and made New York happy this summer. The same goes for other lovable goats Oliver Perez, Tom Glavine, Carlos Delgado, Shawn Green, Dave Wright, Luis Castillo, Willie Randolph, all of whom will be taking some heat from the critics and amateur humorists in the next few days.
I see some Phillies fans are poking their heads out of the dirt. I wish them well in the playoffs. Though I won't be reading the sports sections, so it makes no difference to me.
