• Since Faust was a tragic play, an opera, and a film, how can Schlesinger “paint” his defection as Faustian? Sure, Goethe was an occasional painter, but even he had his doubts.
• Also, as neologisms go, “irono-babe” is about as inviting as Infobahn. (And why the hyphen? The first step in coining any noun is to present it without a grammatical eyesore.)
• How can Schlesinger be an omnivore “and a carnivore?” An omnivore eats both plants and animals. Since this little contradictory morsel was inserted via a hyphenated clause, could it be that the copy desk doesn’t know the difference between a herbivore, a carnivore, and an omnivore?
• What business does an unsubstantiated rumor about Philip Roth’s sex life have in a review of Exit Ghost? I cannot help but wonder if Clive James was asked to spice things up with an indiscretion.
• If a dead man “has been close to all” four men throughout Graham Swift’s Last Orders, must we conclude that these four men have been lingering close to the dead man’s ashes throughout the novel? Or is proper past tense not part of NYTBR house style?
• Likewise: “In telling her story in a nighttime whisper, Paula reveals facets of herself and her experience the reader might otherwise never glean.” Conjunction junction, what’s your function?
• If one buys a book online, one buys it from one’s home computer, not necessarily from Britain.
• If a shape is a visual form, how does it snap back? Aren’t shapes silent? Also, if time “warps at the edges and then stops altogether,” is time a temporal or a visual noun here? Make up your mind.
• Also: “Together, this seemingly ordinary couple became the poles of Hampl’s existence, opposing magnetic forces that held their conflicted daughter firmly between them.” Aside from the messy syntax here, this sentence could be easily read the wrong way. If Hampl’s parents are opposing magnetic forces, would they not repel their daughter?
• “Her previous memoirs portray a woman watching the world go by without her, an outsider gazing in.” Wait a minute. I thought she was gazing outside. Danielle Trussoni appears to be directionally challenged.
• Conflict of interest much, Sammy baby?
• “The essays are more chewy — what one imagines Milan Kundera might sound like before his first cup of coffee.” Nice try, Ms. Harrison, but why not evoke a chewy snack instead of coffee?
• You “want” this and you “want” that, Mr. Taylor. Good Christ, you sound like a spoiled teenager who demands a Porsche on his sixteenth birthday. Criticism isn’t about wanting. It’s about interpreting and understanding.

It appears that the NYTBR podcast has shifted to a kinder, gentler opening tune — which is to say opening music that as safe as elevator music (but certainly not houses). And Tanenhaus is now trying harder to sound warmer than he has in the past. One can only imagine the memos that were disseminated. I commend Tanenhaus for attempting to access that lovely portion of the human spectrum that exists beyond the walls of the New York Times building. But Tanenhaus has all the believability of Tor Johnson in Plan 9 from Outer Space. All the media training in the world won’t do anything to change a man who has all the charisma of a bitter accountant in early April. This podcast, predicated on the We Take No Chances model of corporate complacency, really needs to be abandoned or taken over by someone who still has a shred of genuine ebullience about literature.

To read Jim Lewis’s review of Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke is to enter an overvalued campanile of stupidity, amateurish insight, half-baked conclusions, and insufferable smugness that one expects from a Forbes 500 member who has the apparent misfortune of running into a groundling. The groundling, of course, is you, me, any curious insect climbing up an unsightly sandhill to scout out the dreaded conformists who would replace a beautiful literary vale with their high colonic obstructions.

“Good morning and please listen to me,” begins Lewis, adopting the tone of a bemused rube looking around a restaurant, unsure of how to pay the bill while others simply settle up. In fact, Lewis is so unsure of nearly everything about Johnson that he lacks even the self-starting impetus to ask. This rube is more preoccupied with where Johnson has talked and when Johnson has been photographed, but is so indolent a critic that he cannot even perform two Google searches to answer his own questions. (And whether such junket-like qualifiers matter in a review that has plenty to mine from a meaty 614-page book is debatable.) That such an dull and incurious reader would be assigned for a major Sunday newspaper section — indeed, Lewis openly confesses that he doesn’t care much to review books — is truly astonishing, or would be less so, if the boys’ brigade at the NYTBR were not in the regular habit of offering reviews written by idiots, signifying nothing.

For example, here’s Lewis on his ostensible hero:

But unlike most books about the dispossessed, they’re original (how strange it feels to use that word these days, but it fits), and what’s more, deliriously beautiful — ravishing, painful; as desolate as Dostoyevsky, as passionate and terrifying as Edgar Allan Poe.

Nice to see Lewis taking a writer as sui generis as Johnson and comparing him like some terrified undergraduate haphazardly flipping through a syllabus to meet the requirements of a term paper. Any good literary critic would have known damn well that Denis Johnson was one of the “dirty realism” poster boys a few decades ago and weaved something of this early assessment into his piece. (David Ulin, who should know better, did not, I’m afraid. But at least one gets a comparative example in Ulin’s review that cannot be found anywhere in Lewis’s review.)

Lewis is so lazy that he cannot even point out that Jesus’s Son was, in fact, a series of linked stories. (Has he even read it?) In Lewis’s myopic universe, there are only clumsy taxonomies: “novelist-performers or novelist-pundits or novelist-narcissists” and “novelists who can write this well,” but never any crossover. Lewis is likewise incapable of understanding a sentence, or, like a true linguistic explorer, even venturing a stab at what it might mean. He quotes a sentence, only to flex his critical acumen like so: “What a thing to say, but the book is moving on.” In the same paragraph, he demonstrates that he probably has no business being a critic, seeing as how he cannot even offer precise imagery that one would expect from a novelist. Lewis describes sentences that “roll like billiard balls with weird English on them.” This is an assessment? It strikes me as the kind of thing a literary enthusiast might say to you in a bar after five martinis, but not something that any reasonable person would include in a review in lieu of an attempt to parse the text. (“Y’know thot ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan’ sentence? Rolls like a bowling ball with odd Irish neologisms on it…me few pounds, give me a lash.”)

Like the same frightened undergraduate meeting every prescribed point in a five-paragraph essay, Lewis confesses to his readers: “But I haven’t told you what the thing is about yet.” With sentences like these, one wonders why the NYTBR didn’t just run this review with bracketed sentences. (“[Insert compelling lede here.],” “[Mandatory plot summary.],” the like.) He complains about the “hardware on display (guns, airplanes, intelligence equipage),” but doesn’t seem to understand that a novel involving a CIA agent might actually require such objects. He then offers one of the grandest insults imaginable to Johnson:

And he can occasionally overindulge in significance: a longish journey, at the end of “Tree of Smoke,” left me with the uneasy sense that he can’t tell the difference between Joseph Conrad, who was a genius, and Joseph Campbell, who was not.

I think Johnson’s work stands for itself, but, since Lewis is the kind of yokel who won’t be satisfied until he hears it from the horse’s mouth, here’s Johnson questioned about his post-apocalyptic novel Fiskadoro — by the New York Times, no less:

”Fiskadoro” grew out of Mr. Johnson’s earlier idea ”for a book about a person left after the holocaust, living in sort of a savage state. It was much more primitive than this, and very tribal.” He expected that ”Fiskadoro” too would be centered on a single character, the adolescent boy of the title. ”But I found that he was actually always a little bit distant. For that reason, the two other characters representing different modes of consciousness became more and more prominent.”

This clear emphasis on narrative compartmentalization doesn’t sound to me like a guy who mixes up his two Josephs.

And here’s a hint for the Tanenhaus crew, or any other book review editor: A “critic” or a “reviewer” who calls a mammoth book written by a leading contemporary writer a mere “thing” should probably be led to the door or thoroughly flogged in front of a throng of illiterate cokeheads.

If this is the kind of long-form review that Sam Tanenhaus considers acceptable, Tanenhaus’s remarkable ability to enervate the life and love of fiction through such crude and base shepherding keeps the NYTBR a dessicated husk more fit for automatons than enthusiasts.

This week’s New York Times Book Review includes a potentially promising meditation on ideology by Stephen Metcalf, who writes about a recent essay anthology, Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journey. Ensconced within this essay is Metcalf attempting to come to terms with his personal ideology, with a surprisingly uncharacteristic use of the first-person — surprisingly uncharacteristic, at least, for the Tanenhaus crew, who have continually operated as if writing in first-person was akin to shaking hands with a leper or eating an entree with a salad fork. But I must agree with Levi that Metcalf misses a significant opportunity with this revelation:

In short, I am white, privileged, middle-aged and boring. But one thing I am not, and never will be, is a conservative.

Never will be? Countless individuals have written statements like this over human history, only to live against the promise. While I commend Metcalf for copping to his alleged “privileged” and “boring” status (would Rachel Donadio ever confess anything like this?), it is a great misstep to remain so convinced that one will not change over the course of time — particularly in unexpected ways — while also closely examining a collection with contributors likely to adopt a similar position from the other side (“I own a home. I make good money. I never will be a liberal.”). This could have been a more compelling essay if Metcalf had stopped to examine the plausibilities of conservatism influencing him and others, the rhetorical similarities behind any ideology left or right, or if he had kept up his daring personal perspective throughout the piece’s entirety. Instead, we get this overly tidy generalization:

Because these conservatives were, by and large, low-status males (or the feminism-disdaining women who loved them) in high school and college, they know instinctively how to connect with the culturally dispossessed.

Whether this specific sentence came during the writing or the editing process is difficult to say, but it does fit in with the NYTBR‘s current m.o. Never let the audience contemplate a position outside of a rigid dichotomy. Ironically, this is the very position that Metcalf objects to in the anthology.

I have enjoyed some of Metcalf’s work for Slate, which often has him adopting the contrarian position, only to gradually work against this initial summation over the course of a piece. (See, for example, this essay on Bruce Springsteen.) It’s a nice approach that allows Metcalf to drift eventually to the more interesting gray areas. But I’m wondering if the NYTBR‘s rigid orthodoxy allows Metcalf to take the same intellectual liberties.