Category / Book Reviewing

by Edward Champion

Ethical Nightmares from Tanenhaus’s Dream Factory

Sam Tanenhaus apparently has no problem violating the New York Times’ Ethical Journalism Guidebook. So opines Ariana Huffington, who notes that assigning Kathryn Harrison, who had been slammed in two previous Dowd columns, to review Maureen Dowd’s Are Men Necessary? is a violation of the Times‘ credo to avoid “the slightest whiff of favoritism” (Rule 134 in the EJG). Huffington suggests that hiring Harrison swings the favoritism in the opposite direction.

To play the devil’s advocate here, if we momentarily consider the Times to hold any stock outside of the laughing variety, Huffington may not be going far enough. Rule 141 in the EJG states:

Staff members who have a publisher or a movie contract, for example, must be exceedingly sensitive to any appearance of bias in covering other publishers or studios. Those with any doubts about a proposed arrangement should consult the standards editor or the deputy editorial page editor.

Granted, both Tanenhaus and Harrison can get out of this through a loophole. Tanenhaus himself does not have a publisher or a movie contract. But assigning Harrison to review Dowd was a clear case of fanning the flames of bias. This paragraph from Harrison’s review, for example, has very little to do with the book:

LIKE most people who work hard at seeming to be naturally funny, Maureen Dowd comes across as someone who very much wants to be liked, even though she has problematically joined forces with those women who are “sabotaging their chances in the bedroom” by having high-powered careers. “A friend of mine called nearly in tears the day she won a Pulitzer,” Dowd reports in a passage about men threatened by successful women. ” ‘Now,’ she moaned, ‘I’ll never get a date!’ ” Reading this, I can’t help wondering if Dowd is that self-same “friend.” After all, it’s rare that she resists naming her friends, most of whom have names worth dropping: “my witty friend Frank Bruni, the New York Times restaurant critic”; “my friend Leon Wieseltier”; “the current Cosmo editor, my friend Kate White”; “my late friend Art Cooper, the editor of GQ for 20 years”; “my pal Craig Bierko”; et al.

If the intention here is to settle a personal score or to ape a Dale Peck-style attack mode, why is this review even being published in the Times? If Dowd’s book is, in Harrison’s view, quite awful, then surely the text itself would provide enough examples. And surely there were any number of outlets who would have pushed Harrison further over the edge and provided a more legitimate medium for this competitive ruckus.

Without providing a source, Huffington claims that Dowd complained to Tanenhaus about the review-author matchup. Tanenhaus apparently suggested that if Dowd couldn’t handle criticism, then she shouldn’t write books.

Perhaps Tanenhaus’s intention in hiring Harrison was to demonstrate to NYTBR naysayers that the Times does indeed review books impartially while still abiding by the Gray Lady’s ethical mythos. Well, if this were the case, why hire someone quite prepared to sabotage Dowd, thus spawning a grand mess of journalistic ethics?

Unless of course the NYTBR is no longer about ethics, much less thoughtful reviewing. In which case, why indeed should fiction publishers hold credence in a weekly media outlet that prefers to blow its column inches on redundant sentences like “No mere page turner, this is a page devourer, generating the kind of suspense that is usually the province of the playwright or novelist.”

by Edward Champion

Some Preposterous Things Written by Lev Grossman

It’s official. Lev Grossman is the Uwe Boll of the book reviewing world.

ARTICLE IN QUESTION: “The American Tolkien” (via Locus)

1. “George R.R. Martin is fond of sudden reversals.”

Isn’t every author? It’s called irony.

2. “[T]his is as good a time as any to proclaim him the American Tolkien.”

Why? Because there are no more Lord of the Rings films to look forward to?

3. “an unstable amalgamation of nations caught in the act of vigorously ripping itself to shreds”

Someone needs a copy editor.

4. “Martin shoots the action from many angles.”

Yo, Lev, this ain’t a movie. It’s a book.

5. “Martin may write fantasy, but his politik is all real.”

Since “politik” itself doesn’t exist as a word of its own (perhaps he intended “politick”), the gag’s a bust.

6. “In the wrong hands, a big ensemble like this can be deadly.”

In the wrong hands, a review like this can be unintentionally hilarious.

7. “Martin has an astonishing ability to focus on epic sweep and tiny, touching human drama simultaneously.”

I suppose what Lev meant here is that Martin can on one hand tango on an epic scale, while concentrating on small moments a little later. This is not “simultaneous” by any measure, but might have something to do with these interesting units called paragraphs which must be carefully ordered to balance narrative. But since any good epic novelist is doing this, how does this make Martin “astonishing?” It seems to me that the man’s only doing his job as a storyteller. This is hardly miraculous at all. It comes with the territory. You don’t see professors handing out blue ribbons to MFAs every time they get subect-verb agreement right.

8. “Martin’s wars are multifaceted and ambiguous, as are the men and women who wage them and the gods who watch them and chortle, and somehow that makes them mean more.”

Lev Grossman has one, and only one, novelistic viewpoint that he can recognize. And that’s the whole idea of dualities being perceived in one “simultaneous” blur, without any attempt on Grossman’s part to parse things in even a vaguely structuralist way. Further, it should be clear even to a blindfolded and trigger-happy gunsmith that “multifaceted and ambiguous” characters probably mean a lot more than one-dimensional and unambiguous.

9. “What really distinguishes Martin, and what marks him as a major force for evolution in fantasy, is his refusal to embrace a vision of the world as a Manichaean struggle between Good and Evil.”

This shows outright ignorance of the fantasy genre and religion, and is a preposterous sentence to boot. And again there’s Lev’s obsession with dualities. (Um, isn’t Manichaeism a dualist religion in which a all-powerful force of good does not exist. As a result, would this not discount the many mages, elves, wizards and other assorted characters known to shift continents and overturn campaniles?) As the works of M. John Harrison, China Mieville, Michael Moorcock and Kelly Link will attest, fantasy moved beyond these one-dimensional, black-and-white and often uninteresting milieus quite some time ago.

by Edward Champion

Why Fear Michiko?

Hot on the heels of Michiko slamming Banville into the ground (with an unusual silence from certain quarters), Notes on Non-Camp points to this profile, which claims Michiko to be “the most feared book critic in the world.” More feared than Dale Peck? Or James Wood covering a “hysterical realism” novel? I think the real question here is whether Michiko Kaukutani, who has veered too frequently into distressing fictional affectations of late (is Michiko’s fury the mark of an aspiring novelist?), is a critic worth her salt anymore. Is it really valid criticism for a writer to cling to safe dichotomies (“style over story,” “linguistic pyrotechnics over felt emotion”) while spending most of a review summarizing a book rather than discussing its literary worth? If Michiko found Banville irritating, that’s fine. If she feels that she was alienated from Banville’s story, that’s fine. But it’s simply not enough to offer these sentiments without supportive examples, much less refusing to make an effort to discern the meaning within the text. That’s the least any reviewer can do when approaching a work of art. And given that the New York Times offers a book reviewing clime in which fiction has devolved from an enduring presence to some charming summer-stock production that you attend simply because a relative is in the show, it seems extremely strange to me that Michiko’s generalizations are continually accepted and indeed “feared” by authors and the publishing industry alike.

by Edward Champion

The New Yorker: Is Criticism Being Deliberately Abbreviated?

A good critic would tell you why a film is boring. A good critic would keep the plot summary as brief as possible and cite specific examples for why he felt the way he did. A good critic would, even if the filmmaker failed, try to suggest what the filmmaker was attempting and pinpoint common motifs that have either evolved or have been abandoned.

David Denby is sometimes a good critic, but his review of Elizabethtown is boring, without supporting example and laced with putdowns far beneath Anthony Lane’s lofty heights. To describe a film as “boring” is not enough. To describe “meaningless images” without indicating why they are meaningless is not enough. To insinuate at a lack of screen chemistry between the two leads is acceptable, but to leave the criticism ambiguous and without scope is not enough.

In other words, this review suggests that, at least in this case, David Denby is not a good critic. Perhaps he is better intended for lengthier reviews.

Then again, I’m wondering if this is all an effort by the New Yorker to gravitate towards snarky blurbs in lieu of actual criticism. The “Briefly Noted” section, for example, involves anonymous staffers writing quick blurbs, but it’s curious to me that one rarely sees any raves, let alone qualifying examples, within this section.

Take the latest quartet: Melania G. Mazzucco’s Vita is “intermittently commanding” and the book is praised for “pungent fictional details.” Not “penetrating” but “pungent,” as if to suggest that the book’s chief advantage is that you can whiff a somewhat distressing yet redolent aroma instead of submerging yourself into the text.

Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica fares slightly better, but the critic dismisses this too, suggesting, “An analogous allure pervades this book.” So Gaitskill’s not clear-cut enough for the hoary-heared man in the closet, but if there’s any hope of stepping into the verdure, then you might just be tempted to be transfixed by the green.

The blurb for James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare is less a review, but more of a fussy neologist quibbling over of tone for the accepted thesis (how public events influenced Shakespare’s plays) rather than the supportive argument.

And J.R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar, we have scenes that often feel “contrived and mawkish.” But since there’ s not enough space here for the unnamed critic to provide examples, and since s/he cannot be bothered to identify him/herself, these two modifiers essentially translate into nothing. They are, in fact, no more penetrating from an adjective-laden “literature” blurb in Maxim dumbed down for public consumption, with the magazine’s presumed sophistication there in the tone and the language.

I’ve always thought that sophistication involved having a solid argument with supportive examples. And while the New Yorker may be “sophisticated” in language, its criticism of late has shown, time and time again, that there is very little that these critics are permitted to think about. Such an editorial approach does a disservice to the talented people who write the reviews and the magazine in question.

by Edward Champion

Caitlin “I Checked My Nuance At The Door” Flanagan Strikes Again

From the What the Fuck Department comes this Caitlin Flanagan review (no surprise) of Peggy Drexler‘s book Raising Boys Without Men (as discovered by Scott). Flangan’s essay originally appeared in The Atlantic and has, much to a thinker’s regret, invaded Powell’s fortifications. Drexler has apparently posited a fascinating thesis: boys raised by women without men (read: lesbians and single mothers, referred to here as “maverick moms”) turn out better than boys raised by mothers and fathers. Instead of examining this interesting premise with some nuance, Flanagan takes umbrage against it, failing to realize that a son “better” raised by a maverick mom doesn’t necessarily translate into a “flawless” adolescence or, obversely, a mom and dad there to “fuck you up” — to use Flanagan’s hyperbole.

Scott argues that the problem with Drexler’s book is that there’s no middle ground. But I would argue that it is Flanagan herself who is incapable of walking the middle ground. This means we have a great problem with how the book is being presented. Because when it comes to something as complex as parental roles and child development, a critic cannot cling to cheap dichotomies like a life preserver if she expects to think her way up the river.

Even if we accept Flanagan’s notion that Drexler presents “the low-down rottenness of men” (nowhere in her review does she present a quote from Drexler’s book supporting this idea, other than the “wounded rhinos” thing, which strikes me as more metaphor than calumny), I’m wondering if Flanagan is threatened by the idea of someone not only pointing out “competition, dominance and control” as male issues, but also Drexler’s suggestion that women can instill some variant of these issues. (By way of contrast, both this review from the San Francisco Bay Guardian and this Library Journal review seem to suggest that Drexler is only stating that “maverick mom” relationships exist as a viable alternative and that might, in fact, be better for the developing child.)

A real critic, even a cogent conservative (cogency seems to have escaped Ms. Flanagan from Day One), might have challenged Drexler on whether or not paternally imbued masculinity is essential to child development. Instead, Flanagan puts crass metaphors into Drexler’s mouth (“In her opinion, maleness is a bit like Jiffy Pop”) and then proceeds to categorize Drexler’s book as “the latest entry” in “‘You go, girl!’ studies,” ending with an antifeminist tirade that has little to do with the book, much less Drexler’s argument.

This is reviewing? I certainly hope that this sort of black-and-white depiction of gender roles isn’t what the Atlantic considers to be the apotheosis of criticism.