The Elegant Variation

BOOK REV(I)EWERS*

Sunday's post in which we complained about Blake Bailey's fatuous lede seems to have divided opinion somewhat, but Benjamin Percy, author of Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk, dropped us this line, which we quote approvingly:

I've noticed a certain breed of book reviewer has regularly found his way into your crosshairs of late -- those critics who spotlight their voice, their life, upstaging the assigned book. And I'm wondering if this is indicative of a larger trend. Look at CNN. Look at Fox News. The Nightly News. Anchors have gone casual, making small talk between stories, commenting on headlines. The other day, an anchor on Headline News said, in response to a burglary gone wrong, "Wow. That was a stupid move. What a moron!" On another occasion, a female anchor responded to a report on recent fashion trends, speaking of her own shopping habits. This isn't the school of Brokaw and Cronkite.

Turn to print and online media -- and you see something similar. Every reader is invited to participate in a poll, to upload a photo, to share their story, their opinion. The democratic idea is noble -- but the result is often a clutter of ill-informed, reactionary manure that reeks of me, me, me.

And book reviews are along for the ride, as you've pointed out.

Egomaniacal reviewer or cutural phemon?  What do you think?

* Props to Ben for the headline, which was the subject line of his email.

YOUNG REVIEWERS CONTEST

Maybe the best way to deal with the book reviewing problem is to encourage new voices - which is precisely what The Virginia Quarterly Review is doing with their Young Reviewers Contest.   We've already advised at least one person we know to enter (and you know who you are), but it's open to all, and there are some great judges overseeing this one.  Plus they're tossing around $1,000 in prize money, which is more than you'll probably make as a reviewer ...

THE REAL CRISIS IN BOOK REVIEWING ...

... is that embarrassing ledes like this one are allowed to run, and at the New York Times, no less. 

I really wanted to pan this book. First of all, with the exception of Walker Percy’s “Moviegoer,” I tend to dislike literature about New Orleans (oh the decadence! the quaintness!), and publicity copy for “The House on First Street” boasted about Julia Reed’s “colorful” critique of the city’s “rich flavor.” It’s also a Hurricane Katrina memoir. I’d considered writing my own Katrina memoir, and now I realize I probably never will. True, my own house in New Orleans was reduced to a moldy ruin, and Reed’s had nothing but a broken window, but hers — previously owned by Percy’s brother Phin (fun fact) — is a 6,000-square-foot Greek Revival landmark in the historic Garden District, while my house is a 1,400-square-foot cottage in the (comparatively) raffish neighborhood of Gentilly. And not only is Julia Reed a lot richer than I, she has better journalistic cred: as an evacuee, I wrote a few columns for Slate, while Reed was bombarded with assignments from Newsweek, The Spectator and Vogue, her main employer, whose editors received an e-mail message from Reese Witherspoon, no less, asking if Reed was O.K.

One is probably not supposed to bite that hand that feeds one, but we cannot imagine that any Times reader is remotely as interested in Blake Bailey as he appears to be in himself.

REVIEW: PERSONAL DAYS

My review of Ed Park's debut novel Personal Days appears in tomorrow's New York Times Book Review.  Here's the opening:

When the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno said that “work is the only practical consolation for having been born,” he could not have foreseen the lot of the 21st-century cubicle drones who populate Ed Park’s witty and appealing first novel, “Personal Days.” Today, it seems, notions of work have been transformed from “every man a king” to mass e-mailings of cat pictures

Much is likely to be made of the similarities between “Personal Days” and “Then We Came to the End,” Joshua Ferris’s 2007 National Book Award finalist. Both are set in offices convulsed with layoffs. Both are comic ensemble pieces, and both employ the first-person plural (Ferris throughout, Park in his opening section). But considering the ubiquity of the work experience in American lives, and the thousands upon thousands of novels published annually, perhaps the question shouldn’t be why there are two work-related novels right now but why there aren’t many more.

You can read the entire review here.

"DICTATION" REVIEW

My review of Cynthia Ozick's superb Dictation: A Quartet - which I somehow managed to write without talking about myself - can now be found at the Barnes and Noble Review.  Here's the opening:

"History," wrote Henry James in a 1910 letter to his amanuensis Theodora Bosanquet, "is strangely written." This casual aside could easily serve as the epigraph of Cynthia Ozick's superb new collection, Dictation, which concerns itself with lost worlds evoked by languages -- languages that separate and obscure as readily as they bind. It can be risky to look for connective tissue between stories written years apart and published in magazines ranging from The Conradian to The New Yorker. But themes of deception, posterity, and, above all, the glory of language -- at once malleable and intractable -- knit together this quartet, recasting the whole as the harmonious product of Ozick's formidable talent.

You can read the whole thing here.  (Public thanks to Michael Gorra who alerted me to The Conradian connection.)

ESCHEW YOU

It's interesting to note that Paper Cuts' seven deadly words of book reviewing are exclusively words of praise.  (Though, presumably, "shite" - and "slight" - would be similar no-nos.)  Which raises the question: Are words of praise inherently less interesting than words of criticism?  Or are they merely overused, as Ruth Franklin observed (we were going to say "intriguingly" but stopped ourselves) back when she reviewed David Mitchell's Black Swan Green:

The writer seeking fresh language with which to express her enthusiasm soon discovers that this particular vocabulary has been colonized by p.r. flacks whipping up empty, fluffy blurbs. The result is that all praise now feels like exaggerated praise. Sixty years ago, Orwell famously complained of the book reviewer's clich�s, the "stale old phrases" that get trotted out in the desperation of deadlines: "a book that no one should miss," "something memorable on every page." Nothing has changed, not even the syntax. In this blurbing age, we are still deluged by dizzy claims: that a novelist we know to be decidedly mediocre is "like a latter-day Dostoyevsky," or that a pop historian's latest hack job should be "required reading in living rooms from coast to coast," or that "every single note is perfection" in a piece of chick lit so bad that I could manage only a few chapters.

For the record, we frequently eschew, both in writing and in conversation.

COMING SUNDAY: HIS ILLEGAL SELF

Michael Merschel of the Dallas Morning News is kind enough to provide a sneak peek of my review of Peter Carey's His Illegal Self, which he'll be running this Sunday.  Since I'm off to NYC to speak on a panel at the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference, I won't be able to link to it when it comes up, so follow Michael's links if you are curious ...

BOOKFORUM RICHES

The latest issue of the always excellent Bookforum has been posted in its entirety online and demands your immediate attention.  Highlights include:

* Peter Brooks and Colm Toibin on Henry James.

* John Banville on American pulp fiction.   (Thanks to our many Banville alerters, especially Dave Lull.)

* Wendy Lesser on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.

* Siddhartha Deb on J.M. Coeztee's brilliant Diary of a Bad Year

* Amy Rosenberg on Night Train to Lisbon.

* Nicole Rudick on Benjamin Percy's Refresh, Refresh

* Andrew Hultkrans on Steve Erickson's Zeroville.

* An interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Go spend some time with one of the two best book reviews in the country.

IN THE HOT ZONE

My review of In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars appears today in Steve Wasserman's book section at Truthdig.com.  Here's the opening:

The book publishing industry’s hunger to capitalize on the audiences of popular Web sites and bloggers has recently led it to make some risible creative choices which suggest a questionable grasp of the strength of either medium.  We may accept the short and choppy online, and perhaps we even seek it out: easily digestible nuggets to enjoy during the course of a busy day.  But when we settle down with a book, most of us seek a different experience.  The Web does certain things uniquely well, coupling immediacy with multimedia and a profound sense of interconnectedness, courtesy of the humble hyperlink.  Books, on the other hand, draw their strength from depth, reflection, gestation.  Writers—and publishers—forget this at their peril.  And so, the lamentable and increasingly common Web-to-book transition is seldom a smooth one. 

You can read the entire review here.

REVIEWING AUSLANDER

Although I thought Shalom Auslander's Nextbook column on Los Angeles was a compendium of every tedious, banal cliche ever hurled at this city, I'm really not - despite some perceptions - one to hold a grudge.  I thought his memoir, Foreskin's Lament, was just terrific, and I say so in my review in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

Auslander succeeds because, although superficially extreme in its concerns - God is a thug and Judaism can be ridiculous - Foreskin's Lament manages to occupy a station left open in the current Religion Debates. At one end we find the True Believers and at the other we find Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins denouncing religion as the root of all evil, the solace of dupes. For all his asperity, Auslander reports to us from the middle, as one who can't deny religion's contradictions and lunacies yet has been unable to entirely do away with belief and its necessity. In this, he is probably more representative of most Americans than either of the extremes, and it is in those moments that Foreskin's Lament is most heartfelt and effective.

As Auslander recently said in an interview at Bookslut.com, "It's easy to just slam the door on it, but there are people I know who find solace in it. And, certainly, the idea that there's a God should be right." Perhaps beneath all the name-calling fury and scabrous wit, Foreskin's Lament is intended as a parable on the strange durability of faith. That would be so Auslander.

Auslander will be in town for a reading at Vroman's on Monday evening at 7 p.m.  I hear he's a fun, lively reader, and might just trek out across four area codes to hear him.  If you're in the area, do stop by and pick up this remarkably funny book.