Despite a great NYC visit filled with all sorts of smart book people (including a brief introduction to the legendary Nan Talese, and a 90-minute sit-down with Sam Tanenhaus, from which the only thing we can divulge is that he did receive his brownie), we're pleased as punch to be home again and not even another bland outing of the LA Times Book Review can diminish that. Bs and Cs abound but there are a few precipitous plunges and a general air of "so what?" hanging over the proceedings. Only one AI ALERT (that's for Authorial Intrusion) of note, and no real home runs this week. OK, on to the grades, as we type betwixt yawns:
STATS
Full length fiction reviews: 4
Full length non-fiction reviews: 5
Columns: Discoveries and First Fiction
Giving credit where it's due, we do note that the fiction/non-fiction balance seems about right for once, and the fiction covered is actually fiction worth writing about, not the usual bland grab-bag of thrillers.
TITLES, AUTHORS & REVIEWERS
The Riot Inside Me by Wanda Coleman. Reviewed by Jonathan Kirsch Grade: B
Zorro by Isabel Allende. Reviewed by Yxta Maya Murray Grade: F
John Brown, Abolitionist by David S. Reynolds. Reviewed by Eric Foner Grade: C+
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. Reviewed by Richard Eder. Grade: B+
Dictionary Days by Ilan Stavans. Reviewed by Marc Weingarten. Grade: B+
A Theological Miscellany by T.J. McTavish. Reviewed by Nick Owchar. Grade: C-
The Triumph of Numbers by I.B. Cohen. Reviewed by Anthony Day. Grade: D-
Charley's War by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun. Reviewed by Laurel Maury. Grade: C
Courtroom 302 by Steve Bogira. Reviewed by Jonathan Shapiro. Grade: C+ A.I. ALERT!
First Fiction Column: The Coast of Akron by Adrienne Miller; and The Missing Person by Alix Ohlin. Reviewed by James Marcus. Grade: B
Discoveries Column: Adios Hemingway by Leonarda Padura Fuentes; The Foundling by Charlotte Bronte; and Midnight's Gate by Bei Dao. Reviewed by Susan Salter Reynolds. Grade: B-
Last Night by James Salter. Reviewed by Jane Ciabattari. Grade: B-
WHAT WE LIKE ...
You could have knocked us over with the proverbial feather this week as Jonathan Kirsch rose to the occasion of the Wanda Coleman essay collection and turned in a fine, serious piece of work (We were shocked and dismayed to learn of her banishment from Eso Won Books, even as we lauded her clear-eyed appraisal of Maya Angelou as "a sloppily written fake") ... Richard Eder's thoughtful review of The History of Love is a much-needed corrective to the Foer backlash that's afflicted most reviewers (Laura Miller's dumb-shit outing in the Times being the ne plus ultra of the collapse of critical rigor surrounding the Krauss-Foers.), although even he can't resist a comparison to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ... and Dictionary Days sounds like the kind of quirky title that we're suckers for ... Perhaps we're just feeling generous today but the balance of the B minuses went to reviews that were workmanlike and solid if not terribly involving ... The back page columns remain solidly written as always but the choices didn't particularly move us this week, although the Miller novel is on our desk. (And were we the only ones to note its somewhat unseemly promotion in the pages of Esquire this month, given that Adrienne Miller is Esquire's fiction editor? But we digress.)
WHAT WE DON'T ...
Yxta Maya Murray's breathless review of the Allende is just awful ... Overwrought, overstated, overcooked ... Murray can't resist pointing out that she's read Nietzsche (he's mentioned three times) .... and her review casts a light on another reviewing pet peeve that, although hardly unique to LAT, runs rampant here. She writes:
"Until that moment [when Diego fights with Moncada] Diego had not been conscious of his dual personality," Allende writes so piquantly of her character. "[O]ne part Diego de la Vega, elegant, affected, hypochondriac, and the other part El Zorro, audacious, daring, playful. He supposed that his true character lay somewhere in between."
That is "so piquantly"? It hardly strikes us as piquant - it rather feels a bit expository and heavy-handed. For some reason, Times reviewers seem to lack the ability to select passages to quote that appropriately support their critical judgments. We see this all the time, and remain baffled that this sort of thing doesn't get smoothed out in the editing process ... Elsewhere, the Stavans, McTavish and Cohen reviews are jammed under the somewhat forced rubric "In pursuit of the trivial and the significant" which seems wholly unnecessary ... The McTavish flunks the "who cares" test (do compendia like this need to be reviewed at all?) ... and the Cohen reads like an earnest high school book report:
"Numbers, according to Cohen, are essential to the analysis of society, the conduct of government, the regulation of daily life, and the understanding of how nature came to be."
Whoa. Really? You think? We're grateful for the penetrating analysis. (Reviewer Day goes on to say "The idea that a theory can be proved false by testing has come to be a hallmark of science." ... Now, correct us if we're wrong, but we've always heard from our scientist friends that you can't prove a theory false (you can't prove a negative) - you can only fail to prove it true ... Of course, we flunked chem, so if someone out there knows better, please drop us a line ... Bogira's book sounds both compelling and important but the review is marred by Shapiro's unwelcome authorial intrustions ...
GRADE: C- Blandness appears to be the order of the day ... Wasserman has likened the review to "an interesting dinner party" ... We're scarcely scintillated by the company this time out, and hope he cobbles up a better guest list for future meals ... But we don't hold our breaths awaiting our invitation.
For health reasons I have long ago forsworn reading Laura Miller (not that I am of frail constitution and sensibility) but occasionally I will sample a lead paragraph of her work especially if I find the subject compelling. Having heard seriously good buzz on Nicole Krauss’s second book, I chanced to attempt Miller’s handling of it.
"It would be unfair to liken Nicole Krauss's second novel, ''The History of Love,'' to ''Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,'' the recently published second novel by her better-known husband, Jonathan Safran Foer, except for two things. The first is the deliberate and liberal sprinkling of correspondences between the two books, a system of coy marital cross-referencing that amounts to an engraved invitation to compare and contrast…"
That’s pure crap (forgive my grandiloquence)! The only exception at play is that Miller could attempt this likening, in what seems like unsubtle baiting to hook the reader into a review of a lesser known author by mentioning a well known and controversial one and perhaps a way to spank Foer one more time.
Too bad Ed Champion is off on some rock n roll bingeing (I guess you gotta do what ya gotta do) — as I must now wait for the universally acknowledged definitive assessment of NYTBR content.
Also, weren’t you meeting with Mr. NYTBR? Wha’ happened?
Posted by: birnbaum | May 03, 2005 at 05:07 AM
For health reasons I have long ago forsworn reading Laura Miller (not that I am of frail constitution and sensibility) but occasionally I will sample a lead paragraph of her work especially if I find the subject compelling. Having heard seriously good buzz on Nicole Krauss’s second book, I chanced to attempt Miller’s handling of it.
"It would be unfair to liken Nicole Krauss's second novel, ''The History of Love,'' to ''Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,'' the recently published second novel by her better-known husband, Jonathan Safran Foer, except for two things. The first is the deliberate and liberal sprinkling of correspondences between the two books, a system of coy marital cross-referencing that amounts to an engraved invitation to compare and contrast…"
That’s pure crap (forgive my grandiloquence)! The only exception at play is that Miller could attempt this likening, in what seems like unsubtle baiting to hook the reader into a review of a lesser known author by mentioning a well known and controversial one and perhaps a way to spank Foer one more time.
Too bad Ed Champion is off on some rock n roll bingeing (I guess you gotta do what ya gotta do) — as I must now wait for the universally acknowledged definitive assessment of NYTBR content.
Also, weren’t you meeting with Mr. NYTBR? Wha’ happened?
Posted by: birnbaum | May 03, 2005 at 05:07 AM
I suspect that the reason editors don't call out their reviewers for "lack[ing] the ability to select passages to quote that appropriately support their critical judgments" is because they're just so grateful to have moderately competent writers who remember to quote at all. It's no excuse--you're right to be harsh--but I imagine the editing all happening in some bleary stupor of simply checking for egregious errors, not an editing that deserves the name.
Alas, sad days for all of us...
Posted by: Anne | May 03, 2005 at 06:56 PM
"Now, correct us if we're wrong, but we've always heard from our scientist friends that you can't prove a theory false (you can't prove a negative) - you can only fail to prove it true"
That's wrong. First, Karl Popper's popular philosophy of science says the opposite--that you can't prove theories true, you can only disprove them. Second, in logic you can prove negatives. See, e.g.:
http://www.discord.org/~lippard/debiak.html
and
http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articles/proveanegative.html
Posted by: Jim Lippard | January 18, 2010 at 02:20 PM