Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Walter Kirn on Lush Life by Richard Price: "Raymond Chandler is peeping out from Price’s skull, as well he should be, given such gloomy doings, but ... one detects Saul Bellow’s vision, too. Price is a builder, a drafter of vast blueprints, and though the Masonic keystone of his novel is a box-shaped N.Y.P.D. office, he stacks whole slabs of city on top of it and excavates colossal spaces beneath it. He doesn’t just present a slice of life, he piles life high and deep. Time too. The past is rendered mostly as an absence, though, as a set of caverns, a hive of catacombs. Some of his characters’ ancestors are down there, but the main way we know this is through the hollowness of the new neighborhood built over their crypts."
• William Grimes on Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker: "Muddled and often infuriating, 'Human Smoke' sounds its single, solemn note incessantly, like a mallet striking a kettle drum over and over. War is bad. Churchill was bad. Roosevelt was bad. Hitler was bad too, but maybe, in the end, no worse than Roosevelt and Churchill.... In dedicating it to the memory of American and British pacifists, Mr. Baker writes, 'They failed, but they were right.' Millions of ghosts say otherwise."
• David Rieff on Marching Toward Hell by Michael Scheuer: "While Scheuer fancies his ruthlessness to be Machiavellian realism, his arguments ... are pure militarist utopianism. 'Marching Toward Hell' is an enormously crude, reductionist account of the challenges posed by the jihadists, and as such, difficult to take seriously.... He flatters himself that he is a modern-day Patrick Henry. He’s mistaken." And on Friday Kakutani called it a "scathing, wildly uneven and often intemperate work."
• Gregory Cowles on Smash! Crash! by Jon Scieszka: "Parents probably won’t love this series the way they love 'The Stinky Cheese Man,' but that’s only because as Scieszka reaches out to younger readers, he’s stopped trying so hard to please the grown-ups. I might miss his tap-dancing — in the end, I’m a grown-up too — but Scieszka knows his audience. The same children who chant 'Can we fix it?' as they watch 'Bob the Builder,' after all, turn around and yell 'Can we break it?' as they attack their block towers. For them, Trucktown should be a smash."

Washington Post:

• Ron Charles on The Blue Star by Tony Earley: "The novel builds slowly to these more serious themes -- probably too slowly. Although Jim the Boy walked the line between banality and profundity with exquisite sensitivity, here the balance is not so well executed. Many of these chapters are warm and graceful but not sufficiently essential, and the writing isn't note-perfect enough to sustain the lack of import.... Fortunately, as the novel nears its conclusion, these merely nostalgic scenes begin to acquire real emotional depth."
• Fiasco author Tom Ricks digs into the archives to review Piers Mackesy's 1964 classic The War for America: 1775-1883 for its modern parallels: "Nor did British leaders understand the intensity and vitality of the rebel cause. 'I may safely assert that the insurgents are very few, in comparison with the whole of the people,' Gen. Sir William Howe wrote in 1775.... He calls it a 'strategic history,' which he describes as the no-man's-land between a diplomatic history of a war and a narrative history of its battles. It is the single best such work that I ever have encountered."

Los Angeles Times:

• Paul Wilner on Jackalope Dreams by Mary Clearman Blew: "Reciting plot points doesn't begin to do justice to this remarkable work. Sentences seethe with urgent, unhurried energy, and the description of the land the author so clearly loves is in service of the story, not showing off. You come to care deeply about these people, caught between an uncapturable past and an uncertain future. 'Jackalope Dreams' is a small masterpiece; it deserves the attention it makes a point of not seeking."

New York Sun:

• Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Price's Lush Life: "Mr. Price's plot is a murder mystery's, but the illuminating, slow burn of the book is the aging hipster's fear that his ambitions are not, themselves, distinguishing — not enough to save him from the grim, bottom-line determinism of his paycheck.... But once the basic suspense of the plot peters out, the characters begin to seem less like creatures who populate a culture and more like tools for describing it."
• Adam Kirsch on Baker's Human Smoke: "No one who knows about World War II will take 'Human Smoke' at all seriously. The problem is that people who don't know enough, and who enjoy the spectacle of a writer of apparent authority turning the myth of 'the good war' upside down, will think 'Human Smoke' is a brave book."

Globe & Mail:

• Anakana Schofield on The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black: "The Silver Swan is the second mystery novel by Benjamin Black, a pseudonym of renowned Irish literary writer (and 2005 Booker Prize winner for The Sea) John Banville, who explained his divergence into Black as the desire to do something different. Alas, based on The Silver Swan, he might have been wiser to remain the master prose stylist he was, and raise a herd of curly horned goats to contend with such an urge."

The Guardian:

• Joanna Briscoe on Fault Lines by Nancy Huston (coming to the US in October): "Fault Lines won the Prix Femina, was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, and confirmed Nancy Huston's literary eminence in her adopted France. Yet a work more north American in tone, sensibility and language would be hard to imagine.... Despite acute observations and potentially highly emotive subject matter, it reads as an artificial imitation of real life: a clever-clever, shiny version supported by professional craft and research, but one that is ultimately inauthentic. It's an accomplished novel whose soul is missing."

The New Yorker:

• Jill Lepore takes the long view of the latest fake-memoir controversy: "Maybe the topics that have seized professional historians’ attention—family history, social history, women’s history, cultural history, 'microhistory'—constitute nothing more than an attempt to take back territory they forfeited to novelists in the eighteenth century. If so, historians have reclaimed from novelists nearly everything except the license to invent . . . and women readers. Today, publishers figure that men buy the great majority of popular history books; most fiction buyers are women."
• You can watch clips from Errol Morris's upcoming documentary on Abu Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure (to be accompanied by his book by the same name with Philip Gourevitch).
• And this has nothing to do with books, but do yourself a favor and read Ben McGrath's account fo the impossible task of following ballplayer-turned-entrepreneur Lenny Dykstra around for a few days--"Dude, oh my God, take a ride with me."--which is just as delirious as every other profile of "Nails" I've ever read.

--Tom

Comments

[FredTownWard on March 18, 2008 at 02:53 PM]

Nothing better illustrates the single-minded delusion of the Iraq War defeatist than Tom Ricks' (who apparently has no plans to retitle any updated edition of "Fiasco" as "Success" despite the fact that "The American Military Adventure in Iraq" now IS one) desperate attempt here to convince people to ignore their lying eyes and believe that the success in Iraq now too obvious to keep covered up is somehow an illusion.

About the only "startling parallel" between the two situations is that a powerful country was fighting an insurgency whose strength was at first underestimated; otherwise they are completely different.

First, the British were fighting a world wide war against the French. In contrast the United States is at peace outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. Among other benefits, this means we have no trouble whatsoever in supplying our fighting forces wherever they are. Thus, there cannot possibly be a Yorktown style surrender because there is no one to do the surrounding and no opportunity to surround.

Second, the British were fighting to force the American colonials to stay subjects within their empire. In contrast not even the most paranoid Iraqi is delusional enough to now believe that the United States intends to make Iraq a possession and himself a subject. Only domestic nuts who believe Tom Ricks are THAT crazy.

Third, his attempt to compare the results of British naval caution then with US army caution now misses the rather obvious point that the British caution lost them battles as isolated garrisons were attacked and destroyed, most spectacularly at Yorktown. US army caution while certainly detrimental didn't lose us a single battle.

Finally, his attempt to compare the results of failing to protect loyalists fails primarily because unlike the British the Americans finally wised up as Ricks is forced to grudgingly admit:

"This failing really was addressed only when Generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno instituted a new strategy early in 2007 that made protecting the people the top priority of their soldiers. It remains to be seen whether that change came too late."

No, actually it DOESN'T remain to be seen because the strategy is now a year old and has been crowned with spectacular success.

If Ricks were writing this in March 2007, he would be entitled to his doubts. In March 2008 he is simply deluding himself and hoping for a miracle,...

a miraculous defeat for his own country so he won't have to admit he was wrong.

[Mary on March 18, 2008 at 07:21 PM]

Oh, I hope you will publish the Orange Prize Longlist with links to availability. Lots of us love this annual opportunity.

[maitresse on March 19, 2008 at 01:28 AM]

Hi there, I just found this blog-- looks like a good read!
I was however disappointed to find you're not so much reviewing the reviewers as rounding up reviews on various books.

The only reason I care is because I've written a couple of posts over ay my blog critiquing reviewers, as it were, so I was attracted by the headline to see what you all thought!

See here: http://maitresse.typepad.com/maitresse/2008/03/problems-in-boo.html

And here:
http://maitresse.typepad.com/maitresse/2007/09/problems-in-rev.html