Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Richard Russo on Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles: "The big question that underlies the entire narrative — Who’s at fault here? — couldn’t be more timely, given contemporary America’s fondness for the blame game. The novel begins in moral certitude and virtuous outrage. Though he admits to being little more than a 'vanishing taillight' in his daughter’s life, he still blames American Airlines for his inability to keep the one promise that means so much to him.... The novel also wants us to consider the telling fact that Bennie’s true journey could begin only after he stopped moving. Is it possible he actually owes American Airlines a debt of gratitude?"
• Kakutani on The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie: "Salman Rushdie’s new novel, 'The Enchantress of Florence,' reads less like a novel by the author of such magical works as 'Midnight’s Children' and 'The Moor’s Last Sigh' than a weary, predictable parody of something by John Barth.... Such talk about sorcery and mysterious doubles isn’t delivered here with the sort of dazzling sleight of hand that have made Mr. Rushdie’s most powerful work, like the most powerful work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, so mesmerizing and so phantasmagorical. Rather it’s lacquered onto a plywood story with a heavy paintbrush that leaves lots of streaks and spots and results in a work that feels jerry-built, meretricious — and yes, quite devoid of magic."
• John Hodgman on comics, including the reprints in Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus (Vols. 1, 2, 3, 4): "His stories were linear — even primitive. But there is something powerful and melancholy and personal that weeps in Orion’s epic, city-smashing rages. At other times, though, the pages cannot seem to keep up with Kirby’s astonishing imagination. Concepts, characters, subplots and themes are wildly thrown into the mix like drunken punches and then abandoned, never to be seen again: A whole city 'hewn from the giant trees of a great forest'! Space giants lashed to asteroids! Werewolves and vampires living on a miniature planet in a scientist’s basement (a planet with horns on it)!"
• Maslin on Nothing to Lose by Lee Child: "Where does this brilliantly calculating author go from here? Reacher’s minimalist character is perfect. His moods don’t waver. His baggage stays light. His biography needs no amplifying. His adventures follow a familiar, satisfying arc. None of this is broken, so it doesn’t need fixing. So how does Mr. Child stick to these books’ basic blueprint while still making each year’s model so satisfyingly new? His solution in 'Nothing to Lose' is this: keep the format inviolate but raise the ante tremendously."

Washington Post:

• John N. Maclean on Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11 by Patrick Creed and Rick Newman: "Combing public records and conducting 150 interviews, Creed and Newman have done a monumental reporting job. Firefight tells the tale moment by moment through the accounts of dozens of participants and eye-witnesses. The book needed an editor with a sharper blue pencil -- it's too long, and the writing can be monotonous. Not unlike the heroes whose stories they tell, however, Creed and Newman faced a daunting challenge, rose to the occasion and rescued a piece of history from the ashes."

Los Angeles Times:

• Charles Solomon on The Other by David Guterson: "Inevitably, those comparisons will take the form of 'It's no "Snow Falling on Cedars."' Indeed, 'The Other' is a flat-footed morass of trivia that suggests a bad rewrite of 'Into the Wild'.... In an unsuccessful attempt to disguise the sheer improbability of the story and the underdeveloped characters who wander through it, Guterson buries the reader in meaningless facts.... Apparently this welter of names and details is supposed to take the place of credible character development, but the net result is every bit as entertaining as reading a street guide or a mail-order catalog."
• Amy Wilentz on Rushdie's Enchantress of Florence: "Rushdie has done a lot of research for 'Enchantress.' Unfortunately, the story gets lost amid its own underpinnings. The reader is asked to do the work the writer usually does: to put the complicated, sporadic, diffuse and often irritating mass of information together and make of it a comprehensible whole. Yet the book is not postmodern, deconstructed or radical -- it's not challenging in a good way. There's an awful lot in its few pages (few for Rushdie, that is). Indeed, there is far too much, and 'Enchantress' reads as if it's unedited and unfinished. It's more Rushdie's working notebook for a novel than it is a premeditated work of finished fiction."
• Dinah Lenney on Assisted Loving: True Tales of Double Dating with My Dad by Bob Morris: "Would you look at this book jacket? What was HarperCollins thinking? An old guy, with a comb-over and a gut, sitting on a chaise at the beach -- legs spread wide in his too-tight Burberry swim trunks -- skin like leather, gold chains at his neck and wrists, his mouth full of sandwich, this is supposed to be funny? Because, what, the real story isn't funny enough? Does the publisher want to pretend Bob Morris hasn't written a beautiful book?"

New York Sun:

• Adam Kirsch on Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen: "It is on this level, the level of psychological realism rather than postmodern invention, that 'Atmospheric Disturbances' succeeds, and where Ms. Galchen displays her real gifts as a writer.... What would 'Atmospheric Disturbances' look like, I wonder, if Ms. Galchen had devoted herself to this genuine human mystery, and dispensed with all the book's gaudy, trendy, unnecessary paraphernalia?"
• Ronald Radosh on The Age of Reagan by Sean Wilentz: "Mr. Wilentz reaches judgments with which many people, including this writer, will disagree. He supports the Reagan whose policies he likes, and criticizes fiercely the Reagan whose policies he opposes. In those pages, he fails his own test of remaining objective. Yet despite this flaw, any student of our past will learn a great deal from his book about what Ronald Reagan did for America, and how he changed our nation. Mr. Wilentz has written an essential book for our times."

Globe & Mail:

• M.A.C. Farrant on The Shadow Factory by Paul West: "It was his wife, writer Diane Ackerman, who suggested to West two months after the stroke, and while he was still domiciled in 'the matrix of horror and devastation' of the event, that he 'might want to write the first aphasic memoir'.... He has, and the result - The Shadow Factory - is a stunning accomplishment." And also The Woman Who Can't Forget by Jill Price: "No one ... could argue against her claim that her 'tyrannical memory' has caused her to suffer. It is more that she can't seem to decide the best way to tell her story."

The Guardian:

• Jane Smiley on The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt: "The novel is most interesting for the way in which it fails. Though beautifully thought through, deeply serious and enormously intelligent, it demonstrates that there is a reason why Freud and Kafka belong to one culture, and Ibsen and Sigrid Undset belong to another. It's a rare Scandinavian writer who expects any sorrows at all, even those of an American, to be healed by mere memory."

The New Yorker:

• James Wood on God's Problem by Bart D. Ehrman: "Anti-theodicy is permanent rebellion. It is not quite atheism but wounded theism, condemned to argue ceaselessly against a God it is supposed not to believe in. Bart D. Ehrman’s new book, 'God’s Problem,' is highly adolescent in tone. Its jabbing subtitle, 'How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer,' sounds as if it should be furiously triple-underlined on the dust jacket.... If he no longer believes, of course, suffering should not be a theological 'problem.' But the rebel is stuck, as Dostoyevsky knew well, in an aggrieved nostalgia for belief."
• Louis Menand on Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. 1: The Young Genius by David Moody: "Moody’s book is a biography more of the work than of the man. Pound’s love affairs, friendships, and quarrels and the intellectual and artistic culture within which he operated are mentioned, but they’re not endowed with much explanatory power. Moody treats Pound as a poet whose primary concern was writing poetry, and his pages are devoted mainly to patient, intelligent, and prudently sympathetic readings of the contents of the twenty-one books Pound produced between 1905 and 1920"

--Tom

Comments

[FredTownWard on June 03, 2008 at 01:20 PM]

Of course it goes without saying that the obsolete media would select a Christian apostate to review a book written by another Christian apostate (after all it is not as if they have on staff or even KNOW any Christians), but give James Wood credit for pointing out the inherent idiocy in complaining about why a God YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN allows suffering. This is a problem only to those of us who believe in God, and the seriousness of the question can be judged by the fact that it is the primary subject of the second oldest book in the Bible: The Book of Job. Well, if you bother to read it, you will find that God refuses to answer the question, claiming the sovereign right as Creator to test us, to do with us as He wills. We are stuck with trusting Him, that He has a reason and that it is a good one, and we have been stuck with it almost from the beginning.

That's why they call it "faith".

Thus it is left to the believer to struggle with the question and to come to some sort of understanding that he can live with. The alternative is atheism, and as James Wood is honest enough to remind us, all atheism gives us is nothing to complain about and no one to complain about it to.

[The Luke on June 05, 2008 at 12:01 AM]

It's not just a problem for you, FredTownWard--it's a problem for those of us who are exhorted to become Christians but just can't get past this problem. If there were no such thing as proselytism, then....

[FredTownWard on June 05, 2008 at 04:52 AM]

So what is your problem with proselytizers, The Luke? Do they refuse to take "no" for an answer? Do they call you at dinner time? Do their pleas interrupt your favorite television shows, forcing you to go to the bathroom when you don't even need too?

A proselytizer is just another person exercizing his or her free speech rights in order to talk you into something, and as a group, they tend to be a bit better mannered than more secular marketeers so I rather doubt that they are harassing you to distraction.

If on the other hand your objection is that the mere mention of the subject causes your thoughts to go where you would rather they did not, that is YOUR problem. Nobody has a right not to be offended, and the day some lunatic court declares the existence of such a right, free speech ceases to exist.

[The Luke on June 05, 2008 at 11:11 AM]

My main problem with proselytizers is their theory that without their God I am doomed to spend eternity burning in hell. (And their predecessors' propensity to force conversion at the point of a sword.) Of course they have a right to say whatever they want; no one is suggesting otherwise. Doesn't mean I have to listen, of course.

But we're getting off topic. I guess what I'm trying to say is the question of why a purported God would allow such suffering in the world is a major reason why proselytizers don't find more success. It's a reasonable question for both those with faith and those without to ask.

[FredTownWard on June 06, 2008 at 05:57 AM]

Well, first of all, your "main problem" is with the teachings of Jesus Christ who said, among other things, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light. NO ONE cometh unto the Father except by me." You don't have to believe it, of course, but it is a bit unreasonable to demand that Christians modify what they believe to be the Word of God because you, an unbeliever, have a problem with it. You either accept Jesus' terms for salvation or you don't, and depending on whether or not there is truth to it you are either no worse off or in deep ****. Of course, it goes without saying that forced conversion at the point of a sword is not only wrong, it's useless. It must be of your own free will to do you any good.

As for your second point, yes the question of "why a purported God would allow such suffering in the world" IS a legitimate question for someone considering belief in such a God. I merely contend, along with the reviewer, that it is downright silly to keep harping on the subject after you have ceased to believe. If we ARE in a Godless world then we have NOTHING to complain about and certainly NO ONE to complain about it to.

MY explanation for suffering, which satisfies me at least, is that after Adam and Eve rejected God in the Garden, we have lived in a Cause and Effect world ever since. Sometimes bad things happen, but in most cases the cause or a significant part of the cause is human sin, just not necessarily the sin of the victims. For example sinful, evil, and corrupt governments have made the suffering from the Burmese cyclone and the Sichuan earthquake MUCH worse than they should have been, adding at least one and possibly two zeros to the death toll. At least the Chinese government is trying to make amends for shoddy or unenforced building codes by trying to help survivors, which is more than the Burmese government has done.