Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Joyce Carol Oates on American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld: "Curtis Sittenfeld surely did not intend to create, in this mostly amiable, entertaining novel, anything so ambitious — or so presumptuous — as a political/cultural allegory in the 19th-century mode, yet 'American Wife' might be deconstructed as a parable of America in the years of the second Bush presidency: the 'American wife' is in fact the American people, or at least those millions of Americans who voted for a less-than-qualified president in two elections — the all-forgiving enabler for whom the bromide 'love' excuses all." On Friday, Kakutani liked the book until the politics took over: "In the final pages of 'American Wife'... it’s clear that Ms. Sittenfeld has stopped channeling the thoughts and feelings of a character she has so meticulously created and instead begun using that heroine as a sock puppet for her own views on the unhappy tenure of the Bush administration."
• Maslin on The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti, a "darkly transporting debut novel": "Recently in 'The Story of Edgar Sawtelle,' and now in 'The Good Thief,' the reader can find plain-spoken fiction full of traditional virtues: strong plotting, pure lucidity, visceral momentum and a total absence of writerly mannerisms."
• Dave Itzkoff on The World in Six Songs by Daniel Levitin: "Music, Levitin argues, is not just something to help pass the time on road trips and a swell facilitator for meeting girls: it is, he writes, 'the soundtrack of civilization' — a force that shaped us as a species and prepared us for the higher-order task of sharing complex communications with one another.... [T]o the extent that 'The World in Six Songs' succeeds, it works much like a great piece of pop music, whose combined elements can induce feelings of enlightenment and euphoria, even when some of the words don’t hold up to closer scrutiny."
• Mark Danner on The Way of the World by Ron Suskind: "In a crowded, highly talented field, Mr. Suskind bids fair to claim the crown as the most perceptive, incisive, dogged chronicler of the inner workings of the Bush administration.... At bottom, Mr. Suskind is intent on posing deeper questions: about transparency and the 'dying cult' of secrecy; about 'defining human progress together'; about the 'lack of imagination about what the nation might yet become.' These are hard, frustrating, complicated matters to which he offers only tentative answers, some of them vague, sentimental, even naïve. But he is brave enough to try to discover, through relentless reporting and a sustained and admirable act of sympathy, the right questions. In this age of scandal, we must be grateful to him for that."

Washington Post:

• Ron Charles on Tinti's The Good Thief: "It may be too quaint to imagine there are still families reading aloud together at night (so many Web sites, so little time), but if you're out there, consider Hannah Tinti's charming first novel.... Ren's plight is creaky with sentimentality, but Tinti knows how to keep her balance as she steps through these hoary conventions of Victorian melodrama. By the time she finishes describing Ren's little collection of stolen objects and his muted despair, I wanted to sign the adoption papers myself."
• Robert G. Kaiser on The Limits of Power by Andrew Bacevich: " This compact, meaty volume ought to be on the reading list of every candidate for national office -- House, Senate or the White House -- in November's elections. In an age of cant and baloney, Andrew Bacevich offers a bracing slap of reality.... Bacevich is argumentative, and his case is not proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but at the end of this book, a serious reader has a difficult choice: to embrace Bacevich's general view or to construct a genuinely persuasive alternative. For many years our leaders have failed to do either."

Los Angeles Times:

• Stacey D'Erasmo on The Road Home by Rose Tremain: "She proves herself again magically capable of animating a character from the inside out, illuminating the heart of one modern exile with an extraordinary degree of love, imagination and insight. The pleasure, the wit and the joy in humanity that Tremain brings to every page do what literature, at its best, should do: connect us, as E.M. Forster famously exhorted. Particularly, connect us to the invisible, the lonely, the barely seen."

New York Sun:

• Adam Kirsch on the reissue of Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter: "On one level it can appear as timeless and simple as a folktale. Yet Thomas Mann came closer to the true experience of reading 'Rock Crystal' when he praised Stifter as 'one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature.' In 'Rock Crystal,' as in a Mann story, plot and description are never 'innocent,' no matter how lovingly they are elaborated. Rather, as the novella unfolds, succinctly but without hurry, it evolves into a parable of frightening depth. It is no more than 25,000 words, if that, but in this short space Stifter transports the reader to the heart of the world's mystery, before returning him to a comfortable dailiness that henceforth cannot help but feel haunted."

Globe & Mail:

• David M. Shribman on What Is America? by Ronald Wright: "This is a disturbing book, suitable for the age of W., when Canadians, who are supposed to be our best friends, can tell a CBC poll that the country that most stands out as a negative force in the world doesn't come from the (de)famed 'axis of evil' - a phrase, coined by a Canadian, meant to describe North Korea, Iran and Iraq - but from the nation that sits across from them along the greatest undefended border in the world. Kind of makes you sit up and wonder - and take the Wright argument with real urgency. Here's that argument: The new world order is a New World order, built in the United States by a nation that, from the start, employed militarism and religious extremism to steal and murder its way to prosperity."
• T.F. Rigelhof on Cockroach by Rawi Hage (not available in US yet): "The things that make Rawi Hage a major literary talent - and Cockroach as essential reading as its predecessor - include freshness, gut-wrenching lyricism, boldness, emotional restraint, intellectual depth, historical sense, political subversiveness and uncompromising compassion. Cockroach's clarity of prose and purpose, as well as its ferocity of judgment, might remind older readers of the books Mordecai Richler wrote before he turned to satire."

Times Literary Supplement:

• Ruth Scurr on So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald (not available in US yet): "It is journalistic commonplace to describe Fitzgerald as a 'late flower', a jam-making grandmother who took to novel writing in her sixties and mysteriously wiped the floor with writers half her age, yet there is plenty of evidence in these disparate letters to suggest that hers was always an intensely literary life. Poetry was her earliest and deepest love; biography the first genre she mastered; and the novels for which she has become world-famous emerged from the confluence of these two passions."

The New Yorker:

• John Updike on Early Novels and Stories and Later Novels and Stories by William Maxwell: "He lived for art, its appreciation as well as its creation. In 'Nearing Ninety,' he likened death to lying down for a pleasant afternoon nap and found 'unbearable' only the thought that 'when people are dead they don’t read books.' His shapely, lively, gently rigorous memoirs, out of the abundance of heartfelt writing he bestowed on posterity, are most like being with Bill in life, at lunch in midtown or at home in the East Eighties, as he intently listened, and listened, and then said, in his soft dry voice, exactly the right thing."

--Tom

Comments

[on September 02, 2008 at 10:50 AM]

When future historians study our age, one of the most fascinating areas of study will be Bush Derangement Syndrome: the crippling mental condition that causes otherwise functional leftists to make utter fools of themselves. It differs markedly from the superficially similar Clinton Hatred in this very important way:

Clinton haters for the most part came about their hatred honestly, by getting to know Bill Clinton very well. They invariably turned out to be former lovers, former political allies, former business partners, former friends, or former rape victims. In contrast the American public found Bill Clinton difficult to hate. If you were into drinking and chasing skirts, who would make a better companion? Men wished they could get away with it like Bill did; women wished that Bill would choose them next.

In contrast BDS sufferers are invariably people who do not know George W. Bush in the slightest; it seems that to hate "W" the minimum requirement is that you NOT know him or anything about him.

So in this week's "Old BDS-Sufferer's Monday" we have four examples of this mental condition on display. Curtis Sittenfeld's creepy fictional character assassination of Laura Bush apparently because assassinating the character of the President is no longer sufficient to stand out from the crowd; David M. Shribman's "What Is America?" which argues that a majority of Canadians have also fallen victim to the madness, Andrew Bacevich's "The Limits of Power", the latest in a long list of "America is Dommed, DOOMED because of Bush!" rants that of necessity ignores the fact that we've won the war in Iraq; and finally Ron Suskind's latest deluded charge of Conspiracy so great that the lack of evidence proves only how powerful the Conspiracy really is!

Never before have so many been so insane and so proud of it.

[on September 02, 2008 at 10:52 AM]

When future historians study our age, one of the most fascinating areas of study will be Bush Derangement Syndrome: the crippling mental condition that causes otherwise functional leftists to make utter fools of themselves. It differs markedly from the superficially similar Clinton Hatred in this very important way:

Clinton haters for the most part came about their hatred honestly, by getting to know Bill Clinton very well. They invariably turned out to be former lovers, former political allies, former business partners, former friends, or former rape victims. In contrast the American public found Bill Clinton difficult to hate. If you were into drinking and chasing skirts, who would make a better companion? Men wished they could get away with it like Bill did; women wished that Bill would choose them next.

In contrast BDS sufferers are invariably people who do not know George W. Bush in the slightest; it seems that to hate "W" the minimum requirement is that you NOT know him or anything about him.

So in this week's "Old BDS-Sufferer's Monday" we have four examples of this mental condition on display. Curtis Sittenfeld's creepy fictional character assassination of Laura Bush apparently because assassinating the character of the President is no longer sufficient to stand out from the crowd; David M. Shribman's "What Is America?" which argues that a majority of Canadians have also fallen victim to the madness, Andrew Bacevich's "The Limits of Power", the latest in a long list of "America is Doomed, DOOMED because of Bush!" rants that of necessity ignores the fact that we've won the war in Iraq; and finally Ron Suskind's latest deluded charge of Conspiracy so great that the lack of evidence proves only how powerful the Conspiracy really is!

Never before have so many been so insane and so proud of it.

[Philippe Landry on September 02, 2008 at 02:33 PM]

Again, why does Amazon.com keep recommending this trite, putrid crap to me? Are they trying to make me vomit because they're doing a good job. Maybe they should open a chain of Roman vomitoriums. It makes sense, no?

[H Hardy on September 02, 2008 at 03:58 PM]

P Landry: You're trying awfully hard to be sarcastic and cleverly caustic, but only succeeding in being tiresome. Speaking of vomiting . . .