Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Steven Pinker on What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell: "The themes of the collection are a good way to characterize Gladwell himself: a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures. Gladwell is a writer of many gifts. His nose for the untold back story will have readers repeatedly muttering, 'Gee, that’s interesting!' He avoids shopworn topics, easy moralization and conventional wisdom, encouraging his readers to think again and think different. His prose is transparent, with lucid explanations and a sense that we are chatting with the experts ourselves.... An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring."
• Susan Cheever on Lit by Mary Karr: "There were tantalizing hints of adult life in her two coming-of-age memoirs, 'The Liars’ Club' and 'Cherry.' But 'Lit' is the book in which she grows up and gets serious, as serious as motherhood, as serious as alcoholism, as serious as God. And it just makes her funnier. In a gravelly, ground-glass-under-your-heel voice that can take you from laughter to awe in a few sen­tences, Karr has written the best book about being a woman in America I have read in years."
• David Gates on The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov: "The cover of the published book identifies 'The Original of Laura' as 'A novel in fragments,' as if it were some deliberate experiment in form. In fact, it’s simply fragments of a novel.... Except for that bit of overselling, 'The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun)' — it’s not clear how seriously Nabokov was considering that parenthetical subtitle — should serve as a model of how to publish a posthumous and unfinished manuscript."
• Mary Gaitskill on Cockroach by Rawi Hage: "To overpraise is a subtle form of disrespect, and everybody knows it. I don’t mean to suggest that everyone who has responded to Hage’s work has done so insincerely. But when I see it being compared to Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Genet, Rimbaud and Burroughs — I can’t imagine that anyone with a mind believes that. In making such overblown comparisons, these 'admiring' critics have respected Rawi Hage far less than I have."
• Clancy Martin on Invisible by Paul Auster: "As soon as you finish Paul Auster's 'Invisible' you want to read it again... The prose is contemporary American writing at its best: crisp, elegant, brisk. It has the illusion of effortlessness that comes only with fierce discipline. As often happens when you are in the hands of a master, you read the next sentence almost before you are finished with the previous one. The novel could be read shallowly, because it is such a pleasure to read.... [I]f, like me, part of why you read is the great pleasure of falling in love with a novel, then read 'Invisible.' It is the finest novel Paul Auster has ever written."

Washington Post:

• Charles on The Glass Room by Simon Mawer: "'The Glass Room' works so effectively because Mawer embeds these provocative aesthetic and moral issues in a war-torn adventure story that's eerily erotic and tremendously exciting. No matter how transparent and luminescent their architecture, the Landauers still ride the murky currents of history. The house endures, 'plain, balanced, perfect; and indifferent,' but the family is swept aside by the battles that tear through Czechoslovakia.... In chapter after chapter, era after era, the house miraculously continues, working as a talisman, 'its spirit of transparency percolating the human beings who stand within it, rendering them as translucent as the glass itself.' Like this gorgeous novel, that's an irresistible promise, though far more troubling than it first appears."
• Michael Dirda on The Red Book by Carl Jung: "[H]e also began a remarkable visionary text, illustrated with his own bizarre paintings: 'The Red Book' or 'Liber Novus.' This he composed during a state of 'active imagination' -- that is, of reverie or waking dream. As he said, he wanted to see what would happen when he 'switched off consciousness.' ... The resulting volume is certainly one of the most distinctive gift books of the upcoming holiday season. With a rich crimson dust jacket, thick cream-colored paper and calligraphied pages, this huge tome is the size of a lectern Bible and looks like the kind of spell book a wizard might consult."

Los Angeles Times:

• Joan Wickersham on Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder by Zachary Lazar: "The style is gorgeous -- understated, precise, atmospheric. Like a pointillist painter, Lazar gives us vivid dots that are all the more powerful because we have to do the work of connecting them.... When it comes to the storytelling, however, the pointillist technique is less successful; there are just too many dots.... Looking through news clippings pertaining to the murder, Lazar feels he is reading 'a baroquely plotted crime novel . . . a cacophony of names and faces, facts and suppositions, and in the silent gaps, as if in some occult code, the story of what had happened.' That is a good description of 'Evening's Empire.' It's a spotty, murky, haunting story, told by a son who understands it better than his father ever could have."
• Tim Rutten on Hollywood Moon by Joseph Wambaugh: "'Hollywood Moon' is the third in the series of novels Joseph Wambaugh has set in LAPD's Hollywood station -- and, by far, the best in the sequence.... One of the things that sets Wambaugh's cops and crooks apart from those in so many other mysteries and police procedurals is that he fixes both firmly in the same realistic social context. There, they share a kind of moral vertigo -- a sense of events and feelings spinning out of control and toward disintegration. Things, however, never settle into a facile -- which is to say, cynical -- moral equivalency."

Globe and Mail:

• Robert Wiersema on Under the Dome by Stephen King: "In 100 years, King will, I guarantee, be in the canon. And one of the main exhibits in his inclusion will be his whopping new novel Under the Dome.... It is ... even at almost 1,100 pages, one of the tightest, least self-indulgent novels I have ever read. Every word counts; there's no fat. As King explains in his afterword, 'I tried to write a book that would keep the pedal to the metal'; he's succeeded. This is a novel that will keep readers up all night, then haunt their dreams when they finally sleep. It is perhaps King's finest novel since The Stand, and that's just about the highest praise I can give."
• Carmine Starnino on Upgraded to Serious by Heather McHugh: "McHugh's new book Upgraded to Serious ... offers exactingly ravishing poetry that digs deeply into big themes: free will, consciousness, ideas of language.... In fact, we might even say McHugh has pioneered a new poetic genre: the meditative cliffhanger. Her poems take the shape of an idea or mood clarifying itself in stages, leaving readers on tenterhooks to find out where she'll go next."

The Guardian:

• Joanna Briscoe on Auster's Invisible: "It is so well paced that it rocket-charges the reader through all its games and structural devices, and is a tantalising page-turner of great – if deceptive – lucidity.... [T]he voices of the two possible Paul Austers have merged into one, the tale returning to the first person via the second and third, the momentum of menace increasingly powerful. Some of our assumptions come clattering down around us in a strangely satisfying way and, in exposing the mechanics of his storytelling, Auster paradoxically achieves an intensely felt authenticity. This is a fascinating and highly accomplished novel."
• Peter Conrad on Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith: "This is not the way critics are supposed to comport themselves. Smith's enthusiasm is almost shocking; she breaks the rules established by the black-gowned, gruel-blooded nerds in universities who murder books by dissecting them, reduce poems and novels to texts which are no more than snarled networks of verbal signals and revenge themselves on the literature they secretly hate by writing badly about it. Reading for Smith is a mind-changing, life-giving, soul-saving affair and her criticism has a missionary urgency."
• M. John Harrison on King's Under the Dome: "Where McMurtry's songs encourage everything in life to bleed into everything else, the us-and-them oppositions of Under the Dome are too well differentiated, too overtly polemical. In a three-minute song you can deal in fractured glimpses; in an 800-page blockbuster you must render unto plot all that is plot's. Someone has to be the bad guy. Someone has to pay. Causes are all present and identifiable, and evil is rendered safe by overstatement."

The New Yorker:

• Adam Gopnik on cookbooks: "After reading hundreds of cookbooks, you may have the feeling that every recipe, every cookbook, is an attempt to get you to attain this ideal sugar-salt-saturated-fat state without having to see it head on, just as every love poem is an attempt to maneuver a girl or a boy into bed by talking as fast, and as eloquently, as possible about something else. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate” is the poetic equivalent of simmering the garlic with ginger and Sauternes before you put the cream in; the end is the cream, but you carefully simmer the garlic."

Bookforum:

• John Banville on Nabokov's Original of Laura: "Nabokov was a famously meticulous stylist—none more so, surely, among his contemporaries—and would have died before he would have let work appear that had not been polished to the highest finish. Well, he did die, and the work has been published. Polished it is not, fragmented it is. What we have, in fact, is little more than a blurred outline, a preliminary shiver of a novel. And yet. This edition is a triumph of the book maker's art, and the design, by the Nabokovianly named Chip Kidd, is masterly. There will be those who will deplore the production as gimmicky, but the greatest magicians depend on gimmicks for their most elegant illusions."
• Christopher Hayes on Interesting Times by George Packer: "When the subject is his own work and writing ... he is excessively—almost compulsively—self-questioning. Like someone running his tongue over a canker sore, Packer can't seem to stop himself from returning to hard questions and asking whether he has lived up to the elevated epistemic standards he's set.... Noble as this might be in small doses, an extended reading of his work (particularly his writing in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks and during the run-up to the Iraq war) creates the unfortunate impression that Packer's self-awareness may also be a form of moral vanity."
• Claire Messud on Beneath the Lion's Gaze by Maaza Mengiste: "That Maaza Mengiste's Beneath the Lion's Gaze is all but un-put-downable is a feat for any novel, and perhaps especially for a debut, but it is all the greater an accomplishment given that not a single cheerful event brightens this book's nearly four hundred pages. Set in Addis Ababa during Ethiopia's darkest days in the mid-1970s, from the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie through the reign of terror imposed by the Derg, the revolutionary council that seized power in Selassie's wake, Mengiste's remarkable novel is a catalogue of miseries and brutalities as relentless as any I have encountered in recent fiction.... Somehow, out of this agonizing material Mengiste has created a community, and within it a family, whose passions, conflicts, and ethical dilemmas will engage even the most jaded reader, and perhaps the most jaded reader above all."

--Tom