Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Leah Hager Cohen on Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro: "A quick tally yields all the elements of pulp fiction: violence, adultery, extreme cruelty, duplicity, theft, suicide, murder. But while in pulp fiction the emotional climax coincides with the height of external drama, a ­Munro story works according to a different scheme. Here the nominally momentous event is little more than an anteroom to an echo chamber filled with subtle and far-reaching thematic reverberations." Meanwhile, Kakutani wrote, "The willful melodramatics of [some of] these tales make them far cruder than Ms. Munro’s best work. Unlike the true gems in this volume — the title story, along with 'Fiction,' a story about a woman who glimpses her own life in a work of fiction written by the daughter of a onetime romantic rival — they fail to make full use of their author’s remarkable and copious gifts."
• Nicholson Baker on Googled by Ken Auletta: "Wait. What real value? Come now, my prominent executive friend. Have you not glanced at Street View in Google Maps? Have you not relied on the humble aid of the search-box calculator, or checked out Google’s movie showtimes, or marveled at the quick-and-dirtiness of Google Translate? Have you not made interesting recherché 19th-century discoveries in Google Books? Or played with the amazing expando-charts in Google Finance? Have you not designed a strange tall house in Google SketchUp, and did you not make a sudden cry of awed delight the first time you saw the planet begin to turn and loom closer in Google Earth?"
• Maslin on The Cello Suites by Eric Siblin: "Although those footsteps do not lead him in anything resembling a straight line, they take him all over the Bach landscape in ways that make 'The Cello Suites' a work of ever-percolating interest. Mr. Siblin winds up mixing high and low musical forms, art and political histories, Bach’s and Casals’s individual stories and matters of arcane musicology into a single inquisitive volume."
• Ron Powers on Ford County by John Grisham: "John Grisham, shake hands with Michael Jordan. And then get back to what you do best, as His Airness did, more or less before it was too late.... We talkin’ short story now, sonny — and stories are viewed by many as the major leagues of literary fiction. The seven examples in 'Ford County,' while not exactly dreadful, suggest that the majors remain as far from Grish­am’s grasp as they did from Jordan’s."
• Dominique Browning on Family Album by Penelope Lively: "Banal but terrifying things happen. Then we forget them. Somehow, though, they don’t forget us. Memories lie buried, yet remain forceful enough to shape our lives. In its infinite dimensions, this is the subject Penelope Lively, the British author of more than two dozen children’s books and numerous adult novels, has explored throughout her long and impressive career. In her haunting new novel, 'Family Album,' the act of forgetting is as strange and interesting as the power of remembering."

Washington Post:

• Yardley on Memoir: A History by Ben Yagoda: "One would look high and low to find more incontrovertible and devastating evidence of the triumph of memoir (if 'triumph' is the word for it) than is contained in Yagoda's opening chapter. In mostly deadpan style, he enumerates in some 25 pages the 'million little subgenres,' from 'celebrity, misery, canine, methamphetamine, and eccentric-mother memoirs' on and on through 'the dad memoir,' the spiritual memoir, the 'rock-star memoir' and of course 'the seemingly endless series of bombshells over fraudulent lives.'"
• Charles on Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton: "If you're on the lookout for some light adventure this holiday season, thar she blows!"

Los Angeles Times:

• Bernadette Murphy on Stones into Schools by Greg Mortenson: "Though 'Three Cups of Tea' is not prerequisite reading -- most of the material is recapped in the new book -- it may serve to whet readers' appetites. 'Stones Into Schools' has more characters, more regions to consider, more obstacles to overcome, more history to digest. At times, these 'mores' can require a slow and careful read. But be not discouraged: Like the trouble it takes to build these important and life-enriching schools, endeavoring to better understand this region through 'Stones Into Schools' is worth the effort."
• Dinah Lenney on Cleaving by Julie Powell: "To write a good memoir, you have to be more than shameless; self-awareness -- which is not the same as self-loathing -- is at a premium. No doubt Powell has been as honest as she knows how to be, but she's an unreliable narrator, vain and self-pitying by turns, and lacking necessary perspective. Yes, she can be fearless and provocative, but 'Cleaving' -- which has a third meaning: to penetrate -- wants to be wise, as well. Unfortunately, at the end of this book, Powell seems not much closer to piercing insight about anybody's heart, her own least of all."
• Tim Rutten on Crichton's Pirate Latitudes: "If you're on an airplane for a flight of several hours and not in a particularly demanding mood, 'Pirate Latitudes' would be a reasonably agreeable companion."

The Globe and Mail:

• Brian Boyd on The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov: "In my role as Vladimir Nabokov's biographer, I was the first person other than Nabokov, his widow and his son to read The Original of Laura. After years of imploring Véra Nabokov for access to the manuscript ... she allowed me to read it in 1987, 10 years after her husband's death – once only, without taking notes, and under her eyes, which were trained on me like a drill. When Véra and Dmitri later asked me what I thought they should do with the manuscript, which Nabokov had told Véra she must destroy, I said, to my own surprise, 'Destroy it.' How glad I am that they ignored my advice and that their attachment to Nabokov's work overrode even their respect for his wishes."
• Zsuzsi Gartner on Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith: "In Changing My Mind, Smith's trademark insouciance ... has been tamped down, but the irreverent wit is on display, alongside a penetrating sonar-depth understanding of the fictional enterprise. Shuffle on over, James Wood, there's a new maestro of the literary essay in town. Smith reads with both 'brain and spine,' as one of her heroes, Nabokov, exhorted his students to, and the results here are often thrilling."

The Guardian:

• Joseph O'Connor on The Collected Stories by William Trevor (UK only): "What is remarkable about this collection is how it reveals the extent to which the touchstones of Trevor's aesthetic were there from the very earliest stories: the crafted sparseness of description, the luminous sense of place, the extraordinarily profound insight into the depths concealed by social conversations. Each story proceeds at a kind of internal rhythm, the clarity of cadence and gracious austerity of the writing achieving an exactitude few living writers could match."
• Terry Eagleton on Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger by Fintan O'Toole: "In its rise and fall, as Fintan O'Toole remarks in this superb polemic, 'Ireland made Icarus look boringly stable.' It had moved from being the poster child of free-market globalisation to one of the great economic basket cases of modern history. All this has been accompanied by a culture of corruption so shameless and spectacular that it makes Dublin look like Kabul.... As O'Toole points out, bribery, tax evasion and false evidence under oath have not simply gone unpunished; the very idea of penalising the culprits is viewed by the governing elite as unsporting or even unpatriotic."

The New Yorker:

• Sam Tenenhaus on Going Rogue by Sarah Palin: "Polls taken last November showed that she had alienated centrists, and a majority of people still eye her with mistrust. But this is beside the point. Populists, from William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long through Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace, have always been divisive and polarizing. Their job is not to win national elections but to carry the torch and inspire the faithful, and this Palin seems poised to do. That she is the first woman to generate populist fervor on such a scale enhances her appeal—and makes her, potentially, a figure of historic consequence."
• Nicholas Lemann on My Paper Chase by Harold Evans: "Manchester, when Evans joined the Evening News, in 1952, was home to twenty-six newspapers. Evans lovingly and evocatively describes the vanished newsroom of Linotype machines and gigantic manual typewriters, nearly as noisy and smelly as a factory floor. The best passage in this book is an extended set piece about the work that a copy editor (known as a 'sub') did on a British paper in the fifties, with all the calmness, efficiency, and speed that Evans’s father brought to his railroad work. Newspapers thrived because they had figured out a way to perform what was then an indispensable and logistically difficult service, one that was impossible for anybody else to replicate."

Harper's (subscribers only):

• Dave Hickey on Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963 by Susan Sontag: "After her death, the administrators of Sontag’s estate decided that she intended these intimate jottings to be published posthumously. I seriously doubt this. Sontag’s son, David Rieff, has written at length about her conviction that she would survive her affliction. Yet Reborn is in print, the first of three volumes. Rieff himself is the editor, and he has exercised this Victorian perquisite to abandon all scholarly apparatus and cut enormous sections of Sontag’s text to fashion what amounts to a gay chick-lit memoir with a few big words."
• Kim Phillips-Fein on Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Phillips and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns: "Both Heller and Burns have instead written works of historical scholarship that seek to illuminate Rand’s complexities rather than simply to support or condemn her. Rand celebrated the rational and independent individual, but she herself was often deeply depressed, powerfully sensitive to negative reviews of her work, and likely addicted to amphetamines. She praised originality, but the subculture she created to promote her ideas was inhospitable to debate. She aspired to high seriousness, but her writing was firmly grounded in Hollywood kitsch. It is understandable, then, that neither book seems entirely sure how to treat Rand."

--Tom

Comments

[Pedro on December 01, 2009 at 12:40 PM]

The lessons learned here is this: Don't believe everything you read.