Such sparking essays to inspire. Book critic par excellence Michiko Kakutani shares her deep love of book and how book can expand and enrich our lives.
As Michiko notes, "In these pages I'm writing less as a critic than as an enthusiast."
Over the years I've been a huge fan of New York Times book reviews written by Michiko Kakutani. And when I turned to writing reviews myself eight years ago, as a way to hone my reviewer skills, I went back and did a careful reading of Michiko's reviews, especially her reviews of novels.
Curiously, what I found most compelling in the way Michiko crafted her incisive reviews: the way Michiko would take certain authors to task, most notably authors of the first rank. After reading Ex Libris (and listening to the audio book) I went back yet again and reread many of her New York Times reviews and I'm here to tell you - fanfare with trumpets - if a publisher created a collection of Michiko's negative reviews, the book would sell like hot cakes. No kidding!
Below is a sampling of what could be included in such a volume. I've even come up with the book's title: Thumbs Down! - 100+ Books Deserving a Slicing and Dicing.
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
To begin with, the characters turn out to be an annoying and tiresome lot. Although Perkus made an engaging enough debut in a short story some time ago (the story can be found in a collection called “The Book of Other People,” edited by Zadie Smith), he completely fails to sustain a full-length novel. The narcissism and obsessive-compulsive behavior that made him an intriguing figure in that earlier tale turn him here, in a 400-plus-page novel, into an irritating bore.
The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
“The Kindly Ones” instead reads like a pointless compilation of atrocities and anti-Semitic remarks, pointlessly combined with a gross collection of sexual fantasies. That such a novel should win two of France’s top literary prizes is not only an example of the occasional perversity of French taste, but also a measure of how drastically literary attitudes toward the Holocaust have changed in the last few decades.
Pinocchio in Venice by Robert Coover
Although we are dazzled by some of the set pieces in this novel, Pinocchio's despair and his later reunion with his mother neither move us emotionally nor goad us into an interesting reassessment of the meaning of his tale. This is partly because the novel is weighted down by Mr. Coover's windy, repetitious narrative, his insistence on making all the characters speak in fulsome, pun-filled phrases, his penchant for covering every incident with ornate verbal embroidery.
Worse is his failure to make Pinocchio come alive as a vivid, engaging character. Since his quest for the Blue Fairy seems like little more than an excuse for lots of Oedipal jokes, his suffering on her behalf seems equally meaningless and random. Pushed to and fro by his creator, propelled willy nilly from one adventure to the next, he simply becomes an extra in Mr. Coover's own cerebral puppet show, a wooden marionette who never does manage to become a real human being.
Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić
Such games, of course, have become a convention among the post-modernists who want to force us to connect the narrative dots and, by doing so, turn the fiction-making process into an active exchange between author and reader. Unfortunately, in the case of the ''Dictionary,'' the literary pyrotechnics too often seem like gratuitously clever gimmicks - gimmicks designed to showcase the author's blueprints for Chinese boxes while absolving him of any responsibility for constructing a box (or rather, a story) that actually works to amaze.
A Delicate Truth by John le Carré
“A Delicate Truth,” John le Carré’s new thriller, is anything but delicate: it’s ponderous, heavy-handed and obvious — everything that his wonderful early Smiley novels, which traded in moral ambiguity and psychological nuance, were not.
No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
Interwoven with this gripping tale, however, are the sheriff's portentous meditations on life and fate and the decline and fall of Western civilization. Those lugubrious passages, reminiscent of the most pretentious sections of earlier McCarthy novels like "The Crossing," gain ascendancy as the book progresses, and they gradually weigh down the quicksilver suspense of the larger story.
In fact, "No Country for Old Men" would easily translate to the big screen so long as Bell's tedious, long-winded monologues were left on the cutting-room floor - a move that would also have made this a considerably more persuasive novel.
The Spooky Art by Norman Mailer
Mr. Mailer's writing in general: heartfelt mea culpas and genuine insights mixed up with annoying grandstanding and confused metaphor-making. In these pages, for instance, illuminating observations about the difficulties of writing the great American novel segue into absurd assertions that ''right now the smart money would bet against the serious novel,'' that the métier has suffered a decline in recent years -- assertions that suggest Mr. Mailer hasn't been reading much contemporary fiction these days.
Mortals by Norman Rush
''Mortals'' is a long, tedious and thoroughly haphazard production -- a kitchen sink of a book that possesses none of the pointillist detail of ''Whites,'' the author's haunting debut collection of stories (1986), and all the flaws of his 1991 novel, ''Mating'' -- and more. Though ''Mortals'' gradually gathers speed and focus near its conclusion, only the most persevering of readers are likely to slog through the book's 700-odd pages to get there.
If Ray (the novel's main character) were more of an engaging character -- or had the quirky intelligence and verbal idiosyncrasies of the unnamed narrator of ''Mating'' -- this might make for livelier reading. As it stands, we are stuck for the duration inside Ray's head, or rather, since Mr. Rush has opted for a stilted third-person narration, we are stuck inside a tiny, claustrophobic room with Ray, one of the most narcissistic, self-deluding and defensive heroes to come along in a while.
The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden
Worse, the comic tone of much of this novel overshadows the reality of the horrors actually committed in the Uganda of Idi Amin. Although Mr. Foden does a vivid job of describing the decapitated bodies, the mutilated corpses, the unspeakable crimes committed by Amin's henchmen, such scenes essentially become a suspenseful backdrop for Garrigan's bumbling adventures.
Midway through ''The Last King of Scotland,'' one of Mr. Foden's characters says of Idi Amin's antics: ''It would be quite funny if it weren't for the thousands of people who are dying. All these silly larks of his, it's like pornography. If you laugh at it, you're stepping over the corpses.'' The same might well be said of this clever, fluently written -- but ultimately perverse -- novel.
''Mortals'' is a long, tedious and thoroughly haphazard production -- a kitchen sink of a book that possesses none of the pointillist detail of ''Whites,'' the author's haunting debut collection of stories (1986), and all the flaws of his 1991 novel, ''Mating'' -- and more. Though ''Mortals'' gradually gathers speed and focus near its conclusion, only the most persevering of readers are likely to slog through the book's 700-odd pages to get there.
If Ray (the novel's main character) were more of an engaging character -- or had the quirky intelligence and verbal idiosyncrasies of the unnamed narrator of ''Mating'' -- this might make for livelier reading. As it stands, we are stuck for the duration inside Ray's head, or rather, since Mr. Rush has opted for a stilted third-person narration, we are stuck inside a tiny, claustrophobic room with Ray, one of the most narcissistic, self-deluding and defensive heroes to come along in a while.
The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden
Worse, the comic tone of much of this novel overshadows the reality of the horrors actually committed in the Uganda of Idi Amin. Although Mr. Foden does a vivid job of describing the decapitated bodies, the mutilated corpses, the unspeakable crimes committed by Amin's henchmen, such scenes essentially become a suspenseful backdrop for Garrigan's bumbling adventures.
Midway through ''The Last King of Scotland,'' one of Mr. Foden's characters says of Idi Amin's antics: ''It would be quite funny if it weren't for the thousands of people who are dying. All these silly larks of his, it's like pornography. If you laugh at it, you're stepping over the corpses.'' The same might well be said of this clever, fluently written -- but ultimately perverse -- novel.
Comments
Post a Comment