The End of History in the Penny Press?

Amidst the usual fine verbiage in Sunday's New York Times Book Review was a half-page piece on Laura Kalman's new history of the Carter and Ford administrations, Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974-1980 that caught my attention.

The essay in question is by David Frum. It's a negative review – he calls the book useless – but that in itself wouldn't ordinarily stick in my memory quite so strongly as this piece has. The NYTBR does, after all, occasionally run negative reviews (and contrary to what you might think, I totally understand – and agree with – their tacit decision that this be done only occasionally). The most it might usually do is elicit sympathy: I read Kalman's book and considered it inoffensive – not particularly virtuosic (certainly not worthy, for instance, of either soliciting a review for Open Letters Monthly or, gawd forbid, writing one myself), but interesting in patches … in other words, a good enough book so that a public pillorying in the world's most-watched review venue would make me cringe for the poor author.

To put it mildly, Frum felt differently, and that immediately set me on my guard: when another critic dislikes something I liked, there's an added edge that isn't really present when two non-critic readers disagree; it becomes like mountain-rams sizing each other up for a series of monumental head-butts. It became obvious to me after two sentences that Frum is both a good writer and a strong, deep thinker – and that just makes the head-butting urge all the stronger!

He begins by talking about the long transition-period between a world envisioned for others solely through the art of painting and a world in which there was such a thing as photography: “Suddenly, there was a better way of recording the physical appearance of things, and artists had to discover new purposes for brush and pigment.” This further raised my hackles, since it's a pretty bone-headed reduction of what all those brush-and-pigment works were doing before photography – all it takes is one glance at something by Fra Angelico or Frans Hals or Caspar Friedrich to know that 'recording the physical appearance of things' was pretty far down on their list of motives.

But even that early in the essay, he had my attention – and the next paragraph cemented that:

I kept thinking of those backward-looking artists [i.e. the ones who kept painting 'lifelike' portraits even after the advent of photography] all the way through Laura Kalman's “Right Star Rising.” As a work of history about the Ford and Carter years, there is nothing seriously wrong with it. The facts are accurate, the writing is clear and the point of view is not tendentious. Once upon a time, such a book might have been useful to somebody.

Then the kicker, the thing that's had me thinking about this essay ever since:

But the question it raises – and it's not a question about this book alone – is: What's the point of this kind of history in the age of the Internet? Suppose I'm an undergraduate who stumbles for the first time across the phrase “Proposition 13.” I could, if I were minded, walk over to the university library, pull this book from the shelf and flip to the index. Or I could save myself two hours and Google it. I wouldn't learn more from a Google search than I'd learn from these pages. But I wouldn't learn a whole lot less, either.

Frum then goes on to serially demolish the hypothetical utility of Right Star Rising, but by that point I had no worry to spare for poor Kalman – all my worry was focused on the future of history as a discipline.

Because Frum is right, and as far as I know, he's the first critic in a well-lit forum to raise so openly the specter of Google (and Wikipedia)'s affect on the writing of history: at the fingertips of virtually every literate person in the world is an assemblage of knowledge deeper and vaster than a thousand libraries of Alexandria, and all of it is capable of being summoned, sifted, cross-examined, verified, or exposed in the course of a well-spent hour. If you want to know the exact hour-by-hour movements of one particular brigade on the third day of the Battle of Gettsyburg, you no longer face an uphill struggle against recondite sources in the back-stacks of the Widener Library – the whole thing is available (with colored, moving graphics) at half a dozen places online, places constructed by experts and constantly checked and re-checked by experts. If you want to know the latest theories on the composition of the Lusiads, you no longer have to call for, scrutinize, and photocopy the one scholarly publication in the world that would publish such an article – you can simply, as Frum says, Google it.

The smaller point he's making – for which poor Kalman is the whipping-post – is that histories in the Age of the Internet can't rely anymore on simply relaying facts. This is true, but it's also pat: it's always been true. Even in the dimly-remembered days before the Internet (a collective shudder arises from the reading audience … and yet, such times existed, and men thrived, and women were beautiful), there were encyclopedias and almanacs specifically designed to spare Frum's eager-beaver undergraduate the necessity of reading Professor Dryasdust's 12-volume history of the East India Company. Even two hundred years ago, critics could decry a book as not so much bad as needless (which is not quite the same thing as Frum's “useless,” but close enough).

The Internet doesn't change the facts, but it does change the dynamic: once upon a time, the only way to dig deeper than what you got in an encyclopedia or an almanac was to tackle genuine histories, and when you did that, you were faced with a whole different calculus of effort and gain. You could still come across Professor Dryasdust, somebody who merely assembled fact upon fact and was accurate, clear, and not tendentious. But you could also come across the glories of Gibbon, Parkman, Prescott, Wedgwood, Syme, or Morison – glories based on those same facts but raised to utterly thrilling heights by the skill of the practitioner.

I think that's Frum's larger point, and I wonder if even he knows how large it is. It perfectly diagnoses the acute, unprecedented problem publishing historians face today: their audience is capable of summoning a kind of triage-expertise on any subject, and of doing so faster and more accurately than any audience before them in the history of the world. With an Internet connection and an open hour or two for intense reading, a person can deeply familiarize themselves with the Wars of the Roses or the Salem witch trials or the writings of Julian the Apostate from the comfort of their own bed, even if their personal library shelves are bare. So if you've got your heart set on writing history, who do you write for? What do you assume? How much of your fundamental duty – to tell the stories of the past – can you ethically leave to the anonymous hordes of Wikipedia?

Frum concludes that Kalman's book is “more or less useless,” but he's being a little bit tricky with his conclusions: the specific book he's chosen as the stalking-horse for his tirade is merely adequate on its subject. And it would have been merely adequate in 1988; the Internet's ready access doesn't worsen its defects. A more talented prose-stylist and perhaps a deeper thinker than Kalman could have written a book that mostly recounted those same Ford-Carter facts and was still well worth that undergraduate's two hours in the library.

That's how I'm choosing to see things, anyway: the massive answer-readiness of the Internet isn't a cry for the abolition of chronicles – it's a stone for their whetting.

Soft Porn in the Book Review!

As anyone involved in the thankless task will tell you, there are several kinds of book reviews. There shouldn’t be; they should all be voiced with and motivated by the exact same tone and tenor of honest inquiry, regardless of their subject matter or their author’s fame. But that would only happen in a dream-world where, say, the fiction editor of a literary journal wrote his own reviews – otherwise, all book reviewers have to deal with editors, and whereas the ideal book reviewer has only one motivation for writing a review (I read this book, here’s what I think is important about it), an editor can have several kinds of motivations for running one. Is the author a big name, making the book something your journal can’t simply ignore without looking foolishly provincial? Is the author a friendly person (or even a friend) whose therapy bills will skyrocket if some earnest tyro parses his every typo? Is the author’s publishing house one from which the editor in question wants a long and fruitful relationship (perhaps for future publication of the editor’s own book? Who knows – the poor schmuck writer certainly doesn’t)? Will a savaging of some new book get you dropped from that publisher’s list of future books (a calamity, since if an editor had to buy even a single book, ever, the world would come screeching to a halt)?

Editors tend to accommodate these various intervening factors by developing several kinds of book reviews. There’s the standard straight-up rave, where the only real challenge is to clutch some small strand of dignity to the dancing and cheering of the piece; there’s the roundhouse slam of a once-popular author’s latest, usually done when a) the publisher in question is too big to stop all its galley copies, and b) the author is somehow perceived has having it coming (we don’t beat up on saintly elderly Japanese writers, for instance, even though they’re all completely untalented, but a snotty young white American is fair game – Nick McDonnell won’t be able to breathe easy until he’s collecting Social Security); there’s the undisguised placeholder review, where the book in question is too ‘big’ or ‘buzzworthy’ to ignore but the only reviewer who could deliver a piece in time was an incompetent nincompoop who does nothing more than summarize the plot; and then there’s the ever-popular ‘soft pan’ review, in which the reviewer seems to have mightily disliked the book but is being charmingly coy about it.

I admit, that last kind really bothers me – because the only possible motivation for such a reviewer to obscure what he thinks is naked self-interest: I can’t bash this book because I might meet its author at an Upper West Side literary soiree, or I might want to sleep with its author, or I might want a favor from its author for my own forthcoming collection of elegiac interconnected short stories. It’s perfectly fine to watch out for such eventualities, but not in a full-length essay that’s supposed to be a review of a book. Facebook instead, I always want to shout.

In any given week, you’ll find good examples of all of these various book review types in that bête noir of all serious readers, the New York Times Book Review. That’s why I love it so: every issue gives you a little survey course in the natural history of book reviewing.

Take today’s issue, for example. You can see the political statement right away: the cover is given to a debut novel by Adam Ross rather than to Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis (and if you don’t think the cover spot is a coveted status symbol, you’ve been listening to too many lyingly self-deprecating authors). The review is by a woolgathering Scott Turow, and it’s mostly plot summary and vapid boilerplate (“Mr. Peanut is most harrowing in its bleakly convincing portrayal of the eternal contest that often passes for a marriage”), with a few nonsense-mysticisms thrown in (“The novel is shape-shifting, inhabiting several planes of reality”). The point of the piece isn’t to review the book (I’ve read Mr. Peanut, and trust me: it only inhabits the reality-plane of puerile crapola) but to anoint the author, a benediction the Book Review is better situated than anybody to bestow.

(By contrast, the Ellis review was handed to the literary editor of the OTHER Times, Erica Wagner, who pays proper acknoweldgement to the cultural landmark-status of Less Than Zero and then proceeds to pulverize its new sequel, Imperial Bedrooms, ending with a school-mistress admonition of a type only the Brits can pull off: “’History repeats the old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats,’ runs one of this novel’s epigraphs, a line from Elvis Costello. So it may, but fiction doesn’t have to: that’s the point. Let’s hope Ellis figures that out.” Hee.)



But the type of review most prominently on display this time around is the aforementioned ‘soft pan.’ This would be annoying enough in the Book Review under any circumstances, but two of the times it happens today really irk. First, David Carr turns in a full-length review of Bill Clegg’s new memoir Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and resolutely stops short of slamming a book he obviously disliked. Clegg’s memoir details his descent from cutie-patootie hotshot literary agent to slightly unkempt crack addict, and you might think the reason Carr goes soft on it is because he has high hopes for a similar book of his own – but no: he already wrote that book, Night of the Gun, and it’s considerably, comfortably better than Clegg’s book. And yet, everywhere in his review he stops just short of calling Clegg narcissist pedaling a third-rate survivor’s tale, and it becomes so noticeable it starts to beg for explanation. My best guess is that Carr is a nice guy who didn’t want to beat up on a fellow recovering drug addict. For which, if true, I say again: Facebook, not the New York Times Book Review.

The second ‘soft pan’ is mercifully shorter – Mike Peed’s seven-paragraph notice of Justin Cronin’s 700-page new novel The Passage. For the privilege of getting to watch an author sell his soul in public, the entertainment industry has showered The Passage with the kind of adoration usually reserved for incarnations of the Buddha (although I’m going to hope there was an element of irony in Stephen King’s “The best book EVER WRITTEN! The best book that ever CAN be written!”), and Peed clearly knows this (“If there’s a class at Iowa on exploiting publishing crazes, Cronin surely aced it”). And yet, his seven paragraphs condemn nothing about the book. Instead, all is gentle plot summary (no spoilers!) and guarded pretension (“The Passage, then, is fundamentally an investigation into the creation and destruction of a flawed race”). To put it mildly, a book that was written for the sole purpose of getting its author piles of money deserves rougher handling. And the reason it doesn’t get such handling here is likely connected to the ad revenues generated for the Times by Ballantine Books in promoting The Passage. Plus, you don’t want to be the only person who didn’t like such a hot, hot book, do you? You won’t get invited to any of its parties!

Still, the Book Review this time around ends with a fun piece about how boring, watery Borges loved fantastic, vital Robert Louis Stevenson – if that piece prompts even one of Borges’ pretentious name-dropping fans to try Stevenson, some good will come out of this issue after all.

Frustration, consternation, and irritation in the Penny Press!

When I started this week’s New York Times Book Review, I was certain my main frustrations with it would come from some of the main pieces. The lead piece, by Walter Isaacson, reviews two books on American presidential power – one by the insufferably pompous Garry Wills and the other by the nation’s foremost unindicted co-conspirator, the fascist lapdog John Yoo. A certain recipe for agitation, yes? But no: Isaacson is such a fair reviewer, and here (as in his books) he employs such a calming tone that I ended his review feeling not agitated but only pleasantly informed as to his opinions (although he’s dead wrong to be so even-keeled about Yoo’s book Crisis and Command, as damning and dangerous a book as has ever been produced in America).

(The whole piece was helped considerably by the stark and effective cover illustration by Viktor Koen)

But I was right: after that, the going got distinctly rough. Hilary Mantel, author of the fantastic novel Wolf Hall, reviews Alison Weir’s new book about Anne Boleyn, The Lady in the Tower – and is bafflingly forgiving of Weir’s notorious failings in her chosen profession, as when Mantel allows:

Doubts have already been cast on Weir’s assumptions; the historian John Guy has recently suggested that two sources she took to be mutually corroborating are in fact one and the same person. This doesn’t invalidate her brave effort to lay bare, for the Tudor fan, the bones of the controversy and evaluate the range of opinion about Anne’s fall.

Except that’s exactly what it does: it invalidates her efforts. Guy didn’t just suggest that Weir had ineptly handled her research (a charge I and many others have been laying against her since the start of her career), he proved it, and it wasn’t hard to prove. Certainly it fits with every other history I’ve ever read by Weir; her book on the Princes in the Tower has more angry marginalia by me than it does actual typed words by her. (Of course, Mantel might have mounted a better defense of the book if one-goddam-HALF of her allotted space hadn’t been given to a pointless, juvenile picture of Anne Boleyn, as if the people who don’t know what she looked like care what she looked like, and as if the people who do know what she looked like need reminding of what she looked like)

Things got no better when I read the ridiculously tossed-off half-page review Steve Coates gave of David Malouf’s Trojan War novel Ransom – in fact, they got much worse, since I had some skin in that particular game: not only had Sam Sacks, my colleague at Open Letters, recently reviewed the book with greater length and far, far greater acumen, but I’d reviewed it myself, here at Stevereads. I liked it a lot less than Sam did, but even so, it deserved better than a tired old tag like “the endless power of myth,” which is about the best Coates can give it. When I read an almost-weightless little half-page like this, I always wonder who exactly considers it better than not mentioning the book at all.

The answer to ‘when it almost nothing better than nothing’ is much clearer when the writer of the almost-nothing is famous in his own right, as is the case with Jay McInerney’s blinking, ridiculous piece on Joshua Ferris’ new novel The Unnamed, which gets summarized thusly:

Tim Farnsworth literally walks out of his office one cold winter day, the victim of an uncontrollable locomotive impulse. It has happened before. He can’t stop walking. Really.

In case that ‘literally’ and that ‘really’ weren’t sufficient, it should be pointed out that the protagonist of Ferris’ new book suffers a compulsion that makes him walk until he can’t walk anymore. God is my witness.

I’m starting to wonder if the inordinate fixation virtually all the reviewers of this book have exhibited upon the raw mechanics of its plot (Wyatt Mason being a distinct but lamentable exception!) isn’t a sure sign that Ferris is playing a deeper game than any of them realize. I read The Unnamed and certainly believe this is the case, but readers of the Book Review will amble through McInerney’s summary gathering a vaguely negative impression of the book, so a sad majority of them will never bother to find out for themselves.



But as frustrating as that is (and one can only guess how frustrating it must be for Ferris himself – The Unnamed bears distinct signs of having been a fairly brutal book to conceive and write), none of it held a candle to the issue’s towering inferno of imbecility – located, as it almost always is, in the concluding Essay.

This one is by Jennifer Schuessler, and it’s about boredom in the book world:

If you read a lot of book reviews, there are certain words that tend to crop up with comforting, or maybe it’s dismaying, regularlity. Lyrical. Compelling. Moving. Intriguing. Absorbing. Frustrating. Uneven. Disappointing. But there is one word you seldom encounter: boring. It occurred a mere 19 times in the Book Review in 2009, and rarely as a direct description of the book under review.

“This isn’t because books sent out to reviewers never turn out to be boring (Trust me on this one),” Schuessler informs us. “Rather boredom – unlike its equally bland smiley-faced twin, interest – is something professional  readers, who are expected to keep things lively, would rather not admit to, for fear of being scolded and sent back to the Weekly Reader.”

Schuessler then goes on to play a quick little game with the word ‘bore’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, to haul in Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift narrator (who’s writing a book on boredom), and to drop the term thaasophobia (fear of, you guessed it, boredom), all pit-stops on her way to wondering if maybe boredom isn’t actually (thwack palm on forehead) good for us.

In other words, she writes a very boring essay.

And I wouldn’t have minded this so much (the NYTimes Book Review Essay is often, almost contractually, boring), were it not for the fact that the piece is not only derivative but, literarily speaking, dumb. The reason you don't often read the word 'boring' in a book review isn't because 'professional' readers don't want to be psychoanalyzed; it's because they've realized that a boring book usually isn't worth reviewing. Something irritating? Sure. Something sublime? Certainly. But something just plain lifeless? Schuessler might not have the common editorial sense to pass over such things in telling silence, but most of the rest of us 'professional' readers sure as Hell do. And then there's the myopia of the thing! To put it mildly, boredom has been a much-mined subject in literature in the last fifteen hundred years – a writer who can only bestir themselves as far as Saul Bellow deserves to be stripped of their epaulets. And the reason why the piece is so shallow (assuming here that this Schuessler person is, in fact, capable of much deeper work  - always my madcap assumption until proven wrong) – why an essay on boredom in literature in the country’s most influential book review doesn’t even mention, say, the Russians and the rather prominent Russian novel that’s entirely about the subject? Well, that reason is the least-common-denominator mind frame of the Book Review these days. And that’s in a whole ‘nother dimension of frustration.

The End of Civilization in the Penny Press?

By now I'm sure you've all seen the New York Times Book Review from Sunday, and I swear by Crom and Mitra, I originally intended simply to ignore it here at Stevereads. But you know what? The more of these little things we ignore, the more we give these little things not only power but legitimacy, and then forty years from now we look around at a world both mad and stupid and dare to ask "How on Earth did this happen?"

For those of you who perhaps don't take in the Book Review, a quick recap: James Parker (a Boston resident! How mortifying!) turned in a 1500-word review of the new Stephen King doorstop, Under the Dome, and the Book Review editors decided to run the thing on the cover. The New York Times Book Review is the single most influential yardstick and tastemaker in the book-selling world, of course; not only does 'New York Times bestseller' do wonders for the sale of any book from here to Lahore, but the Book Review actually determines the buying habits of countless thousands of over-moneyed middle-aged people all across the country, people who'll hand over their credit cards for anything between hard covers as long as it carries the Times seal of approval. Authors are paid bonuses entirely dependent on whether or not - and for how long - their book shows up on the Times list, because publishers know there's no advertising like it anywhere on the planet.

And as a great philosopher once said, with great power comes great responsibility.

James Parker confesses to be a lifelong fan of King's work, and that's fine. And millions of people read King's books, which is also fine (some reading being better than none at all). But Parker's piece isn't a book review - it's a barely-coherent fan letter, and it's the lead-off piece in the New York Times Book Review. Genuine, serious authors have new books out, and yet some Times editor decided the most coveted spot in book-press should go to an 1,100-page pulp novel Stephen King wrote in 480 days - and the book is given no legitimate criticism in that lead-off piece. And all of that is really, really bad.

King's novel is as tedious as a reformed drunk. An impenetrable dome suddenly appears over a small town in (yawn) Maine, and suddenly the local bullies are taking over, the local nutjobs are getting nuttier, and King has about a dozen dystopian tropes he can swat around for however the hell long he feels like it. There is nothing whatsoever noteworthy in this enormous book (the author so arrogantly flaunting how little time it took him to produce it looks downright dimwitted when set against the backdrop of how aggressively ordinary a book it is) - all the characters are stock characters, all the subplot outcomes can be predicted on page 2, all the dumb plot-contrivances are simply presented to the reader, linearly and in a sleepwalker's monotone.

And if Parker wants to like this crap, that's fine by me. But he does more than that - it's not that he praises it, it's that he writes his piece under the assumption that its worth as a book is immaterial, as if the mere fact that it was written by Stephen King not only warrants it our attention but exempts it from scrutiny. Parker was somehow allowed to write dark, malevolent nonsense like this:

As for the prose, it's not all smooth sailing. Given King's extraordinary career-long dominance, we might expect him at this point to be stylistically complete, turning perfect sentences, as breezily at home in his idiom as P. G. Wodehouse. But he isn't, quite. "Then it came down on her again, like unpleasant presents raining from a poison pinata: the realization that Howie was dead." (it's the accidental rhyme of "unpleasant" and "presents" that makes that one such a stinker.)

Where to start with this garbage? First, I guarantee Parker that rhyme wasn't accidental - I guarantee King intended it and sat back from 'unpleasant,' 'presents,' 'poison,' and 'pinata' with a proud little smile on his face. He's that far away from having any idea what good writing looks like. He isn't quite Wodehouse? Outhouse is more like it, and it's always been that way - the moronic shift Parker makes here from 'dominance' (which is a question of sales) to 'stylistically complete' (which isn't) is done with a fluidity only given to somebody who hasn't done fifteen minutes of genuine thinking about what he's typing - it's a sure sign that Parker couldn't have disliked this book, regardless of its contents. In fact, its contents get a complete pass:

We shouldn't be too squeamish about the odd half-baked simile or lapse into B-movie dialogue, is my point. Writing flat-out keeps him close to his story, close to his source.

I was going to ignore this whole thing, I swear. But when the front-page essay of the New York Times Book Review slavishly praises Stephen King and mocks with words like "squeamish" those of us who dislike bad, lazy, cliched writing, something serious is going on - something perhaps worthy of comment, and something surely that should shame the Times. The Book Review has praised unworthy authors in the past, Gawd knows - but this is the first time they've allowed a reviewer to admit an author is unworthy and then praise him anyway, working on the assumption that all this hoity-toity palaver about bad writing is just so much squeamishness. It's quite literally the worst precedent any review journal could possibly set. Regardless of how many books Stephen King sells, his first drafts (what you get when you write 'flat-out' and then don't revise) are no more worth reading than anybody else's. James Parker is perfectly free to disagree - but he doesn't disagree. He admits the book is rushed and shoddy, then he tells us those things don't really matter.

That kind of sophomoric idiocy walks a quick path to intellectual irrelevance, and the fact that the Times either doesn't know that or knows it and is willing to risk it in order to win a few populist votes of sympathy ... well, that's the real horror story here.

Bloodsport in the Book Review!

Ordinarily, we here at Stevereads would have folded in anything of interest we found in the Sunday Times Book Review into our next Penny Press roundup, but this week was just too tasty to ignore! We'll return to our regularly scheduled long, obscure, and totally ignored book reviews in due course!

If you've read the Book Review this week, you doubtless already know which piece caught our eye: yep, the one featured on the cover - New Republic brontosaurus Leon Wieseltier reviews Martin Amis' The Second Plane, and the results aren't pretty. Wieseltier has been TNR's literary editor for a quarter-century, and in all that time he's managed to stay open-minded to the feel of writing - amazingly, his ear has not been corrupted, jaded, or deafened. He can be a delighted friend to the darndest books that cross his desk, but if he doesn't like what you write, hoo boy, you feel it in every sentence.

He doesn't like The Second Plane, and that would be bad enough, but in addition he's also at the top of his game in the review from first to last - this is a bad combination for Amis, alas, no matter how much fun it is for readers:

He [Amis] has a hot, heroic view of himself. He writes as if he, with his wrinkled copies of Bernard Lewis and Philip Larkin, is what stands between us and the restoration of the caliphate. He is not only outraged by Sept. 11, he is also excited by it. "If Sept. 11 had to happen, then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime." Don't you see? It no longer matters that we missed the Spanish Civil War. No pasaran!

Haymaker follows haymaker:

And what is gained by preferring "horrorism" to "terrorism," except perhaps a round of applause? Amis's freshness is flat and neurotic and genuinely tiresome. He writes as if Orwell never lived. He is dead to the damage his virtuosity inflicts upon his urgency. Instead, he pulls focus, and pulls, and pulls. His book reminds me of what Heath Ledger is said to have remarked, in disappointment, about Philip Seymour Hoffman's Oscar: "I thought it was for the best acting, not the most acting."

There is a pitch a really good reviewer can reach in a piece such as this, a pitch during which the writer can scarcely put a foot amiss. It's exhilarating to watch but also terrifying: it incurs a certain involuntary sympathy toward the victim. We here at Stevereads have never been a fan of Martin Amis - indeed, we've spent many a profitless hour de-programming young people who, having read nothing else, read him and think the sun shines out his arse. But even so, how can we help but feel a twinge of empathy for somebody on the receiving end of a pile-driver like this:

Pity the writer who wants to be Bellow but is only Mailer. What we have here is a hormonal unbeliever. Amis's sympathy to Islamism is based upon a more comprehensive antipathy to religion. In Amis's universe, you are either religious or you are rational. Or to put it in the bracingly original terms of The Second Plane, it is misology that is the cause of thanatism. Amis calls himself not an atheist but an agnostic, but still he is catching a wave to Dover Beach. "Today, in the West, there is no good excuse for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses," whereas in the East, well, you know.

As good as that is, as expertly excising as that is, it's not the best Wieseltier has to offer. When he digresses, when he pauses to talk about the things Amis has written about, you want nothing so much as to read the book he'd write on these same subjects:

But does Amis really think that reason has no blood on its hands? I do not say this to extenuate holy murder, obviously. All murder is unholy. I wish only to suggest that the simpleton's view of the world that Amis is angrily promoting contributes not very much to the study of the passions that are scalding the planet. There are religious people opposing the terrorists and secular people supporting the terrorists. After the 20th century, the question of which worldview kills more, the godful one or the godless one, was made infernally moot. Anyway, the safety of the West cannot wait upon the progress of enlightenment in Waziristan.

He concedes a number of the basic points Amis makes in his book - points about Islamic fanaticism and the like - but it's no victory for Amis:

I have never before assented to so many of the principles of a book and found it so awful. But the vacant intensity that has characterized so much of Amis's work flourishes here too.

He finishes by mentioning Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke in connection with Amis' book and draws doleful parallels between them:

They are both productions of misplaced literariness. They treat the most fundamental matters of politics and philosophy - what individuals and societies should live for, and what they should die for - as occasions for the display of artifice and the exhibition of temperament. The consideration of their arguments is regularly diverted by the consideration of their effects. For this reason, such writings will have more impact than influence. The criticism of language may be required for the criticism of politics, but politics is not mainly language. History may be generously lighted by the bright beams of the imagination, but the student of history is not primarily an artist. And the great campaign against the medievals of our time will be dreary and long and homely.

In the final analysis, we cannot fault Wieseltier's damnation of Amis' book in any of its main or minor points - it's as thorough and painstaking an evisceration as anything the Book Review has published in a many a long moon. No, the only thing we object to coming from Wieseltier are his opening comments, in which he intones that book reviewing has become "decidedly less grand, less intellectually and aesthetically primary - no longer the literary or philosophical or political adventure that it used to be." Instead, "everything must now be short and pert and helpful."

To which we here at Stevereads naturally object! Not only is Stevereads a bastion of literary purty - no 'pert' sycophants we! - but the good lads over at Open Letters Monthly have created a bolt-hole in the literary landscape in which no past favors apply, in which neither fear nor favor is showed to any literary endeavor. If a damn fantastic old dog like Wieseltier feels so genuinely bleak about the state of the reviewing art, he's always welcome to mosey on over to OLM and start writing pieces! Fire from Olympus is always welcome - as Wieseltier himself points out, there is never enough reason in the world.