Super-Exposure in the Penny Press!

Readers who might once have been irritated by the sight of a topless Rob Lowe on the cover of Vanity Fair (the top item in a strong Penny Press week) will, like all right-thinking individuals in the world, instantly recall his fantastic stint as Sam Seaborn on the still-intensely-missed The West Wing and crack a grudging smile instead. Lowe, it appears, has written some kind of book about his various adventures in Hollywood. I haven't checked yet to see if it includes any wistful anecdotes about his tenure on one of the best TV shows of all time; the excerpt in this month's VF is about his much younger days, when he starred in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Outsiders" with a whole team of fellow Hollywood he-boys, all under the watchful gaze of their passionate (and self-evidently insane) director. While it's fun to watch Lowe contort himself to be nice-guy diplomatic rather than outright calling the young Tom Cruise a robotic authority-douche, neither the grossly overpraised book nor the soppy, ham-handed movie has ever interested me, so I quickly roamed away in search of greener pastures.

Luckily, this month's issue had plenty. There was a bitterly, sinus-clearingly angry shout-piece by Joseph Stiglitz about the gigantic gap between the top wealthiest 1 percent of Americans and everybody else. This is by a wide margin the angriest piece I've read in Vanity Fair in many, many years. Stiglitz rehearses the starkest inequities in America's financial landscape:

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century - inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called "marginal-productivity theory." In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years - whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative - went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards "performance bonuses" that they felt compelled to change the name to "retention bonuses" (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared to those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.

He ends up sounding a warning to the super-rich that their days might end in a public uprising of a kind not seen in America since Shays' Rebellion - the warning is the only major flaw in the piece. It forgets that sage line from "1776": Most people with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor." Comparatively few Libyans or Egyptians want to be military despots (I hope, anyway), so they have no ideological restraint in rising up against military despots. But virtually everybody in America - especially every young person - wants to be a plutocratic bastard who can buy a jet but can't quickly recall his kids' names. As long as that's true, the super-rich in the United States have nothing to fear from the common folk they're disinheriting.

After the fire and brimstone of Stiglitz, it was curiously peaceful to wade into Christopher Hitchens' piece on the debt Western society owes to the stately cadences of the King James Bible. It's a piece without surprises (we've read many similar things done on this, the anniversary of the publication of that epochal work), unless its own existence counts - these new long pieces from Hitchens can't help but be viewed as extremely literary progress reports on the state of Hitchens' illness. Encouraging progress reports, since for a while there last year it looked as if he wouldn't be doing much of this kind of work again. I hadn't realized until I saw this piece and his last one just how much I'd miss them if they were gone forever. And it's interesting that he's keeping up with his reading, although I imagine that would be the last thing to go in any case:

The rack and the rope were not stinted for dissenters, and eventually Tyndale himself was tracked down, strangled, and publicly burned. (Hilary Mantel's masterpiece historical novel, Wolf Hall, tells this exciting and gruesome store in such a way as to revise the shining image of "Saint" Thomas More, the "man for all seasons," almost out of existence. High time, in my view. The martyrdoms he inflicted on others were more cruel and irrational than the one he sought and found for himself).

Much less satisfying was James Wolcott's tired screed against superhero movies, which consists of him whining about how loud and confusing they all are, for all the world as if he were a crotchety 90-year-old who just wants the grandkids to settle down:

For all of the tremendous talent involved and the technical ingenuity deployed, superhero movies go at us like death metal: loud, anthemic, convoluted, technocratic, agonistic, fireball-blossoming, scenery-crushing workloads that waterboard the audience with digital effects, World War IV weaponry, rampant destruction, and electrical-flash editing.

This quintessential complaint of the elderly - wanting things to be different from the dictates of their own natures - is unlikely to yield a Bergman superhero movie any time soon; I'll just have to hope that instead Wolcott regains his sense of fun in time for the onslaught he's so correct in predicting.

The New York Review of Books, as always, provides a corrective to that kind of complaining. There's nothing quite as restorative as literary journalism done really, really well, and since I myself gravitate toward all things historical, The NYRB can often get my tail wagging - as in this latest issue, where the indomitable Gordon Wood reviews two books on John and Abigail Adams and Sean Wilentz reviews Edmund Morris' Colonel Roosevelt. Both pieces are thoughtful, detailed, and wonderfully assured, which is tough enough to do when reviewing a contemporary novel that any schmoe off the street might pick up and enjoy ("what's it about" will usually cover 99 % of their readerly needs) and is bloody murder to pull off when writing about history, about which the average reader neither knows nor knows to care. Reviewing works of history is doubly tricky: you've not only got to give your review-readers enough background on the book so they'll appreciate your observations about it, you've also got to give them enough background on all of human history so they'll know what the Hell you're going on about. Both Wood and Wilentz do a great job at this every time they turn out a review - it's an inspiration.

Of course, since nobody reads history it's those fiction-reviews that keep the show on the road, and they, too, very often elicit inspiring performances. Over in the London Review of Books, for instance, Adam Mars-Jones (easily the coolest reviewer-name we'll see today) out-does every other writer in the issue by turning in a fantastic piece on Philip Hensher's new novel King of the Badgers. This is a classic case of the review being every bit as interesting, fun, and well-written as the book it's reviewing, a contemporary novel about a crime that might have been committed in a benighted seaside town. Mars-Jones concentrates a chunk of his review on the novel's gay characters, a discussion he opens in the most inviting way, by highly literary rambling:

For a straight writer to have a gay hero is highly unusual ...The most famous and successful venture in homosexual ventriloquism by a novelist is still Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers. I had doubts about the book when it came out in 1980, disliking the easy equation of homosexuality with cowardliness, even though this was an equation accepted by many homosexuals of the generation of Burgess's octogenarian narrator, Kenneth Toomey. Terrence Rattigan was surprised to find during the war that he was brave in an ordinary way. Out of this realisation came his interest in such non-cowardly homosexuals as T. E. Lawrence and Alexander the Great.

Mars-Jones returns to this subject of 'writing gay' all through his long and fantastic review, including a great little bit on the imagined popular reception of the 1950s novels of Angus Wilson:

Wilson was running the risk of having his novels labelled sordid and unwholesome. Awkward breakfast-table conversations were on the cards, with the brigadier's wife saying brightly, 'Doesn't he do all those spivs and pouffs well?' and her husband muttering: 'Damn sight too well, if you ask me.' If he had put more homosexual reality into the book [Anglo-Saxon Attitudes], it would either have been rejected by publishers or else approached by reviewers with gas masks, pomanders and tongs.

And it's entirely fitting that right there in the midst of the best review in this issue of the LRB there's a big, beautiful ad for ... none other than Open Letters Monthly! Where readers will find many excellent reviews every single month! The ad was superbly designed by Greg Waldmann and features a generous quote from the always-discerning Scott Esposito ... and best of all, it's sitting right there, in the middle of another great review journal. The air of confraternity is salubrious, to say the least - and if the appearance of such an ad should move writers like Adam Mars-Jones and his most talented peers to peruse Open Letters, well, so much the better.

Promise of Plenty in the Penny Press!

An exceedingly enjoyable day in the Penny Press, proving once again its unending (one hopes) plenty, its aggregate ability to laughter, stimulation, and irritation to even the dreariest afternoon.  My old standbys could do no wrong today, starting, of course, with the mighty TLS, which this time around had as many quotable little bits as an episode of Deadwood. In Maren Meinhardt's wonderfully clear-headed review of the controversial Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which does more justice to the book in four paragraphs than most reviewers have managed to do in four or fourteen pages, she sums things up nicely:

Behind the posturing and special effects, the tenets underlying Chua's position are surprisingly sensible and relatively tame: most things that are worth doing need application and tend to become enjoyable once once one gets good at them; it is the job of parents to help their children get to that point.

I haven't yet managed to understand the outrage and commentary this book has produced, but then, my own tenets of parenting went out of fashion 400 years ago; practically every day, I see children launch themselves into utterly abominable public behavior, and they do it in the very consciously calculated certainty that their parents will not under any circumstances simply physically force them to mind their manners. Instead, such spoiled brats get to indulge themselves, scornful of the fact that the worst their parents will do is try to talk to them, to reason them out of their merchandise-destroying tantrum. "Amethyst," as I heard one over-pronouncing young mother say during one such tantrum, "remember what we discussed about social discourse?"

Elsewhere in this issue, P. J. Carnehan turns in a meaty review of a new art exhibit called "Georgian Faces" and wins this week's prize for Best Opening Line in a Review:

It's good to know that, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, the defense of Dorset against the prospect of invasion was in the hands of well-dressed men.

But then, the TLS has always been a showcase for linguistic pith - most often at the expense of the poor authors whose works fail to impress. It's true that Edmund Gordon over-praises Philip Hensher's merely good novel King of the Badgers (his follow-up to his genuinely great The Northern Clemency), but oh, the sweet compensation found in Matthew Adams' demolition of David Baddiel's The Death of Eli Gold! I haven't read Baddiel's book myself, which is about four narrators recalling the life of the title character, but after the working-over Adams gives it, I'd be happy to buy the author a consoling drink:

Ascribing to each character a distinct narrative voice, the novel attempts to offer a picture of their psychological and emotional development as they adjust to the great novelist's passing. It is a potentially effective idea, but Baddiel's frivolous approach to language and characterization, combine with his evident disregard for the reader, means that that potential is never recognized.

... The novel is sore with afflictions of this kind. To a different kind of enterprise, they might not have been so comprehensively damaging. But The Death of Eli Gold is a long, static, ostensibly reflective work, and as such it is almost totally dependent on precision, weight, and authenticity of voice. It has none of these qualities ...

Hee.

One magazine-reading need my beloved book reviews don't fill is my foolishly persistent need for short fiction (well, almost never - the London Review of Books can keep running Alan Bennett's marvellous novellas forever, as far as I'm concerned) - 'foolish' because I'm so often disappointed you'd think I'd have stopped voluntarily long ago. Granted, writing a good short story is devilishly difficult, so I should keep my expectations low. But Penny Press days like today inflate those expectations - I found not one but two excellent stories. The first, "Twin Forks" by Daniel Woodrell, is in the latest Esquire - it's about a man named Morrow who buys a camp ground and general store out West hoping to escape some of the demons he left behind in Nebraska; it's got some very effective imaginings of loss and pain that a very different main character might have called a mid-life crisis, and the central scene, in which Morrow (with a little backstage help from his shop assistant Royce) confronts two machete-wielding drug addicts who pull up in front of his store in a beat-up car with two women in the back seat:

The women climbed from the beater and stood beside it, the elder subdued and expectant of the worst, the younger dark and expressionless, staring at Morrow. He looked back and could not believe how pretty her eyes were - what color is that? - then couldn't believe he'd noticed. He abruptly fired into the air while yet lost in her eyes and presence, said, "One more step."

The men halted at the sound, looked at each other, laughed till they bent in the middle and had to lean together. The machetes fell to the ground. The driver turned to the staring girl, "Toss me the keys to the trunk."

Royce said, "Don't let them open that trunk. You won't want that."

Woodrell is unknown to me, but the bio-note in Esquire indicates his a fairly seasoned writer, which might help to explain how effective most of "Twin Forks" is - although when it comes to short stories, I've seen many, many seasoned hands fall flat. My notorious case in point would be Alice Munro, who has never written a single well-done short story despite having spent an entire lifetime doing nothing but trying. So imagine my surprise when I turned to her preferred venue, The New Yorker, and found - not a well-done Munro short story, of course (what were you thinking?), but an utterly fantastic tale written by a newcomer to the field. The writer's name is Ramona Ausubel, and the story is called "Atria," and if it's any indication of her talent, her forthcoming book of short stories is worth pre-ordering right now.

"Atria" stars teenager Hazel Whiting, an intelligent and quirkily introspective high school student with a dead father and a hapless mother ("Hazel and her father were never in the world together - by the time she entered, he had already closed the door behind him"). Hazel is a fairly dispassionate observer of the world around her, and when she loses her virginity to a convenience store clerk one afternoon, she does so with almost clinical detachment ("This is it?" she thought. "This is the whole entire thing?"). Shortly after, she's raped by a different man and becomes pregnant, although she refuses to believe she's carrying an actual human baby:

She thought of the men who could have created this. "How could you be a person?" she asked her growing baby. She dreamed that night, and for all the nights of that summer, of a ball of light in her belly. A glowing knot of illuminated strands, heating her from the inside out. Then it grew fur, but it still shone. Pretty soon she saw its claws and its teeth, long and yellow. It had no eyes, just blindly scratched around, sniffing her cave. She did not know if this creature was here to help or to punish her.

The story is told in writing so confident and yet loose-limbed that I'm hard-pressed to think of a similar style - maybe early George Saunders, but there's an ease here that he has yet to achieve (and, to be fair, doesn't seem to want to). There's ample dramatic control as well - the final eight paragraphs of this story will have your heart in your throat, and the effect is entirely uncontrived, springing from Hazel's character itself. It was a thrill to read, and it'll be a thrill to add another young writer to my 'must read' list. Going from "Atria" to the next Munro aunt-a-thon will be a harsh thing.

And since today is the first of the month, there's another entry in the Penny Press I naturally want to mention - and since this post marks the 800th entry here at Stevereads, I'm allowing myself a little indulgence! The first of every month marks the appearance of a new issue of Open Letters Monthly, and since it's the best online literary and arts review there is, it not only qualifies as a part of the Penny Press but also stands implicit comparison with the best of its paper-and-staple brethren. I play a part in the creation of OLM every month, but this in no way cheapens my evaluation - I was a periodical reader long before I was any kind of periodical participant, and I'm well able to click on over to the latest issue of OLM on the first of the month and simply encounter it as a reader. It's true that I know the genesis of the pieces with an intimacy I don't have with other magazines (in this case, for instance, I know the title Jeff Eaton's fantastic review of Colonel Roosevelt had before it got the boring-ass snoozer of a title it currently sports - stuff like that), but knowing that kind of thing can't make the reading experience any better or worse, believe me.

So I'm indulging myself here at Post #800 by telling you this: Open Letters is a hell of a good read every month.

The secret, of course, is the strength of the writing - and I know this because the strength of the writing keeps me reading essays on subjects I'd otherwise immediately ignore. In this latest issue, for instance, one review deals with Teju Cole's novel Open City, which I found stilted, canned, and stomach-churningly egotistical. You'd think, therefore, that a review of it would hold no interest for me - but Andrew Martin's piece in the latest OLM is so urbane and allusive and chatty that I found myself reading along and happy, despite anything I might think about its subject:

The darkness and light that Cole describes seem to project themselves back onto the image of the solitary man in a flickering subway car, and forward onto the titles of Mahler’s final works. Moreover, the connections don’t feel forced. They are clearly the work of someone thinking—they are self-consciously essayistic in construction—but the prose is steady, driving. One keeps reading the book for these moments, and there are many of them.

And if I was initially sceptical about any review dealing with a junk writer like Cole, you can imagine what I initially thought about an entire feature on perfume. My first reaction was that a high-priced ephemeral vanity product like perfume didn't deserve even a glance from what is primarily still a literary review - I certainly wasn't willing to grant perfumery the status of an art. But I read Elisa Gabbert's "On the Scent" column avidly each time it appears, and I do so for her agile, confident prose:

An all-natural perfume would stick out like a sore thumb at the perfume counter in a department store, as they smell and behave in a fundamentally different way and lack ingredients found in the majority of commercial fragrances (such as synthetic musks, dihydromercenol, and Iso E Super); perhaps counterintuitively, it’s usually synthetic chemicals that make a contemporary perfume smell “fresh.”

Likewise I've been mostly uninterested in novelist Ahdaf Soueif's involvement with the recent political upheaval in Egypt, tempted to write it off as Norman Mailer-style opportunistic grandstanding - until I read Rohan Maitzen's exploration of Soueif's activism as seen through the prism of her novels In the Eye of the Sun and The Map of Love. In every piece she writes for OLM, Maitzen exhibits both a joy in meaningful complexity and an explicit faith in the power of literature - it can be an incredibly thought-provoking combination:

“I know there’s an awful lot I don’t know,” Isabel says to Amal. “That’s a start, isn’t it?” Against this epistemological humility, which enables exploration, discovery, and cooperation, run powerful countervailing certainties that, refusing empathy, instead license prejudice, inhumanity, and violence.

Soueif’s novels work against such certainties. Even the heartrending conclusion to The Map of Love is productive, because our mourning prompts us to ask why, to demand a better, more just, more hopeful resolution. Both novels also not only invoke but create their own version of the Mezzaterra: a literary common ground, an optimistic, if endangered, space well served by the novelist’s tools.

Perhaps the ultimate example of this kind of bait-and-switch occurs when a first-rate writer decides to review a book that's not mediocre (like Cole) but outright awful. This contrast is jarring enough when less talented reviewers do it (I myself, for instance, do it all the time) - when really talented people indulge themselves like this, the effect can be surreal. Perfect case-in-point: in the latest OLM, John Cotter (another of those 'Must Read' young novelists on my list) turns in a review of "Alta Ifland"'s 60-page collection of short stories called Death-in-a-Box. The booklet is flyblown garbage in its every pretentious sentence, but something in it caught Cotter's imagination and prompted a beguiling review that's several orders of magnitude more thoughtful and poetic than its subject:

Ifland’s spiky narration turns fables into essays and then into sermons, milking the efficacy of the forms she passes through; just as characters double and blend, so do forms. Not that all of this blending works all the time; generally speaking, these stories begin with strong premises and then escape themselves. Sometimes this is an uroboros (as in “Death-In-A-Box” where the premise with which we begin winds elegantly back on itself); sometimes these endings are fine disappearing acts (as in “Twin Sisters” when one character disappears into another); sometimes these escapes are just French exits, unsatisfying evasions (as in “Uncle Otto,” where a zany character piece decomposes into drunken paperwork).

And the list goes on, in every issue of Open Letters. Part of this is luck, no doubt (magazine editors dislike admitting it, of course, but luck plays a disconcerting role in whether or not a potential freelancer says 'yes, sure' - and whether or not that freelancer then delivers the goods), but a bigger part of it is hard work on the part of OLM's editors, who find, chase, shape, and polish these pieces every month. The process of that finding, chasing, shaping, and polishing is no different at OLM than it is at the TLS or The New Yorker, except in scale and number of available hands on deck, and the results of all that work were among the many Penny Press offerings that pleased me today - so I thought it deserved a mention right alongside the others. Credit where credit's due, and all that.

And for my next 800 entries? Six words: All Paul Marron - All The Time!

November in Open Letters Monthly!

The first day of what promises to be a very chilly November in my bathroom brings nothing but jubilation here on the Internet, because it marks, as always, the debut of a new issue of Open Letters Monthly! No matter what you like to read or read about, you'll find something in this issue to satisfy you. We have a large selection of fiction-oriented pieces: on Emma Donoghue's attention-grabbing novel Room, on The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon's attention-grabbing story of Aristotle and Alexander the Great, on cutie-patootie actor James Franco's attention-grabbing debut short story collection Palo Alto, on David Mitchell's new book, on J. R. Ackerley's attention-deserving novel We Think the World of You, on George R. R. Martin's attention-rewarding ongoing epic fantasy series, and much more! For those of you more nonfictionally inclined, we have a spattering of good history, from the imperialism of Theodore Roosevelt to the beguilements of Cleopatra to the bloody mess of the Somme. And we have the idiosyncratic too, from columns by Brad Jones (on jazz) and Irma Heldman (on mystery novels) to a chummy artist interview by John Cotter. So by all means, duck out of the chill breezes, warm up with our latest offering, and be sure to leave your comments behind like the mittens you invariably leave at a friend's house!

Open Letters in a sultry September!

 

The rampant heat and choking humidity that have characterized the last 115 days without slackening remain with us, sapping all movement of pleasure, turning the contemplation of each day's activity into a presentiment of pure woe. But today is the first of September, and that means at least one thing has changed: a new issue of Open Letters Monthly appears for your pleasure! Even here, though, there's continuity: we've continued to do our best to present you with a wide variety of entertainments, from perfume to video games to literary biographies to historical fiction to straight-up history to poetry both ancient and modern. It's our hope that you'll find some intensely air-conditioned corner of some not-very-pretentious cafe, tuck your feet underneath you on a comfy sofa, and read to your heart's content! What better way to beat the heat of a summer that just won't end?

Rome indeed and room enough in the Penny Press!

It's been a bad week for good faith in the Penny Press. Bad enough Us Weekly ran a picture of Joe Jonas apparently preparing to kiss a girl (even the National Enquirer would've scrupled at that), worse still that National Geographic should so conspicuously lend its imprimatur to a glorified tomb-raider, but worst of all – at least from our bookish point of view here at Stevereads – is the full-blown orb-and-scepter coronation Sam Tanenhaus bestows on Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom in The New York Times Book Review.

The iniquity isn't that Tanenhaus liked the book – because despite appearances, he keeps his personal reactions entirely to himself in the course of a very long, glowing review. No, if he liked the book and wrote it a love-letter this long and gushing, I could live with that. I'd be disgusted, but I wouldn't be nearly as disgusted as I am by what Tanenhaus decided to do instead.

This huge encomium (titled “Peace and War,” as if there weren't already enough travesties going out to Westchester County this week) isn't the result of Tanenhaus really liking Freedom – it's the result of Tanenhaus' entirely political decision that The New York Times Book Review (of which he's the editor) should really like Jonathan Franzen. This isn't high-minded literary debate; it's the cat-fighting that precedes a small-town high school class president election. Oprah Winfrey started things by stepping waaaay outside her comfort zone to nominate Franzen's last unreadably awful doorstop, The Corrections, for her happy, embracing Book Club. Franzen played the 'inchoate integrity' card for all it was worth, and the American public gobbled it up (The Corrections surely contends with Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore and Robert Caro's The Power Broker as the most-bought unread book of the last fifty years). Just last week, Time magazine nominated Franzen as the best novelist since Jesus Christ. Tanenhaus spotted a wave and hopped on his board.

The man's an excellent writer (those of you who haven't read his biography of Whittaker Chambers are urged in all sincerity to drop everything and do so), and that makes it all the more sadly easy to tell when he's not even present for his own review. Pretty much as soon as his first sentence, “Jonathan Franzen's new novel, 'Freedom,' like his previous one, 'The Corrections,' is a masterpiece of American fiction,” it's obvious this is going to be one of those times. All the hallmarks of boilerplate are here, and good boilerplate it is, too – but it bears almost no relation to what Tanenhaus says (or how he says it) when he's genuinely saying what he thought about a book. Instead, it's virtually bent double under the anxiety of the Reviewer's Remorse.

The Reviewer's Remorse goes something like this: I like to think of myself as an independent thinker, and I like to think I run my blog/literary review/library desk/major publishing industry taste-maker with the same amount of independent thinking. But I don't want to be one of those critics who hated Book X when it first came out and now looks like a jackass because it's gone on to become an enshrined piece of the canon. I'll do anything, literally anything, to avoid that.

Even a casual glance at history should amply demonstrate the absolute futility of the Reviewer's Remorse. Names that were venerated a hundred, fifty, or even twenty-five years ago are today nearly-forgotten footnotes. Yes, quickie laugh-getters of the “Rotten Reviews” variety routinely collect all the initial negative notices of now-respected novels like Pride & Prejudice (dissed by a Bronte sister, no less!) or Joyce's Ulysses (famously panned by Virginia Woolf). And yes, such reviews spark a certain frisson – but it's a fraudulent one: it stems from the vague idea that in literature there's a presiding true genius that will out.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The howling irony of Reviewer's Remorse is that it directly inverts the power-structure: critics don't just stand around taking guesses (some lucky, some not) at what the true greats of the literary canon are going to be in twenty-five, fifty, and a hundred years – they determine it. They always have, and they should.

But only the honest critics, and this review of Freedom is deeply, blandly dishonest. An honest critic couldn't write “Assaultive sex reverberates through 'Freedom,' and why not? Sex is the most insistent of the 'personal liberties,' and for Franzen the most equalizing. One is at a loss to think of another male American writer so at ease with – that is, so genuinely curious about – the economy of female desire: the pull and tug of attraction and revulsion, the self-canceling wants.”

Do you know what Tanenhaus means by insistent personal liberties? Why he creates the odious euphemism “assaultive sex” when he's talking about rape? What he means when he calls sex the “most equalizing” personal liberty, when that very notion flies in the face of 17,000 years of human experience? Why he equates comfort with curiosity? Why he uses the synonyms 'pull' and 'tug' in parallel with the antonyms 'attraction' and 'revulsion'? What on Earth a 'self-canceling want' is? No? Neither do I. And neither does he. The point of this kind of prose isn't to say anything – it's to sound like you're saying something. It's the smart kid in the back of the class using lazy-clever short cuts to get his homework done. And the assignment here is to make sure The New York Times Book Review experiences no Reviewer Remorse when it comes to Jonathan Franzen.

Fundamentally, this is the way a reviewer writes when he doesn't believe what he's writing. And in this case it's appropriate enough, because in Freedom Franzen has written a nearly 600-page novel in which he doesn't believe a single godforsaken word. Every particle of the book's grotesquely self-indulgent length is pure artifice, pure hypocrisy, pure lie. Franzen started out with the idea of mocking certain things – most especially the specific kind of mindlessly opinionated and entitled suburbanites with whom he spends his every waking minute and whose ranks he himself long ago joined, if indeed he was ever outside them to begin with – but he found he actually liked them instead, viewed them as genuine civilizing forces (just for clarification: you and I, no matter who we are? We're the ones who need civilizing). But rather than abandon the envisioned evisceration, he thought to turn it elaborately, I'm-smarter-than-you-can-even-see faux-satirical, pretending to hate the thing he loves in order to torture it a little. Call it assaultive fiction. And even that quasi-plan fell apart completely, probably after endless nights spent drinking and endless mid-mornings spent speed-writing to make page counts. What's left – what gets published to unprecedented fanfare this week and collects a National Book Award (at least) in a few months – is nothing at all, a rote exercise in verbiage.

It might be fitting that a book whose own author doesn't care about it at all would generate essays from reviewers who don't care about their own verdicts at all, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. When Sam Tanenhaus isn't resorting to Reviewer Remorse hedge-betting blather, he's a first-rate writer, and I prize first-rate writers: I've always wished I were one, and I consider them incredibly thin on the ground. So naturally, after trudging through Tanenhaus lines like “Franzen's world-historical preoccupations also shape, though less delicately, his big account of the home front – the seething national peace that counterpoises the foreign war,” I went in search of some sort of corrective, somebody actually talking about Freedom.

In addition to Tanenhaus, the field of American literary reviews also sports two other first-rate critics of the current fictive zeitgeist, both also named Sam: there's Sam Anderson, who writes for New York magazine, and there's Sam Sacks, who's the editor of Open Letters Monthly and yet reviewed the new Franzen for The Wall Street Journal (one can only assume they pay better, although it's hard to believe they could match the droit de siegneur). These two never let me down; Anderson is funnier than Sacks (this isn't difficult – the spinning ceiling-fan above my head is also funnier than Sacks), but Sacks has an oddly magisterial probity that no critic currently writing can quite match. Between them, they almost always manage to say everything that needs saying about any present-day male novelist (needless to say, they're both flailingly helpless when reviewing women – but then, I don't notice Jill Lepore or Nancy Franklin stepping forward to review Franzen either).

Except this time, alas. Like Tanenhaus, like most of the best critics, Anderson and Sacks are also afflicted with Reviewer Remorse – Franzen must bring it out in reviewers, what with his ostentatiously domestic purview and the odd, Howard Hughesian stretch of time between The Corrections and this new book (a stretch of time Trollope and Dickens would have disdained; a stretch of time not warranted by anything at all actually in the novel; a stretch of time that is almost always, in my experience with writers, caused by alcohol). Like Tanenhaus, neither of these other Sams wants to believe that Freedom could simply be bad, even though, like Tanenhaus, they experienced not one moment of personal pleasure while reading it (hugely significant that both Anderson and Sacks call the book addictive, with all the word connotes of involuntary and even degrading participation). In this context Anderson's rather reaching invocation of David Foster Wallace can be seen as the desperate hail-mary side-step of somebody who knows he's backing the wrong horse and is too invested (or under orders) to admit it. And that's nothing compared to what Sacks does in the Journal – for a writer as reverential of his sources as Sacks is to drag Milton into a review of Jonathan effing Franzen (Sacks also quotes William Blake, gawd help us all, just to make sure nobody gets out alive) … well, no matter what else it is, it's certainly a cry for help.

And this is just the beginning, of course. If The New York Times Book Review is comparing Franzen to Tolstoy this week, next week The Sacramento Bee will be comparing him to the author of the Book of Genesis. It's depressing, not only because the book itself is such a completely cynical waste of time but also because of what the coronation says about the American literary landscape. Franzen costs Farrar, Straus & Giroux the rough equivalent of twenty-five talented authors who've never feuded with Oprah, and this makes two novels in a row in which he's done absolutely nothing to compensate for that loss. Is the republic of letters really so hard up for good writers that it needs to go down on its knees to this lazy charlatan? On what meat doth this Franzen feed, that he hath grown so great?

July in Open Letters!

The vaporous, malodorous, sulphurous month of July opens bright and fresh today with a new issue of Open Letters Monthly! Hoo-ray! What better way to celebrate America’s birth than by taking your iPad out to Central Park and reading our big, bursting issue as the beautiful day unfolds? We’ve got something for everybody in this issue: pieces on two aspects of the American Revolution, a wonderful appreciation of the great, fun novel Vanity Fair, a round-up of critical responses to Martin Amis’ new novel, a sensitive reading of the latest God-bothering tract from Marilyn Robinson, some scintillating common sense (don’t believe they can go together? Read this piece!) on the much-vexed subject of President Obama, even some of my usual tub-thumping on our old friends the Tudors – and don’t under any circumstances miss Brad Jones’ jazz column: it’ll teach you stuff, make you laugh, and put a lump in your throat. All this, plus lots more! It all awaits you in the July issue of Open Letters, so click on over and read, read, read!

June 2010 in Open Letters!

Morning has broken on a new month, and you know what that means! There in the comfort of your own legally-rented apartment or lawfully-bought house, you get to fire up your Tandy5000 and click on over to a new issue of Open Letters Monthly! Our June issue is huge, just perfect for a nice long intellectual wallow in the summertime. We have a batch of pieces on topics from history (Napoleon, World War I, World War II, the current war in Afghanistan) and biography (the Queen Mother at one end of the spectrum and Artie Shaw at the other!), in addition to which two genres get their biographical due: the novel, and the posthumous fame of Jane Austen.  There are regular features on new mystery novels, new developments in the world of perfume, new movies about video game characters and zombies, and a new look at another short novel. And there’s lots more, all capped with a poem by Tomas Transtromer and a striking ‘cover’ photo. So take advantage of the privacy guaranteed you by Magna Carta (and heavily implied in your Constitutional protection against illegal search and seizure) to snuggle up in the privacy of your own personal space and have a nice long read with us!

May 2010 in Open Letters Monthly!

When it comes to weather, you never know what to expect from May. The last bitter vestiges of winter linger in its mornings, the first decadent tastes of summer can be scented in its high afternoons, and its twilights are little hours of Eden that come from no season at all. Likewise temperaments, in May: people don’t know whether to feel the crabbed reserve of the cold months or the wanton happiness of the warm ones. And so, at least this time, with periodicals! The new issue of Open Letters is here, and it boasts our greatest variety yet: essays about video games jostle with tales of 19th century New York murder; a review of Peter Carey’s new novel sits side-by-side with the ranking of five new perfumes; 1960s radical “Mad Bomber” Melville is here, but so is 1860s critic John Ruskin; two such different novelists as Muriel Spark and Joseph Conrad vie for your attention; zombies, Olympian gods, and the Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter all make appearances. And topping the issue off we have a poem from Nate Pritts, a haunting cover image from Catherine Bourassa-Hebert, and an interview with the artist. So click on over and enjoy the bounty of early Spring (and as usual, if you read something you like, feel free to use that “Donate” button! Early Springs are expensive, after all)

April 2010 in Open Letters!

It’s a new month, the sun is shining (for now), and a brand new issue of Open Letters Monthly is on display for all the world to see! As usual, we have a huge variety of stuff for you to read – and a huge amount of it too, enough to last you the entire month. Highlights this month include Ingrid Norton’s continuing look at short novels (this time it’s George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil), Krista Ingebretson’s look at the complex issues involved in translating literature, Megan Kearns’ contentious look at the ‘riot grrrl’ bands of the late 1990s, and Sam Sacks’ review of Andre Aciman’s Eight White Nights (Sam approves of the book but seems almost appalled to do so – it’s an illuminating, hilarious piece). We have Kristin Walker covering the Young Adult fiction beat, Phillip Lobo reporting from the front lines of the video gaming world, and Irma Heldmann’s latest “It’s a Mystery” column, plus original interviews, poetry, artwork, and much more.

So click on over and give it a read! And as always, feel free to leave comments on what pleases or irritates you (even card-carrying members of the Silent Majority are encouraged to pipe up)!

February in Open Letters!

Ah, February! Despite its winds and snows, it holds the first faint hints of Spring – the touch of its breezes feels ever so slightly softer on the cheek, the blue of its sky suggests deeper, warmer blues to come. Is it any wonder that even a middle-aged bureaucrat could be moved to song when contemplating the holiday dedicated to love, plopped right in the middle of this most hopeful month?

Blyssed be Seynt Valentyn!
For on his day I ches yow to be myn,
Withoute repentynge, myn herte swete!

As you dare to let your hearts unbend from the cringe of midwinter, why not ches the latest Open Letters to be yow’s? We’ve stocked an exceptionally full issue with goodies for your enjoyment, a regular Valentine’s assortment of treats in all shapes and sizes: reviews, essays, contemplations, translations, celebrations! We’ve got world-famous translator David Slavitt doing a bit of very early Milton; we’ve got Manhattan-famous (or is it infamous?) Irma Heldman writing up the latest Elmore Leonard; we’ve got Sam Sacks weighing the worth of two novels set in the rich-are-different world of high finance; we’ve got video game savant Phillip Lobo writing about programs meant to instruct in the classroom, and lots more! Poetry reviews, political reviews, geopolitical reviews, and historical reviews – plus two new feature to fascinate you: “A Year with Short Novels” takes a look at novellas (but dislikes calling them that), and “Good Hooks/Bad Books” highlights an assortment of those particular novels that stink but nevertheless stick with us, always promising more than they deliver.

Which certainly can’t be said of Open Letters! We promise you the best, most interesting, most challenging, and most entertaining basket of belle lettres you’ll find anywhere, and every single month we deliver! Straight to your computer’s inbox, which is where you’ll find our February issue – so click on over and enjoy yourselves withoute repentynge!

Stevereads Gets a New Home!

The week's hiatus here at Stevereads has, I trust, given you all a chance to catch up on your reading (and the reverse - the week straddling New Year's is the only time when I don't read), charge up your library cards, and gird your mental loins for another year of regular book-chat!

The new year starts off with a momentous change here at Stevereads - after much thought, a few misgivings, and some shameless blandishments (wine and latkes, as it were), I've decided to move the whole dang thing over to Open Letters Monthly (http:www.openlettersmonthly.com), where it will join a nascent 'family' of blogs. I'll be joining OLM's new blogging hostess with the mostess, Lisa Peet of Like Fire fame ... and we'll also be featuring a new blog by a guy named Walt Whitman, from whom we expect great things. And if I have my way, that family will grow in 2010.

Disorienting, to say the least, moving someplace new after all these years boring you all in this old location! But rest assured: aside from the new location (which those of you who feel so inclined should, you know, mark or make note of or do whatever people do in such circumstances), this will still be the same Stevereads you've all come to know and love for lo, these many months. Sure, it may look a little better, but that happens to all of us as we get older!

So kindly mark the change and join me there! 2010's cavalcade of new entries begins tomorrow!

December 2009 in Open Letters!

December is upon us, and long before you start worrying about the nightmarish logistics of the holidays, you can sidle up to a brand-new issue of Open Letters Monthly and read fascinating, lively essays on a dozen or more varied topics, from Michael Chabon's new experiences of fatherhood to walking in a killer's shoes in Assassin's Creed II! A mammoth new literary history of America gets examined, as does Philip Roth's slim latest novel. We've got amateur theater, the tragedy of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the literary criticisms of Zadie Smith, the juvenilia of a White House speech writer, a roll-call of international ops, and the further adventures of Spider-Man, plus lots more! So come and read to your heart's content, and as always, feel free to leave copious comments (even the Silent Sentinels of Stevereads are encouraged to say a few syllables over there!)(then come back over here and resume your customary lurking!) - we love hearing what you think!

November 2009 in Open Letters!

It's November everybody - and that means a brand-new issue of Open Letters Monthly to satisfy your curiosity and gratify your senses! And as usual, we've got a jam-packed issue for you: fun, informative pieces on everything from the ridiculous to the sublime. You can read about the new version of the you-be-the-dictator video game Tropico, the new movie (and accompanying novel) of Where the Wild Things Are, the new R. Crumb-illustrated Book of Genesis, the new Richard Patterson (writing history? about King Tut?), the new set of shocking findings from the guys who brought you Freakonomics, the new novels by Pete Dexter, A.S. Byatt, and Hilary Mantel, the new movie Zombieland, and a new book about a Connecticut court case that says the government can take your house whenever it feels so inclined. We examine three new Young Adult novels, the career of Bob Seger, the poetry of Fiona Sze-Lorrain, and the beautiful city of New Orleans before Katrina struck. Our two ongoing series, "It's a Mystery" and "A Year with the Romans," are here with fresh installments, and we have a new look at a classic J.M. Coetzee novel. We top everything off with a poem by John Williams and an arresting painting by Carl Kohler.

So pull up a chair, a comfy couch cushion, or a sleeping basset hound and give us some of your reading time! And as usual, we're curious to know what you think, so send (or leave!) your comments on anything that strikes your fancy.

October 2009 in Open Letters!

It's been a rocky month for Open Letters Monthly this September, what with traffic-jams and site-shutdowns, but the work of assembling another great kept going, firm in the faith that all would turn out well. And it did: the site is up and running, and in October we've got lots and lots of great stuff to offer! This month's star feature is our second annual Bestseller List feature, where our writers take on the most popular fiction titles in the country (from a list we froze before Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol strolled into sight) and sift that list for nuggets of gold. It's the juxtaposition here that's fun, since virtually none of these reviewers typically read the type of books on the list - there's some funny stuff, some irate stuff, and some unexpected stuff waiting for you in the results.

And there's an entire issue besides! Articles on Norman Mailer, Dan Chaon, dating in America, the new iteration of the Halo video game franchise, "It's a Mystery," Canadian poetry, Anthony Trollope, "A Year with the Romans," evolution, and lots, lots more! Make some time today, set aside an hour or two this weekend, and dig in! And, as always, post your thoughts if you feel so inclined! We always like hearing from you!

September 2009 in Open Letters!

Well! After some very ornery technical problems (problems that couldn't behave themselves and show up on, say, the 14th, oh no - problems that waited until the 31st to show up), the September issue of Open Letters has finally hatched to greet a waiting world! And despite the fact that the delay was unintended, the issue is worth the wait! We have our usual assortment of fascinating essays and reviews (including two guaranteed treats, Sam Sacks writing about contemporary fiction and John Cotter writing about contemporary poetry), some regular features for you to soak up ("It's a Mystery," for instance, and "A Year with the Romans"), and in addition this month we have two special surprises: a photo exhibit from our featured photographer Michael George, and a portfolio of music-related articles that will take you from New Orleans to Iceland! It's a nice big plump issue, and after much behind-the-scenes perseverance, it's finally here! Enjoy!

August 2009 in Open Letters!

It's 1 August people, and you know what that means! Yes indeed, it's another cram-packed issue of Open Letters Monthly! This time around, we've got great articles on boxing, the whole Christopher Hitchens/Richard Dawkins "God Debates," a posy of contemporary fiction, our crack sleuth Irma Heldman holding court on the perils of Brooklyn, our gaming savant Phillip Lobo writing about The Sims, our movie maven Sarah Hudson firing a warning shot across Oscar's bow, our zombie queen Deirdre Crimmins writing about really angry people who aren't bloggers, and Brad Jones writing about the Hollywood magic of Vincente Minnelli. I do my duty by the Romans and the Tudors, and we've got new poem and an eye-opening cover photo. And of course you all already know that Open Letters is very active all month long - especially on the OLM blog, where you'll find lots of fascinating stuff, including quite a few book-reviews by yours truly that you won't find here at Stevereads. So click on over there and read to your heart's content! You'll be glad you did!

July in Open Letters!

Well, it might not feel like July outside, but a new month is upon us nevertheless, and that has at least one big piece of good news: a brand-new issue of Open Letters! Underneath another arresting photo by frequent Stevereads comment-leaver Jeff Eaton is an issue bursting with wonders for your delectation! Stars of film, stage, the baseball diamond, and, um, Iceland (?) jockey for your attention with more literary luminaries like Salman Rushdie, Mark Helprin, Aleksandar Hemon, and Javier Calvo. We cover video games, ancient Romans, the British arts & letters scene, and, um, Iceland (??), and we do it all with the style and aplomb you've come to expect! There's a lavishly illustrated edition of The Wind in the Willows, there's a new history of the Comstock Lode, there's the real travails of America's Founding Fathers, and there's, um, Iceland (???). Add to all that a poem (published in English for the first time here), Irma Heldman's "It's a Mystery" column, and our ever-hopping OLM blog, and you've got a well-stocked larder for your July reading! And as always, feel free to leave us your thoughts!

May in Open Letters!

May 1st is here, and you know what that means: a bursting new issue of Open Letters Monthly! And the 'bursting' part is almost literal this time - our May issue is huge! We've got essays and reviews on an incredibly wide variety of subjects, from dreamy, dead tobacco addict Jeff Buckley to dreamy, living tobacco addict Joshua Redman, from the perils of the retail music industry to the perils of the Finnish national epic, from prose as stodgy-but-really-not as that of Roman historians to prose as lazy-but-really-not as that of postmodern fiction-writers. We've got graphic novels, the Russians, Venice, Superman marrying Don Quixote, and of course zombies. New books are reviewed, old books are reviewed, new books about old books are reviewed, and it's all emblazoned by a stunning you-are-there photo (not from news wire-services! we had a correspondent on the spot!) of a volcano erupting in the Galapagos Islands! And you need only wait a week to read my definitive, sure-to-be-quoted review of the new 'Star Trek' movie.

So click on over to Open Letters, pour yourself a nice steaming cup of Adderall, and dig in! And be sure to leave comments, so our beleaguered writers know you care!

April 2009 in Open Letters!

April is here, and although it's bitterly, remorselessly freezing in Boston, the skies are clear, the birds are chirping, the crocuses are poking up all along Jamaica Pond, and best of all (well, OK - second best, since nothing really beats the dawn chorus), a new issue of Open Letters is ready for your examination!

It's a big, healthy issue this time around (15 pieces a month is not an unrealistic goal, methinks)(although forever banishing 'methinks' from my vocabulary might well be), so no matter what you're interested in, there'll be something you'll want to read. We've got essays on literary frauds, the Columbine shootings (both fiction and history), and Grand Theft Auto - we've got an item of new poetry and an item of very old poetry. We have no quiz to bedevil you.

And like all the great review periodicals, Open Letters serves a function many habitual readers are reluctant to admit they need: we're your advance scout. The crop of bright young things, new young authors who all have novels out? The novels you've been wondering about, whether or not to sink your time into them? We've got smart, funny, capable reviewers to sort them out for you - American Rust, The Way through Doors, The Song is You ... read about them all here before you attempt them on your own! Likewise that new 800-page doorstop about the Nazis at war: our review will help you decide if you want to invest the time.

Two last things: for April we welcome Bryn Haworth to our merry gang - he's writes from London, so his contributions will be better-pronounced than any others, but they'll drive on the wrong side of the road; and our issue's stunning, evocative photo (if it isn't perfect visual shorthand for the slightly wistful daydreaming April inspires, I don't know what is) was created by Jonas Sacks.

So make yourself comfy on your favorite reading couch, pour yourself a nice warm cup of coffee (or, for all you B&N folk out there, your morning shot of bourbon), and settle in for some wonderful reading! And, as always, feel free to leave copious comments!

March 2009 in Open Letters!

It's the first of March, and among other things (like, in Boston anyway, snow), that means another jam-packed issue of Open Letters Monthly! This month is no different: thorough, thoughtful articles on a wide variety of topics, from Notorious B. I. G. to video games to the ancient River Thames. The infamous Gardner Museum robbery gets a detailed look, as do the terrific short stories of Mavis Gallant, as do many other subjects both popular and abstruse! The issue has a nifty photo, some original sketches by the redoubtable Rachel Burgess, a poem by the legendary poet Charles Jodoin, and, to mark the two-year birthday of Open Letters, a duality-themed quiz designed to test your knowledge of useless trivia!

So click on over to Open Letters and feast your brain on the banquet provided! And while you're there, don't forget to check out the OLM BLOG, which is updated every day with all kinds of interesting things, including more honest-to-gosh book reviews than you'll find anywhere else! And, as usual, feel free to leave comments on anything that strikes your fancy!