"Some years ago I evolved what I called the Small Ball Theory to assess the quality of literature about sports."

"This stated that there seems to be a correlation between the standard of writing about a particular sport and the ball it utilizes -- that the smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature. There are superb books about golf, very good books about baseball, not many good books about football or soccer, very few good books about basketball and no good books at all about beach balls...."

Wrote George Plimpton — in 1992 — in "The Smaller the Ball, the Better the Book: A Game Theory of Literature" (NYT). I'm reading that not because this weekend is The Masters, but because I stumbled across a 1996 piece "Bad Sports," by Michiko Kakutani (NYT), about the "hippie psychobabble" that had taken over golf writing:

Consider the ur-text of New Age golf writing, ''Golf in the Kingdom'' (1972), by Michael Murphy, a founder of Esalen. In the course of the book, the reader is introduced to a guru-like golf teacher named Shivas Irons, who spouts aphorisms like ''let the nothingness into yer shots,'' and is pelted with a boggling array of metaphors: golf as ''the new yoga of the supermind,'' golf as a recapitulation of evolution and golf as a Rorschach test of character....

Two recent novels -- ''The Legend of Bagger Vance,'' by Steven Pressfield, and ''Follow the Wind,'' by Bo Links -- give us Shivas wannabes, who tell their disciples to find their ''troo self.''... Perhaps sappiest of all is Jeff Wallach's ''Beyond the Fairway,'' a series of essays that purports to be a golf version of ''Zen in the Art of Archery'' when in fact it's closer to one of those business manuals that try to adapt the principles of Sun Tzu's classic ''Art of War'' to corporate back-stabbing....

I'm reading Kakutani's old essay because I was looking up "The Art of War" in the NYT. And I wasn't doing that out of any sort of thought that the Russians are botching the art of war in Ukraine, but because I wanted to do a post in honor of the 50th anniversary (tomorrow) of the discovery of the Yinqueshan Han Tombs, which contained "a nearly complete Western Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) copy of The Art of War, known as the Yinqueshan Han Slips, which is almost completely identical to modern editions." 

Back to Kakutani (whose name is misspelled in the NYT scan of her ancient article):

Zen golf, [Wallach] writes, is ''a way of transporting yourself to a new dimension, gaining access to new perspectives, and maybe racking up a few birdies along the way.'' The problem with such passages isn't just the bad writing (which pretty much negates George Plimpton's famous ''Small Ball Theory'' that the smaller the ball the better the writing), the sanctimoniousness or even its startling trivialization of Zen. The problem is that such writing takes sport out of the lovely pure realm of the physical, where talent and strength and discipline are measured in unforgiving inches and lifetime stats, and plunges it into the warm recovery movement realm of subjectivity and self-esteem.

Little did Kakutani know, the very year she wrote, 1996, a new phenomenon would take over golf. Tiger Woods went professional that year, and just about ever since, the main thing about golf has been how is Tiger doing? An in-the-flesh icon overwhelmed the old hippie psychobabble of "The Legend of Bagger Vance." 

But they did make a movie out of "The Legend of Bagger Vance" — "Time [Magazine] called it one of the most 'embarrassing' films of recent years for its treatment of African Americans and the use of a 'Magical African-American Friend.'" 

Matt Damon's magical friend was, of course, Will Smith: 

"Turns out America today, in its sense of randomness and meaninglessness and indifference to consequences, is like 'The Great Gatsby.' And like 'Fight Club.' It’s also like 'No Country for Old Men.'"

"It’s even like 'True Detective,' though we don’t learn why," Carlos Lozada complains about the "scattershot in her cultural references" in Michiko Kakutani's new book, "The Death of Truth."

Lozada — in "Can truth survive this president? An honest investigation" (WaPo) — continues:

But she is more focused when exploring the left-wing pedigree of post-truth culture. Even though she laments that objectivity has declined ever since “a solar system of right-wing news sites orbiting around Fox News and Breitbart News consolidated its gravitational hold over the Republican base,” Kakutani calls out lefty academics who for decades preached postmodernism and social constructivism, which argued that truth is not universal but a reflection of relative power, structural forces and personal vantage points. In the early culture wars, centered on literary studies, postmodernists rejected Enlightenment ideals as “vestiges of old patriarchal and imperialist thinking,” Kakutani writes, paving the way for today’s violence against fact in politics and science.

“It’s safe to say that Trump has never plowed through the works of Derrida, Baudrillard, or Lyotard (if he’s even heard of them),” Kakutani sniffs. But while she argues that “postmodernists are hardly to blame for all the free-floating nihilism abroad in the land,” she concedes that “dumbed-down corollaries” of postmodernist thought have been hijacked by Trump’s defenders, who use them to explain away his lies, inconsistencies and broken promises.

Even as Kakutani plows through all that left-wing postmodernism, Lozada plows through 4 more books bemoaning the moribundity of truth.

I'm going to read the Kakutani book. I'm interested in all the cultural references! "Fight Club," "Great Gatsby" — that's right up my alley! And I'm fine with quick jumps that show the author's mind at work. It's what I do, and I'd like to read somebody else doing it.

I wouldn't use the adjective "scattershot," because I feel the references are coming at me, and I don't feel as though I'm being shot at, but as if various ideas are being thrown my way, and I'll see what I can catch, that is, what seems right to me. I know that sounds, ironically, like a reinforcement of the thesis that we're living in a post-truth world. But, no. Not really.

At the Hold True Café...

... you can handle the truth.

This is an open thread, but the photo makes me want to link to this book excerpt I read earlier today: "The death of truth: how we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump/From post-modernism to filter bubbles, ‘truth decay’ has been spreading for decades. How can we stop alternative facts from bringing down democracy, asks Michiko Kakutani" (The Guardian).

Have you ever seen a sentence written on the 50th grade level?

I have. Click to enlarge:



From "38 Years on Books: The Essential Michiko Kakutani Reader" in the NYT. That is, this passage is one of a handful of selections from book reviews that appeared over a 38-year period, written by Michiko Kakutani. These selections are offered as exemplifying "a vigorously led life of the mind, a crash course in contemporary literature and a tour through the zeitgeist of the turn of the millennium."

I used Readable.io to do the calculation of the grade level. I think these estimations can be bogus. Long sentences can be great (especially if they're easily diagrammable). But I've never seen a sentence come anywhere near the 50th grade level. Can you even imagine 50 years of schooling? What crazy course of study is even imaginable? And yet, I'll bet there have been human individuals who have so fully embraced the notion of a career as a student that they could write a tome called "50 Years a Student." And if they did, what would Michiko Kakutani have said about it?

(By the way, for comparison, the previous paragraph is written at a 6th or 7th grade level. It also got a "A" for readability, though it recommended not using so many big words. Obviously, "diagrammable" is pushing the limits of readability, but Readable also underlined "especially" and "individuals.")

"Kakutani was a fearsome and unpredictable gatekeeper, more so because she has been a singularly private person, almost never seen or heard from outside of her reviews."

"She is said to be close friends with Maureen Dowd and Alessandra Stanley, part of a long-standing clique of empowered and influential women at the Times.... Kakutani joins dozens of other Times employees who have opted to take voluntary buyouts as the Times implements a plan, as I wrote about earlier this week, to free up budget for some 100 additional reporters. While the buyouts, which are to be finalized today, were primarily aimed at copy editors, both writers and other editors were eligible to apply for the exit packages, too. Kakutani is the most high-profile taker to emerge so far...."

From "MICHIKO KAKUTANI, THE LEGENDARY BOOK CRITIC AND THE MOST FEARED WOMAN IN PUBLISHING, IS STEPPING DOWN FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES/Kakutani, who helped make the careers of writers from Foster Wallace to McEwan, and put fear in the hearts of Mailer and Vidal, will leave her post as one of the most formidable critics in the Times history" by Joe Pompeo (in Variety).

"In the absence of thoughtful analysis or a powerful narrative through line, Garrow’s book settles for barraging the reader with a cascade of details — seemingly in hopes of creating a kind of pointillist picture."

"The problem is that all these data points never connect to form an illuminating portrait; the book does not open out to become the sort of resonant narrative that Robert A. Caro and Ron Chernow have pioneered, in which momentous historical events are deftly recreated, and a subject’s life is situated in a time and a place. Instead, Garrow has expended a huge amount of energy... on giving us minutely detailed accounts of early chapters of Obama’s life.... While the Chicago chapter sheds valuable light on Obama’s connection with black residents and his developing sense of vocation, many of the other sections that try to chronicle his day-to-day life feel extraneous and absurdly long-winded, as if Garrow wanted to include every last scrap of information he’d unearthed. Are we really interested in what numerous Obama classmates, colleagues and passing acquaintances remember about his personality — that he struck them as cool or friendly, arrogant or voluble, cheerful or detached? Do we really want to read repetitious discussions about his cigarette consumption and poker-playing habits?"

That's Michiku Kakutani saying something about David J. Garrow's new book about Obama that's really close to what I thought of that book "Shattered," about the Hillary Clinton campaign. I'd said:

[It's] as though they'd edited it more intensively [in the first third] but then didn't bother and just left us with dumped notes from their interviews with Clinton insiders. There was a lot of semi-digested material about the mechanics of getting speeches written and where to expend funds and how nervous and uncomfortable various people felt at various times. I got pretty bored.

In the Obama book, it's the end, the epilogue, that's different from the rest, different in a way that outrages Kakutani:

Whereas the rest of the book is written in dry, largely uninflected prose, the epilogue — which almost reads like a Republican attack ad — devolves into a condescending diatribe unworthy of a serious historian.... [It's] a crude screed against Obama the president and Obama the man, filled with bald assertions and coy half-truths.

And Kakutani hates Garrow's use of the ex-girlfriend as his central witness:

It’s odd that Garrow should seize on one former lover’s anger and hurt, and try to turn them into a Rosebud-like key to the former president’s life, referring to her repeatedly in his epilogue. He even tries to turn her perception — about Obama’s having willed himself into being — into a pejorative....

I see that I blogged about Kakutani's review of "Shattered" — here. I said:

I've been avoiding talking about "Shattered" — the new book about Hillary Clinton's failed campaign — because...

... the excerpts I saw were written in such a pulpy, trashy style.

"She had let him down. She had let herself down. She had let her party down. And she had let her country down. Obama’s legacy and her dreams of the Presidency lay shattered at Donald Trump’s feet. This was on her. Reluctantly she rose from her seat and took the phone. ‘Mr President,’ she said softly. ‘I’m sorry.’"

Yeesh. It's like a bad young-adult book.

But the NYT has given “Shattered,” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, the dignity of a Michiko Kakutani review, and I will read that. One significant thing I learn is that Allen and Parnes had some good sources:

Allen and Parnes are the authors of a 2014 book, “H R C,” a largely sympathetic portrait of Clinton’s years as secretary of state, and this book reflects their access to longtime residents of Clinton’s circle. They interviewed more than a hundred sources on background — with the promise that none of the material they gathered would appear before the election — and while it’s clear that some of these people are spinning blame retroactively, many are surprisingly candid about the frustrations they experienced during the campaign.

And there's a lot of blaming of Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook. He relied on "data analytics," he "underestimat[ed] Sanders," he "fail[ed] to put enough organizers on the ground," and — after the primary season ended — he "declined to use pollsters to track voter preferences in the final three weeks of the campaign." Okay. Is that really such a big deal?

Here's Kakutani's last paragraph:

In chronicling these missteps, “Shattered” creates a picture of a shockingly inept campaign hobbled by hubris and unforced errors, and haunted by a sense of self-pity and doom, summed up in one Clinton aide’s mantra throughout the campaign: “We’re not allowed to have nice things.”

There's something bland about this review. It doesn't get at what I want to know which is why the book is taken seriously as something special, something other than a rehash of a lot of stuff we already know. The review seems to offer up exactly the language the authors can use to promote the book. What I want to know is: Why give this book a big lofting?

If I had to sketch out a theory, it would be that the Russians-stole-the-election meme is flagging and something else is needed to support the theory that Trump is not a legitimate President. But what is this collection of details from the story of the Clinton campaign? It strikes me as me as pretty normal — typical of campaigns (even winning ones) — and not the "Titanic-like disaster... epic fail" Kakutani says the book depicts.

I certainly think Clinton was bad, but Trump was also pretty bad in a lot of ways. Personally, I've digested the results. Trump won. I'm not buying the theory that Clinton was epically bad anymore than I think Trump is a monster.

Everyone seems to be mulling over the darker tone of "Go Set a Watchman," but...

... I'm reading an article — "Betrayed – Harper Lee wrote the great American novel. She doesn’t deserve this/'Go Set a Watchman' is Boo Radley. Like that key character from ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, it was meant to stay inside, locked away, hidden from the world. It was never supposed to be published" — and I see something I hadn't noticed in any of the other discussions of the new book, something that is far brighter than "Mockingbird."

Spoiler alert:

So Atticus Finch was a racist, and "Mockingbird" was a sweetened-up rewrite?

"Shockingly, in Ms. Lee’s long-awaited novel, 'Go Set a Watchman' (due out Tuesday), Atticus is a racist who once attended a Klan meeting, who says things like 'The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.' Or asks his daughter: 'Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?'... Though 'Watchman' is being published for the first time now, it was essentially an early version of 'Mockingbird.' According to news accounts, 'Watchman' was submitted to publishers in the summer of 1957; after her editor asked for a rewrite focusing on Scout’s girlhood two decades earlier, Ms. Lee spent some two years reworking the story, which became 'Mockingbird.'"

Writes Michiko Kakutani in the NYT.

So there is a fascinating chronological sequence of stories, only some of which we can now see.

1. Harper Lee grew up in small-town Alabama, observing whatever happened, gathering her raw material.

2. "Go Set a Watchman," the original manuscript.

3. Lee's interaction with publishers. There are so many fascinating unknowns here. Why did they reject the story she decided to tell? How much did they pressure her to make the central character a hero and to tell an inspiring story of good versus evil? Did she agree with their idea of what would make a better/more marketable story and did she rewrite in sadness/anger/desperation?

4. "To Kill a Mockingbird," the published book.

5. The adoration of the book that was not the book Harper Lee, on her own, chose to write, and Harper Lee's experience of success on these terms, an experience that the public witnessed as only a failure to give us any other book.

6. The announcement of the future publication of "Go Set a Watchman" and the public's reaction to that, making it a best-seller before it is even seen.

7. The 89-year-old Harper Lee witnesses a new flood of intense "Mockingbird"-based love and decades of hunger for more — all the while knowing what happened growing up in Alabama and what is in the book the unsuspecting public will eventually — after all these years of repression — get to see.

8. The publication of "Go Set a Watchman."

9. Harper Lee finally gets to see the public's reaction, though it's a different public. It's more than half a century after she intended to tell us this story, and the readers are primed with "Mockingbird"-based expectations. Those who have been most interested in getting their hands on another Harper Lee book may feel that the book they are getting is much worse than no book at all, because it takes away what they most loved about "Mockingbird," that fine figure of a man, Atticus Finch.

10. For the next 100 years, America tries to understand this sequence of events, and the story of Harper Lee reveals its endless mythic depths.

David Foster Wallace's essays "could have done with a little judicious pruning."

I laugh out loud at that notion, expressed by Michiko Kakutani, reviewing the new collection "Both Flesh and Not."

Meade asks me what's so funny, I explain, and he cites "too many notes":



"Just cut a few, and it'll be perfect!"

Back to "Both Flesh and Not" — which I just downloaded into my Kindle app. The title seems to grind into our heads that Wallace is not flesh anymore, having hung himself. Anticipating the first or second comment to this post will point that out, I'm pointing it out along with all the references to suicide that appear in the book. There are 4:

1. "What if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite everyone’s best efforts, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of terrible suicidal attack that a democratic republic cannot 100 percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting? Is this thought experiment monstrous?"

2. "It’s not just that there are [in 'Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession'] long and irrelevant footnotes on, e.g., Gödel’s method of suicide, Poincaré’s theory of the unconscious, or the novel properties of the number 1,729.25." [Gödel’s method was refusing all food for a month, under the delusion his doctors were trying to poison him, which doesn't really sound like suicide, unless you believe "suicide" does not mean self-murder. ]

3 & 4. "... [Edwin] Williamson sometimes presents Borges’s stories and poems as 'evidence' that he was in emotional extremities. Williamson’s claim, for instance, that in 1934, 'after his definitive rejection by Norah Lange, Borges… came to the brink of killing himself' is based entirely on two tiny pieces of contemporaneous fiction in which the protagonists struggle with suicide. Not only is this a bizarre way to read and reason — was the Flaubert who wrote Madame Bovary eo ipso suicidal?— but Williamson seems to believe that it licenses him to make all sorts of dubious, humiliating claims about Borges’s interior life: '"The Cyclical Night," which he published in La Nación on October 6, reveals him to be in the throes of an acute personal crisis'; 'In the extracts from this unfinished poem… we can see that the reason for wishing to commit suicide was literary failure, stemming ultimately from sexual self-doubt.' Bluck."

ADDDED; I only searched for "suicide," and, reading the book, I encounter "suicidally" -- a self-regarding "suicidally" -- and the premise of my 4-point list, above, is radically undermined.

Ann Beattie's "Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life" is hilariously panned in the NYT.

By Michiko Kakutani.

[A] narcissistic, self-indulgent, hot-air-filled tome that condescends to its ostensible subject, Mrs. Nixon, and that wastes the reader’s time making ridiculous comparisons between, say, the Nixons and the characters in the Raymond Carver story “Cathedral,” or between the Nixons and the characters in the Chekhov story “The Lady With the Little Dog.” There are silly creative-writing-class exercises, like replacing every noun in Mr. Nixon’s famous Checkers speech with the seventh noun below it in the dictionary; and imagining some incidental events in Mrs. Nixon’s life (like taking a bubble bath or drawing sea creatures in the beach sand with her big toe). The chapter titled “Mrs. Nixon Has Thoughts on the War’s Escalation” consists of this one inane sentence: “You and Henry ordering the ‘Christmas Bombing’ was pesky!”...

...Ms. Beattie spreads a gluey gloss of speculation over Pat Nixon, much of it patronizing, stupid or insulting. For example, she writes that Mrs. Nixon thought for herself, but did so “well within cultural conditioning” and “didn’t think metaphorically.”

In one of her efforts to impersonate Mrs. Nixon, Ms. Beattie assumes an icky, Mrs. Cleaver-like voice, talking about making milkshakes to fatten up her husband so he’ll look better on TV in the next debate against John F. Kennedy. (“It’s festive, pretty and full of calories.”) Worse, much of this book feels like a lecture about creative writing....

Ouch. Remember when everyone fawned over Ann Beattie?

"First, Mr. Foer was to visualize a large bottle of pickled garlic (whatever that is) standing in his family driveway in place of a car."

"Next, he was to picture 'an enormous wading-pool-size tub of cottage cheese' at the front door and to imagine the model Claudia Schiffer swimming in that tub of curds; and so on down the list, in each case finding as creative and, well, as memorable an image as possible."

The erstwhile novelist David Shields says that fiction "has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself."

He's "bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters."

So begins an article by Michiko Kakutani that immediately veers off into another subject (the way the internet is changing us). I'm especially interested in the shift away from fiction. It's happened to me personally over the last couple decades, and I wonder why it is. It's not just about the internet, I think: It's also a loss of faith in what fiction-writers have to say, and it goes along with our rejection of Freudian analysis.

"Palin depicts the McCain campaign as overscripted, defeatist, disorganized and dunder-headed..."

"... slow to shift focus from the Iraq war to the cratering economy, insufficiently tough on Mr. Obama and contradictory in its media strategy."

Michiko Kakutani reviews Sarah Palin's memoir:

All in all, Ms. Palin emerges from “Going Rogue” as an eager player in the blame game, thoroughly ungrateful toward the McCain campaign for putting her on the national stage. As for the McCain campaign, it often feels like a desperate and cynical operation, willing to make a risky Hail Mary pass in order to try to score a tactical win, instead of making a considered judgment as to who might be genuinely qualified to sit a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

"We're wrapping up a presidency led me a man his own team has described as 'not a big reader.'"

And we're reading a post by a blogger — Steve Benen — who is not a big proof-reader.

Let's put aside the issue of whether George Bush is a big reader or not. (Karl Rove says he is. Richard Clarke said he's not.) I'd like to talk about the front-page NYT article that Benen links to, about what a different kind of reader Barack Obama is. Michiko Kakutani writes:

Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.

His predecessor, George W. Bush, in contrast, tended to race through books in competitions with Karl Rove.... or passionately embrace an author’s thesis as an idée fixe. Mr. Bush and many of his aides favored prescriptive books — Natan Sharansky’s “Case for Democracy,” which pressed the case for promoting democracy around the world, say, or Eliot A. Cohen’s “Supreme Command,” which argued that political strategy should drive military strategy. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility.

What’s more, Mr. Obama’s love of fiction and poetry — Shakespeare’s plays, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and Marilynne Robinson‘s “Gilead” are mentioned on his Facebook page, along with the Bible, Lincoln’s collected writings and Emerson’s “Self Reliance“ — has not only given him a heightened awareness of language. It has also imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition quite unlike the Manichean view of the world so often invoked by Mr. Bush.

Is reading to pick out the parts that fit your pre-existing vision more impressive than reading to grasp the author's vision? And, more importantly, since her writing oozes with preference for Barack Obama, why should we believe Kakutani's representation that Bush's books are ideological and Obama's are not?

Finally, there's this notion that fiction reading is what really develops your mind, which, I've long suspected is a pet belief of fiction readers. Immersed in their stories, they imagine — they're so imaginative — that they are better than people who read history and biography and so forth. In any case, Bush did read novels — notably "The Stranger."

But Bush just can't get credit for anything these days, can he?

"'Outliers' ... is peppy, brightly written ... provocative ... glib, poorly reasoned and thoroughly unconvincing."

Michiko Kakutani says okay, that's it, enough of Malcolm Gladwell. Is that a gut reaction (see "Blink") that will spread like some kind of disease (see "The Tipping Point")?

More on the new Hillary books.

The NYT has reviews of the two new Hillary books: Carl Bernstein's "A Woman in Charge" and Jeff Gersh and Don Van Natta Jr.'s "Her Way." Michiko Kakutani reviews only the Bernstein book (because the authors of the other book are or were employed by the Times), and outside reviewer Robert Dallek reviews both books. Let's look at the Dallek review first. Here's what he says about the Gersh/Van Natta:

The book’s greatest flaw is its flogging of all the Clinton scandals, not simply because they are so familiar and ultimately came to so little, but also because they give us insufficient clues to what sort of president Mrs. Clinton might be....

Should Hillary Clinton’s personal limitations — her inclination to shade the truth in the service of her ambition, what former Senator Bill Bradley called her “arrogance,” “disdain,” and “hypocrisy” — disqualify her for the presidency?

It is surely preferable to have our most upright citizens sitting in the White House, but history repeatedly shows that presidents with character flaws have not necessarily been less competent leaders, especially in times of crisis, than those with a stronger moral compass....

Oh, fine then. Character... big deal!

About the Bernstein book, Dallek says:

Mr. Bernstein is... hyperbolic about Mrs. Clinton’s influence and importance. President Bill Clinton survived “in office due principally to the actions of his wife, just as their tangled relationship,” he writes, “was central to his being impeached in the first place.”

Mr. Bernstein adds: “The impeachment of the president was a direct reflection of the choices she had made, the compromises she had accepted, however reluctantly, and the enmity engendered by their grand designs, successes and failures.”

Kakutani writes:

Mr. Bernstein’s overall take on Mrs. Clinton [is] that her “experiential openness” gave her a “capacity for personal growth and change”....

[T]his volume does not really appraise Mrs. Clinton’s record as a senator from New York and sheds no new light on her stance on the Iraq war or her current campaign for the White House....

“With the notable exception of her husband’s libidinous carelessness,” Mr. Bernstein asserts, “the most egregious errors, strategic and tactical” of [Bill Clinton's] presidency, particularly in its stumbling first year, are “traceable to Hillary,” including, in large measure, the inept staffing of the White House, the disastrous serial search for an attorney general, the Travel Office brouhaha, Whitewater and the alienation of key senators and members of Congress.

Kakutani notes that the book is really long and that Bernstein spent 8 years writing it and seems rather defensive about spending so much time on it. Are readers going to put up with this? Aside from the health care fiasco, the Clinton Era events that involve Hillary really don't need to be remembered in detail. The Gersh/Van Natta book looks like a better read, perhaps.

Bush shook his hand and then “turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the president’s hand.”

Writes Barack Obama (in his new book "The Audacity of Hope," which Michiko Kakutani loves).

Poison and fiction.

Michiko Kakutani reviews Jonathan Franzen's new memoir -- "The Discomfort Zone" -- and seems rather horrified to gaze upon the character that is the novelist. Me, I'm extremely fascinated, especially by what most upsets Kakutani, his "doomed marriage":

[H]e describes the judgmental outlook that he and his wife shared for many years: “Deploring other people — their lack of perfection — had always been our sport.”

... Mr. Franzen writes that he and his wife “lived on our own little planet,” spending “superhuman amounts of time by ourselves.” He fills his journals with transcripts of fights they’ve had, and writes that they both “reacted to minor fights at breakfast by lying facedown on the floor of our respective rooms for hours at a time, waiting for acknowledgment of our pain.” “I wrote poisonous jeremiads to family members who I felt had slighted my wife,” he adds, while “she presented me with handwritten fifteen-and twenty page analyses of our condition; I was putting away a bottle of Maalox every week.”

Kakutani can't figure out why anyone would want to consume what the author himself acknowledges to be poison. Maybe you prefer the nature of the novelist to be processed into a work of fiction. You prefer poison cooked up into something more delectable, like "The Corrections." I prefer to see that the poison is poison.

"John Updike writing about terrorism?"

Michiko Kakutani goes after "[t]he bard of the middle-class mundane, the chronicler of suburban adultery and angst" for his look into the mind of a jihadist in his new book "Terrorist":

[T]he journalistic portraits of the 9/11 hijackers that Terry McDermott of The Los Angeles Times pieced together — from interviews with acquaintances of the hijackers, "The 9/11 Commission Report" and material from interrogations of captured terrorists — in his 2005 book "Perfect Soldiers" are a hundred times more fascinating, more nuanced and more psychologically intriguing than the cartoonish stick figure named Ahmad whom Mr. Updike has created in these pages....

[He] is given to saying things like "the American way is the way of infidels," and the country "is headed for a terrible doom." Or: "Purity is its own end." Or: "I thirst for Paradise."

In other words, Ahmad talks not like a teenager who was born and grew up in New Jersey but like an Islamic terrorist in a bad action-adventure movie, or someone who has been brainwashed and programmed to spout jihadist clichés. Much of the time he sounds like someone who has learned English as a second language.

Mr. Updike does an equally lousy job of showing us why Ahmad is willing to die and kill for jihad. We're told that the imam who teaches Ahmad the Koran has become a surrogate father to the fatherless boy. We're told that Ahmad is disgusted with his flirtatious mother and her succession of boyfriends. And we're told that he wants a mission in life and can't think of anything else he wants to do after high school.

How I wish some filmmaker would do to this book what Stanley Kubrick did to "Red Alert"!

Actually, the first movie this review made me think of was not "Dr. Strangelove," it was "Napoleon Dynamite." Something about the teenager who doesn't fit in and talks funny called to mind the unforgettable dialogue:

Do the chickens have large talons?

Do they have what?

Large talons.

I don't understand a word you just said.

We need to make more fun of the terrorists. I don't want to see the World Trade Center burning in a horror movie. I want to see merciless fun made of the terrorists. Updike seems to be trying to understand terror-boy. Somebody throw a Kubrick at him.