A little help for their friends - demise of the New York Times Book Review

National Review, March 7, 1994 by James Bowman

Occasionally, it is true, a foreign or ideologically tainted novel will be reviewed negatively, but no mainstream American novel from a mainstream house ever gets a really bad review. The result is that the fiction pages are not only uncritical and uninformative but repetitive and boring as well. The same approbatory expressions appear again and again: the typical novel is "richly textured" and "richly evokes"--well, just about anything but mainly "a world of its own." Some such formulation appears almost routinely. The reviewers seem to take this idea for granted by telling the reader that "you find yourself loving his world" or referring to "the important world each [story] creates," but at the same time they enjoy reminding us with some frequency, as if nobody had ever thought of it before, that to write fiction is "not to tell a story but to enter a world" or, indeed, a "universe."

These worlds and universes are "brilliantly realized." They may be "labyrinthine" or "Beckettian" or "Marquezian," but they are pretty sure to be both "hilarious" and "unsettling." The heroes are typically "outcasts," "outsiders," or "sensitive loners." They are sensitive because they have come from "dysfunctional" families. Indeed, there seem to be no institutions or social structures in these idiolectic worlds which are otherwise than "dysfunctional." It is not too much to say that the function of such worlds is "dysfunction." That is how they establish their claim to moral authority. Where there are victims of social dysfunction and "a]oneness," there is also authenticity. And the suffering of the victims is, needless to say, always portrayed "unflinchingly."

TECHNICALLY speaking, there should be no villains in these dysfunctional worlds. The whole point of such jargon is to depersonalize evil and render it obsolete. Nevertheless, to judge by the stock NYTBR review, there are a lot of "sinister" fellows about. Their purpose is to color the background "noir," to make it "hip" and "skeptical" and "sophisticated"--all self-evidently good things. They serve as a self-conscious, "postmodern" commentary, perhaps, on the shopworn existentialism of the rest. For, as Alfred Corn's review of Lempriere's Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk puts it: "Literary works of any sophistication usually include a self-critique." Thus, in these pages, the ideal novel would be described as Rand Richards Cooper described Michael Doane's City of Light: "a thriller with a distinctly post-modern, indeed semiotic, cachet, like Frederic Forsyth with a touch of Paul de Man."

Which is to say, like chocolate ice cream with a touch of anchovies. Yum, yum! Who could resist? Yet it is a curious fact that, although the reputation of Paul de Man remains unsullied in the New York Times Book Review if it does anywhere in the world, the central tenet of "deconstruction" is curiously disregarded there. This is that the author, like God, is dead. Thus he is in no position to obstruct with a "privileged" view of his own work the fantasies of meaning or unmeaning dreamed up by the industrious deconstructor. Yet in the NYTBR, oddly, the author is still very much alive--even when she is dead, as you can tell from Elizabeth Gleick's review of Janet Hobhouse's novel, The Furies, a feminist exploration of mother-daughter relationships.