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

National Review, March 7, 1994 by James Bowman

Before it was published, Janet Hobhouse had unfortunately died young (42) of ovarian cancer, so there were even more reasons than usual to give the book the sweetheart treatment:

One cannot read a sentence of this book---a mesmerizing,

hauntingly autobiographical work without thinking of the au-

thor's death, without feeling that Hobhouse was searching for

answers to consuming questions about her family, her choices,

her life, trying to put at least some of her demons to rest before

it was too late.

Yes, but is it any good as a novel? Well, it is "fiercely intelligent" and, in some sense, "satisfying," but mainly Miss Gleick either is uninterested in its qualities as fiction or is unwilling to discuss these. The book is "hauntingly autobiographical," as she frankly admits, in the sense that, for the reviewer at any rate, it is never separable from its author's personal life. Most novelists would cOnsider that failure--else why not write autobiography under its own name? But Miss Gleick passes no such judgment. She merely concludes that:

The Furies, of course, will not be fascinating to everyone.

Helen's contemplations would be tiresome if Janet Hobhouse

had not been so smart, so fluent at mixing the literary with the

colloquial, so funny at just the right moment. But even those

readers who are not hypnotized by the piling on of phrases, by

the race to the finish, will respect the honesty with which Hob-

house laid her life bare.

It's like paying a compliment to a homely woman: If you can't say she's pretty, you can tell her she has a good personality; and if she doesn't have a good personality, you can at least tell her she's sincere.

To me, what is curious is that no one thinks that insufficient or seems to detect a note of irony in the absence of any more fulsome praise. It is as if the author's personal authenticity--here conferred both by cancer and by those feminist "demons" (round up the usual suspects!)--were enough to vouch for the worth of her book. And, indeed, this appears to be so. In the recent case, for example, of Mercy of a Rude Stream, Henry Roth's first novel since 1934, Robert Alter filled a page and a half with tributes to

Mr. Roth as well as to praise of his one previous work, Call It Sleep. Nowhere does he mention that the new book, or at least the one volume of it that has ap- peared so far, is essentially a rewriting of the old one but without its freshness or stylistic elan.

Perhaps this is an unfair example, Nearly all reviewers seem to have thought it cruel and churlish to savage an 87-year-old, recently bereaved arthritic who has finally mustered the spirit to produce something, however feeble, after sixty years of silence. But it is typical of the NYTBR's reviews, which are often a testimony to the personal qualities of the author as revealed in his narrative. Chief among these is "compassion"---a word that, having become slightly debased even among those for whom it has long been a mantra in such contexts, is now often qualified by reference to its "impressive breadth" or (as the case may be) "depth."