Monday, January 31, 2005

Rick Moody: Worst Critic of his Generation? Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation here, standing in for Ron.   I'd sent our esteemed host an email on the following subject a few days ago, and since he's been called away on personal matters, he suggested that I might step in directly while he was away.  Now, Ron is noted for his civility, whereas I'm noted for my case of advanced pottymouth and generally unsophisticated thinking, so don't delete your Beatrix bookmark if I temporarily lower the standards around here but, as the parable of the tortoise and the scorpion reminds us, we can't fight our nature.   The cause of my ranting email to Ron was the one-two punch of disbelief I experienced reading Rick Moody's near-incoherent review of Epileptic by David B. in last Sunday's NYTBR.  (Yes, I know it's a week late but you have to factor in fulminating time.)  The "one" of the punch was the foolishness of the offending review itself but the even more potent "two" was that no one called him out on his shabby criticism.  Now, I suppose that because Moody has already been "Peck"-ed to death (one should probably qualify for a lifetime amnesty from criticism after being a victim of Peck's quill), others may have given him a generous berth.  But the review is full of such screaming boners that I'm frankly kinda stunned that no one's cried foul yet.  And since Ron's mission is to review the reviewers, this seemed a worthy forum to examine some of the particular infelicities on display.  Let's dive right in, shall we?   Moody writes:  "Among the reasons for this popularity is that comics are currently better at the sociology of the intimate gesture than literary fiction is."   This is such a stupid blanket generalization that I'm not even sure where to begin gainsaying it, but come on.  Does he really believe this, or is he merely seeking to provoke?   I understand that saying "That's stupid" is not a terrific rhetorical tool, but it does seem that some statements are so prima facie ridiculous that no other response will suffice.  Or, if we're opting for a bit more nuance, we might try, "Well, actually Rick, you're wrong.  By a profoundly long shot."  The "sociology of the intimate gesture" (which is, in itself, one of those poetic but nearly meaningless descriptors, but we'll play along with it for now) is the very stuff of literary fiction and it strikes me as a particularly brazen – and empty – assertion to make that comics are somehow better at this.    There's more, sadly.  He goes on:  "Literary fiction, obsessed on the one hand with defending itself against the popularity of cinema, is too preoccupied with story."   Again, one wonders what sort of "literary fiction" Moody is on about these days.  In fact, it's one of the biggest mainstream knocks against literary fiction that it's not especially narrative heavy.  Why does no one call him on nonsense like this?  A merely cursory list of "plotless" literary fiction titles would probably bring down the AJ servers.   And then:  "You read this kind of social observation only infrequently today."   I think Ron and I could cobble up a fairly comprehensive reading list for Mr. Moody, don't you?  It's probably fair to say that the recent much-criticized NBA nomination list suggests that perhaps Moody is looking in the wrong places.  In fact, the pile of galleys that adorn my desk (and Ron's no doubt) seems at times to be concerned with little more than just that.   Then there's this rickety little construction.  "Just as the European novel has a different set of concerns from its American relations, so does David B.'s story have preoccupations we might not ordinarily find in a graphic novel."   Now, to quote Will Ferrell in Zoolander, did I take a crazy pill?  Has no one noticed that the first part of this statement bears no logical relationship to the second part?  (Perhaps he should have specified "American" graphic novel, which would make it merely sloppy editing instead of sloppy thinking.)  But as to the larger point, of course European novels differ from American ones.  As do Northern ones from Southern ones.  And urban ones from rural ones.  And Spiegelman from manga.  Is this what passes for critical commentary these days?  This is the sort of annoying space filler that should drive smart readers nuts.   Once he sets aside the masturbatory introductory antics, he actually has some useful and interesting things to say about Epileptic.  But the discerning reader has long since turned the page.   OK, I've vented.  I feel better now.  Tomorrow, civility returns to Beatrix.  Godspeed, Ron.  Your readers need you. posted by ron @ Monday, January 31, 2005 | Permanent link

Saturday, January 29, 2005

Not Just a Right Bastard, but THE Right Bastard I'd previously mentioned on Beatrice that David Orr, the critic who put me in the New York Times, was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle last week. Now I'm able to tell you why, thanks to Tingle Alley's reporting: four essays from the NYTBR and this essay from Poetry, which explores the controversial terrain where poetry meets personality: "If you’re going to review a Larkin book, you’re going to do a lot of sighing over the poet’s racial slurs, spiteful quips, and dirty magazines. But why is that? Why do we feel the need to judge a Larkin or a Lowell or a Pound — or at least to judge them morally?" In part, Orr explains, it's because we want our poets to adhere to strict rules of behavior and public image, and "we’re less forgiving of poets’ misbehavior if the misconduct also seems to be a departure from these personae. In this, we’re not unlike William Bennett, the famous moralist, Clinton assailant, and slots player." Viewed from that perspective, "Larkin played a part we thought we might like--Common Man--yet he did things we don’t want to think are common at all. That we find hard to forgive." posted by ron @ Saturday, January 29, 2005 | Permanent link

Friday, January 28, 2005

Hello, Stranger... When I wrote about Wyatt Mason on Proust, I didn't realize that Seattle's sassier alternative newsweekly The Stranger ran an article by Charles Mudede that same week about The Proust Project, a group entry by 28 writers in the Summarize Proust competition that includes short essays on their favorite passages of In Search of Lost Time. "What real readers of Proust’s novel want are answers," Mudede says: "They want to know why this particular passage is more enchanting than that enchanting passage. They want a critic who can accurately determine where Proust gets his special form of juju from. And if the critic can do that, then they want him or her to expose the means by which this special juju mesmerizes the reader so easily and so effectively. An account of a childhood or college experience will not resolve these pressing matters directly but indirectly--which is why the best that the best of the personal accounts in The Proust Project can do is contribute to the mystery of their selected passages. But what you and I want is less sorcery and more answers; we need treatments that will help neutralize the powerful spell Proust has cast on us. Or, to put it a slightly more squirm-inducing way, "If a reader of Remembrance of Things Past wants to become a magician instead of the subject of a magician’s unearthly powers, then he must do his best to get a hold of Proust’s Ariel, pull him out of the air, strap his delicate body to an operating table, open him up (rib cage apart, gooey heart squeezed to a stop), and examine the grape- and olive-colored organs of the creature who charmed his ears with Debussian music, his eyes with Whistlerian colors, and his mind with Bergsonian philosophies." Um, right. posted by ron @ Friday, January 28, 2005 | Permanent link

Blogging Has No East Coast/West Coast Rivalry Personal matters will call me away from the book review reviewing on Monday, but I've received a very gracious assist from Mark Sarvas, the creator of what Los Angeles magazine (PDF) recognizes as one of that city's seven most essential blogs: The Elegant Variation. He already knows what he's going to write about, and, boy, is he ready to lay down a hurting, so brace yourselves. Circumstances permitting, I return Tuesday. posted by ron @ Friday, January 28, 2005 | Permanent link

Thursday, January 27, 2005

Following Up Some of Our Top Stories So Far... (1) More reviews for Haruki Murakami. In London, The Sunday Times, Hugo Barnacle calls Kafka on the Shore "a disciplined mix of the thriller, the fantasy genre and the literary novel" with "a certain peculiar conviction." (Read a bit from the first chapter and see if you agree.) Tobias Hill tells readers of the daily edition the book's "as nutty, funny and silly as any of those that have come before it," but "not Murakami at his best." Here in the U.S., Robin Vidimos (Denver Post) calls the novel "a near-mystical river trip into a foreign land" that "requires a floating suspension of disbelief to accept," but finds it worth the effort. (Well, Vidimos's exact words are "hardly a waste of the reader's time," which would seem to overlap with Hill's opinion.) Michael Shelden (Baltimore Sun) has unreserved enthusiasm for Kafka; upon completing the book, he insists, "you won't be sure whether you've just encountered a great Japanese novelist pretending to be a hip American or a great American novelist pretending to be a disaffected Japanese intellectual." (Yes, that's the Michael Shelden whose Graham Greene bio came this close to suggesting Greene committed the Brighton Trunk Murder; this British review of that book is notable for being authored by Peter Parker, who currently has an Isherwood bio out.) Finally (at least for now), Paul Lafarge (Village Voice) admires Murakami's ability "to cobble together a world that's lifelike enough to hold the reader's attention out of what are, at bottom, gross abstractions." He adds, "He has been compared to the American minimalists Chandler and Carver, but the comparison is inapt; minimalists believe in getting the details right, whereas for Murakami the details are an impediment to seeing the whole picture." Adding Chandler to the minimalist pantheon's a bold touch, but Lafarge may be on to something there. He doesn't love the book unconditionally, but he does embrace the flaws more fully than other critics who have simply proposed that it's time to pay Murakami respect--for Lafarge, Kafka is 'so strange that even its chestnuts take on an air of mystery," and become part of the overall effect. (2) As the real-or-made-up debate continues to swirl around Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, Caitlin Macy (WaPo) informs readers the novel is set at "a (remarkably thinly) veiled Groton" that contains "a character who is a dead ringer for [my] husband." Macy almost certainly scores points with WaPo colleague Jonathan Yardley for declaring the novel's heroine "no disaffected Salingeresque anti-hero coolly outing phonies," and she praises the frankness of Sittenfeld's depiction of her protagonist's adolescent sexual desires (in all its "throbbing, undeniable legitimacy") without the awkward conflation of character and author that marked Daniel Asa Rose's NY Observer review. Meanwhile, in California, Nerissa Pacio (San Jose Mercury News) applauds the "unflinching, nuanced character study" as Jesse Berrett (SF Chronicle) recognizes "one of the most tender and accurate portraits of adolescence in recent memory." So tender and accurate, in fact, that "its relentless self-consciousness is too much to take, at least for readers who are not teenagers." posted by ron @ Thursday, January 27, 2005 | Permanent link

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

"Reality is inside the skull." Michiko Kakutani (NYT) tackles Robert O'Harrow's "unnerving" No Place to Hide, which depicts the security-industrial complex that's taking shape right now in America, "not a futuristic place conjured in a Philip K. Dick novel or Matrix-esque sci-fi thriller." But is O'Harrow's reporting really " uncannily reminiscent of the world imagined by Orwell" in 1984? I didn't quite think so when I called the book "a thought-provoking, comprehensive account that strikes the right balance between dismissive and alarmist" in PW a few months back (read chapter one). Other reviewers are equally reluctant to invoke Big Brother so strongly. Miguel Helft (San Jose Mercury News) praises O'Harrow for revealing "the extent of the capabilities of the data-collection industry," which "have become virtual intelligence services in their own right." Though he warns that "unchecked government surveillance inevitably leads to abuses of power," Helft doesn't suggest things are quite so bad yet. Ryan Singel (Wired) believes "O'Harrow here shows himself to be one of the nation's finest reporters," but adds, "There is no J. Edgar Hoover in O'Harrow's book, no figure intent on keeping tabs on every anti-war protester using the latest technology." Which would probably stand as a refutation of the Orwell theme, even though Singel later states "there is much to fear in a world where FBI agents use grand jury subpoenas and Patriot Act powers to cull millions of records from a major city's businesses." Still, he points out, following O'Harrow's lead, this isn't a case of Big Brother trying to squash dissent but of basically well-intentioned people who believe they are acting to preserve freedom. Over at Mother Jones, Matthew Brzezinski does, in fact, warn that the "secretive new alliance" between corporate data collectors and federal law enforcement "could, if left unchecked, irrevocably alter our notions of freedom." But even one of the most liberal publications in the nation admits "the brains behind the security-industrial complex are not setting out to create an Orwellian state, but rather to use cutting-edge technology to track down murderous extremists." (Although, Brzezinski notes drily, "these bureaucrats and entrepreneurs are not very adept at proving that they are working in our best interests.") Maybe other reviewers in days and weeks ahead will pick up the Orwellian theme; for now, though, Kakutani seems to be the only critic quite so stirred up by O'Harrow's reportage. posted by ron @ Wednesday, January 26, 2005 | Permanent link

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

At the Risk of Offending All My New Readers... After noting the sexual explicitness of several recent releases, Jerome Weeks (Dallas Morning News) explains Toni Bentley's The Surrender to what I presume is a family readership. Now, the opening line, calling the book "wince-inducing for its subject--anal sex," is pretty funny, but what gets me is the bit about how "Ms. Bentley finds her Big Release in an unexpected place." (No word, however, on whether he says "it reads like a sex guide from Pluto" because she likes it doggy-style.) posted by ron @ Tuesday, January 25, 2005 | Permanent link

Yes, But Is it "Genuinely Insect Repellent"? Jonathan Yardley (WaPo) appears to be the first major reviewer to take on Bret Lott's Before We Get Started, which isn't too surprising since it's a trade paperback guide for aspiring writers, not exactly a genre that gets the reviewers's blood racing. Except, apparently, Yardley's...and not in the good way, as he invokes the specters of Gissing and London to attack Lott as an example of how "the rise of the writing schools has added whole new universes of meaning and possibility to hackery," not to mention "smug, self-referential and self-obsessed, literal-minded and careerist to a fare-thee-well." Plus the book itself is "genuinely repellent." Tingle Alley has already pointed out that Lott probably lost any hope of a good WaPo reviewed when he cited "J.D. Salinger's stupendously overrated little novel," Catcher in the Rye, as an inspiration, which to Yardley "suggests nothing so much as arrested adolescence and makes all the more dubious [Lott's] claim to have sound counsel for aspiring writers." It's a shame Yardley couldn't think of any better books by writers about writing more recent than those by Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty to steer readers towards; in the last few months, I've found much to like about John Dufresne's The Lie that Tells a Truth, for example. But perhaps it's an even greater shame that the material circumstances of the book's publication won't lead to many other reviews, creating a huge gap between Yardley's slam and the generous assessment by an anonymous Publishers Weekly reviewer who believes "Lott advances a case for a new and radically more hopeful genre of fiction," adding, "He imparts his own brand of wisdom on writing and the world of publishing with resounding candor and sincerity." posted by ron @ Tuesday, January 25, 2005 | Permanent link

Monday, January 24, 2005

Welcome... ...to the official unveiling of Beatrix. I put together a few things last week so there'd be something when you all showed up; the items below should give you a fairly good idea of where I'll be taking this blog. Please note that the list of links to book review sections at newspapers and magazines is very much a work in progress, one to which I'll be adding rather frequently. When I told folks last week I was doing this, one friend asked, "For the love of God, why?" I gave him a flip answer about publicity and traffic-building, which isn't exactly false, but there's a deeper reason: I'm a book reviewer, and I'm always trying to figure out how to make myself a better one. Seeing what makes other people's reviews work (or not work) is part of how I do that. Though I'll try to keep that in the background, so you just get to see the entertaining bits. (As to how the name came about...honestly, when I told Douglas I'd be interested in blogging about books for AJ, after Terry was kind enough to put us in touch, he asked me if I had any ideas for what to call such a blog; this is the first thing that came to mind, and nothing else could dislodge it.) posted by ron @ Monday, January 24, 2005 | Permanent link

Friday, January 21, 2005

Critical Reaction May Be Linked to Cat Ownership John Updike (New Yorker) , Charles Taylor (Salon), and David Thomson (NY Observer) all published reviews of Haruki Murakami's latest novel, Kafka on the Shore this week. Thomson adopts a conversational tone, heavy on the plot synopsis, before throwing up his hands and admitting, "I don’t know whether this is 'magical realism' or whatever... I think it’s far more useful to study the bare-bones directness of Mr. Murakami’s prose, the professional insistence on seeing what happened next and how it happened, and then the nearly throwaway touch of poetry." He finds parallels in Murakami's verbal artistry to the visual style of Japanese film director Kenji Mizoguchi, and builds upon the cinematic metaphor by holding the "cutting" between dual narratives responsible for the story's allure. Updike also starts out with a fair amount of summary, but eventually finds his way towards a discussion of "Japanese supernature" as viewed through the country's indigenous cult: "Shinto, to quote the Encyclopædia Britannica, 'has no founder, no official sacred scriptures, in the strict sense, and no fixed dogma.' Nor does it offer, as atypically surviving kamikaze pilots have proudly pointed out, an afterlife. It is based on kami, a ubiquitous word sometimes translated as 'gods' or 'spirits' but meaning, finally, anything felt worthy of reverence. One of Shinto’s belated theorists, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), defined kami as 'anything whatsoever which was out of the ordinary.'" Though Updike considers Kafka "more gripping than it has a right to be and less moving, perhaps, than the author wanted it to be," he still seems somewhat in awe of the novel...though to a lesser degree than Thomson and, for that matter, Taylor, who roughly mirrors Updike in believing "the book the author seems to think he's writing is less affecting than the one he's actually written." Despite that, he still recognizes that "Murakami's writing strikes a singular balance between the ascetic and the sensual;" bypassing Thomson's cinematic references, Taylor turns to Murakami's beloved jazz to explain how the author "does something in his prose comparable to what Miles Davis did in his great '50s work: His notes are spare but so carefully chosen that together they feel rich." Ultimately, though, Taylor confesses, "In big ways, Kafka on the Shore doesn't work." British novelist David Mitchell (Guardian), an admitted fan of Murakami, likewise concedes: "Detractors may also point to elements in Kafka on the Shore which repeat themselves throughout Murakami's work with enough regularity to smack of a checklist: portals into Lynchian inbetweenworlds; cool-as-Bogart semi-orphaned teenagers who think and have sex more how male middle-aged writers wished they had thought and had sex when they were teenagers than actual flesh-and-blood teenagers tend to; protagonists on quests for lost women; sexually frank assistants; hyperlinks to war-time paranormal experiences; random citizens who possess a more intimate knowledge of jazz, whiskey, coffee and chamber music than market research in Shinjuku would ever turn up." Yet Mitchell eventually makes his way to the point all the reviewers quoted above seem to be circling: though Kafka is "not one of Murakami's masterpieces," he says, "respect is due." (And speaking of respect, Murakami's frequent translator, Jay Rubin, has a thoughtful excerpt from Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words in which he discusses coping with Murakami's most violent scenes, a sentiment many reviewers might share after committing themselves to reading Kafka.) posted by ron @ Friday, January 21, 2005 | Permanent link

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

'Cause I'm an Adult Now... Eleni Gage (New York Sun) trails a few days behind the initial reactions to Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, and the novel reminds her that "youth isn't wasted on the young; it's endured by the young." This steers her into a long aside about celebrity teenagers, whose exploits "make my 30-year-old self wonder what I was doing all those years, wasting my youth when I should have been writing erotic diaries a la Italian literary sensation Melissa Panarello, or working on my singing career." Eventually, Gage circles back to the novel--which, being about a scholarship student at an illustrious prep school, doesn't really have much to do with the Olsen twins or Ashlee Simpson but, she proposes, serves as a corrective to the glamorous new public images of teendom that may plague adult women, by reminding us how dramatic even the most ordinary adolescent problems can seem when viewed from the inside. In the end, she confides, "I'm impressed with Ms. Sittenfeld's powerful, evocative prose, and newly content with my own life." posted by ron @ Wednesday, January 19, 2005 | Permanent link

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

You Say Mad-A-Lin And I Say Mad-A-Leen Wyatt Mason (New Republic) weighs in the new team translation of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (including the three volumes which, due to copyright restrictions, can't be published in the U.S. for years). But before he gets to that, Mason takes a long detour that kicks off with the observation that "everyone hates translations" and then explores why: "Sentimental, low-born, and bumbling; their work misleading, unclear, and crude: translators--the consensus would suggest--are in the business of turning gold into lead." Mason then goes on to show how translators from Jerome through Tyndale to Nabakov have struggled against that perception (and against the sacredness--literal or literary--of the original text) before coming to light upon Proust and his first English translator. "Reading the French," Mason observes, "one cannot argue the fact that Moncrieff's choices frequently are amplifications of Proust's prose. Although Moncrieff's English, taken on its own terms, is certainly attractive and clear, his consistent departures from the original French do serve to inform Nabokov's marginal 'This translator is insane.'" Mason then considers the revisions of Moncrieff before exploring the new translations, ultimately deciding: "After having spent the better part of four months reading the new Viking/Penguin Proust, and the old Kilmartin/Enright Proust, and the erenow Moncrieff Proust, I will tell you there is no comparing them. No matter the local differences aplenty, the global movements of mind and the quality of vision are undeniably, uniformly there. " Consider, by way of contrast, Christopher Hitchen's (Atlantic Monthly) observations last year; he focused primarily on Lydia Davis's translation of Swann's Way and decided, "I can't be the judge of whether Davis is right or wrong in saying that Kilmartin's ear for French is deficient. But... the laurels may go in the end to the one who has the superior feeling for English." He does admit, though, that in certain passages "it hardly matters whose English or French ear is the better; the acutest ear in Paris was Marcel Proust's, and there's no dulling it." For more insight in Wyatt Mason's approach to translation, Charlie Onion's interview is a good resource. At the very least, it may revive your interest in Rimbaud... posted by ron @ Tuesday, January 18, 2005 | Permanent link

Monday, January 17, 2005

We Can't Wait to See Harold Bloom's Reaction It's actually somewhat surprising to see Jessica Winter devote major Village Voice space to reviewing Christopher Booker's The Seven Major Plots, which "compiles a Jungian taxonomy of stories, distilling the entire history of the fictive arts into a handful of flexible but unbreakable archetypes--Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, the Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth--and then extracts from those seven imaginative drops a single battle royal between Dark and Light." Surprising, in that I've read the book (I wrote the PW review, which will appear eventually) and I thought it rather a mess. The ideas in the first couple hundred pages, where those seven plots get enumerated, are mildly engaging (if dogmatic) literary criticism, but they are buried beneath painfully turgid prose. The slog only gets worse in the remaining two-thirds of the book, described accurately by Winter as "a cranky old man muttering to himself about the good old days before the Romantics slurred our speech with their befogging opiates and hippie dream visions." Over in England, Roz Kaveney (Independent) matches Winter's assessment: "No book on which someone as clever and diligent as Christopher Booker spends 30 years can be wholly worthless. It can, however, be wrong-headed and disappointing if... his extended reading and deep pondering has not changed him fundamentally." Kaveney also notes the "great white male" tenor of the criticism, concluding, "There are many virtues to the democratic spirit, and one of them is humility; a humility that sometimes stops intelligent men making asses of themselves in public." Another English reviewer, Kasia Boddy (Telegraph), also observes that "[Booker's] claims for universality, though, would have been strengthened by reference to non-Western traditions." (In defense, there are a few such citations, but she's right: not nearly enough.) She adds, '"The problem with Booker's [theory] is that its increasingly broad strokes require numerous elisions and distortions," citing his bungled presentation of the ending of Middlemarch; the first detail that leapt out at me was when he claimed High Noon had a happy ending. Adam Mars-Jones (Observer) nails Booker on the even dumber mistake of claiming Star Wars is set in the distant future; he also suggests that any critic who "ends up condemning Rigoletto, The Cherry Orchard, Wagner, Proust, Joyce, Kafka and Lawrence--the list goes on--while praising Crocodile Dundee, E.T. and Terminator 2" has some serious flaws in his thinking. The reviews aren't all bad, of course: John Bayley (Spectator) exclaims, "No critic could have a more penetrating sense of why the great and the good in literature have earned their classic status, or a better nose for detecting a comparable excellence in new or unexpected places." Hyperbolic praise like that, though, just makes one wonder how often Bayley gets out of the house. After all, saying that films and popular fiction can tell tales as engrossing as the Great Books isn't exactly a school of thought Christopher Booker invented. posted by ron @ Monday, January 17, 2005 | Permanent link

Sunday, January 16, 2005

Charlotte Simmons Wishes She Could Be Lee Fiora I'd link to Daniel Asa Rose's (NY Observer) review of Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, except that the Observer seems to believe that making money off its archives is more important than providing easy access to anything more than a week old. So you'll have to take my word for it when I tell you that Rose starts out by pitching the young writer as the Opposite Day equivalent of Tom Wolfe, "a gimlet-eyed novelist posing as a 14-year-old student," but in the second paragraph he begins an odd and somewhat creepy path of simultaneous infantilization and sexualization. Sittenfeld is "all grown up, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of a big-buzz debut novel;" later, Rose condescendingly notes the author's Cincinnati roots: "Ever notice how Ohio girls are the ones most enamored of the East Coast? Victims of the so-near-yet-so-far syndrome." (And remember, this is the way Observer reviewers treat the authors they like.) Moving along, Rose not only conflates Sittenfeld's attractiveness, literary and otherwise, with the sex life of teenage narrator Lee Fiora, with particular enthusiasm for the blowjob scene, he freely admits to his critical strategy: "Blame the publisher, who made the questionable decision to send out press materials that feature photos of Ms. Sittenfeld’s real-life Groton School junior class, and even of her heartthrob--presumably the recipient of her oral largesse." By the time Rose gets to his closing advice--"Keep the gimlet eye, kiddo, but lose the snobbery. With heart and talent like yours, it’s beneath you"--one wonders whether he even remembers the line between author and subject. Other reviewers seem to have kept a tighter rein on their imaginations. Caroline Leavitt (Boston Globe) praises the "boarding-school alumna" for "achingly funny authenticity," but doesn't belabor the point. Amy L. Stoll (Rocky Mountain News) doesn't even mention Sittenfeld's background as she rhapsodizes over the "pure, unrefined narrative on the transcendental experiences of adolescence." And though Elissa Schappell (NYTBR) hits many of the same talking points as Rose, including the "gimlet eye" and the pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, she goes out of her way to take the opposite tack in discussing the possible confusion between author and narrator: "Most novels are autobiographical in some way, first novels in particular. But even allowing for that, Prep, both in structure and in narrative, feels like a memoir. Without an author photo of a teenage Sittenfeld posed on the quad of an elite East Coast boarding school, we can't know. And it doesn't really matter." Are we to infer that Schappell didn't get that Groton class photo in her press kit? posted by ron @ Sunday, January 16, 2005 | Permanent link