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.

A "trashily facile" novel about "the rich and overprivileged, grotesquely set against the backdrop of 9/11."

Jay McInerney -- that 80s hipster of a novelist -- has a new novel. Michiko Kakutani has a review:

"The Good Life," in contrast, is at its most powerful in chronicling its characters' romantic and familial travails, and at its most ham-handed in its attempts at social satire. Indeed the novel is a bizarre mix of the genuinely moving and the trashily facile, the psychologically astute and the ridiculously clichéd; part of it aspires to create an F. Scott Fitzgerald-esque romance, and part sags to the level of a Judith Krantz tale about the rich and overprivileged, grotesquely set against the backdrop of 9/11....

These sections of "The Good Life," which often lie submerged amid pages and pages of embarrassing writing, suggest that the author has both the desire and the ability to move beyond the glibness of his recent fiction and to tackle more than facile chronicles of fizzy life in the fast lane. In fact, this flawed novel suggests that just as so many of Mr. McInerney's characters dream of reinventing themselves, so, perhaps, is the author struggling to find a way to reinvent himself as a writer.

Too bad these author struggles don't take the form of doing another draft -- I say glibly, from the safety of my place in a writing form that is all about forgoing drafts.

David Foster Wallace.

I can't say I've read much of his fiction, but I love David Foster Wallace for his nonfiction essays. One of my favorite books is "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," a collection of essays, including one about going on a luxury cruise, the supposedly fun thing he'll never do again that he saved me from ever having to do.

So I was happy to see he's got a new collection of essays, "Consider the Lobster." I should have bought it yesterday at Border's, where I had it with me on the counter, next to a latte and a stack of bluebooks, in a pile with a few other books, not including Ana Marie Cox's "Dog Days," which I looked for but found wasn't in stock.

"Consider the Lobster" gets a nice front-page-of-the-arts-section review in today's NYT. Michiko Kakutani writes:

The strongest entries in this volume are written in language that shows that it's possible to be serious without being sanctimonious, funny without being sophomoric, erudite without being pretentious, and these chapters unfold, beguilingly, from the particular to the philosophical, from small case studies to larger, zeitgeisty ruminations.

(That makes me think of blogging: I want to blog like that!)

...Mr. Wallace is capable of writing about things like metaphysics and the politics of the English language with the same verve and irreverence he brings to matters like the pornography industry and the cooking of lobsters. He describes language snobs as Snoots ("Syntax Nudniks of Our Time") and "usage Trekkies," and he argues that few people make "very deep syntactic errors" in conversation because "there is probably an actual part of the human brain that's imprinted with this Universal Grammar the same way birds' brains are imprinted with Fly South and dogs' with Sniff Genitals."...

He's similarly able to show why he disagrees with language Descriptivists (who claim that "so-called correct English usages like brought rather than brung and felt rather than feeled are arbitrary and restrictive and unfair") by drawing the following analogy: While it can be argued that the dictum identifying "pants instead of skirts" as the "correct subthoracic clothing for U.S. males" is similarly arbitrary, restrictive and unfair, the fact "remains that in the broad cultural mainstream of millennial America, men do not wear skirts."

(Subthoracic! I need to use more words like "subthoracic.")

Unlike the author's last two claustrophobic [fiction] books, this collection trains Mr. Wallace's acute eye not inward at the solipsistic terrain of people's minds, but outward at the world - at politicians, at writers, at ordinary and oddball individuals of every emotional stripe.

Mmm... yes. I love this kind of nonfiction. Spare me your made-up characters and stories and tell me whatever you have to say about the world you observe. I know it's too much to ask that Mr. Wallace blog, but this reminds me of so many things that I want blogging to be. And that I love to get a nice, fat, juicy book of essays from my favorite living essayist.

I went to a David Foster Wallace reading some years ago. I believe he was promoting "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," and that was the book I had in hand for an autograph. The man seemed terribly shy, as if it was quite painful for him to appear in public. In the question session, I wanted to ask him about it -- are you the person you seem to be in the essays? -- but I just couldn't bring myself to risk making him uncomfortable, even though, at the same time, I felt the flat questions he was getting weren't making him feel too good.

Suddenly, it was time for the signing, and with my usual way of being the first person to get to the front when a crowd moves, I was right there where the signing was to begin. Then, somehow, behind the second person that got to the counter, a long line formed. If I were to get in line then, I'd be behind 30 people. The hell! I was appalled at my fate. I was first, kind of. And now I was supposed to get behind all those who shuffled obediently into the line? Mr. Wallace noticed my distress and took my book to sign:



He hated lines too, he told me. See what he wrote?

I recommend:

"Admission and Exclusion" at elite universities.

Michiko Kakutani reviews "The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton," by Berkeley sociology professor Jerome Karabel. Here's some fascinating historical information about the origins of the nuanced admissions procedures we academics hold so dear:

Mr. Karabel writes that until the 1920's, Harvard, Yale and Princeton, "like the most prestigious universities of other nations," admitted students "almost entirely on the basis of academic criteria." Applicants "were required to take an examination, and those who passed were admitted." Though the exams exhibited a distinct class bias (Latin and Greek, after all, were not taught at most public schools), he says that "the system was meritocratic in an elemental way: if you met the academic requirements, you were admitted, regardless of social background."

This all changed after World War I, he argues, as it became "clear that a system of selection focused solely on scholastic performance would lead to the admission of increasing numbers of Jewish students, most of them of eastern European background." This development, he notes, occurred "in the midst of one of the most reactionary moments in American history," when "the nationwide movement to restrict immigration was gaining momentum" and anti-Semitism was on the rise, and the Big Three administrators began to worry that "the presence of 'too many' Jews would in fact lead to the departure of Gentiles." Their conclusion, in Mr. Karabel's words: "given the dependence of the Big Three on the Protestant upper class for both material resources and social prestige, the 'Jewish problem' was genuine, and the defense of institutional interests required a solution that would prevent 'WASP flight.' "

The solution they devised was an admissions system that allowed the schools, as Mr. Karabel puts it, "to accept - and to reject - whomever they desired." Instead of objective academic criteria, there would be a new emphasis on the intangibles of "character" - on qualities like "manliness," "personality" and "leadership." Many features of college admissions that students know today - including the widespread use of interviews and photos; the reliance on personal letters of recommendation; and the emphasis on extracurricular activities - have roots, Mr. Karabel says, in this period.

Later, universities changed the goals of admissions, Karabel writes, in part because discriminating against women and minorities went out of style and in part because large amounts of money from the foundations and the federal government freed them from needing to cater so much to the preferences of alumni donors. Karabel characterizes these changes as self-interested: the Big Three wanted "to preserve and, when possible, to enhance their position in a highly stratified system of higher education." They were "often deeply conservative" and "intensely preoccupied with maintaining their close ties to the privileged."

You just can't win with these sociology professors. Try to adopt an enlightened policy, and they'll find a way to demonstrate that you did it for your own good. Well, maybe you did.

What's in the Times Arts section today?

1. A Princeton student (Kathleen L. Milkman) gets a big article, with a big picture of herself, all about her senior thesis, on the first page of the Arts section. How does one pull off such a thing? She did a statistical analysis of the content of the stories in The New Yorker. (Hmmm .... sounds like a job I used to have.)

The study was long on statistics and short on epiphanies: one main conclusion was that male editors generally publish male authors who write about male characters who are supported by female characters.

The study's confirmation of the obvious left some wondering why Ms. Milkman, who graduates this morning from Princeton with high honors, went about constructing such an intricate wristwatch in order to tell the time, but others admire her pluck and willingness to cross disciplines in a way that wraps the left and right brain neatly into one project.

... and left others wondering why the NYT put a big article about her on the first page of the Arts section. Standard reader response: What about my plucky graduate? The answer must be: we all care about the short stories in The New Yorker. ... Don't we?

2. New Oprah's Book Club choice: Anna Karenina. (The nice Pevear/Volokhonsky translation.) Can't say anything against that, can you?

3. Stanley Kubrick's crazy archive has been transformed into a huge museum exhibit. I want to see it, but--right now at least--it's in Frankfurt, at the Deutsches Filmmuseum.

4. There's going to be a big fundraising concert for John Kerry at Radio City Music Hall on June 10th. It has a name: "A Change Is Going to Come." That title is based on the beautiful song "A Change Is Gonna Come," which was written by Sam Cooke after witnessing a civil rights demonstration in 1963 ("I was born by the river/In a little tent, and just like that river I've been running ever since"). I guess "Gonna" had to be changed to "Going to." But that is one of the best songs ever, and it never hurts to stop and think about how great Sam Cooke was. Go to that first link and see the list of artists who have covered that song. Artists appearing at the June 10th concert are: Jon Bon Jovi, Whoopi Goldberg, Wyclef Jean, John Mellencamp, Bette Midler, James Taylor, and Robin Williams.

5. David Foster Wallace has a new book of short stories and Michiko Kakutani is not being very nice about it.

Unfortunately for the reader, such tiresome, whiny passages predominate in this volume. There are moments in "Oblivion" when we catch glimpses of Mr. Wallace's exceptional gifts: his ability to conjure both the ordinary (a Midwest motel room with a television stuck on the motel's welcome page) and the extraordinary (a Spider-Man-like figure, who may or may not be a terrorist, scaling the slippery side of a skyscraper); his ability to map the bumpy interface between the banal and the absurd.

These moments, sadly, are engulfed by reams and reams of stream-of-consciousness musings that may be intermittently amusing or disturbing but that in the end feel more like the sort of free-associative ramblings served up in an analyst's office than between the covers of a book.

"Reams and reams of stream-of-consciousness musings ... free-associative ramblings ..." -- sounds like a blog!