January 23, 2023 Issue

Merve Emre, in her "Everyone's a Critic," in this week’s issue, bashes literary scholars. She calls them deformed. She quotes John Guillory’s new book, Professing Criticism: “If there is a thesis that unites the essays in Professing Criticism, it is that professional formation entails a corresponding ‘déformation professionnelle.’ ” She argues that academia has ruined literary criticism. She says that in university, criticism is "more interested in its own protocols than in what Guillory calls 'the verbal work of art.' "  

Well, all I can say in response is that, in a lifetime of reading, some of the best criticism I’ve read is by university scholars. Examples:

Sandra M. Gilbert’s Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 1972 (Gilbert taught at Queens College of the City University of New York, at Sacramento State College, at California State College, Hayward, and at St. Mary’s College of California);

Bonnie Costello’s Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 1991 (Costello is Associate Professor of English at Boston University);

Roland Barthes’ New Critical Essays, 1980 (Barthes was professor at the Collège de France);

James Wood’s Serious Noticing, 2019 (Wood is a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University);

Helen Vendler’s The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, 2015 (Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University);

B. J. Leggett’s Larkin’s Blues, 1999 (Leggett is Distinguished Professor of Humanities and professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville);

Dan Chiasson's One Kind of Everything, 2007 (Chiasson teaches at Wellesley College);

Bożena Shallcross’s Through the Poet’s Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky, 2002 (Shallcross is an associate professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Chicago);

Eleanor Cook’s Elizabeth Bishop at Work, 2016 (Cook is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Toronto);

Robert Hass's What Light Can Do, 2012 (Hass teaches at the University of California);

Michael Wood's The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, 1994 (Wood is Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University).

I'm just scratching the surface here. These literary scholars are interested in the verbal work of art, deeply so. I enjoy their writing immensely. 

November 16, 2015 Issue

Judith Thurman’s "Silent Partner," in this week’s issue, is the fourth review of Vladimir Nabokov’s Letters to Véra that I’ve read. The others are Michael Wood’s "Dear Poochums" (London Review of Books, October 23, 2014), Martin Amis’s "In 'Letters to Véra,' Vladimir Nabokov Writes to His Wife" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, November 10, 2015), and Stacy Schiff’s " 'His Joy, His Life' " (The New York Review of Books, November 19, 2015). Of course, I want to compare them. Amis’s piece is the most adoring. It focuses on Nabokov’s prose:

It is the prose itself that provides the lasting affirmation. The unresting responsiveness; the exquisite evocations of animals and of children (wholly unsinister, though the prototype of “Lolita,” “The Enchanter,” dates from 1939); the way that everyone he comes across is minutely ­individualized (a butler, a bureaucrat, a conductor on the Metro); the detailed visualizations of soirees and street scenes; the raw-nerved susceptibility to weather (he is the supreme poet of the skyscape); and underlying it all the lavishness, the freely offered gift, of his divine energy.

Schiff concurs: “He sounds unmistakably like himself, if without the polish, the mandarin disdain, the stage-managing. The jewels skitter helter-skelter across the page, from an émigré’s “stoop-shouldered speech” to a 3:00 AM encounter with a “very hungry, very lonely, very professional mosquito,” to a “waiter sweating hailstones.” Wood dissents: “Not much memorable writing though, unless you’re fond of the purpler shades of Nabokov.” Thurman’s opinion is mixed. She says, “The earliest letters, intoxicated with language and desire, are intoxicating to read.” But later in her piece, she writes, “Boyd and Schiff both drew upon these letters for their biographies, so they contain few surprises, except for the revelation—a disconcerting one, for a lover of Nabokov’s fiction—that he could be a bore.”

Of the four reviewers, only Thurman considers what it might’ve been like to actually live with Nabokov. She says,

There is little doubt that Mrs. Nabokov took a keen interest in her husband’s every triumph, toothache, and fried egg. But it is also possible to imagine that, in bleak moments, she tired of his endearments (“my little sunshine”), bridled at his pet names (“lumpikin”), and resented the ostentation of a love that can be hard to distinguish from self-infatuation (“It’s as if in your soul there is a prepared spot for every one of my thoughts”).

Wood, Schiff, and Thurman all note the one-sidedness of the correspondence; Amis seems oblivious to it. Wood writes, “There are no letters from Véra in this book. There are none extant: she got rid of them all.” Schiff says,

In the end all of the correspondence would be his. Somewhere along the line, Véra’s letters disappeared. Dmitri Nabokov maintained that his mother—pathologically private, and well aware who the writer in the household was—destroyed them, although there is no evidence that she did so. It is just as likely that their recipient misplaced them; he was a man in whose hands telephone numbers evaporated, who could lose a book of matches in a tiny room, who might entrust his return ticket to the train conductor. We are left to reconstruct the object of Nabokov’s affection entirely from his side of the correspondence.

Wood and Schiff appear to accept the one-sidedness without question. But Thurman takes a different view. She writes,

At the end of this volume, you have to wonder what Véra’s qualms were as she disposed of her letters. She must have had some. The truth of her past would never be complete without them. Was it the act of a morbidly private woman refusing to expose herself—and thus, consciously or not, enshrining her mystique? Or an auto-da-fé that destroyed the evidence of wifely heresy? These questions reverberate in the echo chamber of “Letters to Véra.” “You are my mask,” Nabokov told her.

I find Thurman’s skepticism refreshing. All four reviews are absorbing. They raise the old question about what bearing, if any, our knowledge of a writer’s private life should have on our appreciation of his or her work. In Nabokov’s case, the answer appears to be that without Véra, he may not have been the writer he was. As Thurman says, “Each of them found a lodestar in the other.”

"Boyhood": An Unsentimental Story of Tough Survivorship (Contra Richard Brody)

Finally, Richard Brody provides his reasoning for including Boyhood on his “Negative Ten” list (see "The Best Movies of 2014," newyorker.com, December 11, 2014). Today, in his "The 2015 Oscar Nominations: Selma Snubbed and Wes Anderson Triumphant," newyorker.com), he says,

But for all the performers and directors in the Academy who may have received bad reviews, there’s another category that absolutely everyone within it shares, and that accounts, I think, for the movie that will clean up at the February 22nd ceremony. They were all children, and they will vote for “Boyhood,” which is an audacious movie in the sole regard of Richard Linklater’s sheer tightrope nerve in keeping the production going a couple of weeks a year for twelve years. The very fact of pulling off “Boyhood” deserves praise, but the movie’s absurd sentimentalization of childhood and adolescence, its vision of a boy and teen without a spark of ferocity, without an evil thought, without energies to tame or impulses to master—without any wildness at heart—could satisfy the old studio system. Even Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy had more spunk. Linklater’s version of the best little boy in the world will, I think, win the Oscar. Having nothing to apologize for means never having to say you’re sorry.

What Brody construes as “absurd sentimentalization,” his New Yorker colleague Anthony Lane views as a depiction of “a tough, daily quest to refloat and sail on” ("Balancing Acts," The New Yorker, July 21, 2014). Lane says,

So many of the men in “Boyhood” seem like losers, or bullies, or both, minds and mouths locked tight with disapproval and denial, and the challenge for Mason—and, you feel, for any kid—is not just to survive the squalls of youth but somehow to grow from boy to man without suffering a death of the spirit.

Michael Wood, in his "At the Movies" (London Review of Books, August 16, 2014), shares Lane’s view:

There is also a sense in Boyhood that ordinariness is not what happens anyway but what happens if you’re lucky. The film invites us to conjugate the messed-up and far from happy lives of so many adults (and of the historical world around them) with the modest, mildly stubborn sanity of the children. They are lucky but luck isn’t all they have. Broken marriages, drunken husbands, desperate mothers, violent school bullies, drugs, temptations to drop out, break-ups with boyfriends and girlfriends: the children survive all these because they know when to stop, because they can’t be lured into the follies of their elders and so many of their peers.

Wood goes on to say:

At moments you think they are not going to make it. The alcoholic husband is thoroughly out of control, as are the school bullies practising throwing circular saws at their victims. Something bad has to happen here, you think. Because it often does in life, and because it always does in the movies, once the possibility has been announced. In movies where it isn’t going to happen the violent alcoholics and the flying sawblades don’t even show up. Still, what is guiding Linklater’s story here is not easy optimism but something like a best-case scenario when the odds are bad – a refusal of the odds as destiny.

Wood and Lane express my view. Boyhood isn’t a sentimental picture of “the best little boy in the world,” as Brody alleges. It’s an intricate portrait of a kid who, through luck and caution, manages to survive the psychological wreckage happening all around him. Brody’s criticism of Boyhood seems flimsy, disregarding the film’s many strengths – its brilliant use of elision, its naturalism, its intimate scale, its “twin sense of continuity and interruption” (Lane’s words), its miraculous ability to make time’s flow visible, its discovery of the extraordinary in the ordinary. Brody’s listing Boyhood  as a “Negative Ten” is hard to comprehend. He probably thinks it's a provocative move. It is. It's also a disservice to a great movie. 

The Ides of March: Lane v. Wood

Last night’s South Carolina debate’s mesmerizing, nasty, opening moments, which saw Newt Gingrich and John King try to cut each other up over Gingrich’s ex-wife’s “open marriage” allegation, affirmed the truth of Michael Wood’s interpretation of The Ides of March: “politics is not about good deeds but about dirty business, a matter of getting down in the muck with the elephants, as one of the movie’s campaign managers puts it” (“At the Movies,” London Review of Books, December 1, 2011). It’s interesting to compare Wood’s piece with Anthony Lane’s review (“Primary Suspect," The New Yorker, October 10, 2011). Incredibly, Lane construes The Ides of March as a love story. He says, “The quirk of this movie is that, for all its pretensions to topical soothsaying and its somber machinations of plot, it remains, in essence, a love story.” The love that Lane detects is between the Governor (George Clooney) and his press spokesman (Ryan Gosling). Lane says,

There are small shimmers of gay longing on display here – Myers getting ‘all goosebumpy,’ as Horowicz [a Times reporter] points out, at the very thought of Morris, or tearing up slightly as he watches his boss breeze through a Q.&A. – but further than that the movie fears to tread.

Lane’s take strikes me as totally wrong-headed. The Ides of March is about as far from being a love story as you can get. Wood gets it right; the movie is about politics’ rottenness. But I’ll give Lane credit for his inspired description of the Governor’s campaign manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman): “the human equivalent of a smoke-filled room.”

Credit: The above artwork is by Robert Risko; it appears in The New Yorker (October 10, 2011), as an illustration for Anthony Lane's "Primary Suspect."

The Social Network: Denby v. Smith v. Wood

Just for fun, I want to compare three reviews of “The Social Network”: David Denby’s “Influencing People” (The New Yorker, October 4, 2010); Michael Wood’s “At the Movies” (London Review of Books, November 4, 2010); and Zadie Smith’s “Generation Why?” (The New York Review of Books, November 25, 2010).

I’ll be guided in my analysis by Anthony Lane’s view that “The primary task of the critic, (and nobody has surpassed the late Ms. Kael in this regard), is the recreation of texture – not telling movie-goers what they should see, which is entirely their prerogative, but filing a sensory report on the kind of experience into which they will be wading, or plunging, should they decide to risk a ticket” (from Lane’s Introduction to his great collection of New Yorker writings Nobody’s Perfect, 2002).

Denby starts his review excitedly, proclaiming “The Social Network” to be a “work of art.” He engages in some interesting interpretation (e.g., “‘The Social Network’ suggests that we now treat one another as packets of information”), and lays out an excellent overview of Fincher’s previous work. Along the way, he provides some wonderful, semi-abstract descriptions of the movie (“a tightly fitted mosaic of agitated fragments,” “a linear accelerator that breathes”). But it’s not until near the review’s end that his prose reaches its highest pitch, when he tries to get at what it is that gives Fincher movies their distinctive look:

Even Fincher’s patented junk and mess, first seen in “Alien 3” and then, in the rubbishy, derelict rooms in “Se7en” and “Fight Club,” has a perversely attractive appeal, a glowing awfulness, as if it were lit from within. He doesn’t hide the disintegrating walls, the sordid beds; we are meant to see the ugly poetry in them.

Denby’s insight – “we are meant to see the ugly poetry” – leads him to write what is, I believe, the most inspired line in his review:

The scenes of the Winklevosses in their boat, crisply cutting through the water, are ineffably beautiful; the twins are at ease in their bodies and in nature, while the Zuckerberg gang slouch over their computers in the kind of trashed rooms that Fincher’s anarchists and killers live in.

Zadie Smith’s “Generation Why?” is not so much a review of “The Social Network” as it is a rant against the evils of Facebook. She argues that Facebook is reductive (“When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility”). She contends that it’s degrading (“In Facebook, as it is with other online social networks, life is turned into a database, and this is degrading”). She claims it encourages pack mentality (“But the pack mentality is precisely what Open Graph, a Facebook innovation of 2008, is designed to encourage”).

Smith likes “The Social Network” because (1) it’s a recognizable portrait of “a computer nerd, a social autistic” (“Oh, yeah. We know this guy. Over-programmed, furious, lonely”), and (2) it satirizes Generation Facebook’s “celebrity lifestyle” vision of the good life. Smith’s description of this vision is one of the great pleasures of her piece:

Again, we know its basic outline; a velvet rope, a cocktail waitress who treats you like a king, the best of everything on tap, a special booth of your own, fussy, tiny expensive food (“Could you bring out some things? The lacquered pork with the ginger confit? I don’t know, tuna tartar, some lobster claws, the foie gras and the shrimp dumplings, that’ll get us started”), appletinis, a Victoria’s Secret model date, wild house parties, fancy cars, slick suits, cocaine, and a “sky’s the limit” objective: “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool?… A billion dollars.”

Michael Wood’s review is the briefest of the three pieces. Like Denby and Smith, he notes “the long, intense, information-crowded conversation before the credits,” but unlike the other two writers, he shows how the zinger that Erica scores against Zuckerberg in this early sequence (something along the lines of “You’ll go through life believing people don’t like you because you’re a nerd. This won’t be true. They won’t like you because you’re an asshole”) links with a line that a lawyer says to Zuckerberg near the end of the movie (“You know, you’re not really an asshole, you’re just trying so hard to be one”). Wood considers this linkage and says that it lends Erica’s line “a weird retrospective authority.”

Wood makes another illuminating point about the film’s structure when he says, “At the centre of the movie, with flashbacks radiating out from it, is the room where the depositions are being heard in the two cases.” This reminded me that my dislike of flashback shadowed my own response to “The Social Network” when I saw it a couple of months ago.

Denby admires the movie’s “ugly poetry”; Smith likes its satire; Wood notes its radiating flashbacks. And the Anthony Lane “recreation of texture” award goes to … David Denby for his felicitous “while the Zuckerberg gang slouch over their computers in the kind of trashed rooms that Fincher’s anarchists and killers live in.”