By Steve Rhodes
I didn’t get around to this column last week, so this week we’ll do two weeks’ worth.
Publication: Tribune
Cover: “Two of Fall’s Most Buzzed About Novels.” You have to squint really hard at the text under that to find out what they are. In case you weren’t already lured by the illustration of a bunch of male figures with (apparently) hands in pockets standing around thinking (thought clouds) of generic depictions of books.
The Tribune book review is just . . . tiring.
Other Reviews & News of Note: “Military Manual May Offer Clues To Petraeus’ Plans For Iraq.” Is this the Trib’s way to spin the fact that they are the last to get to The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual out of the University of Chicago Press, first noted in the Beachwood on July 23rd and reviewed pretty much everywhere else by now?
And from last week’s Tribune:
Cover: “Male in America: Anyone who says growing up is easy hasn’t read these smart, new books.”
Um, who says growing up is easy? An entire TV and movie genre has grown up around the difficulties of growing up, not to mention . . . books.
So anyone who says growing up is easy isn’t that smart, and probably doesn’t read books.
Other Reviews & News of Note: “Weathering the Storm: Powerful memoirs explore New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina.”
Which might have been worth a cover – seeing as how it was the two-year anniversary and all. Sheesh.
Also: What’s this, “Teen Angst Redux” on page 10? So actually a third book on how growing up isn’t easy. Maybe this one wasn’t “smart” enough to be included in the cover lineup.
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Publication: Sun-Times
Cover: A bunch of back-to-school stuff.
Other Reviews & News of Note: “How possibly does a girl forget her first high school boyfriend, not to mention her best friend in the world and her parents’ divorce?
“In Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, my back-to-school choice for young adult readers, Naomi Porter trips and falls down a flight of concrete stairs and cracks her head,” writes books editor Teresa Budasi. “And that’s how she forgets the entirety of her still-in-progress teenage years.”
Now that sounds interesting.
Also: “Lobotomy tells the unsettling story of why the author’s step mother sought this treatment for her then 12-year-old ‘troublemaker.'”
Why, yes, tell me more!
And: “Anti-Hero’s Portrait Skewers Society,” a review of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England.
Go on, I’m listening!
Finally: “Age of Contrariness: At 70, [Joseph] Epstein admits he’s fallen out of step, embraces his hatred of fun and curmudgeonly ways in this 19th book filled with criticisms and barbs.”
Eh, seems a bit too cranky for me. But a nice run.
And in last week’s Sun-Times:
Cover: Okay, I own a copy of On the Road and I have nothing against Jack Kerouac, but my God can we get over it?
That was a sentiment I expressed two months ago when the Tribune book review put Jack on its cover, it’s a sentiment I expressed last month when the New York Times put jack on its cover, and it’s now a rage I want to scream to the world as the Sun-Times put Jack on its book review cover this week.
It’s not that the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road doesn’t deserve notice; it’s that we’ve been noticing the book for 50 years. It’s been drained of its significance and turned into a prop that can mean anything to anyone.
You know how it goes: It’s a book that affirms Christianity! It’s really a book about how we should have stayed in Vietnam! It’s actually an anti-drug screed! It’s about rebelling against The Man, man!
I mean, I’ve tried to read it several times and I can’t get past the first 25 pages. It bores me silly. But yes, I understand its significance in its time and place.
But what of it? What lessons have we learned from it? To me it is fantasist lifestyle nonsense for the vast majority of its name-checkers, as opposed to the true believers who see their own lives reflected somehow or whose eyes were opened up to alternative possibilities about how to live.
But I view it much like a lot of nostalgic culture from that time period. By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong. The other tens of millions were going to economics class or business school – or to work – every day. Now everyone wants to pretend they were part of something.
I’d be more interested to read about what Kerouac has wrought, and to see coverage and respect given to today’s inheritors who instead are told to put on a suit and grow up.
Do we believe in Kerouac or no?
Either live the life or blow him apart, but please let’s not engage in thinking some shallow appreciation of a beatnik author can put a patina of cool on your despicable corporate life.
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A Slate debate: On The Road: Masterpiece or Masturbation?
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Publication: New York Times
Cover: “Haitian Fathers,” a review of Brother, I’m Dying.
Other Reviews & News of Note: It’s kind of hard to resist this: “The trick of balancing a serious novel on a single potential act of intercourse can’t help causing its author, one would think, some performance anxiety.”
But it’s also a bit too much to open this review – of Jeffrey Lent’s A Peculiar Grace – with “All novels end, but not all novels climax.”
Nice try, but please.
And from last week’s New York Times:
Cover: A line drawing that kind of looks like Lou Piniella but is really . . . I dunno, author Denis Johnson?
Other Reviews & News of Note: “There’s not much reason to think that the Democratic Party has suddenly overcome its confusion about the passing of the industrial economy and the cold war, events that left the party, over the last few decades, groping for some new philosophical framework,” Matt Bai writes in The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.”
The Democrats are confused about a lot of things – the Iraq War, chiefly – but I’m not so sure the passing of the industrial economy and the Cold War are two of them. If anything, the passing of the Cold War has confused Republicans, who need – and have found – a new global enemy in order to define themselves and what they are against.
At its core, the Democratic Party still (ostensibly) stands for blunting the cold sharp edge of unrestrained capitalism and ravenous captains of industry, often using government as a leveling tool to protect those who most need protecting and to re-balance the scales of economic predation.
The fact that they do a miserable job of it – and in many cases merely pretend to stand for this – has nothing to do with the confusion Bai identifies, and in fact even the premise of his book seems wrong from the start, as if billionaires and bloggers are battling to remake the Democratic Party when the true internal battle is the same one that’s always existed – moderates vs. progressives (who have now had that label appropriated by their interparty enemy), corporate shills, meek souls and sellouts vs. true grassroots believers.
What might have been an interesting book would have been sussing out the main division between these groups: Economic policy. If Democrats only represent the middle-class and their health care concerns and job security, that’s a different party than the one who put the last first and took it from there.
On the other hand, if this book is really about the Democratic Netroots, the best such a book could do is explain that there really is no such thing – not ideologically speaking – except perhaps for a demand for authenticity. But I get the feeling that Bai’s book is more of the same old pundit gibberish; and Reason editor Nick Gillespie, the libertarian who reviews the book, isn’t much better as he takes offense, for example, at the “elitism” of Rob Reiner for interrupting a policy discussion by saying “I’ve got to take a leak. Talk amongst yourselves.” And the problem is what? Sounds more crude than elitist to me, but more than anything it’s completely representative of . . . a guy who had to take a leak. Please.
I think I’ve located where the real confusion is: Among the pundits who conduct our political discourse.
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Charts:
1. Tony Dungy
2. Navy Seal
3. Duane “Dog” Chapman
Alan Jackson’s wife is 4th; God (the not-great one) is 5th; Billy Graham is 8th; Ike is 13th.
Posted on September 11, 2007