I was astonished, reading Imaginary Homelands, at the tone of some of Rushdie’s book reviews:
- Umberto Eco (Foucault’s Pendulum): “Unfortunately, the journey to this truth is so turgid that it’s impossible to care about reaching the goal. This is Spielbergery without the action or bullwhips, and if, as Anthony Burgess threatens on the jacket, ‘this is the way the European novel is going,’ we should all catch a bus in the opposite direction…” (272).
- V. S. Naipaul (Among the Believers): “Terrible things are being done today in the name of Islam; but simplification of the issues, when it involves omitting everything that can’t easily be blistered by Naupaul’s famous Olympian disgust, is no help.” This “makes Among the Believers, for all its brilliance of observation and depiction, a rather superficial book” (375).
Note to self: don’t ask Rushdie to blurb my book.
Say what you like about Rushdie, his skin is about as thin as that of the USS Maine. He delivered a spellbinding lecture here in the winter of 2003-04; during the Q&A, some thoughtful Madisonian asked whether this whole fatwa thing didn’t just propel him to fame and wealth: wasn’t it rather a convenience to have had the radicalized element of the second-largest religion on earth told they would receive an eternity in paradise for murdering him, plus a few million dollars to tide them over until then?
Rushdie’s answer was less furious than it might have been.
Rushdie’s strength as a reviewer lies in that forthrightness: a guy who takes down Eco, Naipaul, Graham Greene (“a rather plain Panamanian plonk,” 215), Julian Barnes, and Stephen Hawking (“a particularly bad case of Premature Eurekitis,” 261) is that much more persuasive when selling his readers on an Indian cinéaste (Satyajit Ray) who doesn’t get much exposure hereabouts.
Reading his work makes me wonder whether my own critical writing is too tame: if my arguments don’t draw blood, are they as useful to the scholarly world as they could be?
Of course Rushdie’s authority matches his audacity, and he can offend without fear of repercussion; he doesn’t have to get tenure, or go to conferences with Naipaul, Greene, et al.
interesting!
I’ve actually been curious about styles of critiquing for a while, since I’ve done some on past blogs. I especially find it difficult to review a book if I know the author. (I say this like I know tons. I know three, online.)
I wonder if the connections created by the net will make reviewers nicer? Though I suppose there will always be people like Rushdie…
anyway, just wanted to say I liked the post
Naipaul’s pretty vicious himownself, though I’m thinking more of within his fiction than without (eh, there’s both).
Maybe it’s actually that Rushdie is _not_ thick-skinned at all and he’s taking down authors he feels threatened by.
I’m not sure that sniping criticisms are the most useful tone for book reviews. Unless, perhaps, you are reading them to be entertained. What is the purpose of book reviews, anyway? I guess that’s my larger question.
Grace’s point about an increasingly networked literati had me thinking in exactly your direction, Sisyphus: the reductio of a kindly, civilized reviewership leads to an eternity of NYTimes Book Reviews: vague blandishments for all, and thoughtful shrugs when a book isn’t Quite the Thing. Readers need reviewers who will say that a book is a travesty.
In the case of a Naipaul, I’m pretty sure we would ignore the critique of almost anyone less rooted in the literary imagination than Rushdie. But in the case of the other 99% of the books out there, there really is a role to be played by bloggers. I think.
Have you been following Seal Press Disaster #2? The disaster is titanic—Seal Press has come to stand in for the contemporary feminist movement’s privileging of whiteness—and the rhetoric of those attacking the Press has been unremittingly Rushdieësque, and thank heavens for that.
Oh yeah, the Seal Press debacle is sure a debacle.
/tautological observation.
But more generally (outside the realm of book reviews), I think there’s a difference between viciousness, which I’d feel uncomfortable with, and forthrightness, which my advisor has been encouraging me to use more often. As graduate students, we’re trained in a weird mode of either ATTACK!!! or deference, with very little practice in simply making strong claims without tearing others down (or having the tear-down be the main purpose of the writing). So I’m in favor of, shall we say, modulated forthrightness.
Yes, there is definitely a place for constructive criticism, rather than criticism that only makes the criticizer feel proud and superior. That always gets to be tricky though as people vary so widely in their thick-skinned-ness, and something that is true and useful can get taken way too intensely or personally. Even though grad school is supposed to be a long toughening process, I’m still not very good with keeping that distancing balanced.