The B&WR of the NYTBR

I’ve had less that than four hours’ sleep each night for the past four nights. The muse needs her rest. Still, if you bear with me, I have one interesting tidbit below.

I have a point in here somewhere. Something about how to right write a good book review. Yeah, that’s it.

12:30 pm Wednesday: I caught those two errors above . . . I don’t dare read the rest of this post!

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The Balls and Walnuts Review

of

The New York Times Book Review (September 24, 2006)

There are good book reviews and there are bad book reviews. I can’t explain well the difference, but I know what I like.

Take Terrence Rafferty’s review of David Long’s The Inhabited World, a novel of self-examination told by the ghost of a suicide. Not my cuppa, but Rafferty thinks The Inhabited World “is a terrific novel,” and so it’s Rafferty’s job to prove it to me.

Prove it, Mr. Rafferty.

This is, surprisingly, not a depressing book at all, in part because its descriptions of Evan’s slide into despair are so simple and lucid and particular. “All at once he felt terrible,” Long writes of his hero’s first, nonlethal bout of depression. “It was a dire, hurtling sensation.” The subject is awful, almost unthinkable, but you feel a strange joy in the writing, the serene satisfaction of exactitude in the sound those two adjectives, “dire, hurtling,” make as they tumble into place.

What the fuck is Rafferty saying? Beats me. Depression isn’t awful (either you mean the word as “awe-full” or else its a worthless variant on “bad”) and it certainly is not unthinkable. And “a strange joy in the writing,” just from “dire, hurtling”? I don’t feel it, sorry, and Rafferty has left me with zero desire to open this book.

Contrast this with Alexandra Jacobs’ review of Tina Cassidy’s nonfictional treatment of childbirth through the ages, Birth. Jacobs tosses the reader tantalizing tidbit after tantalizing tidbit:

But the detailed description of a brutal 18th-century procedure called a “symphyseotomy” (you really don’t want to know), complete with an illustration of the long, hooked instrument used to perform it, proved too much to bear.

Details, that’s the difference in these two reviews. I can hang my hat on “you really don’t want to know” — Birth may put to the test even this doctor’s squeamishness. Any details in Rafferty’s review?

Words are life-savers in “The Inhabited World,” the strong, steady current of energy that keeps the novel going, keeps it generating those little flares of pleasure that get us all — writer, characters, readers — safely past the dark spots.

There’s a love of words here, all right. It’s not Rafferty’s love of Long’s words, however, but of his own . . . and nary a detail to tell you anything interesting about the story. What we have here is an erudite version of a 6th Grader’s book review: “This book was really neat. It had great words. I really liked it. You should read it.”
Back to Alexandra Jacobs’ review of Birth:

Husbands who complain that their newfangled presence as “coaches” in the delivery room quashes the libido . . . should be grateful they aren’t members of the Huichol tribe of Mexico, whose laboring mothers tie a string around their partners’ testicles, yanking enthusiastically as each contraction peaks.

Jacobs’ review fairly drips with details. I know, for example, that in Birth I will find a recipe for placenta pizza (yes, some women still eat the placenta) as well as an account of a woman who performed her own C-section with a kitchen knife. Birth may not be for everyone, but everyone can tell by reading this review whether Birth is for them. And isn’t that the hallmark of a good book review?

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Getting my nuts yanked by a woman undergoing the pain of childbirth . . . better still, a woman who blames ME for the pregnancy. Masochistic fantasies don’t get much better than that.

On that note, good night, sweet dreams, I’m outa here.

D.