A little help for their friends.

IN HIS new book about the New York Times called Behind the Times (Random House), Edwin Diamond quotes Gore Vidal's observation that in the paper's Sunday Book Review section "the air is alive with the sound of axes grinding." But if this is true, why is it that the Review is so bland? Axes don't come much duller than those we see fecklessly chopping away in its pages every Sunday. Perhaps they save all the sharp ones to plant between each other's shoulder blades out of the public view? Mr. Diamond outlines a few cases in which personal animosities have found their way into print, but clearly, for every author who can make a case that an enemy has been given his book to review, there are a hundred who have grounds for passing out cigars over the choice of their reviewers. Behind the Times chronicles the sweetheart reviews given to New York Times insiders since Rebecca Sinkler took over as editor of the Book Review in 1989, but it misses the sweetheart reviews given to non-insiders. John Ellis, writing in Heterodoxy last November, did a splendid job of documenting cases in which conservatives have seen their books, when they are reviewed at all, airily dismissed by obvious ideological opposites while feminist and other PC books are routinely sent for review to the ideological twins of their authors (see box, next page). But he does not descend far enough into this sinkler of intellectual corruption.

Even a cursory look at its contents in recent years reveals that the New York Times Book Review has for the most part ceased to function as a critical organ. It is typically a cheerleader, an adjunct of the publishing industry, a blurb-writer's paradise. Miss Sinklet seems to have adopted as her guiding principle the rule that says: Don't make waves. Mr. Diamond quotes her as claiming that the editors invariably ask prospective reviewers, "Will the author have any grounds for objecting to you as a reviewer?"--a question designed to screen out the interesting and the challenging along with the unfair.

This perverse idea of book reviewing may have something to do with the therapeutic culture, the fashion for "self-esteem" and the horror of seeming "judgmental." But it is also true that the Times Book Review occupies a unique place in American cultural life. It is not just a magazine of opinion but a quasi-public institution, like the Public Broadcasting System or the National Endowment for the Arts. And, as with PBS and the NEA, every citizen of the republic of letters seems to think he has some right to claim in the Book Review. At least twice in recent years it has been sued for publishing bad reviews--so far without success. When Norman Mailer's sprawling spy novel Harlot's Ghost received a review by John Simon which was not to Mr. Mailer's liking, he asserted and was accorded a right to reply.

There are not many writers whose standing in the literary world would allow them to get away with a stunt like that, but there are a great many who share Mr. Mailer's belief that, whatever other publications may do to their books, it borders on the unconstitutional for the New Yorh Times Book Review not to show them due deference. In the face of such expectations it is perhaps not surprising that an editor who is not herself a literary heavyweight has taken to publishing more and more bland appreciations that read like extended publishers' blurbs, fewer and fewer tough-minded and argumentative pieces. This is what we might call outcome-based reviewing, and it comes naturally as a part of the more general dumbing down of American culture.

The same process must lie behind the paper's enthusiastic plunge into pop culture. A glance at what books are reviewed in a typical week is as dispiriting as the thought of how they are reviewed. Space for serious academic books, except those in the trendy fields of women's and multicultural studies, is limited, while a preponderance of attention is given to books about sex or popularized science, self-help and inspirational books, political tracts, thrillers, children's books, literary gossip, and trashy show-biz biographies. It's true that Madonna's Sex got a rather negative review from Caryn James. But it did get a whole page. I wouldn't be surprised if Alma Mahler was allotted her half-page because the reviewer was smart enough to begin: "Alma Mahler-Werfel was the Marilyn Monroe of her day."

Above all, there is an awful lot of pretentious fiction of little or no literary merit which is reviewed as if it had just descended from the atelier of Dickens or Tolstoy. It is in this department that outcome-based reviewing is most obvious and influential. Every novelist is entitled, it seems, to have his novel reviewed by another novelist who gives it the kid-glove treatment that he will expect from a third novelist when his next novel comes out. It is not exactly a case of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" but a vast conga line of backscratchers snaking its way through all the major publishing houses.

Occasionally, it is true, a foreign or ideologically tainted novel will be reviewed negatively, but no mainstream American novel from a mainstream house ever gets a really bad review. The result is that the fiction pages are not only uncritical and uninformative but repetitive and boring as well. The same approbatory expressions appear again and again: the typical novel is "richly textured" and "richly evokes"--well, just about anything but mainly "a world of its own." Some such formulation appears almost routinely. The reviewers seem to take this idea for granted by telling the reader that "you find yourself loving his world" or referring to "the important world each [story] creates," but at the same time they enjoy reminding us with some frequency, as if nobody had ever thought of it before, that to write fiction is "not to tell a story but to enter a world" or, indeed, a "universe."

These worlds and universes are "brilliantly realized." They may be "labyrinthine" or "Beckettian" or "Marquezian," but they are pretty sure to be both "hilarious" and "unsettling." The heroes are typically "outcasts," "outsiders," or "sensitive loners." They are sensitive because they have come from "dysfunctional" families. Indeed, there seem to be no institutions or social structures in these idiolectic worlds which are otherwise than "dysfunctional." It is not too much to say that the function of such worlds is "dysfunction." That is how they establish their claim to moral authority. Where there are victims of social dysfunction and "a]oneness," there is also authenticity. And the suffering of the victims is, needless to say, always portrayed "unflinchingly."

TECHNICALLY speaking, there should be no villains in these dysfunctional worlds. The whole point of such jargon is to depersonalize evil and render it obsolete. Nevertheless, to judge by the stock NYTBR review, there are a lot of "sinister" fellows about. Their purpose is to color the background "noir," to make it "hip" and "skeptical" and "sophisticated"--all self-evidently good things. They serve as a self-conscious, "postmodern" commentary, perhaps, on the shopworn existentialism of the rest. For, as Alfred Corn's review of Lempriere's Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk puts it: "Literary works of any sophistication usually include a self-critique." Thus, in these pages, the ideal novel would be described as Rand Richards Cooper described Michael Doane's City of Light: "a thriller with a distinctly post-modern, indeed semiotic, cachet, like Frederic Forsyth with a touch of Paul de Man."

Which is to say, like chocolate ice cream with a touch of anchovies. Yum, yum! Who could resist? Yet it is a curious fact that, although the reputation of Paul de Man remains unsullied in the New York Times Book Review if it does anywhere in the world, the central tenet of "deconstruction" is curiously disregarded there. This is that the author, like God, is dead. Thus he is in no position to obstruct with a "privileged" view of his own work the fantasies of meaning or unmeaning dreamed up by the industrious deconstructor. Yet in the NYTBR, oddly, the author is still very much alive--even when she is dead, as you can tell from Elizabeth Gleick's review of Janet Hobhouse's novel, The Furies, a feminist exploration of mother-daughter relationships.

Before it was published, Janet Hobhouse had unfortunately died young (42) of ovarian cancer, so there were even more reasons than usual to give the book the sweetheart treatment:

One cannot read a sentence of this book---a mesmerizing,

hauntingly autobiographical work without thinking of the au-

thor's death, without feeling that Hobhouse was searching for

answers to consuming questions about her family, her choices,

her life, trying to put at least some of her demons to rest before

it was too late.

Yes, but is it any good as a novel? Well, it is "fiercely intelligent" and, in some sense, "satisfying," but mainly Miss Gleick either is uninterested in its qualities as fiction or is unwilling to discuss these. The book is "hauntingly autobiographical," as she frankly admits, in the sense that, for the reviewer at any rate, it is never separable from its author's personal life. Most novelists would cOnsider that failure--else why not write autobiography under its own name? But Miss Gleick passes no such judgment. She merely concludes that:

The Furies, of course, will not be fascinating to everyone.

Helen's contemplations would be tiresome if Janet Hobhouse

had not been so smart, so fluent at mixing the literary with the

colloquial, so funny at just the right moment. But even those

readers who are not hypnotized by the piling on of phrases, by

the race to the finish, will respect the honesty with which Hob-

house laid her life bare.

It's like paying a compliment to a homely woman: If you can't say she's pretty, you can tell her she has a good personality; and if she doesn't have a good personality, you can at least tell her she's sincere.

To me, what is curious is that no one thinks that insufficient or seems to detect a note of irony in the absence of any more fulsome praise. It is as if the author's personal authenticity--here conferred both by cancer and by those feminist "demons" (round up the usual suspects!)--were enough to vouch for the worth of her book. And, indeed, this appears to be so. In the recent case, for example, of Mercy of a Rude Stream, Henry Roth's first novel since 1934, Robert Alter filled a page and a half with tributes to

Mr. Roth as well as to praise of his one previous work, Call It Sleep. Nowhere does he mention that the new book, or at least the one volume of it that has ap- peared so far, is essentially a rewriting of the old one but without its freshness or stylistic elan.

Perhaps this is an unfair example, Nearly all reviewers seem to have thought it cruel and churlish to savage an 87-year-old, recently bereaved arthritic who has finally mustered the spirit to produce something, however feeble, after sixty years of silence. But it is typical of the NYTBR's reviews, which are often a testimony to the personal qualities of the author as revealed in his narrative. Chief among these is "compassion"---a word that, having become slightly debased even among those for whom it has long been a mantra in such contexts, is now often qualified by reference to its "impressive breadth" or (as the case may be) "depth."

"This poignant story derives its power from a rare emotional depth," says Donna Rifkind of the title story in Abraham Rodriguez Jr.'s collection The Boy without a Flag. But to judge from the publication in which these words appear, there is nothing more common in contemporary fiction than "emotional depth." By contrast, Miss Rifkind qualifies her commendation of Mr. Rodriguez's stories as "boldly true to life," by saying that "being true to life is the first, easiest test of a writer's skill." Really? I would have thought that the task of giving his fiction the stamp of reality was the hardest thing a writer had to do. But it turns out that by "true to life" she only means: includes lots of drugs and violence.

For the excerpts in the review reveal that any kind of verisimilitude is at best intermittent (what street drug dealer tells a 13-year-old child that dealing drugs for him is "better than any Federal program you can name" or that the grade-school kids who pick up crack vials for a dime each are employed in "entry level" positions?). Miss Rifkind acknowledges that young Mr. Rodriguez's prose "is often as awkward as the book's adolescent characters" (I guess the ability to write comes pretty far down her list of the tests of a writer's skill). So why, then, is his book, published by Milkweed Editions of Minneapolis, accorded the honor of a review in the New York Times Book Review? Most likely because he is young, Puerto Rican, and writes about authentic stuff such as drug dealing and abortion and illegitimacy on the mean streets of the South Bronx. Reviewing in the NYTBR has become, among other things, a form of affirmative action.

ALMOST THE only things marked wrong by the easy graders of the Book Review are inadvertent sins against women by men. (They have to be inadvertent because if they were deliberate the books would not have been reviewed.) The hero of Joe Coomer's The Loop, according to Carol Muske, is good-macho, a man who "just is (by nature or perhaps because he's an orphan) a manly man, a tender, gentle, funny person--and an eccentric literary hero... he seems to exist without any inbred bitterness, nursed grudges, peeves, or, worse, trenchant Family Values." Unfortunately, this paragon--or rather his creator, who is a genius of "Marquezian" talents---rather slips from his pedestal when he allows one chapter to be narrated by "the loquacious, tumescent librarian Fiona," and Carol Muske--feehng jealous perhaps?--comments sourly: "I know of no woman, real or fictional, who would say: 'I want to mount him in the hospital bed and ride all the sadness out of him.'"

It does seem a little far-fetched, now that she mentions it. But, as a mere mistake of verisimilitude (albeit one with political undertones), it is not ultimately vitiating. On the whole, her opinion of the book requires the imperative mood: "Read this book--and feel better while you wait for the world to make sense"--which it will do, too, before her use of the words "inbred," "trenchant," and "tumescent" does. Such idiosyncratic (it does not do to say "erroneous" any more) usages seem to be a testimony to the writer's training in one of the many "creative writing" programs where they teach that calculated obscurity-not to say incomprehensibility--is "profound." For part of the clubbiness of fiction reviewing in the New York Times Book Review is due to the clubbiness of the fiction industry itself and, above all, to the schools of creative writing in which so many novelists have been trained.

THIS TRAINING has produced a latter-day version of the aureate style of past academic writing, and its influence extends to the assessments offered by reviewers who imagine that "creative" writing and good writing are one and the same. Even where this influence of the academic style is slightest, it still betrays itself in the sorts of examples of "magical prose" most often chosen by reviewers. To them, good writing is not the effective and memorable marshaling of words and images to a particular end but phrases that are resonantly obscure or charmingly periphrastic and images that are baroque and recherches.

Ms. Mackay's writing [writes Walter Satterthwait of Shena

Mackay's A Bowl of Cherries]--adroit, intelligent, and evoca-

tive--is a joy. Almost casually, she tosses off images that are

striking in their precision and their lyrical use of the common-

place. As Daisy hears Julian hiss at her through the telephone

receiver, "venom sizzled in the little holes." When one character

hurries out, frightened, into the sweltering night, where the

wind rustles through the trees, "the leaves, glazed and uneasy, showed their undersides like animals laying back their ears." At

the very least, this is splendid prose; arranged differently on the

page, it would very likely be called poetry.

Would it, indeed? Well, lots of stuff is, these days. Called poetry, I mean. But "precision"? Precise is precisely what these images are not. When was the last time you heard venom sizzle? Why would it be heated up to sizzling point anyway? Is Miss Mackay trying to tell us that Julian, not satisfied with poisoning poor Daisy, wants to burn her as well? And how is it possible to visualize animals that are simultaneously showing their undersides and laying back their ears? The one is an act of submissiveness, the other of anger or hostility. We are in any event left to guess why the sight of the underside of a leaf should suggest menace to the exquisite sensibilities of Miss Mackay.

Where a more brutal reviewer, unschooled in the ways of the "creative," might conclude that the author is metaphorically challenged, Mr. Satterthwait prefers to see her as, I take it, a deep-souled creature who sees what the rest of us do not see and whose images are therefore pregnant with significance in measure directly proportional to their incomprehensibility. "Poetry," as he conceives it, is not communication but shamanism. The author tries on the robes of the prophetess, and the critic's function is limited to telling her how good she looks in them.

If we understand that some such assumption underlies much of the fiction reviewing to be found in the New York Times Book Review, it is easier to understand why the nonfiction reviewing is almost as bland. For a novelist, getting reviewed there is a kind of validation of one's existence as a writer, as someone licensed, as it were, to look into things and to pronounce on them. It is more like receiving an award than submitting oneself to an examination. A reviewer who criticized a book would be like an Oscar presenter who criticized the winner of the award he presented. However good his judgment, it would be a serious lapse of taste. In the case of nonfiction books there is obviously the residual expectation of a basic correspondence between word and reality which cannot (usually) remain entirely unexamined, but some of the "creative" writer's writerly mystique almost certainly inhibits reviewers from making a just assessment.

REVIEWS OF the work of conservatives are affected by the mystique in a different way. They do not get the same validation as pundits, seers, and prophets. They lack authenticity. They have failed to get their cards punched with authenticity's symbols--in particular "compassion," "skepticism" (by which is meant nihilism), and alienation. The gang of the alienated, be it noted, is very large. And to those who belong to it, the conservatives' state of non-belonging is the most noticeable thing about them. The belongers become obsessive about it.

After Rush Limbaugh's first book, The Way Things Ought to Be, had sat atop its own best-seller list for nearly six months, the Book Review was finally embarrassed into noticing its existence. Walter Goodman, the New York Times's television critic, called the book "a rant of opinions, gags, and insults with a few facts or near facts sprinkled in like the meat in last week's stew." There is no argument or substantive criticism in this review, and the knowing, superior tone is sustained by treating Mr. Limbaugh as a curiosity, a cultural phenomenon, a fad appealing, as Mr. Goodman says, to the "booboisie" who are flattered when they are told by Mr. Limbaugh that guys like Mr. Goodman in the cultural elite look down on them. I wonder where such an idea could come from?

The interesting thing about Mr. Goodman's review is the shorthand style. Here is a man who knows he is preaching to the converted. It is enough for him simply to list Limbaugh's opinions--against liberals, multiculturalists, environmentalists, rioters, abortion, feminists, and so forth-- and cluck his tongue. To him and presumably to those who read the New York Times Book Review it is self-evident that such a man is branded as being beyond the pale by the targets of his criticism and not its content, and that anything he has to say must be distorted, oversimplified, or just plain wrong.

The same tone is present in almost all the Review's notices of books by conservative authors. Everywhere one finds the same unmistakable note of condescension, even in the most favorable reviews. Take the review by Charles Gati of George Weigel's book The Final Revolution, about the role of the Pope and the Polish Catholic Church in the collapse of Eastern European Communism. Mr. Gati calls the book "eloquent but one-sided" and then concentrates entirely on the so-called one-sidedness by criticizing Mr. Weigel for ignoring the other factors at work in undermining the Communist system. He admits that Mr. Weigel says that there were many causes for the events of 1989, but then he will not allow him to concentrate on only one of them, complaining:

By focusing almost exclusively on the post-1945 history of Po-

land and the Vatican, Mr. Weigel creates the impression that in

the end nothing else really contributed to the fall of Communist

regimes. There is no discussion of the gradual decay of Commu-

nist parties, nothing about the opening of the Hungarian border

to East German refugees, no analysis of the political circum-

stances that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. There is no

consideration of accidents, coincidences, miscalculations, missed

political signals-only of underlying historical processes in

which the children of light led by the church prevailed over the

children of darkness.

The sarcasm of the last half-sentence, appealing to the Book Review's supersophisticated readers' natural prejudice against religious modes of thinking, is used to reinforce the suggestion in the rest of the passage that Mr. Weigel is too simple-minded to have considered all the other factors that a cleverer person (like Mr. Gati, for instance) would have noticed. But on his own showing such an "impression" could only have been created in someone (like Mr. Gati, for instance) who ignored the author's disclaimers.

Stripped of its rhetorical sneering, all that remains of this passage is Mr. Gati's complaint the Mr. Weigel has not written a book more like his own. This is not criticism, it is publicity. Mr. Gati, a professor of political science at Union College, Schenectady, and author of The Bloc That Failed, never has to mention his own book. It's right there in his thumbnail bio at the bottom of the page.

MR. GATI'S is actually quite a favorable review, but it manifests the paper's general attitude that there is something tainted or suspect about anything emanating from a "right wing" point of view. Again and again, conservative authors who cannot simply be dismissed are condescended to and criticized for things they have not written or things they have which reviewers consider self-evidently untrue. Kenneth Woodward, for example, criticizes Michael Novak's book The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism for "theological cheerleading," merely for the suggestion that democratic capitalism is the system of government and social organization most in keeping with the Gospels--as if the book itself were not a compendium of arguments and evidence for that contention, none of which are considered by Mr. Woodward.

Here, to conservatives, is the more familiar face of outcome-based reviewing: if an author comes to a conclusion approved of by the reviewer--that is, a liberal one--he is applauded; if he does not he is condemned. Thus, John Brademas praises Thomas Sowell's Inside American Education for its criticism of schools of education, dumb jocks, and college rankings by journalists, but it is so obvious to him as to be beyond argument that Mr. Sowell is wrong to say that more money does not necessarily mean better education. Usually a reviewer can simply point to a book's "right wing" provenance to discredit it ipso facto. Thus Nina Auerbach agrees with Gerald Graft (in Beyond the Culture Wars) in deploring "the journalists who publicize these attacks [on universities] as disinterested without noting their origins in the political right wing." There is a splendid shamelessness about such obvious partisanship. The authors of the reviews in the NYTBR often feel that they owe the reader not even a pretense of objectivity, impartiality, or judicious weighings up of pros and cons. They and the editors alike assume that the audience is of one mind on all the important issues of the day. So it is that Andrew Delbanco introduces his review of a biography of Abraham Lincoln with this heartwarming story:

My eight-year-old daughter, confused by her father's reverence

for a Republican President, tried this theory out on me the

other night: "In the old days the good guys were the Republi-

cans; now it's the other way around." "Something like that" was

my parentally evasive reply, as I worried that I had been en-

couraging her to see the world through the categories of a

child---a privilege she will, alas, soon outgrow.

This is the sort of thing that could happen to any of us. In fact, I seem to remember having a similar conversation with my son after incautiously expressing admiration for Grover Cleveland. But in a review with pretensions to academic seriousness it is disastrously out of place.

Or rather, the fact that it is not, so far as Miss Sinkler and her fellow editors are concerned, is very revealing about what academic seriousness means these days. For it seems to be not a disciplined habit of mind but rather an attitude, like the smug yuppie coda to Mr. Delbanco's confirmation to his daughter that the Republicans are now the bad guys: "Not that a clever chap like me thinks in such crude terms," he seems to be assuring us, "but as a rough and ready approximation of the moral order it could be allowed to stand, I thought, for the convenience of an eight-year-old who may one day be almost as brilliant as I am." When the outcome-based review finishes congratulating its right-thinking subject, it proceeds to congratulate its right-thinking self. Welcome to intellectual narcissism; welcome to the Book Review of the Nineties.