The Brief Return of the Maslin Watch

From yesterday's review of the new Anne Rice:

"Christ the Lord shares predilections with her other books. Even in biblical times and in the Holy Land, Ms. Rice retains her obsessions with ritual and purification..."

Because, God knows, an obsession with ritual and purification stands out as unusual in the Holy Land of biblical times.

Maslin Watch: Bulking Up

I think I'll be making a habit of Maslin Watching at the end of the week from here on in, catching both reviews in one swoop. (Like you care.) Yesterday she let loose with another twofer, covering new thrillers from Harlan Coben and Jonathan Kellerman, two authors she says "start with a routine situation and see how far it can stretch." But Coben's Just One Look is deemed "far-fetched even for a thriller," and given the narrative excesses Maslin's tolerated in the past, one can only imagine what Coben must have done this time--though she still admits "he does a good job of riveting the reader."

It's a whip-through critique, over too quickly to be especially outstanding or awful, though it does play to Maslin's strengths as a thriller reader. She deals with Kellerman's Therapy with equal dispatch, pausing at the onset to mark "the descriptive detail that is one of his hallmarks and one of the incidental attractions in his fiction." A hallmark and incidental? Never mind...anyway, she quotes from this one a bit more extensively, and one really must wonder, given the near-parodic dreadfulness of the prose, if she isn't cannily trying to supply the novel with enough rope: "The killer used the spear on her, then he shot her, too. To me that says big-time anger."

Earlier in the week, Maslin took on Transmission, the "wickedly astute second novel" by Hari Kunzru. This review's much heavier on the quotation, with a minor emphasis on synopsis, with just a smidgen of criticism, and that primarily through comparison:

If Transmission starts out with an eye for literate social satire that suggests Martin Amis or Zadie Smith, it winds up in a Chuck Palahniuk paranoid daydream of systematic unraveling.

In other words, it reads like one of the reviews where she's coasting, relying on tricks instead of working up the close readings that come when she tackles thrillers and suspense novels head on.

Maslin Watch: Revisiting a Prior Thesis

I have it on reliable authority that I was, in fact, reading too much into the passages from Truth and Beauty Maslin quoted in her review. Though the friendship between Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy depicted in the book was affectionately intimate, a reader who knew them both informs me it was not sexual. "Lucy was a tremendously physical and physically affectionate person, like a preteen girl," she observes. "As Ann has said, she got cancer at 10, and there were parts of her personality that stuck at 10-years-old. She was very good at demanding love, by which I mean she demanded a lot and she always got it."

That's thoroughly consistent with the excerpts Maslin and Oates quoted and Patchett's original New York article--and, on reflection, even as I was raising questions about the review's dancing around the issue, the relationship sounded a lot more like schoolgirl crush than love affair. I might not even have paid it as much mind had I not noticed a similar coyness on Maslin's part in an earlier review.

Maslin Watch: Things That Make You Go Hmm

To Ms. Patchett, "Lucy had white Irish skin and dark blond hair and in the end that's what you saw, the things that didn't change: her eyes, the sweetness of her little ears." As that may indicate, Ms. Patchett's love for her friend transcended the usual bounds of girlfriendly affection. It was fondly physical: they could curl up happily together.

What exactly is Maslin trying to suggest about Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy? (And don't think such coyness on her part hasn't come to our attention before now...)

In her story of a tender and undying friendship between budding writers, Ann Patchett often invokes the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. She presents herself as the dutiful, hard-working figure and draws another writer, Lucy Grealy, as the more glamorous and flamboyant one. The only thing wrong with this formulation is that Ms. Patchett's latest novel, the gorgeous "Bel Canto," had nothing antlike about it. It was the dazzling performance of a butterfly.

Well, here's the thing: in order to achieve that dazzling effect, you usually have to put in a lot of careful, meticulous work, day after day.

Ultimately, even though she thinks Truth and Beauty is "more repetitive and less concise" than Patchett's original New York article, Maslin recommends the memoir as a "two-character drama at the center of a larger story about how writers build confidence, get their bearings and find their voices."

Meanwhile, I fully admit to being late in my consideration of Monday's mystery review, this time devoted to Lee Child's The Enemy, the sort of " hard-boiled, swaggering thrillers" Maslin usually loves. After poking a bit of fun at one of his ads, she admits "he's got the goods." Then, as she often does, she puts this latest novel featuring a recurring character in solid context, preparing readers for how it "it serves its purpose: to explain Reacher's military training and to show why it has made him such a smart strategist and cool customer." Along, of course, with much quoting of his pithy dialogue. ("'You,' I said. 'Outside.'") And some bits that, if I didn't know different, I'd think were parodying the military thriller's conventions:

"Her skin had a copper tone mixed behind pure ebony black. Her eyes were like coal. Her jaw was delicate, like fine china. She looked impossibly small and gentle, for a soldier. But then I remembered her sharpshooter badges. More than I had."

Then she hits this insight into the appeal of Reacher, and of the thriller genre in a broader sense:

[H]e emerges as a classic noir loner, and a very charismatic one, despite his willingness and ability to inflict damage on those who he thinks deserve it. It is worth underscoring that these books, while crackling with assertiveness, do not present Reacher as a loose cannon. They avoid the ugliness of an action hero with too free a hand.

An interesting bit of restraint, considering her earlier invocation of Dirty Harry to explain Reacher's appeal, and one could argue just as easily that the "willingness and ability to inflict damage" is integral to such characters' charisma, not a counterforce to it. But she's right, ultimately: another factor in their appeal is often the degree to which their violent tendencies are kept under wraps until just the right moment.

Maslin Watch Averts Its Gaze Briefly

I understand that Maslin has thrown a bunch of books together again. But I've got paying clients today, so I'll have to skip this round.

By the way, she was right: The Rule of Four is pretty neat so far, about fifty pages in... NOTE: This website takes you to a Flash game I don't have time for either; if you play it, maybe you could report back with a comment?

Maslin Watch: Joshua Jackson, Call Your Agent

It just so happens that Maslin picks a book I've had my eye on, which I suppose means I'd best move it to the top of my stack: The Rule of Four. Because, hell, I'm a sucker for thrillers built around arcane manuscripts like the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili--a book I've been mildly fascinated by ever since I read about it in an art magazine when I was 18. (See this transcript of a radio interview with another Hypnerotomachia fan for more info.)

Anyway, this novel sounds sorta like Foucault's Pendulum starring the hip kids of the now generation, "a balancing act between riddle-solving and thriller mechanics, to the point at which dead bodies and detectives wind up at Princeton." I am so there. Oh, you want to hear about the review? It was pretty good; Maslin's on a bit of a roll this week.

Maslin Watch: It Was a Very Good Day

It's Monday, which means Maslin's probably got a mystery on her hands; this time, it's the new Michael Connelly novel, The Narrows. (Sarah will now add a comment about how of course Maslin found time to review the new Michael Connelly...)

It's actually one of the better Maslin pieces I've seen since starting the Watch. The opening paragraphs hit just the right mix of summing up Connelly's oeuvre, summing up this novel's plot, and offering glimpses of telling scenes--but it does offer a major spoiler (at least for anybody who's read Connelly's earlier work). So there's nothing really to criticize this time around.

UPDATE: Sarah refers readers to Oline Cogdill's review for the Orlando Sun-Sentinel, which manages to say all the important things about Connelly's career and his writing without giving away any twists to The Narrows.

Maslin Watch: But It's Not Science Fiction

"This is a novel in which a theme-park technician whose forte is animatronic orangutans surreptitiously takes on the job of creating a fake bride."

I am not a fan of the book-reportish "This is a novel in which..." construction, but maybe Maslin's review of Thomas Berger's Adventures of the Artificial Woman gets better. Or not, the next sentence goes: "Popular culture is strewn with such soon-to-be-treacherous creatures, from HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Stepford Wives." Now, the Stepford connection is obvious, but you're left wondering what HAL 9000 has to do with fake brides, until you realize she's lumping them all together as "soon-to-be-treacherous creatures," but here's the thing: there's no clue in her lead that Berger's fake bride is "soon-to-be-treacherous," and the Stepford Wives were the very opposite of treacherous, which was rather the point. Well, I suppose maybe they were treacherous if you were Katharine Ross.

But Mr. Berger's version is friskier than most, even if his story also has a decidedly porcine angle.

Somebody may, perhaps, be subconsciously recalling a long-ago viewing of Weird Science, featuring Kelly LeBrock as the soon-to-be-treacherous Lisa and Bill Paxton as the decidedly porcine Chet. But on we go, through the plot synopsis and occasional commentary, until we get to:

Adventures of the Artificial Woman finds the author of Best Friends and Little Big Man in high spirits, and in a high-concept storytelling realm. Whatever its missteps, it manages to undertake a familiar form of satirical fantasy and come up with something new.

This "something new" is, from the sound of it, Philip K. Dick's We Can Build You with naughty bits and lame political satire. But since it's from a "real writer," it's not science fiction but a "high-concept storytelling realm," even though all Maslin's outside comparison points are science fiction films based on science fiction stories--no, wait, I think Levin was able to escape the ghetto, too, as I recall. This isn't the first time this year Maslin's given an author the opportunity to evade the science fiction label; back in January, she bailed out J.D. Robb: "[E]ven if it unfolds in the midst of household droids and futuristic technology, Divided in Death isn't really science fiction."

At this point, I've got to ask: What does it take to convince Janet Maslin a book is science fiction?

Maslin Watch: Monday Morning Mysteries

Maslin looks in on two international men of mystery, Boris Akunin and Alexander McCall Smith. Akunin's Murder on the Leviathan comes off as an interesting pastiche of "the kind of parlor-room intrigue that can bring to mind Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes or a game of Clue," and Maslin deftly zeroes in on a few details that make the story work--or, in the case of the replication of 19th-century ethnic stereotypes, stumble. Although it's a bit odd, perhaps, to say that Akunin's written one of "the most successful recent mystery series to have been imported to the United States from faraway lands" when this is only the second book in that series to have been translated into English and published here.

Of course, the description is much apter for Smith's chronicles of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, the latest of which is also treated rather deftly in a few short paragraphs. The juxtaposition of the two books is a tad flimsy, but not entirely out of line; if ever Marilyn Stasio should seek time off from her mystery rounding-up duties at NYTBR, Maslin may be right for the job.

Maslin Watch: Didn't We Just Do This?

Come to think of it, we did--and since Maslin went fluffy yesterday, today she gets all serious in a review of Ron Chernow's new bio of Alexander Hamilton. She starts by detailing all the exciting things Chernow did besides read old letters and journals to research the book:

In the course of his research for this monumental biography, Ron Chernow arranged to lift and aim the dueling pistols thought to have been used by Alexander Hamilton and his killer, Aaron Burr. He visited the jail cell on St. Croix where Hamilton's mother was imprisoned for adultery. He found the precise spot on the island of Bequia to which James Hamilton, Alexander's father, disappeared after abandoning his illegitimate son. To answer questions raised about Hamilton's racial heritage, Mr. Chernow commissioned genetic testing of a lock of Alexander's hair.

But mostly he had to read. A lot.

After dwelling on the tonnage of Hamilton's writing for a while, Maslin pretty much whips through the life, here and there pointing out aspects she thinks Chernow does particularly well at depicting. A little more background on what he calls the "golden age of literary assassination in American politics" might have been welcome, to supply a richer context, but mostly this is a squarely solid effort.

Maslin Watch: Good Grief

Maslin considers Good Grief, which Jennifer Weiner assured me a while back I should read, when I queried her about her blurb. I mention this because of Maslin's opening remarks:

Good Grief is a novel that would dearly like to be The Lovely Bones. So Lolly Winston treats matters of life and death with such incongruous lightness that the book's cover (in pretty, eye-catching, Bones-like hues) features a pair of bunny-rabbit slippers.

Now, I'm still waiting for a copy of the novel, so I can't say much about its content, but if we might be permitted to judge a book by its cover for a moment--and apparently Maslin has given us leave--the comparison I would make is not to Alice Sebold but to Weiner...because the extreme close-up on the legs and feet is stylistically similar to the cover on her debut, Good in Bed. And my impression all along has been that, far from the semi-mystical tone of The Lovely Bones, Winston might be aiming more for the more ordinary chick-littish paradigm of examining a female protagonist's all-too-human responses to setbacks and tragedies as she slowly, but surely, gets back on her (bunny-slippered) feet.

"It's funny how you don't have to be related to someone to love them like family," Sophie eventually realizes, with Crystal in mind. Now there's a line to excite Lynne Truss, the grammar policewoman whose Eats, Shoots & Leaves has also become popular [and also reviewed by Maslin]. In addition to its faulty construction...

Just goes to show, I never particularly thought of "It's funny how..." as a faulty construction, but I suppose, looking at it closely, that it is, and "that" should be used in place of "how." But isn't Lynne Truss actually all about punctuation?

Maslin Watch: I Love Paris in the Springtime

Is Janet on a once-a-week schedule these days? We missed her Monday, but today she reviews the Library of America's new Paris-themed anthology, assembled by Adam Gopnik. I can't particularly blame her for relying so heavily on quotations this time around, because a book like this seems to cry out to be quoted.

Maslin Watch: Grammar Cracks

Sorry I've been remiss lately, but duty beckons and all that. Anyway, in her most recent review, Maslin takes on "self-appointed grammar fiend" Lynne Truss and takes a bit of glee in allegedly catching a misplaced modifier; I'm reserving judgment until I can see the actual passage in Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Here's a cute trick:

Ms. Truss has not succeeded solely on the basis of her punctuation acumen (though that is considerable — and by the way, she finds dashes and parentheses annoying).

Not that I'm criticizing it; I'm about to get away with something similar in a review of another grammar book, describing a reader's probable reaction to repeated agitation for a English third person singular gender-neutral pronoun by suggesting "one wonders what all the fuss is about." By the time Maslin purposefully misuses "it's," though, the schtick might be getting a bit old. Other than that, there's mostly a lot of quotation, but when you've got quotes this good, I suppose you might as well use them.

Lynne Truss will be appearing at Coliseum Books next Monday, so if you live in New York, maybe you should check her out.

Maslin Watch: Back in Action

Things just weren't the same without the regular Monday morning Maslin Watch, were they? And then nothing from her yesterday! I was worried I might have to find a new schtick, but everything is back in place, as Maslin considers Plum Sykes.

After three paragraphs of quotes extracted to convey the tone of Bergdorf Blondes, Maslin finally gets around to suggesting "the real-life counterparts of these characters and quite a few fun-loving others are liable to enjoy the brain candy that is Ms. Sykes's first novel," and though that infinitive phrase may be proper grammar, it's still a bit rambling, but that's what you get for trying to cram as much into one sentence as you can.

Into the blender go Bridget Jones, Anita Loos, "Sex and the City" and "Clueless"; out comes a diabolically amusing concoction.

Now, I admit I'm hardly the biggest fan of the genre, but this shopping list doesn't seem all that diverse--except for Anita Loos, which I'm wondering how the hell she got on. (Not that she isn't great, just that she's been consigned to the scrap heap of respected but largely unread writers.) I mean, I'm not entirely sure what the difference is between Cher and Carrie Bradshaw, other than that the high school kid doesn't smoke and screw like the big city columnist. And all Bridget adds to the equation is self-doubt; granted, that's quite a bit to add, but the other core elements remain the same.

Ms. Sykes somehow manages to treat this as satire while also playing it nearly straight in a book that boasts as many flagrant product plugs (Michael Kors, anyone?) as it does funny one-liners. "Bergdorf Blondes" brings to mind the wise men of Spinal Tap and their deathless dictum: it's a fine line between stupid and clever.

The thing Maslin seems not to get is that satire is best done when you play it completely straight--when you don't, you're doing farce, which is a completely different genre. Good satire works because it first convinces us of its realism, then suckerpunches us with the scathing potrayals and commentaries. Even Gulliver's Travels succeeded because Swift aped perfectly the conventions of the explorer's journal, though modern readers more likely than not don't notice.

Ms. Sykes crosses over to the stupid side in those ill-advised moments when she allows real life to intrude on fabulousness. Whatever else New York sample sales may be, they are not "so fraught with danger they make the Gaza Strip look peaceful."

But you know what? Without seeing it in context, this still strikes me as an absolutely dead-on representation of a certain uptown mindset, in which fabulous people compare the slightest travail to international catastrophe...and a lot of that mindset shows up in the Times. The Significant Other and I still chortle over a piece from last year, in which a woman wrote about being delayed at the airport for several hours and earnestly compared it to "a refugee camp experience." You might well call it "stupid"--but it's stupid on the part of the people who live that way, not necessarily on the part of the author who writes about them.

For all the book's noxious insistence that Champagne and diamonds make the world go round, Ms. Sykes has a distinctive, wily and well-deployed comic voice.

Can I just point out that I find the Times convention of capitalizing champagne utterly quaint? But seriously...I suspect this "noxious" holds the key to much of Maslin's (and likely other readers) reaction, in that Sykes is writing about an element of New York City that, for those millions of us who aren't members, is an object of both envy and ridicule, often simultaneously. (Probably for people outside New York as well, but the effect is perhaps more immediate locally.) So a story like Bergdorf Blondes is "supposed" to provide opulence in which readers can wallow and to give the rich their comeuppance at some point...and if I weren't writing on the fly, I'd probably go into Fitzgerald at this point blah blah blah. Anyway, the point again seems to be that--and I freely admit I haven't read the whole thing, though calls are going in to the publicist--Sykes may have portrayed the Manhattan socialite world a little too accurately for some reader's comfort.

Maslin also makes a crack about "the inherent cattiness of its genre" which struck me as a bit odd. She says Sykes is a better writer for avoiding it, but I don't know that I'd call it an "inherent" genre component in the first place. It exists in several of the books, to be sure, and some authors probably are working out some jealousy issues on their secondary characters, but if there is cattiness in the books, I suppose I see it coming more from individual authors and, perhaps, the narrative requirements of individual protagonists than from some "inherent" trait.

Maslin Watch: Would You Buy
A Used Car From This Book Critic?

"It's All True has more mileage on its odometer than the usual Hollywood novel."

Now, I know what Maslin's trying to get at with this metaphor--that David Freeman's novel has literary quality, ooh la la--but when you're looking to buy a used car--and let's face it, the "Hollywood novel" is pretty much a used car of a genre at this point--don't you want one with as little mileage on the odometer as you can get? And, yes, bashing Hollywood novels is a pretty easy rhetorical device; if you doubt me, just read her followup description: "not so much a Hollywood novel as a real novel that happens to be parked there." As opposed to the tri-state area where the "real novel" is traditionally set, you mean?

"The ripples of regret and wry wisdom running through this story go beyond the borders of the screenwriting world," she continues, and even I'm not sure what that has to do with anything, but I think it means Freeman makes his screenwriting protagonist emblematic of the universal human condition or something like that. From there, she goes into the usual cobbling together of synopsis and sound bite, and we're never quite told what makes Freeman's book so much better than any other Hollywood novel, unless she meant its nostalgic tone, which she claims has "more equanimity than despair and... a welcome element of self-knowledge." That doesn't strike me as all that inherently impressive. Oh, the prose sampled in the review reads well enough, and it's easy to see why Maslin would think it's better than Jackie Collins, but I reserve doubts as to whether it would hold up against Budd Schulberg, Gavin Lambert, or Bruce Wagner (and you might have your own names to insert here as well) until I've read it all.

Digging around, I found an article Freeman wrote back in 2001 in which he outlines the genre's parameters, pointing out its richness in ways that profoundly elude Maslin. It appeared in the Writers Guild house organ along with an essay by Lambert; both of them, interestingly, mention You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up, a Richard Hallas novel which sounds like it really ought to come back into print again.

Of course, a Maslin review isn't quite complete without a glaring omission, and in this case, it's an explanation of the title: It's All True was the title of a never-finished docudramatic anthology Orson Welles was making for RKO down in Brazil until the studio pulled the plug and typecast him in the industry as a money waster. Some might say his directing career never fully recovered from the blows...but then, that wouldn't be looking at the situation with more equanimity than despair.

Maslin Watch: Talk About Your Coincidences

The posting of Maslin's review of Still Life With Bombers on the same day reports break of Israel's assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin is the eeriest book-related synchronicity I've seen in the Times since September 11, 2001, when the Arts and Letters section ran a profile of Bill Ayers, a member of the Weathermen who'd set bombs at the Pentagon nearly thirty years earlier and not only didn't regret it, but said he felt he hadn't done enough.

David Horovitz (not to be confused with David Horowitz) has, in Maslin's estimation, has produced "an anatomy of an impasse [with] chilling efficacy." Praising his reportage, and quoting from it generously--but, hey, when you've got passages this vivid, you might as well use them, I suppose--she tends to summarize his conclusions rather than analyze them. Whether Horovitz is right or wrong in his assessment of Yassir Arafat, however, it seems that his consideration of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could not be more timely.

Maslin Watch: How Much in Today's Dollars, Though?

You know, maybe these field notes have been filtering their way back to the book desk, because today's review of The Island at the Center of the World, a history of Dutch Manhattan, is pretty good, if maybe a little hyperbolic. The only nit I'd pick is in this sequence:

Mr. Shorto assumes that certain things are established about early Dutch colonization of Manhattan and its environs: That Peter Minuit bought the island from Indians for the equivalent of $24. ("So he bought it. Everyone knows that.") That the Indians were ignorant savages, easily swindled. And that peg-legged Peter Stuyvesant was the best-known figure in New Amsterdam. Beyond that, how much has become common knowledge?

Somehow, I'm sure--or at least I would hope--Maslin didn't mean to suggest it was established as fact that "the Indians were ignorant savages," and wedged this assumption between an evidenced fact and an opinion that verges on fact quite unintentionally.

Maslin Watch: Nary an Orlando Joke to Be Found, Alas

"I had the idea that for some personal reason, which I might never know, she'd wanted me to unlock her riddle," writes Mr. Ball, the Savannah-born author of Slaves in the Family and The Sweet Hell Inside. Thus, he surmised, "I would have to investigate Dawn Simmons and follow her story all the way to the naked truth."

Say what you will about Maslin (because Lord knows I do), but at least she calls bullshit on such self-indulgent melodrama, albeit very politely, as befits a Times book critic, and with a little too much willingness to indulge the author and see where he goes with it. Apparently, in Peninsula of Lies, Ball's trying to do some sort of "Quest for Corvo" on Dawn Langley Simmons, a Savannah matriarch who used to sit at the feet of the Bloomsbury crowd... as a young lad.

The story itself sounds like it might be interesting, without Ball tromping around all over it, but the details and quotes Maslin selectes make his version appear utterly dreadful, like her singling out the book's "most specious descriptive touch." But she ends on a coy half-revelation that might have been more profitably explored, as an opportunity to examine whatever themes the book may have, rather than spend so much time on random details.

Maslin Watch: At Least She Doesn't Call It Noir Again

Maslin's contribution today is less a review than a fan letter to George Pelecanos, "one of today's most stellar writers of hard-boiled crime fiction" (thanks to Sarah for pointing out her longstanding admiration for his work). Not that that's a bad thing; I think Pelecanos is pretty swell, too.

It is a book that bears out Mr. Pelecanos's often-repeated conviction that the moral lessons of youth shape the destiny of a man.

As much as I like his novels, though, I have to say I'm reasonably certain this theory didn't exactly originate with him. And I'd have to point out to Maslin that a fictional story doesn't quite bear out any conviction of this sort, no matter how often repeated, except entirely by the author's design, which doesn't really do anything for the conviction's status as an independent hypothesis.

Maslin's right to point out, however, that Hard Revolution (which I started reading after hearing Pelecanos the other night) is probably best appreciated as an introduction to Derek Strange, who features prominently in the author's most recent crime novels, adding some much appreciated backstory to the character. She indulges in a lot of synopsis, though she's a close enough reader of Pelecanos to be able to point out his use of recurring characters, which surely must count for something. On the other hand, there's clunkers like:

Darius works in a Greek-owned restaurant. (There is a strong Greek component to the cultural mix of Mr. Pelecanos's world.)

Surely Maslin knows that Pelecanos is a Greek-American whose father owned a diner in D.C.; she certainly could have fleshed out that component of his writing more effectively. Perhaps, instead of lumping him in with "the crime-fiction peer group that includes Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson and others," it might be more interesting--and critically useful--to compare him to authors like Madison Smartt Bell and Richard Price, two white-skinned writers who have grappled with contemporary race relations throughout their fiction. To be honest, I can't see all that much common ground, other than the superficial genre boundaries and a shared publisher, between Pelecanos, Connelly, and Rankin, or for that matter Robinson (though I think a reasonable argument could be made for linking Connelly and Robinson thematically). It's easy to say you like crime fiction and leave it at that, but when you can make an argument that somebody like Pelecanos is doing more with the genre, I think you should go the extra distance and talk about what that is.

And what she does say these crime writers all have in common--a fetish for pop music references--seems a rather skimpy hook on which to hang a literary movement. I'm pretty sure she just brought it up as an easy way to gloat over having gotten a free "limited-edition CD with a soundtrack to accompany this novel. And it's a beaut." I haven't heard the disc, but it certainly looks good on paper: an effective sampling of the Time Warner music group's archives, with liner notes by Pelecanos and Peter Guralnick.

Maslin Watch: Oh Boy, Suburban Angst, That's New

In general, I think the "Dear Penthouse" gag is a bit played out, so I have to admit that the first of many quotes in Maslin's review of Tom Perrotta's "poignantly funny new novel about love and marriage," Little Children, doesn't exactly endear me to the book, as much as I loved Election long before it was a movie. But the uninspired way she builds off that quote thrills me even less:

"I'm a 31-year-old stay-at-home dad, and you'll never believe what just happened to me at the playground." Or maybe you would, since Mr. Perrotta tells his story so knowingly.

After that, we get a lot of plot synopsis without much critical intervention, and thank God for that, because when the critical voice does kick in, it tries desperately to be sassy: "So they kiss. And the earth moves. And, Houston, we have a problem." But after that, she does start to identify and grapple with the book's themes and Perrotta's particular assets, so things aren't a total wash.

Maslin Watch: Rock'N'Roll Hoochie Koo

Maslin's take on the memoirs of former CBS Records exec Walter Yetnikoff is...well, to be honest, I think she's found an apt text on which to apply her critical approach, and for that I'm largely going to leave her alone this time, save only to consider the following statement:

However frivolous he is about recycling old party-boy stories, he is more serious about depicting the power struggles, back-stabbing airplane envy and creative accounting that defined the business as he knew it.

I wonder--not enough to pick up the book, per se, but I wonder nevertheless--if the ratio of personal chicanery to professional chicanery in the book is as heavily skewed towards the former as it is in the book review. Because one would like to have a high-ranking music exec pull back the curtain and reveal the precise workings of the exploitation process, though one suspects this may not actually be that dreamed-about tome. In the meantime, though, I think we may have found Maslin's niche, as she writes perfectly well about a book when she ignores anything to do with its bookish qualities and focuses strictly on its status as an object of newsworthiness.

Maslin Watch: Flashy Grandmasters

Mr. Fischer's behavior also jibes with another observation included here: "The chess mentality offers rich pastures in which psychoanalysts may safely graze." Mr. Fischer once expressed interest in building a house in the upright, cylindrical shape of a rook.

Usually, I suspect, when someone suggests "rich pastures" for psychoanalysts, they have something a little subtler in mind than obvious dick jokes. But on to Janet's review of Bobby Fischer Goes to War (which I actually praised a few months back in the pages of Publishers Weekly, a review you can find on Amazon and which has ended up blurbed on the back of the dust jacket, I see).

She starts off well enough, identifying what made David Edmonds and John Eidinow's Wittgenstein's Poker work: "They created an ever-inflating social, psychological and historical context for this confrontation until the dispute legitimately assumed epic proportions." She suggests they apply this same literary tactic to the Fischer/Spassky match. Never mind for now that the event had epic proportions even before the first move was made; she's right in pointing out how the book expands from a report on a single chess match to a brief on the state of the Cold War in the early 1970s.

But then she takes issue with how they tell the story:

Mr. Edmonds and Mr. Eidinow sometimes show signs of strain. They explain Timothy Leary and LSD to anyone from another planet who happens to be reading this book...They remind readers that Watergate, the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers made Americans welcome chess wars as a distraction. They even explain the nature of vengeful behavior as it relates to warring Mafiosi in Sicily.

I don't see this as a serious problem, though, for the simple reason that unlike Janet Maslin, I don't have any memories of Fischer/Spassky. I was two years old when they played; other potential readers of the book weren't even born yet and while they may have heard about Vietnam and Watergate in school, maybe even the Pentagon Papers and Timothy Leary, they probably didn't learn anything about the public chess craze of the time, so it's worth setting up the context. (I forget how the warring Mafiosi fit in, but I imagine it was a legitimate colorful parallel of some psychological tendency.)

Her snapshots of the book's portrayal of its two leads are synopsis and quotes, but that's fine. And the remarks about how the two authors depict Iceland are fine, too. But I think she missteps again when she says the book "tries its hardest to amplify the strategic importance of the match." I read it as doing something slightly different: retracing the public's sense of the strategic importance, hyped by an eager media, while effectively underscoring how the two players were hardly ideal representatives of their respective nations.

And then, in a truly bizarre ending, she notes, "Mr. Fischer's favorite American player, the mid-19th-century champion Paul Morphy, toured Europe winning matches, accruing much attention and renown. Like Mr. Fischer, he had his strange side. He was found dead in a bathtub in New Orleans, surrounded by women's shoes." OK, fine, this ties into the opening thesis that the chess world is full of guys with sexual hangups of one sort or another, but does it actually add anything to our understanding of the book? No. Not only that, the emphasis on what passes for kinky at the Times ignores the book's real psychological depth, which is substantial. Ignoring the potential insights found in the FBI files on Fischer's mother, which Edmonds and Eidinow discuss at some length, strikes me as a rather embarassing omission, especially if you choose to leave it out to have room for a pseudo-salacious anecdote about somebody who has nothing to do with the main story.

Overall grade: mixed. The missteps are serious, but they don't entirely tank what was shaping up as an okay review.

Maslin Watch: Actually, I Rather Liked This One

Well, here's a tactic I haven't seen in a while: opening your book review with a thought experiment:

Suppose that you are in a stationary position, reading a newspaper that contains a review of a new book about mind-blowing physics.

And if the physics isn't mindblowing (as I believe the word is properly spelled, though I'd accept the hyphen if Bill Safire or Jesse Sheidlower pressed it upon me), the meta-reflexiveness of Maslin's lead ought to do the trick.

The cutesy commentary will bring you back down to earth, though, starting with "Electromagnetic forces are holding your skin and bones together. (Whew.)" In an effort to prove the cutting edge physics of Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos is okay for regular folks, she starts tossing out one-liners like, well, a decaying atom shedding electrons:

If at some future date physical evidence is found to corroborate the boldest of these speculations, trips to Stockholm may ensue.

Dr. Greene is the author of [The Elegant Universe], a book that his mother barely glanced at before telling him that it gave her a headache.

He is also a guy for whom Einstein's theories of relativity amount to baby talk.

And he is the cutest thing to happen to cosmology since the neutrino...