In the Book Review: The McCarthy Incident
I was leafing innocently through the New York Times Book Review on Sunday, to learn what the poets in Ghana are doing these days, when I came across a review by Tom McCarthy of Clancy Martin’s How to Sell and had the settled order of my literary world violently detonated. We’re talking comedy-style glasses-falling-off spewing-milk-out-the-mouth slapstick here.
It had been a fairly tranquil Book Review up to that point. True, the cover illustration by Matt Dorfman was almost comically hideous, but that was to be expected (the illustrations in the Book Review are always either working hard to be hideous or working hard to upstage or out-clever the review they accompany – sometimes both). The book chosen for the first review, Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton, wasn’t bad, and the review, by Bruce Barcott, was spirited. And in the letters page, former Metropolitan Opera violinist Les Dreyer told a charming anecdote about spotting the great opera singer Marian Anderson sitting demurely in the audience during the Met’s Farewell Gala in 1966 and wondering why she wasn’t up on the stage with opera’s other luminaries. At intermission he works up the courage to ask her:
She lowered her eyes. I peered over the pit railing and beheld her slender hands folded over the crook of a cane. I reached over and extended my right hand, which she enclosed firmly with her. For several silent minutes we held hands, while tears flowed on both sides of the pit railing. At last she said softly that she hoped to be remembered as Ulrica (in her 1955 Met debut in Verdi’s “Ballo in Maschera”), not hobbling about with a cane or being a “nuisance” onstage in a wheelchair.
Delightful, and pure Marian Anderson. But trouble was brewing, and I, bemused by Dreyer’s vignette, didn’t pay proper attention or I’d have seen it. I’d have spotted dark clouds, for instance, in David Gates’ long review of Counterpoint’s new reissue of talentless novelist Janet Frame’s Towards Another Summer, in which he compares Frame to some other female writers and draws an artistic equivalence between Virginia Woolf and Mary Gaitskill, but no … it was a drowsy morning, after all, and I was pinned rather agreeably under roughly 140 pounds of sleeping basset hound.
And the next piece was fantastic, a lively, hugely readable review by David Leavitt of Reynolds Price’s new memoir Ardent Spirits. The fun of this review was virtually built in: Price’s memoir is as dicey and circumspect on the subject of gay life as Leavitt’s writings have always been direct and dramatic – the pairing here was inspired, and it paid off.
There followed some standard Book Review stuff, and I was further lulled. I smiled to see the great Jonathan Rauch delivering up a generous helping of prose (reviewing the latest trifle from Richard Posner – the title escapes me, but the subtext-title would be the same as it is for all of his books: Something I Just Read About in the Paper This Morning). This essay had me smiling so broadly that as I sailed into the next – McCarthy’s – my heart was light and my eyes were sparkling, the snail was on the thorn, and all was right with the reviewing world.
And at first McCarthy didn’t disappoint. He’s a smart writer, and he opens his review by publicly doubting the hyperventilating blurbs accompanying Martin’s How to Sell (Jonathan Franzen wrote one, and somebody called Benjamin Kunkel). Even when McCarthy’s prose occasionally faltered (”To argue out the merits or otherwise of claiming originality when some types of repetition are nothing to be ashamed of would take more space than I have here” – well, yes, if you write like that), I read on, naive and serene.
Then I came to it, and the Peace of Versailles was shattered. It happened during a sentence in which McCarthy’s talking about Faulkner. I’ll never forget where I was the moment I read it (well, I was still pinned under the aforementioned basset hound, but that’s not the point). All unsuspecting, I read this:
Quentin’s section of The Sound and the Fury, perhaps the greatest of all American novels (or, for that matter, of all novels) …”
Naturally, I read no more that day.
After the initial paroxysms of anguish had subsided, I thought of calling friends at the Times – surely the editorial ranks had been decimated by the swine flu? How else to explain such a howler, such a glaring, blaring monkey’s ass of a line slipping through into print? McCarthy himself can’t take all the blame – he’s young, after all, and Faulkner’s fat, lazy, rambling, incoherent blatherings appeal especially to young people (most of whom think if they are similarly fat, rambling, and incoherent, they might be able to dodge the boring old work of crafting fiction). But young or not, swine flu or not, he shouldn’t have been allowed his True Confessions moment – how can anybody take the rest of McCarthy’s review seriously, having read that scream of delirium? How can anybody take the rest of the Book Review seriously, having found such a nugget of appalling surreality lodged in an otherwise straightforward essay?
The Sound and the Fury is not the greatest of all novels. In comparison with such works as (pause for literally a nanosecond to summon a mental list) War and Peace, Tale of Genji, or Tom Jones, it’s a speck of dirt, an entirely forgettable burp of bad taste. In comparison with such American works as (another nanosecond) Moby Dick, The House of Mirth, or The Recognitions, it looks like just the amateurish scrapbook it is. Hell, in comparison with other 1929 novels, it gets spanked around the room like a band camp nerd – what can it do against competition like All Quiet on the Western Front, for instance, or the most dominant example imaginable, Look Homeward, Angel?
Still, nonsense can work its deviltry. Don’t believe me? Wait for a dramatic pause in the action the next time you’re taking in “Hedda Gabler,” then stand up and shout “Hedda looks like my mum!” You’ll be escorted from the theater, but I guarantee: you’ll have ruined the evening for everybody else.
Will I return to the Book Review, or has the McCarthy Incident forever torn us asunder? I don’t know. I just don’t know. To quote Cletus T. Judd, perhaps the greatest of all American country music singers (or, for that matter, of all singers), “If I can’t trust you with my heart, how can I trust you with my truck?”
Steve Donoghue
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