It’s always a little game of win and lose in the New York Times Book Review. You’ll get long (well, long-ish), thoughtful analysis on one page and puerile log-rolling on another, and some of it will do justice to the immense amount of influence the publication has in the book world, and some of it will only undermine that influence. 20 or so reviews of varying length every week, week after week – sometimes the devil will win a hand.

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Take today’s Book Review: on one page, there’s a review of Geoff Dyer’s new novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi that heaps ecstatic praise on the book, calling it “profoundly haunting” and “fearless” and assuring readers that “Dyer’s trademark wit and uniqueness, in fact, surround you before you’ve even turned the first page.”

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This is confusing for two reasons: first, because it’s entirely mistaken – Dyer’s book is actually a time-wasting little spill of a thing (as Open Letters‘ Steve Donoghue points out here), and second, because the Times review was written by Pico Iyer, who’s normally an extremely talented and insightful guy. Anybody can have an off day, but even so, it’s painful thinking of how many loyal Book Review readers will now buy Dyer’s book expecting haunting and getting daunting (or even flauntingly taunting) instead.

Train move And then on the next page, there’s Jennifer Senior reviewing Dave Cullen’s Columbine Immer nie am Meer divx in a piece that does full justice to the forensic rigor and sledgehammer power of Cullen’s book, the first and likely the ultimate examination of the people, the media, and the dark events of that day in 1999 when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire on their fellow students. Senior is excellent throughout:

Yet what’s amazing is how much of Cullen’s book still comes as a surprise. I expected a story about misfits exacting vengeance, because that was my memory of the media consensus — Columbine, right, wasn’t there something going on there between goths and jocks?

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In fact, Harris and Klebold were killing completely at random that day. Their victims weren’t the intended targets at all; the entire school

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was. Columbine, it turns out, was a failed attempt at domestic terrorism. Shortly after 11:14 a.m., the two boys hauled a propane bomb into the cafeteria, programmed to go off at 11:17. It never did. Had the massacre gone as planned, it would most likely have killed more than 500 people, yielding far less readily to rumors about high school’s tribal politics.

After School Special video You can read her full review here, and then you can turn to Open Letters‘ Brad Jones giving the book much more detailed attention here.

And in the meantime, what’s a conscientious Times reader to do about all this hopscotching around of review reliability? Step #1: tread warily, on alert for reviewer tricks and bull-hockey. And Step #2: whenever possible, let Open Letters be your confidential guide!

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In the latest New Yorker Angels in the Outfield film

, a double-sized travel-themed issue, James Woods lavishes three pages of praise on Geoff Dyer’s latest book Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

. Woods describes the book as “relentlessly funny,” “savagely funny,” “wonderful,” “pungent and funny,” “very amusing,” “original” “affecting,” and “unexpected” – and those are just the prisable bits from a general slurry of praisesong. Dyer’s work, we’re told, is “familiarly postmodern”:

Grande gestures are futile, and in the place of hard work or exacting thought there is sex and drugs and clubbing, and various kinds of mind-bending music. Everything is unfinishable, belated, and philosophically twilit.

Toward the end of his piece, Wood goes from hyping Dyer specifically to writing a hall-pass for every lazy artist who’s ever lived:

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In the earlier books, Dyer’s characters failed to write not because they were indifferent to writing but because they wanted too much to write. Negative liberty expresses a fear of completion; if you never start a work, then at least there is no chance of your having finished it. To complete something is in some ways to make it disappear; not starting it is a preemptive strike against loss, a way of elegizing what has not yet disappeared.

It’s impossible to say what would prompt somebody with Wood’s sterling work ethic to write such nonsense, and it’s likewise impossible to figure out how a lazy, self-indulgent, and utterly ineffective collage like Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi somehow managed to appeal to a critic of Wood’s usual circumspection – wanderlust, maybe? A little bit of Walter Mitty peeking through?

However his review happened, it’s completely wrong: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

is narcissistic effluvia of the most toxic kind, worthless as a novel, worthless as two connected novellas, worthless in its pages and paragraphs, and worthless in its every line. Many of you (although perhaps not Daniel Green, at least writing here) have a high regard for Wood’s literary criticism, and in my opinion that regard is justified – but not this time.

Still, anybody can lapse now and then. Hell, I declared East Lynne a masterpiece when it first came out. I was wrong then, and Wood is wrong now, but we can both go on to be both right and good – which is more than can be said for Geoff Dyer.

Steve Donoghue

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Geoff Dyer
Pantheon Books, 2009

It’s perfectly legitimate if reading a book occasionally makes you want to punch the author. Who hasn’t felt the urge to sock Hemingway in the jaw? Me, I’d keep a roll of pennies just for Truman Capote. But it’s quite another thing if reading a book makes you want to punch random strangers. That’s when you know the book you’re reading is not only bad but really bad. Throwing a book across the room out of frustration is an editorial comment; throwing a book at the cat is a criticism of the author’s choice of vocation.

It wasn’t ten pages before I could no longer safely take Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

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on the subway. Hell, the title alone had me glancing angrily at my sleeping basset hound.

No surprises: the book concerns a guy named Jeff, and it splits its time between Venice and Varanasi. In the first half, Jeff is a hack journalist who gets assigned the Biennale in Venice, that orgy of art world lunacy all sane Venetians loathe and avoid, an antic interval in which crazy foreign so-called artists descend on the city with their exhibitions and installations and a separate but equally appalling horde of journalists descend to describe the descent. Jeff attends out of combination of boredom and alcoholism, until he meets the alluring Laura (get it? get it? Sigh), who transports him into ecstasy, both in bed and out. In the second half, a world away in Varanasi, a figure who may or may not be Jeff is still seeking ecstasy and may or may not find it by the time of the novel’s indeterminate (which is to say lazy) conclusion.

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Long before that conclusion – in fact, mere pages from the beginning, Jeff is narcissistically mulling over life in modern-day Britain as he stops into a convenience store for a snack:

He had read, a few days earlier, that British Muslims were the most embittered, disgruntled and generally fed up of any in Europe. So why was there all this talk about the need for Muslims to integrate into British life? The fact that they were so pissed off was a sign of profound assimilation. What better proof could there be?

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Chewing over this important Topic – at the last moment he’d opted for chocolate rather than gum – Jeff walked on to Regent’s Park.

Even before you realize that Topic is a type of British candy bar – and certainly afterwards – you’re experiencing the only legitimate response to finding such adolescent idiocy in a published novel: you want to punch the author squarely in his smug, class-clown face. And while he’s recoiling, you want to yell at him that moronic tricks like that – or all that wheezy blather about pissed-off Muslims – doesn’t even pass muster at the local pub, let alone in a book whose title echoes Thomas Mann.

The Varanasi parts are no better:

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I had finished my banana. It had not looked that great but, taste-wise, it was one of the best bananas I had ever eaten, so I immediately unpeeled another and started eating that too, and it was every bit as good, almost, as the one I had just finished.

Yum.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi should come with a warning label for any people, cats, or basset hounds who happen to be near you when you’re reading it: Yum = Punch.

–Steve Donoghue

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