Oh, Violence! Please, Violence!
Koenig, Rhoda
Rhoda Koenig OH, VIOLENCE! PLEASE, VIOLENCE! A plea for malice in book reviewing. I never read a book before reviewing it," said the Reverend Sydney Smith. "It prejudices a man so." I am sure...
...In the last 40-odd pages of the book, fate, as Lorelei Lee put it, keeps on happening...
...But, as Malamud said in a New York Times interview, this is his "significant" novel, explaining what his "experience" has "totaled up to," and "the texture of it, the depth of it, the quality of human experience in it is greater than in my previous books...
...Then he winds up, "But if flawed, it is also a rich book, generous in what it offers...
...Not surprisingly, Dubin, like his creator, has a very high opinion of himself...
...But now the New York Review carries a great many pedantic essays, on books you haven't heard of and don't want to-some of them in languages other than English...
...Searing," they call it, "mar velous," and "brilliant...
...Could you specifically say," she writes to him, "what I ought to be thinking about in the way of a job or career, or recommend books that might be helpful...
...the brine of hostile criticism is only a memory...
...Fanny's undiscriminating sex life makes it impossible to take her search for order very seriously, and her coarseness and naivete repeatedly trivialize her sexuality...
...Kitty discovers the affair...
...And Richard Locke, in the Saturday Review, ended his penultimate paragraph, ''Some book-ill-written, self-serving, morally obtuse, narratively and psychologically crude...
...What a lovely story this is," coos Peter Prescott in News week...
...The Times Book Review keeps assigning reviews to college professors ("experts in their field...
...and he analyzes philosophical problems in bed with his wife, while having one short, unphilosophi-cal word on his mind...
...Or do they get past the first few pages at all...
...So why is it that, despite this great weight of opinion and the high place the book occupies on the best-seller lists, I cannot see Dubin's Lives as any thing but an immense bore...
...Lawrence and an affair with Fanny Bick, a 22-yearold college dropout who is briefly the Dubins' "cleaning person.'' The only other character of importance is Kitty, Dubin's Gentile wife, who, with her relentless Rhoda Koenig, a senior editor of New York, edits the book review column of that magazine...
...I like the vibes you have with what you're doing," she tells him, and later admits that she contrived to meet him because she was impressed by a section in one of his biographies ("That part wiped me out...
...For about 300 pages, the plot consists of Dubin going to bed-or almost going to bed-with Fanny, Dubin writing his Lawrence biography, and Dubin talking to his wife about the meaning of life...
...When he wants to be rejuvenated, she is the Life Force...
...Do they believe that they are insensitive, like those readers of Cosmopolitan who, not knowing what magic can be achieved with a bit of surgical tape, think the models' breasts much more beautiful than their own...
...his sex adventures parody the ones in Lawrence's novels...
...A friend of mine suggests what I know many people believe: "They just want to keep being invited to those literary cocktail parties...
...Malamud even falls into it himself, telling us that Dubin "regretted his stiff-assed frigid letter to her basically warm one," that Fanny's "orgasm, she swore, spaced her," and that "she had this thing about cola drinks-they gave her hives...
...Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene," she lamented...
...They take such a beating each week that they are easily impressed by someone who writes, not an 800-word column, but-a book...
...And the man currently in charge of reviews at the Times Book Review lacks the capacity or the will to make it'interesting...
...indeed, the phrase "eponymous protagonist" was made for him-is a vaguely Jewish biographer of Lincoln, Twain, and Thoreau, now 56 and restless with his career and his 25-year marriage...
...A book a reader must live with for a long time,'' decrees Roger Sale in the New York Review of Books...
...with a shiny cover...
...He's young,'' explains Fanny, "and I like his ass...
...It's ironic that Malamud should have told the Times interviewer that he has been influenced by the women's movement and that his daughter "raised my consciousness," for Fanny seems to exist only for Dubin's convenience...
...Fanny's attraction to Dubin is simply incredible-and, unlike her, I do not mean that as a compliment...
...Dubin, who seems to be looking for aggra vation, takes on a life of D.H...
...A book is born into a puddle of treacle...
...bed with Fanny...
...A universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns...
...Some chapters turn me on...
...and a number on every page...
...and she introduces him to hitherto unknown pleasures ("Is this what is called footsie...
...She inspires him to poetic flights ("You're a little larger than life, Fanny...
...Fanny, however, seems to have a softening effect on the arrogant, mean-spirited Dubin...
...And you can be sure that when significant comes in the door, serious as well as funny fly out the window...
...In a grand seductive gesture, Dubin takes her to Venice, but the expensive and elaborate consummation is delayed by Fanny's recurrent bouts of nausea and diarrhea...
...Why does a lively young girl seek the caresses of a tedious, elderly academic...
...The next paragraph begins: "But this is excessive...
...And the New York Review announces in its classified section that over 40 percent of its readers are teachers or graduate students...
...At one point, when his wife is on vacation, the telephone rings, and "Kitty was on the phone, her voice affectionate...
...One must toast the vital specificity of the characters," commands Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times...
...Twenty years ago Elizabeth Hardwick wrote for Harper's an article entitled "The Decline of Book Reviewing...
...Indeed, these two forces tend to cancel each other out...
...This may be a motive, although I have assisted at a number of these orgies and found, as Dorothy Parker did 50 years ago, that "the place was filled with people who looked as if they had been scraped out of drains...
...I felt that before you tossed your underpants at me...
...And Francis Brown, the nonentity at the Times Book Review of whom she complained in her piece, was succeeded by John Leonard, who made the Times Book Review more lively and more literary...
...And I dearly hope that they will snap out of it and stop being so ami able about so much of what comes their way...
...The maddening affability of too many review ers these days makes one want to stand and scream, like the young wife in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, "Oh, violence...
...she heightens his awareness ("I'm sorry I didn't respond more appropriately to your needs...
...Everyone is found to have 'filled a need,' and is to be 'thanked' for something and to be excused for 'minor faults in an otherwise excellent work.' " Not long after Miss Hardwick wrote that, she helped to found the New York Review of Books, which for years carried long, thoughtful, sometimes mischievous essays...
...Fanny inherits some money and decides to become a lawyer- and suddenly the book is over...
...analyzing and earnest sensuality, seems more Jewish than he...
...And the periodicals who use different reviewers with every issue give most of their "important" books to the same few people...
...These demoralized souls bear little resemblance to the popular stereotype of the reviewer as a gleefully malicious imp...
...Though he had been expecting her call Dubin was displeased to have it come as he was lying in Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $10.00...
...Now, this material could have been the basis for a funny story-the distinguished author makes a fool of himself over a girl less than half his age...
...She says things like "Jesus, I had this mind-blowing god-awful dream" and "I've read Walden...
...More to the point, I think, is that the critics at Newsweek and the daily Times, and the others who write regularly, have to read an enormous number of books each year, or, to put it another way, their jobs consist of shoveling mountains of crud...
...When reviewers do rouse themselves to find fault with large, important books, they often apologize for their remarks, or sweep them away, in the same review...
...Writing in the Washington Post, John Gardner admits that Malamud "frequently abandons verisimilitude and psychological credibility," but says that he does so "because he cares more about ideas than about how people really talk...
...Reviewers for the more sophisticated journals may know how to disguise this kind of deference in print, but in a paper like the Minneapolis Tribune one sees it in its most naked form...
...I wonder if the gentlemen at the book reviews think they're helping these read ers any more than the people who write jacket copy...
...I am sure the re viewers of Bernard Malamud's new novel, Dubin's Lives,* have read it attentively, but they seem to have retained an impar tial determination to consider it a wonder ful book...
...Robert Towers gets almost to the end of his long, favorable review of Dubin's Lives in the New York Times Book Review before confessing, "The book, as a whole, eluded me...
...I wonder and worry about the nonacademics who consult book reviews before heading for a store, the people who are simply intelligent and interested in books...
...So when a book comes along that's not too hard to write about, that seems to be about something, and that has the appearance of literacy-especially if it's by a large and glowing name-the regular critics fall upon it with the enthusiasm of lifers baying after the warden's ugly daughter...
...I am told that, at a meeting of the judges of the National Book Critics Circle awards last year, one tenderhearted member protested the exclusion of a very silly title thus: "Oh, but it's such a brave book...
...William B. Dubin-certainly not the "hero...
...Dubin's grown son and daughter -who have made only a couple of brief appearances-get into terrible trouble...
...That line says even more about the editors who let it stand than it does about the reviewer...
...This cannot be good...
...Are they disappointed and angry, having been gulled into buying a very expensive flower press...
...Fanny's vocabulary is about as deficient as her moral sense...
...A little more thought would be nice, a little more discrimination, but at least they could stop being so gentlemanly...
...Oddly, Dubin, the respected writer, never winces at this kind of talk...
...What do they think after reading a leaden book that has been hailed as the masterpiece of the month...
...Or it could have been turned into a serious novel about the conflicting claims of life and art, love and responsibility...
...A review in that paper's book section recently said, "I always try to approach a book sympathetically-realizing how damn difficult it is to write even a bad book...
...Please, violence...
...Then, after Dubin has endured two nights of sleeping chastely next to Fanny, he walks into their hotel room to find her underneath a gondolier...
...I mean you make life seem larger...
...Fanny is an appropriate match for this courtly lover...
...Since none of the characters has changed (Fanny's sudden career decision is as unconvincing as everything else about her), we are left to imagine Fanny telling a colleague that his brief really wiped her out, and Dubin inviting eager young Lawrence scholars for dirty weekends in Sun City, hat, then, are we to make of the critics who have praised Dubin's Lives to the heavens...
...Apparently, Dubin's great mind exerts a powerful spell over the popsy...
...Both publications seem in the cold, dead grip of academe...
...Dubin himself is almost killed...
...None of this newfound sensitivity, however, prevents Dubin from telling his wife that he has slept with one of her friends, or from sneaking out to the barn behind the house for a roll in the hay with Fanny...
...when he wants to be wise and paternal, she is Troubled Youth...
...Although Dubin keeps saying that Fanny "teaches" him about sex, he is plainly the one in charge in this stale version of a teacher-student affair...
Vol. 12 • June 1979 • No. 6
