Eternal Recurrence: Tom Wolfe edition

In our ongoing coverage of Tom Wolfe's new book, we mentioned yesterday that we enjoyed Jacob Weisberg's review in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review. What distinguishes good criticism from great criticism? We're glad you asked. A couple of things, actually.

First, we prefer critics to resist the urge to pronounce a simple verdict. There are great pressures in the "marketplace" of modern media to give everything a thumbs up or a thumbs down. That has more or less guaranteed that most critics are all thumbs. They approach every review with the idea that they have to make an argument either for or against it; they begin to marshall their evidence and write their punchlines. The problem with this approach is that it doesn't often give the reader or the subject a fair shake. There are not very many flawless masterpieces being produced these days—in fact, ever. (That's kind of inherent in the definition of "masterpiece.") There IS a lot of crap, but you can usually find something redeeming about most of it. The point is, there is a kind of intellectual dishonesty about reducing everything to an unqualified yes or no.

Second, there are way too many critical reviews and they are all way too short. This is related to the first point—marketplace pressures to cover as many artifacts and events as possible, and to do it decisively, if not very thoughtfully. Thus our "blurb" culture. Can you find an example of a magazine or newspaper that DOESN'T have, as a part of its regular offerings, dozens of instantly forgettable reviews of CDs, books, and movies? (We can think of one. If you think of the same one, or another that fits the bill, we'll send you a Rake T-shirt. Send your answer here. First responder wins). It is not necessary for a good critical review to be long, but it helps.

Third. This is the most difficult quality to explain and to achieve, but it is what makes a really good piece of criticism something we tear out of a magazine and carry around in our breast pocket: the ring of truth. The beauty of a really good review by someone like Anthony Lane—or Peter Shjelldahl, or Jacob Weisberg, or Chuck Klosterman—is that you know, without reading the book, or seeing the film, or listening to the CD, that the critic hit the nail on the head.

Now, we think Weisberg hit several homeruns in his piece. He comments that Wolfe's descriptions of the modern campus are "excrutiatingly" detailed, but Wolfe—being a journalist rather than a true novelist—writes like a reporter. There are no meaningful descriptions of peoples' motives, only their actions and their appearances. (This is an editor's constant struggle, by the way, and it is what distinguishes a newspaper reporter from a magazine writer. Reporters are very uncomfortable with subtle description and analysis. If they can't find a source to say it, and another to confirm it, then they can't write it. Writers have the opposite problem—finding an authority greater than themselves.) Weisberg also gets it just about exactly right when he says that Wolfe's peculiar magic is his ability to create page-turners; it's almost impossible to put Wolfe down, even when he's at his worst. Finally, the clencher: Who ever re-reads a Wolfe novel? No one. Running our own mental check, we find that the only Wolfe book we've ever reread was "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," and that, of course, is not a novel; it is a work of non-fiction.

Compare "I Am Charlotte Simmons" to, say, Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections," or Jonathan Lethem's "Fortress of Solitude." Both of those books have short sections which describe life on the modern college campus— but they are both better books, because they trade in interior, essential truths rather than surface appearances and incidents. We've been planning to reread both of those wonderful books from the moment we finished them the first time.—The Editor in Cheese