In the Book Review – A Month Ago
Haunting me for the past month has been the 9 September 2007 issue of the New York Times Book Review, which I was to have written up on the afternoon of the tenth, after lunch. “After lunch,” however, was spent sprawled on the bedroom floor, struggling over what seemed like hours to stand up, and finding, when I could stand, that my face was pushed into my chest. Ten days later, I was wheeled into an operating room for an eight-hour procedure that – there is no justice in this world – left me better off than I’d been before. This only made the omission of the “Haitian Fathers” issue of the Book Review the more gnawing.
Why bother? Surely not just post-Catholic guilt. No. At least two regular reviewers, Liesl Schillinger and Walter Kirn, appeared in the issue, and I’m quite taken with the ability to search Portico for either of their names and have returned a comprehensive list of the books that they’ve reviewed for the Times over the past several years.
It turned out to be one of the dullest issues in living memory, with more Noes than ever before. You might for that reason find it amusing. My favorite is the one-sentence dismissal of “an opportunistic bar of soap” that got reviewed solely because Alexander Pope is a character. You know, The Jane Austen Book Club effect….
¶ Haitian Fathers.