Two things are missing from the photograph. The shambolic bar — now out of ice, now out of glasses, now out of vodka — was partly my fault, mine and a lot of other people’s: we hadn’t RSVP’d. The other thing missing is the blaring music, which I suppose was some sort of punk rock. Nothing less harmonious with the setting can be imagined, not, at least, without somebody pointing a loaded pistol.

The punk show itself, two floors below, was appropriately anti-social, a sort of un-fun house. But the staging was interesting. Mannequins were posed in niched arcades designed to simulate the near-ruined beaux arts décor in which the downtown scene evolved. (Out-of-towner note: “Downtown” Manhattan lies between Canal Street and 14th Street. Plus, of course, the rather small TRIangle BElow CAnal. Below Canal Street — further downtown in geography if not terminology — lie Chinatown, City Hall, and Wall Street, three different neighborhoods that are not “Downtown.”) We did not linger. As soon as we met our friend, we got back on the elevator and went up to the roof, where I should have liked to stay a bit longer, not only for the sunset snaps, but Kathleen wanted to sit down, and all the benches had been removed (?). So we pushed along to dinner at a nearby restaurant, and that was very nice. On the way, I persuaded Kathleen and our friend to strike poses before the ghastly statues that are still standing outside the stadtpalais across from the Museum even though I was sure that the first thing Carlos Slím would do when he bought the place was to have them carted off.

***

This morning, while Kathleen went through the Times, I read Frederick Seidel’s wearily dismissive review of Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, in the NYRB.

So much New York, so much Seventies, such bursting-apart-at-the-seams liveliness! What a splendor of invention! These passionately alive and not believable characters! Heat without heart. Such an abundance of life and liveliness and language! It’s a glorious novel Rachel Kushner has written with heat but without warmth. Maybe that’s a new kind of novel.

**

What’s this book interested in? It’s interested in being made into a movie.

I found myself asking, “Is it true, this heat without warmth thing?” Is The Flamethrowers a mere scenario? For a few moments, I engaged with Seidel’s critique. Then I came to my senses. Bad reviews, especially bad reviews of novels, oughtn’t to be taken seriously. They should be wearily dismissed themselves. I do not speak as a partisan of Rachel Kushner’s art. (I rather preferred her first book, Telex From Cuba.) I’m just repeating the lesson that I learned from years of reviewing book reviews. Bad reviews, however entertaining, fail in their essential purpose, which is to show why a book, or anything “under review,” is worth talking about. The fact that other people are talking about something may warrant comment, but never a review. You review something if and when you yourself see something valuable, and you want to recommend it to others. Seidel’s piece is unworthy of the NYRB, and ought not to have been published, more or less as a matter of principle.

I’ve read two bad, or at least diminishing, reviews of George Packer’s The Unwinding. While I doubt that Seidel’s review will seriously dent sales of Kushner’s novel, I fear that The Unwinding might not be so hardy. I was expecting that the Times might be unfavorable, but not that David Brooks would write the review, which in turn would be buried in the middle of the Book Review. No one could be deadlier than Brooks at dispatching a book such as Packer’s. The writing, the reporting, are lavishly praised. But analysis is found wanting.

I wish Packer had married his remarkable narrative skills to more evidence and research, instead of just relying on narrative alone. Combine data to lives as they are actually lived.

This plausible comment belongs to the class of dismissals that fault a book not being something that its author probably didn’t intend it to be. Packer clearly means to paint a powerful picture of American dysfunction, and he’s faulted for doing so, because there’s no data to back up his poetry. But who would read the analysis that Brooks has in mind? And what if the data that we have doesn’t really tell us anything? What if Packer is calling for a new kind of analysis? Reviewers like Brooks also like to scold Packer for having an implicit political agenda, as if this were somehow unprofessional.

He paints an admiring portrait of the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, whose political views seem to coincide with his own.

I’m not sure that I would characterize these particular coinciding views as political. I see them as moral.

Michael Lind’s somewhat harsh review in Bookforum came as a surprise. (Sadly, it is not online.) It is also a piece of disappointed praise.

The unwinding of the New Deal proceeds. There is much to lament, and Packer strikes the elegaic tone well in a brilliant and innovative book that transcends journalism to become literature. For inspiration, readers will have to look elsewhere.

That doesn’t really make sense: what, so far as written words goes, exceeds literature as a source of inspiration? I’m still basking in the glow of inspiration lighted by Packer’s bit of  literature. When I began to get a sense of what “organized money” might really be, I didn’t fault Packer for letting the term stand for nothing more precise than an offstage bogeyman. The bogeyman actually does come onstage, in all of the sections having to do with Jeff Connaughton, and in some of those relating Dean Price’s tale of woe, not entirely but just enough to get a sense of its anatomy. I thank Packer for laying out food for inference. And the Jeff Connaughton story alerted me to the fact that there is no loyal opposition in today’s America. There hasn’t been one since Reagan’s persistent demonizing of Democratic-Party values (such as they were). There is only the organized money, a nexus of corporate lobbyists, deep-pocketed think tanks, government contractors, and politicians who want to make some real money someday. There is no serious opposition to organized money that can be considered truly loyal, to the Constitution as well as to its protection of the right to fairly-gained personal property. Opposition — consider the Occupy movement — is not only ideologically straitjacketed and fatally underinformed, but manifestly insurrectionist. The Tea Partiers may think that they’re in opposition, but in fact they are both paid for and distracted by organized money.

After one long excerpt from the book, Lind writes,

This illustrates the most serious weakness of Packer’s project, which is also the weakness of a certain strain of American liberalism — the failure to distinguish the villainy of particular individuals and selfish elites from the lamentable collateral damage caused by technologically driven economic progress.

Sign me up as a willing failer! “Technologically driven economic progress” is necessarily paid for by “selfish elites,” and the villainy is systemic. There is no justification for the existence of billionaires. Not all the hospitals and education programs and charitable whatnot in the world can redeem the sheer wrongness of such concentrated wealth. I’m not arguing for “confiscatory taxation” here but for something deeper, something that would making the piling up of such vast fortunes impossible in the first place. We might, for example, and without doing violence to any core beliefs, put a cap on patent and license fees, effectively denying protection after a (very generous) figure has been reached. Once Bill Gates had amassed a fortune of a certain size, had such a scheme been in place, no one would have had to pay for a license to use DOS — the germ of that pile. (We already impose similar restraints on pharmaceutical companies.) It is simply not in anybody’s interest — certainly not in the billionaire’s family’s interest — to allow colossal properties.

***

The weather is seasonably pleasant today, which bodes well for our picnic. I’ve just steamed the potatoes for salad, and now I’ve got to cut them up and drizzle them with oil while they’re still warm, something I learned from Julia Child. What I did not learn from Julia Child is to use fingerling potatoes, which bring to potato salad something of the deep pleasure of a good baked potato.

Off we go, then. Bon weekend à tous!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, June 21st, 2013 at 1:00 pm.