The soundtrack this week is Mozart’s Requiem—in whatever version is your favorite—to honor Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who died on January 2 at the age of sixty-five. A first-rate scholar and an uncompromising critic of much that is awry in contemporary American culture, Betsey—once a fierce Marxist—was a convert to Roman Catholicism (formally entering the church in 1995), as was her husband Eugene Genovese, himself a distinguished historian. She was also a member of the editorial board of Books & Culture and a generous supporter of the magazine. What comes immediately to mind, however, is a small personal detail: her warmth when I told her about my daughter Mary and son-in-law John converting to Catholicism not long after their marriage, and her subsequent delight when Mary gave birth to our first grandchild, Theresa. A piece about Betsey by her student Christina Bieber, now on the faculty of Wheaton College, will appear in the March/April issue of Books & Culture.
Shifting gears, I direct your attention to two pieces from Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, one very bad and one very good. The stinker is Dave Itzkoff’s review of Michael Crichton’s new novel, Next. Ever since Itzkoff began his tenure as the NYTBR’s science fiction columnist, it’s been apparent that he is out of depth, and many of us have wondered how on earth—or on Jupiter—he ever got the gig in the first place. Now Itzkoff has produced a piece of work so sublimely incompetent, so deliciously bad, that the National Book Critics Circle is sure to revoke his license to review fiction.
To review a book, you have to be able to read it. You don’t have to like it, or the author. Obviously Itzkoff doesn’t like Michael Crichton. That’s fine. But Itzkoff evidently doesn’t know how to read. He fails this basic test at every level. First, he gets basic details of the plot wrong, as when he refers to “a pedophiliac biotech worker beset by a 16-year-old girl savvy enough to fake her own rape.” But the young woman in question is not working alone; she is employed by a shadowy organization that deals in what used to be called “industrial espionage.”
That sort of thing is bad enough. Far worse, Itzkoff shows himself to be painfully obtuse when confronted with satire and irony and the games that writers have played for lo these many centuries. Noting that Crichton inserts facsimiles of authentic news stories and fabricated items (purporting to be from the Times, for example), Itzkoff sputters indignantly: “Some of these reports are based in reality, but they often play fast and loose with the facts: while it is true, for instance, that the Australian performance artist Stelarc has sought to grow a quarter-scale replica of his own ear from living cells, it is not true, as Crichton suggests, that the project was successfully completed at M.I.T., or that hearing-aid companies were interested in licensing the technology. The author makes no attempt to distinguish his extrapolations from established fact, and even seems to relish the ambiguity.” The cad!
Can you imagine Michael Crichton’s delight when he read this inadvertent masterpiece of prissy incomprehension? Don’t let Itzkoff anywhere near the works of Jonathan Swift. The poor man’s brain might explode.
But there is still worse to come, for Itzkoff misses the whole thrust of Crichton’s book. A typical reader of Itzkoff’s review would come away with the impression that Crichton is an “alarmist” critic of genetic research (the sort of person, in other words, who wants to puts restrictions on stem-cell research). Nonsense. Number 4 of Crichton’s recommendations in the author’s note at the end of the book is “Avoid bans on research.” He notes that, in his judgment, “certain research should not be pursued, at least for now,” but he is against bans, not least because they don’t work. It is abundantly clear from the novel that Crichton rejects religious arguments against humans “playing God.” As he said in a lecture included as an appendix in his previous novel, State of Fear, “In my view there is only one hope for humankind to emerge from what Carl Sagan called ‘the demon-haunted world’ of our past. That hope is science.”
Crichton is a contrarian. He is quite capable of skewering some of the excesses of the biotech industry (especially the way it has infiltrated “academic” science)—and remarking approvingly on G. K. Chesterton’s prescient critique of eugenics in the annotated bibliography for Next—while at the same time satirizing traditionalists who, in his view, are mired in the “demon-haunted world” (including, probably, most readers of Books & Culture). Evidently Itzkoff is incapable of making such distinctions.
The wonderful item in Sunday’s Book Review is as good as Itzkoff’s piece is bad: an essay by novelist Richard Powers, “How to Speak a Book.” Here Powers explains why he has dictated his books for some time now, using speech-recognition software, and teases out some of the implications of “speaking” a book. It’s one of the richest reflections on speech and sound and writing and “text” I’ve read in a while—it reminds me both of Walter Ong, whom I mentioned in my previous piece in this space, and of that book I urged on you, A Concise History of Western Music by Paul Griffiths (Cambridge Univ. Press). Do you remember the first sentences of Griffiths’ book? Here they are again:
“Someone, sitting in a cave, punctures holes in a bone drained of marrow, raises it mouthwards, and blows—into a flute. Breath becomes sound, and time, through that sound, is given a shape. Being sound and shaped time, music begins.”
Keep that in mind as you read Powers’ essay. And if you like it even half as much as I did, you might want to check out his most recent novel, The Echo Maker.
John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.
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