Monday, May 12, 2008
Dec 24, 1998 | Earlier this week, we announced the winners of the third annual Salon Book Awards -- our 10 favorite books of 1998. But as even Santa knows, you can't have a who's-been-nice list without a who's-been-naughty list, too. So without further ado, here's the second annual Salon Turkey Shoot, a roundup of what some of our contributors thought were this year's least successful books.
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Dennis Drabelle
WORST: "The Best Little Boy in the World Grows Up" by Andrew
Tobias (Random House). The title ends too soon -- "And Becomes an A-Gay
Snot" would round it out accurately. Andrew Tobias' follow-up memoir is so
name-droppingly smug that it sends you back to its predecessor, "The Best
Little Boy in the World," published in 1976 under the pseudonym John Reid,
to see if you misremembered that sometimes affecting story of growing up
gay in a homo-hostile world. And in fact, you did: In light of the new book,
the earlier one's tendencies toward self-satisfaction become all the more
noticeable. What a blunder -- to write a book so bad that it snakes back
and infects a predecessor that had been edging its way toward minor-classic
status.
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MOST OVERRATED: "The Professor and the Madman" by Simon
Winchester (HarperCollins). You call this a book? Though entertaining, it's
an article-length idea teased out to volume size: Loony American kills
Brit, gets sent to booby hatch, becomes useful soul by supplying word-use
citations to dictionary-makers, gets crazier with age and cuts off his
johnson. That's about all there is to it, but the padding starts with the
verbose subtitle ("A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford
English Dictionary"), continues through a preface, jumps to a postscript,
an author's note, acknowledgments, suggestions for further reading -- and
the text itself is larded with excerpts from the dictionary and several
whole-page drawings. At 242 pages, this item is vastly overweight.
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Dennis Drabelle is working on a memoir about the 1950s and the birth pangs of American youth culture.
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Stephanie Zacharek
WORST: Geoff Dyer's "Out of Sheer Rage" (North Point) may not
be the very worst book of the year, but it's easily one of the most
disappointing. Dyer's 1996 novel "But Beautiful" is one of the loveliest
books about jazz ever written. "Out of Sheer Rage" -- which was supposed to
be a serious study of D.H. Lawrence but ended up as Dyer's masturbatory
rumination about his own writer's block -- hasn't a smidgen of lyricism:
It's more like one long, sustained whine. Dyer apparently feels compelled
to put words -- any words -- to paper. And here, he puts out lots. And
lots. And lots. Wonder if he went back and counted them, just for kicks.
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MOST OVERRATED: In Howard Norman's "The Museum Guard" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a young Jewish woman becomes obsessed with a woman in a painting and feels she must leave her home in Halifax for Amsterdam so she can become the woman in the painting -- all this as Hitler begins exterminating Jews throughout Europe. She's lucky enough to have some good friends who eagerly help her act on her plan. Later, they realize their mistake: oops! Praised by critics for its graceful prose and unplumbable emotional depth, "The Museum Guard" tries to cover some very big subjects indeed: the horrors of the Holocaust, the meaning of identity and some other stuff. If it only had a brain.
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Stephanie Zacharek lives in Boston. She is a frequent contributor to Salon.
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Carlin Romano
WORST: Hagiography by definition appears after the death of a saint,
but it rarely arrives just as the sainthood is called into question. From the
very first pages of "Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker" by Ved
Mehta (Overlook) -- in which the longtime Shawn disciple announces that a
friend who read the book in manuscript urged him not to refer to his
subject as "Mr. Shawn" -- this was a uniquely odd performance: a willful
insistence on writing the traditional version of the story of the legendary
New Yorker editor, come hell, high water or Lillian Ross. The friend
described it as "an unabashed work of veneration." Mr. Shawn, one suspects,
would not have stood for it.
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MOST OVERRATED: Nonfiction books get a critical premium when bound
in high moral purpose. Edward Ball's "Slaves in the Family" (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux), winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction,
outdistanced all contenders on that score this year, which gives it my nod
in this category. Ball's exploration of his slave-owning ancestors and
document-laden tracking of descendants of their thousands of slaves edifies
the reader and plainly quenched the author's existential thirst. The
shaping of the story itself, however, hardly rises to narrative art, and a
strain of sanctimony appears too often, despite the author's best efforts.
Get started on your Mother Teresa bio.
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Carlin Romano, literary critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy at Bennington College.
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Brigette Frase
WORST: J.G. Ballard, who has a weakness for lunatics with Really Big
Ideas, outdid himself in "Cocaine Nights" (Counterpoint). Charles
Prentice goes to a chichi country club in exclusive Estrella del Mar to
investigate five arson murders for which his brother Frank is being framed.
Charles, as dim and clueless as Inspector Clouseau (minus the idiotic charm
-- he has the personality of a limp handshake) forgets all about his
brother when he falls under the spell of the "charismatic" tennis pro and
civic booster Bobby Crawford, who stages orgies, rapes, fires, robberies
and assaults. Frank's lover forgives Bobby for trying to strangle her
because "it's all in a good cause. He wants to bring people back to life."
Nothing like a little "transgressive behavior" to foster community spirit.
What a shame that Ballard and his characters are unblemished by any sense
of humor. With a nip here and a tuck there, this could have been a really
funny novel.
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MOST OVERRATED: I started reading Joyce Carol Oates novels in
graduate school, which is peculiar right there. When I needed a break from
theoretical semantics, phonemic algorithms or even "The Brothers
Karamazov," I'd wander in the U. of Chicago stacks, looking for current
fiction. And everywhere I turned, I ran into Joyce Carol Oates. So that's
what I read for fun. Over a number of years, her novels managed to depress
me softly with her (lurid, yet smoothly crooned) song. Is that all there
is? I wondered. Nothing has changed. "Man Crazy" (Dutton) is as
competent, as well-written and as utterly unnecessary a book as I've read
in some time. Poor teenage Ingrid, with her Vietnam-freaked daddy, her
alcoholic slutty mommy, looking for love in all the wrong places. Daddy
kills Mommy's boyfriend and Ingrid runs away, ending up with a loony
motorcycle cult guy who calls her "Dog-girl" and makes her swallow a
still-beating human heart. Ingrid is a composite newspaper clipping of a
Troubled Teen suddenly forced into a horror-porn flick. What's wrong with
Joyce Carol, anyway? She knows how to write a book, or maybe that's the
problem. She doodles them off instead of working them. I loved her Gothic
stuff, "Bellefleur," for example. Maybe she should have followed her bliss
into Anne Rice country.
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Brigette Frase is a book critic living in Minneapolis.
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