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Fw: Nabokov is "a semiprecious writer ...
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Date
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EDITOR's NOTE. Excised from a longer piece.
----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy P. Klein
To: Sent: Sunday, September 01, 2002 9:12 AM
Subject: Nabokov is "a semiprecious writer ...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
September 1, 2002
'Nobody's Perfect': A Critic's Wit, in Bulk
By LAURA MILLER
n the introduction to ''Nobody's Perfect,'' a collection of his writing on film, books and other topics for The New Yorker, Anthony Lane imagines an ideal reader of sorts, who, ''in a small back room in a country town . . . will suddenly jump up and down in unprecedented fury, enraged by my appraisal of 'Speed' or 'The Bridges of Madison County,' and bang his head on the ceiling.'' That scenario, redolent of summer holidays and books not paid for but idly plucked out of someone else's shelves when it's too overcast to head down to the lake, seems about right; these pieces weren't meant to be read in one long gulp. People perk up when their weekly copy of The New Yorker arrives with an Anthony Lane review in it, just as they do when someone approaches them with a tray of delicious candies. Making a meal of such treats, however, like reading the 101 movie reviews that kick off ''Nobody's Perfect'' in a single stretch, is another matter.
This is starting to sound dismissive, and it's not meant to. Lane writes prose the way Fred Astaire danced; his sentences and paragraphs are a sublime, rhythmic concoction of glide and snap, lightness and sting. Like his beloved Jane Austen, his style is infernally contagious. This review will sound just like him, and there's nothing I can do to prevent that; I'm helpless in the face of a higher power. Cleverness is, after all, a kind of insight, and at the very pinnacle of that quality you find what looks a lot like genius. A quip like '' 'Hamlet' is film noir'', for example, inhabits some previously uncharted crevice between the facile and the profound. It doesn't tell you much about ''Hamlet,'' actually, but it's uncannily eloquent about film noir. And it's funny, though why it should be is the kind of question you can find yourself contemplating for a surprising length of time.
"Nobody's Perfect" bristles with lines that good: to say that the devices in "The Usual Suspects" are old-hat is "like cutting your finger and saying you're bored with your own blood"; "One of the curious side effects of hype, of course, is that the longer and more loudly a work is discussed the less idea you have of what it is actually like"; Dean Martin's "trick was to appear drunk even when he was not, and to look even when he was drunk as if he were only pretending to be drunk and were fully in command of the situation -- as, of course, he was, even though drunk"(a gleefully Johnsonian pronouncement on Rat Pack cool). Enough of this and you're likely to feel, in the best possible way, a little drunk yourself -- or prone to making the kind of observation that starts off this sentence, a prime example of helpless Lane mimicry.
However, step across the divide at the center of "Nobody's Perfect," and you will meet another Anthony Lane. The grand, beautiful people of the movies are not really his thing; he prefers the crabbed, the crotchety, the uneasy and the isolated -- in short, he likes writers, particularly English ones. If some of the essays in the "Books" section of "Nobody's Perfect" are hilarious (a piece about bestsellers in which all of Judith Krantz's motifs are distilled into a haiku, for example), in others you will be walloped by a Lane whose sympathies are fully engaged. The terrific lines keep coming, but they are doublecharged: Nabokov is "a semiprecious writer;" W.G. Sebald's sentences "draw you on with such courteous grace toward the soft verges of dread"; Pynchon is "in the fullest sense, an old hippie". The tenderness of Lane's essay on the lonely, epileptic Edward Lear (in whose work he senses "something amiss, a certain squeezing and wringing of the spirit") half broke my heart; the one on Housman left me, to my astonishment, in tears. Why is this man, who writes of "the unpalatable truth that people are likely to be more expressive in what (and whom) they deny themselves than in their gratifications," reviewing movies? Not once did his film reviews have me wondering how late the video store stays open, but I could not read him on the writers he loves without being seized with a desire to read them too. It seems a sad comment on contemporary journalism that the "Movies" section of this book is its biggest, dispiriting enough to kill any inclination I had to close with a pun -- that is, if I were any good at them.
Laura Miller is an editor at Salon.com.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
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----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy P. Klein
To: Sent: Sunday, September 01, 2002 9:12 AM
Subject: Nabokov is "a semiprecious writer ...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
September 1, 2002
'Nobody's Perfect': A Critic's Wit, in Bulk
By LAURA MILLER
n the introduction to ''Nobody's Perfect,'' a collection of his writing on film, books and other topics for The New Yorker, Anthony Lane imagines an ideal reader of sorts, who, ''in a small back room in a country town . . . will suddenly jump up and down in unprecedented fury, enraged by my appraisal of 'Speed' or 'The Bridges of Madison County,' and bang his head on the ceiling.'' That scenario, redolent of summer holidays and books not paid for but idly plucked out of someone else's shelves when it's too overcast to head down to the lake, seems about right; these pieces weren't meant to be read in one long gulp. People perk up when their weekly copy of The New Yorker arrives with an Anthony Lane review in it, just as they do when someone approaches them with a tray of delicious candies. Making a meal of such treats, however, like reading the 101 movie reviews that kick off ''Nobody's Perfect'' in a single stretch, is another matter.
This is starting to sound dismissive, and it's not meant to. Lane writes prose the way Fred Astaire danced; his sentences and paragraphs are a sublime, rhythmic concoction of glide and snap, lightness and sting. Like his beloved Jane Austen, his style is infernally contagious. This review will sound just like him, and there's nothing I can do to prevent that; I'm helpless in the face of a higher power. Cleverness is, after all, a kind of insight, and at the very pinnacle of that quality you find what looks a lot like genius. A quip like '' 'Hamlet' is film noir'', for example, inhabits some previously uncharted crevice between the facile and the profound. It doesn't tell you much about ''Hamlet,'' actually, but it's uncannily eloquent about film noir. And it's funny, though why it should be is the kind of question you can find yourself contemplating for a surprising length of time.
"Nobody's Perfect" bristles with lines that good: to say that the devices in "The Usual Suspects" are old-hat is "like cutting your finger and saying you're bored with your own blood"; "One of the curious side effects of hype, of course, is that the longer and more loudly a work is discussed the less idea you have of what it is actually like"; Dean Martin's "trick was to appear drunk even when he was not, and to look even when he was drunk as if he were only pretending to be drunk and were fully in command of the situation -- as, of course, he was, even though drunk"(a gleefully Johnsonian pronouncement on Rat Pack cool). Enough of this and you're likely to feel, in the best possible way, a little drunk yourself -- or prone to making the kind of observation that starts off this sentence, a prime example of helpless Lane mimicry.
However, step across the divide at the center of "Nobody's Perfect," and you will meet another Anthony Lane. The grand, beautiful people of the movies are not really his thing; he prefers the crabbed, the crotchety, the uneasy and the isolated -- in short, he likes writers, particularly English ones. If some of the essays in the "Books" section of "Nobody's Perfect" are hilarious (a piece about bestsellers in which all of Judith Krantz's motifs are distilled into a haiku, for example), in others you will be walloped by a Lane whose sympathies are fully engaged. The terrific lines keep coming, but they are doublecharged: Nabokov is "a semiprecious writer;" W.G. Sebald's sentences "draw you on with such courteous grace toward the soft verges of dread"; Pynchon is "in the fullest sense, an old hippie". The tenderness of Lane's essay on the lonely, epileptic Edward Lear (in whose work he senses "something amiss, a certain squeezing and wringing of the spirit") half broke my heart; the one on Housman left me, to my astonishment, in tears. Why is this man, who writes of "the unpalatable truth that people are likely to be more expressive in what (and whom) they deny themselves than in their gratifications," reviewing movies? Not once did his film reviews have me wondering how late the video store stays open, but I could not read him on the writers he loves without being seized with a desire to read them too. It seems a sad comment on contemporary journalism that the "Movies" section of this book is its biggest, dispiriting enough to kill any inclination I had to close with a pun -- that is, if I were any good at them.
Laura Miller is an editor at Salon.com.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: Click Here