This is really a sad day for the NYTBR. For those who don't know, the NYTBR is regarded as the standard-bearer for book reviews in America. It's the most esteemed, most credible, most watched.
Lately, the NYTBR has been falling on hard times. It's lost a lot of its credability and the time is ripe for another literary review to supplant it. I can't imagine that this review of Nicholson Baker's new book Checkpoint will help much. It's written by TNR's literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, and is as bad as that would suggest.
Had Wieseltier stuck to reviewing the book, I would have had no problem with his review. He starts out just fine, discussing Baker's work as a novel.
The novel consists in the transcript of a conversation in a room in a hotel in Washington in May of this year. Jay has summoned Ben to his room to explain what he is about to do ''for the good of humankind.'' We infer from what is said that Jay is a deeply unhappy man. His wife has left him, his girlfriend has left him, he has lost his job as a high-school teacher, he works as a day laborer and has declared personal bankruptcy, he spends his days reading blogs...
Ben is Baker's liberal. He understands that George W. Bush is all the terrible things that Jay says he is, but he deplores the means, and he fears that his friend wishes to destroy the president because he wishes to destroy himself. He hopes to trick Jay into catharsis by taking a hammer to a photograph of the president, but it is not clear that catharsis comes. He tries to persuade his ruined friend to abandon his ''mission,'' but the encounter ends inconclusively. It may be that Jay has been talked out of suicide. It may be that the president is really in danger.
So far so good. But after setting up the novel Wieseltier then decides to abandon textual analysis to rail against the politics of the hard Left.
The signs of the degradation are everywhere. In a new anthology of anti-Bush writings by distinguished journalists and commentators and a senator (Kennedy) and a congressman (Dingell), the pages are ornamented with exhilarating anagrams such as ''The Republicans: Plan butcheries?'' and ''Donald Henry Rumsfeld: Fondly handles murder.'' The back cover thoughtfully calls Rumsfeld a ''war pig.'' In an advertisement that proudly lists ''recent contributors,'' The New York Review of Books suddenly names Noam Chomsky, who has not appeared in its pages in decades; but this is the glory in which the journal apparently wishes to bask again. Al Gore denounces Abu Ghraib as ''the Bush gulag,'' and Moveon.org publishes a huge ad instructing that ''The Communists had Pravda. Republicans have Fox.'' And so on.
From here Wieseltier proceeds to gleefully abandon any pretense that his book review is anything other than an opportunity for him to spout off about politics.
The philosophical argument for liberal demagoguery is that it is merely an expression, or an exaggeration, of American democracy. But then this must be true also of conservative demagoguery, which also claims to speak (but rather less plausibly) in the voice of the common man.
Is there a political compnent to Checkpoint? Definitely. Is a reviewer of this book entitled to discuss Checkpoint with regard to American politics and society? Absolutely. But this is not what Wieseltier does.
Halfway through the review Wieseltier abandons the book entirely and goes off on his own tangent. Wieseltier tries to pose Checkpoint as an example of the liberal politics that he despises. It may be that Checkpoint is every bit as a hateful and mindless as Wieseltier seems to imply, but we can't tell from his review because Wieseltier never provides any text to back up his assertions.
In fact, given that Baker is a prominent intellectual, a celebrated author, and not necessarily liberal, it would seem that if any anti-Bush book is nuanced and subtle, Checkpoint would be it. Readers who would like to know, however, will have to look elsewhere than Wieseltier's review. In fact, given the way that Wieseltier uses indignation and anger as surrogates to evidence and analysis, it seems that his review of Checkpoint uses the exact tactics he purports to despise. Not to mention, hasn't Wieseltier encouraged the same screeds in his own pages at the hands of hatchet-reviewing thug Dale Peck?
The NTYBR's role in all this should not be lost. Why did they give the review of Checkpoint to someone like Wieseltier? Wieseltier's management of TNR's reviews, especially after his encouragement of Peck, are highly suspect. The NYTBR could have done much better and it remains a mystery why they didn't. All that is certain is that this will add to the steady decine of the Review.