Flex Mentall(y-Retarded).
I love long-form book reviews, otherwise known as book review essays: a well-written one, liberally stocked with well-chosen quotations from the work or works under consideration, can really give you a sense of whether a particular book is worth your time, energy, and, perhaps, money.
This week's issue of The New Yorker (the October 15 issue, although it was published on October 8: Columbus Day / Canadian Thanksgiving) has a review of Tom Wolfe's new doorstopper of a novel, Back to Blood, by James Wood. Wood's opening sentence both sets the tone and says it all: "Tom Wolfe writes Big and Tall Prose -- big subjects, big people, and yards of flapping exaggeration."
Wood slam-dunks his case by citing lengthy passages from Back to Blood, which appears to be about ethnic turmoil in Miami, and the 'roid-powered rage-fucks who all but jerk off in public while fantasizing about their own pecs, lats, delts, and glutes. I'm a lifelong fan of superhero comic books, and even I find this, as a premise for a 700-paged novel, risible. As for its execution, well....
Gentle Reader, I could reproduce the comically bad Wolfean prose that Wood cites here, but I fear that the varicose veins in my nether regions may well collectively elect to burst should I do so; suffice to say that, after reading this essay (titled "Muscle-Bound"), I no longer feel the faintest glimmer of guilt over never having read more than fifteen or twenty pages in the mass market paperback edition of Bonfire of the Vanities that my mother bequeathed to me, lo these many years ago, with the fond, heartfelt words: "It sucked."
Thanks, Mom.
This week's issue of The New Yorker (the October 15 issue, although it was published on October 8: Columbus Day / Canadian Thanksgiving) has a review of Tom Wolfe's new doorstopper of a novel, Back to Blood, by James Wood. Wood's opening sentence both sets the tone and says it all: "Tom Wolfe writes Big and Tall Prose -- big subjects, big people, and yards of flapping exaggeration."
Wood slam-dunks his case by citing lengthy passages from Back to Blood, which appears to be about ethnic turmoil in Miami, and the 'roid-powered rage-fucks who all but jerk off in public while fantasizing about their own pecs, lats, delts, and glutes. I'm a lifelong fan of superhero comic books, and even I find this, as a premise for a 700-paged novel, risible. As for its execution, well....
Gentle Reader, I could reproduce the comically bad Wolfean prose that Wood cites here, but I fear that the varicose veins in my nether regions may well collectively elect to burst should I do so; suffice to say that, after reading this essay (titled "Muscle-Bound"), I no longer feel the faintest glimmer of guilt over never having read more than fifteen or twenty pages in the mass market paperback edition of Bonfire of the Vanities that my mother bequeathed to me, lo these many years ago, with the fond, heartfelt words: "It sucked."
Thanks, Mom.