richardwells's review against another edition
5.0
Much, much to my chagrin I'd not heard of this guy. I didn't read the New Republic where he was the literary critic. Happy for this collection. I learned something in every chapter, and every chapter contained an original thought or quote worth writing down.
Recommended for lovers of literature.
Recommended for lovers of literature.
hcq's review
5.0
My apologies to Mr. Giraldi, because he doesn't think a reviewer’s feelings should matter, but I loved his book.
It’s the best kind of book about books, the kind that you can’t stop thinking about for days after you’ve finished reading it, and eventually find yourself wishing you could have coffee with the author and just talk/argue with him directly in conversation for a few hours. (Admittedly, I’m always going to have a soft spot for someone who quotes my beloved Robertson Davies.)
The relatively polemical pieces at the beginning were entertaining, but they were also admittedly some rather low-hanging fruit; seeing someone with this sort of mind take on Fifty Shades of Gray is like watching Muhammad Ali beat up a playground bully. It’s fun and the victim richly deserves it, but it is a bit unfair.
That essay in particular made me a bit uncomfortable. Mr. Giraldi gives lip service to the idea that not everyone loves reading and that’s okay, but it’s clearly not, because he complains throughout about Americans’ infamous lack of attention to reading in general, and serious books in particular, with lines like “Tell me the books you read and I’ll tell you who you are; tell me you choose to read no books and I’ll tell you there is no you.” (Or elsewhere, in a funnier, less Brillat-Savarin mode: “But I trust you'll agree that the possession of books is not identical to the possession of shoes. Someone with thousands of books is someone you want to talk to; someone with thousands of shoes is someone you suspect of soul-death.”)
He returns to this in the essay “Against Dullness,” when he observes that “Wide and deep readers of literature have the privilege of a multihued perception, of experiencing life with a fullness and profundity that nonreaders will never know.”
But he keeps forgetting that the operative word in that last line is “privilege.” I’m as tired of being told to “check my privilege” as anyone (thanks, it’s right here, right where I left it), but those of us who love books often forget that most people are not readers. And that it really is okay.
I have a dyslexic friend who, unsurprisingly, doesn’t enjoy reading. He does enjoy art, cooking, gardening, collecting, dancing, etc., and his senior quote in our high school yearbook was the famous line from Auntie Mame, “Live! Live! Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!” To suggest that his life lacks perception or fullness—or anything, really—just because he’s not lucky enough to also be a reader would be fall-down funny to anybody who’s met him—or anyone like him.
I was also fascinated by the discussion of style that ran throughout the book, particularly Mr. Giraldi’s insistence on the connection between style and morality. On the one hand, he makes a great case for it, and as an editor in many ways I agree with statements like “Every novel is true or false in its language before it’s true or false in anything else.” (The Hedonist)
But then he takes it further, and I start to doubt.
“In literary art, style is not severed from substance; style permits substance, allows theme or plot or character to be born, which is why the literary artist’s first concern is always language: without that nothing can happen, nothing else can hold. ‘Style is matter,’ said Nabokov (the italics are his), which was just a restatement of Goethe’s notion that ‘a writer’s style is a true reflection of his inner life.’ In that way, style amounts to an embodiment of morality. (American Bestsellers)”
Is Giraldi really saying that a book can’t be beautifully written and immoral, at the same time? That can’t be right. I don’t mean murder mysteries or descriptions of killers, of course (no one’s suggesting that Agatha Christie was really a serial killer manqué), nor do I mean obscene in the typically prudish “let’s ban sex scenes” sense.
I’m thinking about books like Updike’s first Rabbit novel. It’s gorgeously written, because that’s his style. But there’s a seriously unpleasant scene in which a man forces a woman to perform oral sex upon him, and it’s not treated as a big deal. That, as much as the act itself, made it grotesque; the author clearly didn’t see it as anything serious.
It’s a morally terrible scene, and it killed the Rabbit series for me. I still love Updike’s essays about books (his review of Cheever’s Journals, in which Cheever said mean things about him personally, was remarkably graceful) but I was never able to read him again quite the same way.
I had a similar problem with Saul Bellow, in The Adventures of Augie March. As I wrote in my Goodreads review: “There’s a really painful, dated bit early on, when Augie is describing how the big-shot in his neighborhood used to paw, grope, and generally sexually harass all the young women in his orbit, and it's just shrugged off with a teeth-grindingly clueless excuse, basically saying ‘Well, he was powerful and had money, so the girls never minded.’ Blurgh. Just no.”
Again, it’s a book famous for its great writing and style, but the moral sensibility is, at best, blinkered.
Given his argument, I’d love to hear Mr. Giraldi’s opinion. We’re both in Boston, so maybe someday I’ll find a way to buy him that coffee, and we can talk about books for a while.
Hey, a girl can dream.
Final quibble: I think I’ve quoted him enough to show that I appreciate his prose, but given how rough Mr. Giraldi can be on writers when he thinks they’re being lazy, indulging in clichés or mixing their metaphors, someone should have caught this anatomically confused line of his: “Nobody can tell for certain what breathes in another’s heart…”. (?) (On Literature and Love)
It’s the best kind of book about books, the kind that you can’t stop thinking about for days after you’ve finished reading it, and eventually find yourself wishing you could have coffee with the author and just talk/argue with him directly in conversation for a few hours. (Admittedly, I’m always going to have a soft spot for someone who quotes my beloved Robertson Davies.)
The relatively polemical pieces at the beginning were entertaining, but they were also admittedly some rather low-hanging fruit; seeing someone with this sort of mind take on Fifty Shades of Gray is like watching Muhammad Ali beat up a playground bully. It’s fun and the victim richly deserves it, but it is a bit unfair.
That essay in particular made me a bit uncomfortable. Mr. Giraldi gives lip service to the idea that not everyone loves reading and that’s okay, but it’s clearly not, because he complains throughout about Americans’ infamous lack of attention to reading in general, and serious books in particular, with lines like “Tell me the books you read and I’ll tell you who you are; tell me you choose to read no books and I’ll tell you there is no you.” (Or elsewhere, in a funnier, less Brillat-Savarin mode: “But I trust you'll agree that the possession of books is not identical to the possession of shoes. Someone with thousands of books is someone you want to talk to; someone with thousands of shoes is someone you suspect of soul-death.”)
He returns to this in the essay “Against Dullness,” when he observes that “Wide and deep readers of literature have the privilege of a multihued perception, of experiencing life with a fullness and profundity that nonreaders will never know.”
But he keeps forgetting that the operative word in that last line is “privilege.” I’m as tired of being told to “check my privilege” as anyone (thanks, it’s right here, right where I left it), but those of us who love books often forget that most people are not readers. And that it really is okay.
I have a dyslexic friend who, unsurprisingly, doesn’t enjoy reading. He does enjoy art, cooking, gardening, collecting, dancing, etc., and his senior quote in our high school yearbook was the famous line from Auntie Mame, “Live! Live! Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!” To suggest that his life lacks perception or fullness—or anything, really—just because he’s not lucky enough to also be a reader would be fall-down funny to anybody who’s met him—or anyone like him.
I was also fascinated by the discussion of style that ran throughout the book, particularly Mr. Giraldi’s insistence on the connection between style and morality. On the one hand, he makes a great case for it, and as an editor in many ways I agree with statements like “Every novel is true or false in its language before it’s true or false in anything else.” (The Hedonist)
But then he takes it further, and I start to doubt.
“In literary art, style is not severed from substance; style permits substance, allows theme or plot or character to be born, which is why the literary artist’s first concern is always language: without that nothing can happen, nothing else can hold. ‘Style is matter,’ said Nabokov (the italics are his), which was just a restatement of Goethe’s notion that ‘a writer’s style is a true reflection of his inner life.’ In that way, style amounts to an embodiment of morality. (American Bestsellers)”
Is Giraldi really saying that a book can’t be beautifully written and immoral, at the same time? That can’t be right. I don’t mean murder mysteries or descriptions of killers, of course (no one’s suggesting that Agatha Christie was really a serial killer manqué), nor do I mean obscene in the typically prudish “let’s ban sex scenes” sense.
I’m thinking about books like Updike’s first Rabbit novel. It’s gorgeously written, because that’s his style. But there’s a seriously unpleasant scene in which a man forces a woman to perform oral sex upon him, and it’s not treated as a big deal. That, as much as the act itself, made it grotesque; the author clearly didn’t see it as anything serious.
It’s a morally terrible scene, and it killed the Rabbit series for me. I still love Updike’s essays about books (his review of Cheever’s Journals, in which Cheever said mean things about him personally, was remarkably graceful) but I was never able to read him again quite the same way.
I had a similar problem with Saul Bellow, in The Adventures of Augie March. As I wrote in my Goodreads review: “There’s a really painful, dated bit early on, when Augie is describing how the big-shot in his neighborhood used to paw, grope, and generally sexually harass all the young women in his orbit, and it's just shrugged off with a teeth-grindingly clueless excuse, basically saying ‘Well, he was powerful and had money, so the girls never minded.’ Blurgh. Just no.”
Again, it’s a book famous for its great writing and style, but the moral sensibility is, at best, blinkered.
Given his argument, I’d love to hear Mr. Giraldi’s opinion. We’re both in Boston, so maybe someday I’ll find a way to buy him that coffee, and we can talk about books for a while.
Hey, a girl can dream.
Final quibble: I think I’ve quoted him enough to show that I appreciate his prose, but given how rough Mr. Giraldi can be on writers when he thinks they’re being lazy, indulging in clichés or mixing their metaphors, someone should have caught this anatomically confused line of his: “Nobody can tell for certain what breathes in another’s heart…”. (?) (On Literature and Love)
stefanieh's review
5.0
This was all kinds of fantastic! Geraldi is the kind of critic who is smart, insightful, and is not afraid to have an opinion. He makes you want to be a better reader. Get ready to add more books to your TBR!
featherbooks's review
5.0
Smart, opinionated, I must add this book to my overflowing library. I complain about uncommitted lackluster book reviews, not Giraldi. He has something to say and strong ways of saying it. Nathaniel Rich reviews the book in the New York Times and the first paragraph is exemplary:
"If literature, as William Giraldi writes in American Audacity, is “the one religion worth having,” then Giraldi is our most tenacious revivalist preacher, his sermons galvanized by a righteous exhortative energy, a mastery of the sacred texts and — unique in contemporary literary criticism — an enthusiasm for moralizing in defense of high standards. “Do I really expect Americans to sit down with ‘Adam Bede’ or ‘Clarissa’ after all the professional and domestic hurly-burly of their day?” he asks in an essay bemoaning “Fifty Shades of Grey.” “Pardon me, but yes, I do.” The only insincerity there is the request for pardon: Giraldi is defiantly, lavishly unforgiving."
"If literature, as William Giraldi writes in American Audacity, is “the one religion worth having,” then Giraldi is our most tenacious revivalist preacher, his sermons galvanized by a righteous exhortative energy, a mastery of the sacred texts and — unique in contemporary literary criticism — an enthusiasm for moralizing in defense of high standards. “Do I really expect Americans to sit down with ‘Adam Bede’ or ‘Clarissa’ after all the professional and domestic hurly-burly of their day?” he asks in an essay bemoaning “Fifty Shades of Grey.” “Pardon me, but yes, I do.” The only insincerity there is the request for pardon: Giraldi is defiantly, lavishly unforgiving."
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