It would be very easy, given our widely-known disdain for Dave Itzkoff‘s book reviewing skills, to hold up yesterday’s essay on searching for extraterrestrials and say, “WTF? This is the NYT Book Review, Dave; you could at least manage to give us a book review.” But I’m not going to do that.
In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that, even given a few personal stylistic quibbles I have with the piece, this is the best thing Itzkoff’s done since he launched his column last year, and I don’t think it’s coincidental that it’s heavier on reporting than anything he’s done for the Review. Heck, it might even be a shining example of that “news about the culture” approach Sam Tanenhaus was championing when he took over the Review…and, just to extrapolate wildly for a second, the sort of thing that would make a combined book review/op-ed section like the one said to be coming out of Los Angeles a must-read—if it were a genuine melding of the two that offered serious, thoughtful reflections on public issues, including the ways those issues are reflected in contemporary literature. In other words, a rather more accessible version of the New York Review of Books). I mean, that’d be so much better than an awkward mix of book reviews in one half of the section, and op-ed pieces in the other half, wouldn’t it?
Another essayist I’d assign to that dream Review every chance I got: David Orr, who offers a blistering back-page critique of the New Yorker and Dana Goodyear‘s article on the Poetry Foundation. I still stand by my recent recommendation of Goodyear’s article as the best starting point for getting a grip on the current debate in the poetry world over accessibility vs. quality, but Orr takes the ball and runs it another ten yards, easy. For one thing, he nails exactly what’s wrong with New Yorker poetry…* Say, you think I could get mediabistro.com to let me invite Orr and Goodyear to chat about all this in front of an audience?
*Although he didn’t mention the absolute worst NYer poem of the last decade: Kurt Vonnegut‘s tribute to his pal Joseph Heller. As my wife pointed out, that’s not even poetry, it’s a NYT Metropolitan Diary item, only less funny.