The New York Times Book Review

"The e-book list has migrated online, the digital world being its natural habitat," the Times announced. "Given the fluid variety of pricing in today’s marketplace, we have also stopped including cover prices on the lists. The third change is the one you’re reading right now."

The third change is a more bloggy look. There will be a new column, called "Open Book," devoted to readings and panels (there are, after all, many a literary event on any given night), as well as an outlet for archival looks back in time. In the debut column, for example, there is a blurb with choice quotes from a 1925 review of The Great Gatsby (amazingly, people were writing about it even before Baz Luhrmann). "Open Book" will replace "Up Front," the front of book (front of review?) page.

Although nobody, least of all Times Book Review readers, likes change, this one seems relatively benign.

Brian Stelter. (Photo via Facebook.)

Last week was quite a whirlwind for New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter. Top of The Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV, his look at the world of morning television, hit shelves, and Mr. Stelter found himself in the potentially awkward situation of appearing as a guest on morning shows to talk about a book about morning shows.

At press time, Mr. Stelter had done around 20 media appearances, with more scheduled. He was on Morning Edition, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, CNN’s Early Start, Entertainment Tonight and Inside Edition. Revelations were sprinkled throughout the tabloids and on the cover of Us Weekly, which featured a smiling photo of Ann Curry in a yellow cardigan, arms defiantly resting on her hips, with the headline “Stabbed in the Back: They called her ‘Big Bird’ and plotted to get rid of her. How Ann Curry’s coworkers tortured her and why she won’t forgive Matt Lauer.” 

“I feel the same way a morning producer feels at 9 a.m.—proud of my work, happy that people have seen it for themselves and dog-tired,” Mr. Stelter told Off the Record over the weekend.

Although The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story the weekend before the book came out on some of the juicier elements about Ms. Curry’s ouster and the drama with Matt Lauer behind the scenes, the newspaper itself panned the book in a review

“Brian Stelter’s book on the nefarious network morning show wars ends up being like a breakfast made not quite to order,” veteran television critic Ed Bark wrote. “The eggs over easy have one hard yolk, and the bacon’s a little limp. The toast is well-buttered but burned, and the coffee’s short on heat. Edible? Yes. Fulfilling? Not quite.”

Mr. Bark then took the reporter to task for his use of metaphor, which, when comparing a book to breakfast in the opening of a review, seemed a tad unfair.

“It’s a breezy read with more than a little overblown prose, some of it just plain silly,” Mr. Bark continued, noting that the author, at 27, still has “ample time really to get the hang of this.”

“I expected a tough review,” Mr. Stelter told OTR. “If it had been glowing, readers would have rolled their eyes.”

Tough review or not, it did little to quell the celebration. Mr. Stelter’s girlfriend, NY1 traffic reporter Jamie Shupak, organized a book party at The Park in Chelsea. (The book is dedicated to Mr. Stelter’s parents and to Ms. Shupak: “For Jamie, my love, who makes every morning a good one.” Of course, Ms. Shupak is usually at the NY1 studios before dawn to report on traffic conditions.)

Sunlight streamed through the large windows, making it difficult to see the media people, drinks in hand, who stood with their backs to the view of the High Line.

“You know, Jamie was the social director of her sorority,” Mr. Stelter told OTR. We didn’t doubt it. The bubbly brunette, in a lime green minidress, acted every bit the hostess, posing for pictures and thanking people for coming. In keeping with the theme, the dessert table featured chocolate cakes shaped like miniature TV sets and peanut butter balls shaped like tiny suns.

“Matt Lauer and Ann Curry send their regrets,” joked Mr. Stelter, before thanking both his and Ms. Shupak’s moms and a host of editors and colleagues, many of whom were in the room.

“The hardest part was putting together a guest list,” Ms. Shupak said, explaining that she had to keep adding people at the last minute. But Ms. Shupak evidently did a good job. In addition to her family and his, there was a strong Times contingent: Michael Grynbaum, Michael Barbaro, Christine Haughney, Dave Itzkoff, Julie Bloom, Stephanie Clifford, Julie Bosman and Bill Carter all seemed relaxed despite a Politico hit piece on executive editor Jill Abramson’s tenure that ran earlier in the week. Bloggers, television execs and NY1 hosts rounded out the list.

Out on the balcony, media reporter David Carr smoked a cigarette in the setting sun while talking to a friend of Ms. Shupak’s mom.

As we were leaving, NY1’s Pat Kiernan reminded us to grab a copy of the book. They were almost gone.

New York Times 

The biography "is mortifying in its dullness and lack of instinctive feeling for its subject." Part of this is due to Mr. Bradford's writing.

"You’re only a few pages into Martin Amis: The Biography before you begin confronting sentences like this one, in which words come together as if to commit ritual mass suicide..."

But the writing isn't the whole problem. It goes beyond lack of feeling for the subject and poor writing. It's everything.

"Mr. Bradford strains to make sometimes far-fetched links between Mr. Amis’s life and fiction. He quotes Mr. Amis poorly, quite a hard thing to do," Mr. Garner writes. " He makes declarative sentences of the sort you consistently quarrel with in your head. Even the photo selection in Martin Amis: The Biography is drab."

The whole thing is pretty bad.

"The flaws, like the veins in a chunk of Stilton cheese, are pervasive," writes Mr. Garner. We imagine he has been waiting to use this particular metaphor for a while. Perhaps he came up with it while staring pensively at British cheese.

Does Mr. Bradford do anything right? Well, he manages to keep track of Mr. Amis' extensive romantic entanglements. No easy task.

"Mr. Bradford neatly chronicles Mr. Amis’s multiple (and sometimes overlapping) girlfriends, many of whom are described with comments like 'the most captivating female of her generation.'"

Unfortunately, in doing so, "Mr. Bradford’s prose seems canned, like the voice-over in a 1950s-era industrial film," writes Mr. Garner. Well, then.

Mr. Garner seems to be having almost as much fun trashing the biography as Times restaurant critic Pete Wells trashing Guy Fieri's restaurant. And Mr. Garner didn't even have to suffer through bad food--just poor quality prose, sensitivity for subject, photo selection, quotes, arguments and overall dullness.

"Back to Blood"

The first person thanked in the acknowledgments of Tom Wolfe’s new novel, Back to Blood (Little, Brown and Company, 720 pp., $30), a doorstop set in Miami, is that city’s former mayor, Manny Diaz. The second is the former police chief. There are also “Miami’s maker of yachts that look like X-15s and don’t so much sail as lift off” and the “developers and engines of the Wynwood art district, Miami’s equivalent of New York’s Chelsea.” The book hasn’t yet begun, and already the reader has been plunged into a sea of boldface names.

The only subject Tom Wolfe has ever been interested in is status. Even as a writer of nonfiction: his 1965 piece about The New Yorker was obsessed with staff writers’ relative proximity to editor William Shawn; his profile of Phil Spector, from 1964, is more explicit: “Status!” he writes. “What is his status?” And his much-discussed essay from 2000 on John Irving, Norman Mailer and John Updike, his literary contemporaries, drives the obsession home: “On second thought, I have to mention that cover of Time,” he writes about his own public image. “[T]here I was, not only on the cover, but on the cover wearing a white double-breasted suit and vest and a white homburg ...” He goes on.

The Time cover, from 1998, was to promote the second of his four novels, A Man in Full. As a writer of fiction, Mr. Wolfe is notable for both his neck-vein-bursting enthusiasm and his on-the-scene reporting, traveling to whatever American milieu has captured his fancy that year. But the method by which he obtains information is governed by the sort of access available only to a man who appears on the cover of Time in a double-breasted white suit. The sort of access Mr. Wolfe was afforded in researching Back to Blood, in the company of Miami’s brightest stars and biggest civic boosters, becomes clear early on in the novel. Every piece of information he’s gleaned in Miami, in New York (the subject of The Bonfire of the Vanities), in Atlanta (A Man in Full) and on a college campus in Pennsylvania (I Am Charlotte Simmons), has been in service of the self-evident thesis that in America, status is important.

In his vaunted hyperbolic style, Mr. Wolfe blows up details of consumption and lards each one with an exclamation point; a pixelated focus on the trappings of wealth serves as a stand-in for character development. He is either an author obsessed with exposing radical truths about American materialism or an author whose sympathies lie with those who have power, those he sets out to critique. Anyway, they’re more fun to write about.

In Back to Blood, plot is second to style. That said, the novel is technically about the divergent paths of Nestor Camacho and Magdalena Otero, a former couple, both distanced from their roots, who find themselves implicated in an art-forgery scheme. Nestor, a disgraced cop taken off his beat, is a vigilante of sorts; Magdalena, a nurse with a side job in seduction, finds herself dating an art patron, then a more prominent art patron.

But neither character’s actions are in service of the plot, which is diluted by lengthy descriptions of the Magic City’s fine restaurants and art galleries. In spite of the presence of Hollywood stars “Leon Decapito and Kanyu Reade” (yikes), the white people buttering each other up at Art Basel are more authentic than any other characters in the book. “You’re not cutting-edge if your whole generation is dead or dying,” says one art patroness. “You may be great. You may be iconic, the way Cy Twombly is, but you’re not cutting-edge.” Indeed. Meanwhile, Magdalena, squired on a man’s arm, thinks little of this. “What did iconic mean? She hadn’t the faintest idea.”

Art Basel comes midway through the book, but this tone is set much earlier. Back to Blood kicks things off with a prologue entitled “We een Mee-AH-mee Now,” a pidgin rendering of the manner in which a wealthy Latina in a Ferrari (surprised? Mr. Wolfe is!) tells off the wife of Edward T. Topping IV, the editor of the Miami Herald. “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant to the maximum, to the point of satire,” we’re told, though the satire never arrives (unless employing “Hotchkiss, Yale” as a descriptor counts as satire—which, to the Yale-educated Mr. Wolfe, it may indeed).

Topping appears in the book only briefly, but his prejudices are the author’s. By page seven, Topping is thinking to himself, “Oh, ineffable Latin dirty girls!” As smut talk, this is less imaginative than the inventively revolting descriptions of sex in I Am Charlotte Simmons, but conveying the desires of a golden-years WASP may be easier for Mr. Wolfe than doing the same for a young co-ed. Aside from the woman in the fancy car in the Mee-AH-mee parking lot, the only Latina given weight in the book is Magdalena, a beauty who flits from one man to another, whose employment as a psychiatric nurse is complicated not merely by the fact that she’s sleeping with her boss but also by the fact that she is flummoxed by any mention of talk therapy or psychiatric drugs.

The white characters in Back to Blood are granted, in even the briefest appearances, the opportunity to distinguish themselves through ambition or cunning or incisive thinking; the Latinos are important because they are Latino. The book’s title, for instance, comes from Topping’s epiphany, in the prologue, that America is re-segregating. “‘La Raza!’ as the Puerto Ricans cry out. ‘The Race!’ cries the whole world. All people, all people everywhere, have but one last thing on their minds—Back to blood!”

Mr. Wolfe does not attempt to make this an argument, to support the claim that “all people everywhere” are seeking to reify divisions between the races. Tellingly, he doesn’t bother to show the evolution of Topping’s thoughts; before his wife and the stranger in the sports car get in a fight, Topping is lusting for the forbidden Latina, “the tumescence men live for welling up beneath his Jockey tighty-whiteys” while contemplating “dirty girls” and his C.V. The thought of renewed segregation “pops into [Topping’s] head from out of nowhere.” It’s so important to the author that he express his particular thoughts on status in 2012—that it’s predicated on race, that white men ought to marvel fearfully at the manner in which Latinos show solidarity to one another even as the same white men exclusively view other races as sex objects or threats—it doesn’t matter if he’s using his characters as accidental prophets.

At least Topping gets to have thoughts. Mr. Wolfe doesn’t deign to expend the same attention on the book’s ostensible main character, Nestor, the cop. He is little more than a body that can be dispatched to accomplish feats of strength. Though he’s the engine that moves the plot forward, Nestor is only sporadically aware of the dynamics of power swirling around him: he’s the tool of a white journalist, just as Magdalena is arm candy for a parade of white boyfriends. Their trajectories—one ultimately happy and one sad—are a matter of chance and accidents. A Latino police officer and a Latina medical professional are, in Tom Wolfe’s Miami, disempowered due entirely to their weak minds and indecisiveness; while this reader hasn’t met many Miami cops or nurses, Nestor and Magdalena’s dim wits seem, at best, an ungenerous sampling of the least flattering of human traits. To have them as the two representatives of Latin-American culture here suggests that whatever Mr. Wolfe saw in Miami, he didn’t like.

Mr. Wolfe describes Nestor’s physique as one might a rock formation: “an entire mountainscape of muscles, huge boulders, sharp cliffs, deep cuts, and iron gorges ... an entire muscle terrain ... ME!” he writes from inside Nestor’s muscle-bloated skull. The character’s thoughts are almost parodically simple. “He asked himself, ‘Do I exist?’” While Topping’s unbidden thought resulted in a passable American Studies term paper topic, Nestor’s inner life is unworthy of the level of close examination his dark foreign body demands.

Nestor sets the plot into motion when he climbs a ship’s mast to stop the attempted emigration of a Cuban refugee. He reacts with astonishment to his Cuban family’s anger at this (“Nestor was bewildered ... couldn’t get a word out ... just stood there with his mouth open. His mother was looking at him in a way she had never looked at him in his whole life! Even Mami!”) and subsequently doubts his own existence. He’s attracted to a Haitian Creole woman whose younger brother is in legal peril, but Nestor is essentially a prude. When a group of women whose jeans “hugged their declivities fore and aft, entered every crevice, explored every hill and dale of their lower abdomens, climbed their montes veneris,” he looks away, leaving the author to salivate alone.

Elsewhere, Magdalena (herself possessed, we are told, of a conventionally attractive form) finds herself ignored at an art opening and, through Mr. Wolfe’s narration, expresses the exact same reductive existentialism as Nestor: “A little Cuban girl named Magdalena no longer existed, did she.” Both moments of dwindling personal worth come as the characters deal with their estrangement from their families, from La Raza: They need their blood to exist.

The vacuity with which Nestor and Magdalena question whether or not they exist without ties to their community is insulting. Neither asks what their disavowal of their parents really means. The two characters are asking whether their lives have meaning divorced from their race, when Mr. Wolfe has given the reader no reason to believe that they have ever engaged with the world around them or had a meaningful thought. The question is the answer. They do not, in fact, exist.

Past novels by Mr. Wolfe edged toward a hard, dark border between that which is tacitly acknowledged as acceptable talk for the private club and that which cannot be said anywhere. While Sherman McCoy, protagonist of the quasi-journalistic Bonfire of the Vanities, was satirized for his materialism and infidelity, a character based on Rev. Al Sharpton was portrayed brutally as a corrupt media manipulator. A Man in Full hinged on the rape allegations against the inarticulate and cruel black football star Fareek Fanon. “Fareek,” as in “freak”; “Fanon,” like the author of The Wretched of the Earth. If status intrigues Mr. Wolfe, it may be because he’s a Yale man with money. These poor benighted Miami types! On the rare occasion that Mr. Wolfe finds something to criticize in a character with status, Magdalena or Nestor is there to do something dumber to provide comic relief. An orgiastic art party provides Mr. Wolfe the chance to document bloated late-stage capitalism at work, but more especially the opportunity to spotlight Magdalena’s vapidity. “She had never even heard of Miami Basel until Maurice invited her,” we’re told, a page before Mr. Wolfe slips in a long paragraph about architecture and hotel life and “status” for the lucky ones who are already in the know: “The Random was a typical hotel of the much-touted South Beach Retro boom. A clever developer like Duroy would buy a small, crabbed hotel, eighty years old or more ...”

Magdalena can never hope to know about any of this, nor, in any of her dealings with wealthy art patrons, does she attempt to learn. And she’s as adrift in Miami as the black athletes surrounded by white hegemony in A Man in Full and I Am Charlotte Simmons; mute even in her private thoughts, uncomprehending, suffering for unnamed sins. Whatever she believes—we’re not privy—the novel ensures that the world of ideas and of power dynamics, the only world in which Tom Wolfe feels comfortable, is one to which she is not admitted. Back to blood? Among the many things Mr. Wolfe fails to give his readers is any indication that he, for his part, ever left it.

Into this cacophony, with her hands over her ears, strides Katie Roiphe. “La la la, I cannot hear you,” she bellows, producing a body of criticism that presumes culture is determined entirely by things people have said to or about her. Though her book is entitled In Praise of Messy Lives (The Dial Press, 288 pp., $25), Ms. Roiphe’s mind is neat as a pin, untroubled by the unexpected inference, the awareness of mitigating factors in television or film or literature that might unmake her arguments. If contemporary writing has shown us the dangers of having too much information to consume, one does not miss the pre-Internet era when reading Ms. Roiphe, but one also wonders how, precisely, she is spending all her time.

In her defense, she is aware of a few things that have happened to the world—and not just to her—over the course of her rise in stature. Her columns in Slate, The New York Times Book Review and elsewhere, culled together for this collection, demonstrate that she has heard of both the hyper-popular erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey and the hyper-popular television drama Mad Men—though in both cases her having heard of them was prompted by a publication looking for the Roiphe touch (“I had never watched a single episode of Mad Men” before she was called by an editor, she notes). She has heard of Facebook and of Gawker—the latter, she tells us, an outlet whose “tone itself is monotonously unvaried.” Hmm. She heard that Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2008. She has heard of contemporary male writers whom she finds, in comparison with the likes of Philip Roth and John Updike, troublingly libido-free.

But Ms. Roiphe’s previously published considerations of works of art and figures on the cultural scene comprise only a minor portion of this book. In Praise of Messy Lives is a strange animal, a collection of wildly different previously published works that fancies itself a statement of writerly purpose rather than a multifarious body of work. “I am aware that there are an unusual number of people who ‘hate’ my writing, and that I have done something to attract, if not court, that hatred,” Ms. Roiphe writes in her introduction, noting that her work has a common element, namely, “[t]hemes obsessively being worked through, a worldview, sometimes actively or perversely courting the extreme.”

“Courting the extreme” is, of course, not a theme so much as a behavior; the through-line Ms. Roiphe sees is an engagement with herself as the center of the universe, her mind the source, of which all culture is merely a tributary. Necessarily, Ms. Roiphe works in extremes: what she is documenting is not culture writ large, but rather the manner in which it engages or repulses her. The book’s first essay, for instance, briefly takes on The Age of Innocence—because a friend told Ms. Roiphe that a mutual acquaintance compared her to Wharton’s tragic divorcee Ellen Olenska.

The essay is not about Wharton, really, but generally regards Ms. Roiphe’s own life as messy (ergo exemplary) and her cohort’s existence as tidy (ergo clearly papering over more fundamental flaws, like hypocritical judgment). “I can’t help thinking,” Ms. Roiphe writes like some gone-to-seed Carrie Bradshaw, “that this particular form of moral disapproval is related to our current madness about child-rearing, or desire for $900 Bugaboo strollers, Oeuf toddler beds, organic hand-milled baby food, and French classes, not to mention ...” For now, enough. Of whom is Ms. Roiphe speaking? It is impossible to tell, exactly, because she cites no examples, not a single artifact, other than the shared experience of people she personally knows.

And so it goes: Ms. Roiphe argues that “we create a cultural climate” through “casual remarks made while holding a glass of wine”—and that would be all well and good in a book of personal essays. In writing that has the purpose of clarifying the “cultural climate,” though, a co-worker telling the author “You really do whatever you want,” or the aside, “I remember hearing somewhere: ‘You have one life, if that,’” only serves Ms. Roiphe’s eternal argument: in how she lives her life, she is in the right.

Ms. Roiphe spends much of her book in a defensive crouch. Its first section is, in effect, a lengthy defense of her life as a single mother against assailants unknown—among those judging her are anonymous friends who merge pity with dismissive cruelty.

“Someone who was trying to persuade me not to have the baby said that I should wait and have a ‘regular baby.’ His exact words were ‘You should just wait and have a regular baby!’ What he meant, of course, was that I should wait and have a baby in more regular circumstances.”

This citation of an unusually rancorous remark evokes sympathy for Ms. Roiphe—what a nasty thing to have heard—but not sympathy with her argument, that what she terms “respectable couples” ought to be told to end their prejudice against single mothers rather than remain “blinkered.” (The above, it becomes clear, is one of two comments that created the aforementioned “cultural climate” that oppresses the author.) Not every married couple is prejudiced against single mothers—unless one crudely believes, as Ms. Roiphe does, that they are united as a group only by the fact of their being married. This argument could be made by a far more politically radical author; Ms. Roiphe is merely, if rightly, hurt by some thoughtless people she has met.

The second section is literary criticism. Here Ms. Roiphe abandons the self, but based on its placement, following cultural criticism that reads like memoir, we, subliminally at least, are only able to read it as about Ms. Roiphe. At the very least, the author’s essay on young male writers’ sexlessness in The New York Times Book Review in 2009 advanced Ms. Roiphe’s career as a provocateur. Citing Jonathan Franzen’s description of a female character as “beautiful at 32,” Ms. Roiphe writes, “To the esteemed ladies of the movement I would suggest this is not how our Great Male Novelists would write in the feminist utopia.” It is another offhand and perhaps insensitive remark that has sent Ms. Roiphe into a productive furor.

Consider an author she sees as closer to an equal for a sense of Ms. Roiphe’s mind: on the subject of Joan Didion, she is both nasty and almost insanely myopic. “The news was all about how the news makes you feel. And that is one of her most dubious legacies: she gave writers a way to write about their favorite topic (themselves) while seeming to pursue a more noble subject (the culture)."

On the subject of Ms. Didion’s writing about herself, Ms. Roiphe concludes: “Didion did it elegantly, but many of those who followed did it not so elegantly.” She names Anna Quindlen, Maureen Dowd, Susan Orlean and Meghan Daum, though she fails to name herself. She also mentions that any female writer Ms. Roiphe personally knows (ah, there is her trademark “evidence”) has a row of Joan Didion books on her shelf, and has read her late at night until “the sky [was] streaked violet.”

In the book’s latter half, comprising two sections called “Messy Lives” and “The Internet, Etc.,” we have an attack on Maureen Dowd, again, for “pretending to cover cultural trends with journalistic accuracy” by citing examples of individual women as synecdoche for the state of things. Better to have emotional than journalistic accuracy, it would seem, as in an essay on how the generation of Ms. Roiphe’s mother—the memoirist Anne Roiphe, who wrote the proto-feminist novels Digging Out and Up the Sandbox—was better able to “achieve ... dissolute fluidity.” Forget the sexual, racial and class-based inequalities Mad Men portrays—“casual and flamboyant adultery” is an achievement that makes one wistful for the 1960s. Meanwhile, a certain group of unnamed current male novelists, Ms. Roiphe argues, just likes to go to Whole Foods.

The Internet, however, is Ms. Roiphe’s biggest preoccupation. But even as she unloads on Ayelet Waldman, Internet commenters and “Gawker writer” Emily Gould (publishing a set of dated pieces has its hazards) for their cruelty, she does not seem to realize that, in aggregating the lives and purported statements of her entire social set, she is doing precisely what she claims Gawker does: plugging in “anyone to the formula.”

Ms. Roiphe’s formula, in spite of her self-proclaimed messiness, is remarkably clean: she is contra everything, all at once. This means refusal to cite examples or refusal even to become aware of them unless guided by the heavy hand of a magazine editor; this means burning every bridge; this means often blithely contradicting herself. (The Didion essay is the skeleton key to Ms. Roiphe’s reflexive contrarianism: the writer criticizes Susan Orlean for being a Didion manqué for writing a personal aside into a travel essay about Thailand, some 70 pages after an essay about male/female relations based on Ms. Roiphe’s own trip to Cambodia.) The Internet Ms. Roiphe decries at the book’s end has given us a lot of noise, but there are gems of true insight embedded in the dross. Whereas Ms. Roiphe’s essays all end neatly; she writes of Internet commenters, “I welcome, of course, any further evidence or information that would help our understanding of this fascinating and mysterious species.”

If she can’t find any writing on that subject, she should ask her friends at the next party.

Lionel Shriver.

Harper, $26.99.

Lionel Shriver wrote her latest novel, The New Republic, before the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and, according to the book’s foreword, held it back until both her sales record and the public appetite for a terrorism-themed satire increased. Her first stroke of good fortune came swiftly when her 2003 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, a school-massacre thriller that arrived a tasteful distance after the 1999 killings at Columbine High School, became a mega-hit and, eventually, a film starring Tilda Swinton. As for a public willingness to chuckle at anything terrorism-related, a decade would seem to suffice for the old mantra about tragedy plus time yielding comedy. The problem for Ms. Shriver is that the first wave of terrorism black comedy must necessarily have a sharpness, and a sense of gravity and for the facts on the ground that The New Republic utterly lacks.

The novel takes its title both from the real-life magazine for which its bumping-up-on-middle-aged protagonist, Edgar Kellogg, has freelanced and from Barba, a fictional peninsula dangling off the bottom of the Iberian peninsula, seeking independence from the government in Lisbon. Kellogg has thrown aside his legal career to write professionally and, having been swiftly hired by a USA Today-ish daily, is yet more swiftly dispatched to the would-be independent nation of Barba, where a terroristic nationalist front is centered and where his predecessor has gone missing.

More so than We Need to Talk About Kevin, The New Republic deeply indulges Ms. Shriver’s worst quality as a prose stylist—a tendency toward didactic, inhuman dialogue. Her tin ear for the patterns of human speech borders on the Randian; her political philosophy is, simply, that life is nasty, brutish and far too long. “Saddler’s appetite for poontang was suspicious,” says one character. “The nightmares were fabulous, lush with fantastic fears, hilarious with misadventure,” says another. The nadir: “Nicola, you’re the only one in town who’s ever noticed that the emperor might not be dressed to the nines. Your journo friends here operate like Visa card outfits.”

The jags of dialogue in this novel are neither colloquial enough to be honest nor outlandishly posh enough to approach the best of Evelyn Waugh (though Scoop is a clear influence here)—they indicate an author seemingly unsure of just how grounded in reality she wants her novel to be. Ms. Shriver’s ineptitude with human speech served We Need to Talk About Kevin well; it was told in the first person, through letters written by a haughty woman brought low who clearly labored over each word. The tormented prose could be read as the product of a tormented mind. So Much for That, Ms. Shriver’s most recent novel, had a similar problem with its dialogue. A political tract centered upon in the American health-care debate, its characters (who, to be fair, felt far more real and recognizable emotions than the characters in The New Republic) recited hastily rewritten policy papers.

What does tend to save The New Republic’s dialogue from the worst kind of didacticism is how apolitical it is. The foreign correspondents with whom Kellogg works spout off constantly but rarely express coherent political philosophies. Instead, they end up repeating the same tautologies about getting the story and the same gripes about how hellish Barba is.

The book’s politics occur mainly in Kellogg’s mind and his relationship with his editor back in America. He discovers that his predecessor, a beloved foreign correspondent, had been fabricating stories and claiming that terrorist attacks by the Barban liberation front were the work of others. Satire is only effective when it’s believable, and The New Republic beggars belief when Kellogg begins calling American papers, impersonating a Barban terrorist and claiming that various terrorist attacks on European and American soil are the work of his comrades.

Ms. Shriver never bothers to show quite how this maneuver actually helps his journalistic career. He generally calls papers he isn’t working for; how this results in scoops for his own paper is never made clear. And a setting that features a steady stream of terrorist attacks for which no one claims responsibility is itself a stretch for anyone who even occasionally follows the news cycle.

Bret Easton Ellis set his 2005 novel, Lunar Park, in what was clearly an alternate reality, wherein terror was visited upon families by an unknown and unknowable entity. The only significant differences between the world Ms. Shriver has created and our own are wildly unrealistic dialogue and a picaresque focus on incident. The author legitimately seems to believe that a series of terrorist attacks could be claimed by some fellow using a kazoo to disguise his voice, because no one else would come forward.

Ultimately, The New Republic drips with condescension for its reader, nowhere more so than in its closing two pages, where it’s implied that Kellogg took credit for the events of Sept. 11, 2001, on behalf of the Barban terrorists for whose cause he cares little but whose existence nebulously boosts his writing career.

The concept of a writer conflating real events into ludicrous fantasies to boost his or her career cannot be a foreign one to Ms. Shriver. Indeed, The New Republic seems less ghoulish and more clever when it’s read as a comment on its own existence and Ms. Shriver’s career as a magpie of human misery. Despite or perhaps because of its flaws, The New Republic is compulsively readable—just like the news coverage of global tragedy that Ms. Shriver implies exists merely for the pleasure viewers find in catharsis.

In this novel, deaths that occur offstage are treated so lightly that the reader comes to care little for those that happen onstage—those of central characters. The theme here is charisma—why some men’s lies are easily swallowed and help bolster their myths, while others’ merely make them appear pathetic—and yet Ms. Shriver makes little effort to fully investigate this phenomenon. Things are interesting because Kellogg thinks they are, and he thinks they are simply because he is insecure about having been fat as a child.

This is programmatic writing that is as devoted to simple cause-and-effect as a briefing in a big USA Today-style paper. It bears no resemblance to the complexities of the truth—either about world events or, more pertinently, human nature—and in that it is similar to the prose of a harried writer on deadline, working toward the end-of-night pint. If Ms. Shriver, herself a journalist who has written for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, set out to summarize through her style the manner in which journalism fails its subjects, she has succeeded brilliantly.

The sad irony of The New Republic, ultimately, is that it violates the journalistic dictum an editor articulates in its first 20 pages: “The hack who fancies himself a mover-and-shaker gets slipshod—thinks he’s covering his own story.” Ms. Shriver strives to shake up her readers’ sensibilities regarding both terrorism and human nature by overstepping the bounds of what she is able to convey, and ends up covering a story that is irresistible only to her.

The book, Longreads: Best of 2011 (Kindle Edition), is pretty self-explanatory. What was the best stuff on Longreads this year? You can now have it on a Kindle!

This is really, really great news for people who want extra ways to read blogs like This Recording on a Kindle.

You know what else comes with the success of putting out a book? Book reviews! And Longreads just got their first one:

We like Longreads! We do. We swear. It's just that this...is a good question. Feel free to take it on in the comments! Which you can't do on an eBook.**

[*Or people with decent-sized Twitter followings and/or jobs in media and publishing whose opinions on these matters are considered, in some regard, authoritative.]

[**Which maybe, actually, makes it worth paying for?]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Political Evil.

In early 2003, people started killing each other in Darfur, a region of western Sudan. The Darfuris rose up against the country’s regime. Then the country’s regime cracked down on the Darfuris. The crackdown became a massacre. Things had gone from the barbaric to the Boschian. Thousands died, then hundreds of thousands. Shock at the scale of the killing was compounded by its genocidal overtones. Darfuris regard themselves as Africans, but the Sudanese government, which is focused in Khartoum, a city in central Sudan, regards itself as Arab; the state is a relic of the colonial era, and it contains a fractious hodgepodge of peoples. Although the Darfuri uprising was ostensibly about resources—Darfuris felt the regime had forsaken the region—the ferocity of its suppression suggested something more primal. Old codes had been reactivated. The hodgepodge seemed to have given way to pogroms.

The killing in Darfur also suggested, to many observers, something familiar. “During the height of the conflict,” as Alan Wolfe recalls in his new book, Political Evil (Knopf, 352 pages, $27.95), “The Village Voice’s Nat Hentoff put the matter this way: ‘Of course this is genocide. It is also pure evil. Mr. Bush is not afraid of that word. Let him, right now—unlike Bill Clinton turning away from Rwanda—save lives in Darfur.’” Mr. Hentoff’s reference to Rwanda was meant to sting. Nine years earlier, in 1994, Rwanda’s ethnic majority, the Hutus, had tried to exterminate its ethnic minority, the Tutsis. As the slaughter of the Tutsis accelerated (“at a rate of 333¹/3 deaths per hour, or 5½ per minute, this genocide was the most intense in human history”), Western leaders temporized. Eight hundred thousand Africans would die. No one intervened. “It was as if thoughtful people the world over woke up from their long night of inaction and realized that despite repeated calls after the Holocaust never again to sit back and do nothing in the face of genocide, they had done exactly that,” Mr. Wolfe writes.

Still burning with this memory of omission, perhaps, Western commentators were quick to vent their indignation at the carnage in Darfur. “For nearly all those who became involved in efforts to save Darfur, such accounts of attacks by Arabs against Africans, the one determined to enslave, the other forced to obey, suggested a repeat of the Holocaust,” Mr. Wolfe writes. The existence of an “African Auschwitz” was duly proclaimed. The Sudanese Arabs were flagged as Islamofascists.

Such strong language proved an attractive vehicle for the cause. “Hollywood figures—especially Hotel Rwanda’s star Don Cheadle, but also Mia Farrow, Matt Damon, and George Clooney—played a crucial role in bringing the Darfur crisis to public consciousness,” Mr. Wolfe writes. A cottage industry of good intentions briefly took root. MTV sponsored a Darfur video game. Timberland produced an anti-genocide street boot. When Mr. Cheadle and John Prendergast published Not on Our Watch in 2007, “the manifesto of the anti-genocide campaign,” U.S. Senator Barack Obama coauthored a preface. A coalition of the high-minded had emerged, determined to atone for America’s remissness in Rwanda.

Yet the parallels with Rwanda were inexact. “The name ‘Sudan’ stems from the Arabic bilad al-Sudan, or ‘land of the blacks,’” as Mr. Wolfe observes, “and those called ‘Arab’ are just as black as those called ‘African.’” The case for genocide, it turns out, was not cut-and-dried. “Taking race in the Western sense of the term into account, the conflict in Darfur is not between races but within one,” Mr. Wolfe writes. “Taking it in the African sense of the term, the same conflict is not between two but among many.” The epithets “Arab” and “African” primarily connote distinctions of station and dialect, not skin color. “Africans” lived in rural areas, were farmers, came from peasant stock; “Arabs” were affluent, urban, the scions of nomads. Although race occasionally inflected the pattern of killing in the Sudan, geography—regionalism—first set that pattern. What happened in Darfur may have been evil, but it wasn’t genocide. It was a chaotic counterinsurgency.

The drawing of fine-grained distinctions in gruesome situations can seem niggling. Those who refrain from applying the genocidal tag to the violence in Darfur are frequently scorned as nitpickers. The French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy, as usual, is typical. When asked if the bloodshed satisfied the criteria of genocide, Mr. Levy, an occasional visitor to Darfur, replied, “There is a sort of discussion similar to the discussion of the sex of the angels in the Middle Ages.” Mr. Levy’s point, presumably, was that such nuances are academic compared to the awfulness on the ground.

But Mr. Levy is wrong, or at least crass; misnomers can be mortally consequential. As Mr. Wolfe points out, “As long as the rebel groups thought there was a chance of Western military intervention—as happened in Kosovo—they had every incentive to keep fighting.” The persistent characterization of the fighting as genocidal nourished delusional expectations in its actors. The Darfuris awaited a deus ex machina; the Sudanese were roiled by neo-Colonialist paranoia. The embellishments of the anti-genocide movement had inadvertently given “both sides reasons to keep fighting.”

The leaders of the anti-genocide movement were hardly villains themselves. But they are Mr. Wolfe’s villains. Political Evil is a book about the importance of insisting on the niceties of human nastiness. It aims to provide an atlas of the underside of modern political life. Mr. Wolfe has subdivided his subject into four categories: Terrorism, Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and “Counterevil”—the fighting of evil with evil methods. Each division of evil is complemented by an arsenal of prescriptions for combating it. It is a grand concept for a book. Along the way, Mr. Wolfe is obliged to pick a path through the relevant theory. His tread is heavy. Augustine was wrong; Kant was wrong; Mani was wrong; Arendt was wrong; and Philip Zimbardo, architect of the Stanford Prison Experiment, was very wrong. Mr. Wolfe stands on the shoulders of giants, and frequently pokes them in the eye.

The bits on metaphysics, however, are Mr. Wolfe’s shallowest. His profoundest passages are about political language. Political Evil is a book that is mostly about the evils of exaggeration.

Wolfe.

In Mr. Wolfe’s view, few evildoers are radical in the sense that Hitlerian Germany was radical: devoid of rational political aims. The establishment of a Palestinian state is, for instance, a rational political aim. However heinous their methods, people in pursuit of it are at least partially susceptible to political influence. Racially pure planetary dominion, of the sort sought by the Nazis, is not a rational political aim. Its agents can be met only with force. “Islamofascism” is therefore a term that vexes Mr. Wolfe. No one is served by rhetoric that pens in the moderate among our enemies with the monstrous. “In an age of terror, responding with words is likely to wind up saving more lives than responding with arms. Even when both are required, it is foolish to give up both.” Mr. Wolfe is not nostalgic for the era of realpolitik—he has harsh words for Henry Kissinger—but he is nostalgic for eras with a superior respect for understatement.

Such eras have been rare. If Mr. Wolfe’s book is any guide, hyperbole is as American as the hot dog. The book’s finest chapter, “The Misuses of Appeasement,” presents a brief history of America’s rhetorical enthrallment by the example of Neville Chamberlain, the appeaser of Hitler. “No other legacy of our confused ways of responding to evil is more dangerous than our constant attempts to create new Hitlers on the one hand and to overcompensate for Chamberlain’s mistake on the other,” Mr. Wolfe writes. In every post-WWII American military imbroglio, the appeasement analogy has been a crucial rhetorical lever. General Douglas MacArthur sincerely feared the totalitarian potential of his enemies when he invoked Chamberlain, as did J.F.K. and L.B.J. The sincerity of the invocation has subsequently waned. “By the time the appeasement rhetoric was applied to Iran and Iraq, by contrast, the cynicism had become palpable.”

“The evils of totalitarianism … were unique to a particular time and place.” Mr. Wolfe’s insight is as plain to state as it would be Herculean to implement: all evil is particular, and it must be addressed particularly. Generalities may stir the blood, but they are the ball and chain of diplomacy. Once you have pegged your foe as the heir to Goebbels, there can be no talking it through over a bottle of Perrier. “Powerful nation-states that do not use their power with restraint waste the advantages their power gives them,” Mr. Wolfe writes. That restraint can manifest itself verbally. It can also manifest itself in areas where excesses leads to caskets. Writes Mr. Wolfe, “If the intention of the 19 terrorists who sacrificed their lives on Sept. 11 was not only to rain death and destruction but to force the United States into overreactive acts of folly, their strategy has to be considered a success.”

editorial@observer.com