Observer » Dwight Garner

Times Book Critic Dwight Garner Skewers Martin Amis Bio

Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 17:04:52 -0400

New York Times book critic Dwight Garner has no kind words for Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford. But if Mr. Garner did not enjoy the reading experience, which he described as "like watching a moose try to describe a leopard, using only its front hooves," well, he sure seemed to enjoy panning it.

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.

A Partial List of Allusions in the Times’s Paterno Review

Daniel D'Addario — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 10:15:35 -0400

Without any of these cultural artifacts, Dwight Garner would have been unable to review the new biography of disgraced football coach Joe Paterno:

The Insane Clown Posse and their relationship with Amish people
"James Dickey's famous poem 'Falling'"
President Richard Nixon
Comic actor Eugene Levy
The toppling of Saddam Hussein statues in Iraq
The death of Aldous Huxley

Times Plucks Travel Editor for the Book Review

John Koblin — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:32:13 -0400

The New York Times has hired internally to replace Dwight Garner at The Book Review after he moved to the daily reviewing beat. The nod goes to Laura Marmor, a deputy editor for the Travel Section. In her new job as Senior Editor, she'll be making a "broad range of review assignments" and help put the section together each week while "collaborating with our editorial team to upgrade our enterprise projects," writes Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus in a memo.

In September, The Times replaced reviews editor and Rome-bound Rachel Donadio with a copy editor at the paper, Greg Cowles.

Here's the memo announcing Ms. Marmor's new positon:

The Book Review is delighted to announce that we've found a new Senior Editor. She is Laura Marmor, who since 2004 has been the Deputy Editor at Travel, where, according to Stuart Emmrich, "she recruited notable writers both from within the paper and from outside (including Edward Albee) and also edited a number of special issues, including one on Literary Travels."

Before coming to The Times, Laura worked at The New York Review of Books, Esquire and Mirabella (rising to become Deputy Editor) and for five years was a Page-One editor at The Wall Street Journal. At the Book Review, "the fabulous Laura Marmor," in Stuart's phrase, will be making a broad range of review assignments in addition to helping Bob Harris and me put the section together each week and collaborating with our editorial team to upgrade our enterprise projects. She's joining us in December.

Sam Tanenhaus

Dwight Garner on The Times’ Daily Book Reviewers in 1996: ‘They Calcify Quickly’; Ten Years Later Critic is Contrite

Leon Neyfakh — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:49:31 -0400

Two things curious about Dwight Garner's new gig as daily book critic at The New York Times: One is that he had some not very nice things to say about his new colleagues back in 1996 when he worked at Salon, and two is his 1998 profile of Michiko Kakutani, where he quoted one book critic after another on how she didn't deserve her Pulitzer Prize. James Wolcott is in there quipping poisonously that while there is a pattern of Times critics going "downhill" after winning their Pulitzer, "We'll probably have no such luck with Michiko," and Jonathan Yardley making fun of her for reviewing lots of short books.

The 1996 piece takes the form of an interview, wherein Mr. Garner asks himself 10 questions about the state of book reviewing. Number nine is "Should there be term limits for daily book critics?"

Mr. Garner's answer:

Four years maximum, given the track record of the critics at the New York Times and most other dailies. Daily critics, with the Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley as a possible exception, have the half-life of snow tires. They calcify quickly. These days you can count on Michiko Kakutani to swat at anything (Phillip Roth, Nicholson Baker) that — sexually, morally — puts some sweat on her brow. And reading the Times' other critics, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and Richard Bernstein, it almost doesn't matter whether they're writing pro or con; the tone doesn't vary. (Their earnest, straight-on, eight-paragraphs-of-plot-summary prose is the equivalent of what used to be called, in football, "three yards and a cloud of dust.") No one's regularly throwing sparks. Anywhere.

Ten years on, Mr. Garner denounced the piece in an e-mail to Media Mob.

"I wrote that article for Salon more than a decade ago, and its chest-thumping, know-it-all tone makes me cringe today," he wrote. "It's a piece that clings to me on Google like a vampire bat. Michiko Kakutani is an enormously talented literary critic, and I'm honored to be writing on the same culture pages. We don't agree about every book, but it would be very boring if we did."

He added: "Also, it was around the same time I was friendly with Bill Ayers."

Longtime Times Book Review Senior Editor Dwight Garner to Join Kakutani and Maslin in Daily Paper

Leon Neyfakh — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:26:02 -0400

Dwight Garner, by far the most visible editor at The New York Times Book Review, told the folks over at the National Book Critics Circle on Friday that he's leaving the job and joining the rotation over at the daily paper's Arts section. Mr. Garner confirmed in an e-mail this morning that he'll soon be in the mix with Janet Maslin and Michiko Kakutani, reviewing one or two books per week.

Mr. Garner, whose prominent role at The Times' book blog Paper Cuts and his weekly column on the best-seller list made him better known than most of his colleagues at the NYTBR, said the paper's culture editor, Sam Sifton, was bringing him in as a replacement for William Grimes, the former food critic who moved to the obituaries desk several months ago.

Mr. Garner said that while he has "loved every minute" of his time at the NYTBR, he has been "yearning" to write reviews more regularly.